With the bellows working, Oliver could have begun smelting ore. Fortunately, he already had metal.
He had brought several axes and little knives out of the pirates' camp, originally intending to let Kellan choose something serviceable until they reached a town. A closer examination had put him off that plan. The weapons were cast from hard, brittle pig iron, chipped, blunt, and poorly finished. Even the worst gray equipment in Azeroth would have compared favorably.
An axe wasn't his first choice for Kellan anyway. The boy hadn't finished growing. He couldn't put his full strength behind a chopping weapon, and the short reach would bring him dangerously close to an enemy.
Oliver decided on a spearhead about thirty centimeters long, shaped so that it could serve as a dagger when removed from its shaft. He would make a sword too, to use with a wooden shield. That ought to give Kellan a much better chance of surviving a fight.
Brenner started the fire. Oliver took up a mining hammer and broke the captured weapons into pieces with a few ringing blows. Watching how easily he did it, the smith looked rather grateful that yesterday's attack had ended without Oliver hitting him back.
The crucible would hold only about three-fifths of the scrap. Oliver chose smaller fragments that would melt readily and set the rest aside. He worked the new bellows himself, keeping the flow steady. More than an hour passed before the pieces dissolved into a fiercely glowing pool.
“You can pour it now,” Brenner said. “Have you made the sword mold?”
“What would I need that for?”
Brenner started to answer, stopped, and tried again.
“Perhaps you call it something else. My father taught me to cut the sword's shape into stone, or make it in sand. You pour the iron in. When it cools, you've got the blade to work on.”
Oliver understood what he meant. His memory supplied lost-wax casting as an association, along with what he had read about metal cooling too quickly in a mold and leaving flaws in a blade. For the quality he wanted, he preferred forging: repeated working and heat treatment to improve the metal's consistency, strength, and toughness.
Brenner was a young craftsman in a small village. Oliver had no reason to assume every smith in Westeros cast swords this way.
“I learned a different method,” he said. “Have you got an iron poker?”
Brenner fetched one and watched him take it.
“What are you going to do?”
“Work the bellows. I'll show you. Kellan, take the tongs.”
With the smith maintaining the air and Kellan holding the crucible steady, Oliver put the poker into the molten iron and began to stir.
“Like stirring a pot so everything's mixed properly,” he explained. “It's an old way of working iron. Air reacts with some of the carbon and impurities as you stir. They leave as gases, and what remains becomes closer to wrought iron.”
Several of the words defeated his new vocabulary. He supplied them in English, leaving Brenner to stare at him and try to remember sounds he couldn't yet understand.
“But take too much out, and it's soft. Less brittle, yes, but not what we want for this. We'll add some of the pig iron back at the right point.”
He kept stirring. More than an hour later, the knowledge in his head told him it was time. He added the reserved fragments, waited for them to melt, and stirred the mixture again. Then he divided it among three long ingot molds Brenner had prepared.
The fierce white glow faded as the metal began to set. While the largest ingot still shone red, Oliver took it to the anvil.
He hammered it into a flat strip, folded it, and worked it flat again. Four times he repeated the process. Then he changed to a smaller hammer and began shaping the edges. A leaf-shaped blade emerged, its rough blank about a meter long. At one end he drew out the narrower tang that would carry the grip, then set the work aside to cool.
While he waited, he mixed charcoal dust, iron powder, and clay in equal portions. Once the blade was cold, he worked its edges on a stone until they shone and spread the mixture over the thicker parts, leaving the cutting edges exposed.
The furnace would not take the whole length of the blade. Oliver had to build a narrow charcoal furnace in the yard before he could heat it again. When the steel glowed red, he took it out and plunged it into water. Steam rose around the tongs. The clay-coated treatment was meant to leave hard cutting edges supported by a tougher body.
He had the beginnings of a sword.
He also had very little energy left. It was late. Oliver left the blade at the smithy and went back to the tavern with Kellan.
* * *
They returned early the next morning. Three jobs remained: the further heat treatment his remembered process called tempering, the polishing, and the fittings.
Oliver heated the blade to a red glow in the long furnace and kept it there for about two hours, following the process he remembered for easing the stresses in the metal and improving its toughness. Afterward came the stones, working from coarse to fine to remove scale and unwanted material, refine the surface, and bring the edges to a sharpness worthy of the work already done.
Without an edge, a good blade was still only an inconvenient iron bar.
The fittings could have taken almost as much effort as the sword. Decoration mattered to price: give two similar blades different grips and guards, and one might be treated as an everyday tool while the other became a family's treasure. Oliver wanted something practical for his apprentice.
He hammered a piece of iron into a flat oval, made an opening for the tang, and fitted it as a guard. Wood from the yard supplied the grip and a plain sheath. Finished, the sword measured about eighty centimeters overall, fifteen of them in the grip.
He tried a few movements in the yard, then stopped.
It didn't feel much worse than his own short sword, the one wearing the Azuresong Mageblade's appearance.
“Kellan. Come and try it.”
The boy accepted it and made several cautious cuts through the air. His expression changed. Balance, weight, the way it followed his hand: everything seemed to be where it belonged. He knew enough about weapons to understand that this was far beyond anything he ought to possess.
“Sir, I can't. It's too valuable. A real fighter should have this. Someone like you.”
“Made from scrap, in two days. I can make another.” Oliver smiled at his distress. “Find some wood. Let's see how it cuts.”
Kellan shook his head violently. “Not with this.”
“It's all right. I want to see the cut.”
“Father said an axe is for firewood. A sword's for defending yourself. You don't use it on just anything.”
“You're a stubborn little sod, aren't you?” Oliver took the sword back. “Watch.”
He planted a piece of wood about as thick as his arm upright in the ground and struck diagonally through it. The upper part slid away. The lower part remained standing.
“There.” He returned the sword. “Treat it like that and you'll end up wanting to marry it.”
While Kellan looked anxiously along the edge, Oliver picked up the severed wood. The cut was smooth and clean.
“At least a blue,” he murmured.
He had used things he remembered reading about: stirring the iron, adjusting the mixture, quenching, the later heat treatment. But knowing a description had not supplied everything. The feel of the metal, the temperature he needed, the moment to change what he was doing: those had come from the master-level smithing skill he had brought from the game.
Now he had felt it at work. It had become part of him as surely as the fishing and cooking had.
He dropped the wood and patted Kellan's shoulder. The boy was still grinning over the sword.
“Not finished yet. You can admire it later.” He looked toward the smith. “Brenner, have you got... What's he doing?”
Brenner crouched with his hands over his ears and his eyes shut, whispering.
“He's been like that since you cut the wood,” Kellan said.
Oliver leaned closer.
“Stir... like soup... mix it... charcoal dust...”
The young man was trying to hold onto everything he had seen. Oliver couldn't fault the diligence, though they still had work to do.
He touched Brenner's shoulder. “Any round iron rods?”
The smith sprang to his feet and searched his stock.
“Here, master.”
The rod would let Oliver form the socket of the spearhead. The rest was much like a double-edged dagger, with the socket in place of a grip, and simpler to make than the sword. Over the afternoon, he forged two: one for Kellan and one for himself.
When they were finished, he turned to the bill. They had used more material than he had expected, and it seemed fair to pay extra.
Brenner refused before he could finish the offer.
“You let me watch all of it. You explained what you were doing. I couldn't have bought that knowledge for any price. A little material doesn't repay it.”
Oliver considered the objection. He liked sharing what he knew, but that didn't mean pretending it had no value.
“All right. One more favor, then. We need shafts. Mine about twice my height. His about twice his.” He indicated the new apparatus beside the forge. “You can keep the bellows.”
Brenner agreed immediately. Ever since trying it, he had been thinking how to make one of his own after Oliver left. It might not turn out as well, but it had to be better than the old leather bag. Now he was being offered the finished thing in exchange for two lengths of wood.
With their account settled, Kellan put on the new leather armor, hung the sword at his waist, and carried his shield and spearhead back to the tavern. Oliver spent the evening eating, drinking, and talking with the villagers who came in. Only when the moon was high did he finally go upstairs.
He was nearly asleep when he remembered.
“Early start tomorrow, Kellan. We'll make the apprenticeship official.”