Kelly clear come and done of the of Donnell‘s military's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Kelly woke on the armory floor with the cold anvil at her back. The forge had gone gray. One sword hung on the wall. The council wanted a full set of plate armor by month's end, and she had emptied the only steel rack in town to make that single blade. Two months of waiting would cost her the post. She crossed the yard to the training hall. The recruits were already inside, six of them, waiting in a loose line by the door. She had told them to come at dawn. She had nothing to hand them but pine shafts and rope. The hall smelled of new-cut cedar. Along the back wall stood the practice rack the carpenters had bolted down the week before. Painted bars ran across its frame. Canvas bags hung on chains beneath. Kelly stopped in front of it and stared at the iron pins holding the crossbars. She put her hand on the yellow bar and pulled. It turned in its sleeve. She tested the red one. Solid iron. She rapped it with her knuckle and heard the note she wanted. She counted the bars. Seven, all iron, all thicker than her thumb. She counted the chains. She counted the pins and the plate feet bolted to the floor. She did the math against a breastplate, a helm, greaves. It was not enough for forty times a sword. It was enough for a start. She turned to the recruits. She told them to strip the rack. They stared. One asked if she meant the whole frame. She said the bars first, then the chains, then the pins, then the plates on the floor. She said to leave the wood standing. The recruits went at it with wrenches and a pry bar. The bags came down in a heap of canvas and sand. The bars came out one by one and stacked at Kelly's feet. By noon the rack was a wooden skeleton and the iron lay in a pile that reached her knees. She walked to the courthouse and found the judge inside. She told Ed Edwards plain what she had done and what she intended. She said the practice rack was town property and she had stripped it for armor stock. She asked him to write it into the record before anyone called it theft. Ed looked at her a long moment. He asked if the recruits would train on bare wood. She said they would train on bare wood for two months. He wrote the note and signed it and pressed his seal. Kelly carried the first bar back to the forge and set it on the anvil. She had bought herself the start of a breastplate. She had also stripped the training hall of every tool her recruits needed to learn to fight. The council would get their armor. The men on the porch would drill with sticks until the shipment came.