Orsfin Ironblood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Three men Orsfin Ironblood knew climbed the frozen peaks for heartmetal. None came back. One of them swung a pick beside Orsfin on the lower ridge for two winters, and Orsfin buried the man's tools himself when spring failed to return him. Now Orsfin stood at the village edge with a pack on his back and nine feet of red-haired bulk between the cold and his choice. He meant to climb where the others died and bring back the ore that does not break. He meant to forge an axe from it. He carried a map he had bought from a trapper two seasons back. It showed a single peak with three sites marked in a triangle, each circled and crossed out by a different hand. Failed digs. Dead men's notes. Orsfin had studied the map through two winters of preparation, and he believed the survivors of those expeditions had narrowed the search for him. He would start where they had stopped. He also carried a slab of slate he had cut and scored himself. Into it he had chiseled the marks of every ice pattern he had learned to read: the blue veins that meant hollow beneath, the milky bands that meant rock close behind, the hairline fractures that ran toward ore. A miner reads stone. Orsfin had taught himself to read ice the same way, and the slate was his proof and his guide. He tied it inside his coat against his ribs. He climbed for nine days. He reached the first marked site on the east face and dug until his pick rang on dead granite. He traversed to the second site on the south slope and dug through a drift to find only more drift. He climbed two more days to the third, the highest mark, and found a shaft already sunk and already empty. He sat in the wind beside the empty shaft and ate frozen bread and understood that the dead men had not narrowed anything. They had only proved where the heartmetal was not. A small four-armed squirrel watched him from a rock, then leapt away across snow no man's boot had pressed. Orsfin pulled the slate from his coat. He turned his back on the triangle of failures and faced the unmarked west ridge, where blue veins ran under a sheet of clear ice and milky bands cut behind it in a pattern that matched two of his chiseled marks at once. He drove his pick into the snow at his feet to mark the spot. The trapper's map he folded once and pushed deep into his pack. From here he would carry only his own.