John didn’t stop working, his hammer rising and falling in a relentless, deafening rhythm against the anvil. William watched the sparks scatter and die on the dirt floor, waiting for a break in the noise before trying again.
“Have you been to Arindale often?”
John gave a sharp nod, his eyes locked on the glowing metal. “Every couple of months,” he shouted over the ring of steel. “I take down swords, tools… whatever the merchants are willing to pay for. Then I load up on coal and pig iron for the next run. It’s about a six-hour haul by carriage each way.” He drove the hammer down one last time, then swung the cooling iron back into the heart of the forge to cook.
William stepped closer, his face catching the sudden draft of heat from the orange glow. “Is it big?”
John paused, leaning heavily on his hammer handle as the fire did its work. “Bigger than this valley, anyway. It’s a trading town. A sprawling, chaotic mess of stone and timber compared to what we've got here.”
“What is it like?” William asked, leaning against the wooden post of the bellows.
Stolen novel; please report.
John drew the iron back out, the metal screaming as he instantly went to work brushing away the black scale clinging to its surface. “Busy,” he muttered between short, heavy strokes of the wire brush. “And expensive. More expensive than it has any right to be.”
He paused to wipe a heavy line of sweat from his brow with his forearm, throwing a quick, knowing glance at the boy.
“Nothing like this little patch of dirt, kid. They've got wide stone streets down there. Merchants shouting until their throats bleed, carts clogging the lanes with silk and spices from the south, and people always moving. Buying, selling, hurrying somewhere. Feels like nobody down there remembers how to stand still.”
John hefted the billet, checking its angle in the light before setting it aside. “There's a massive city hall right in the dead center—a big, imposing stone mountain. Everything in Arindale seems to crawl around it.” He gave a dry chuckle, his grin fading slightly. “And it smells terrible. Like rotting river water and too many horses.”
William nodded slowly, staring into the fading glow of the coals as he tried to imagine a place that massive. "If it's really that big," he said, looking up to meet the blacksmith's eyes, "and there are so many strangers coming and going... did you ever see anything unusual while you were down there?"
John raised an eyebrow, his gnarled hands resting on the edge of the forge block. "Like what?"
William swallowed hard, finally building up the courage to ask the question that had been eating him away from the inside.
“Have you ever seen magic?”