While Ysabet, Osha, and Kiv wheeled the chalk barrow along the lower market ditch to buy winter oats and lamp tallow—stopping twice behind dry-stone tanner’s walls to give the three-tap signal and lift the wool corner for Pip—Ashaun climbed the steep cobbled steps toward the upper smithies alone.
Here the roots of the dead mountain beast’s left antler plunged into the granite cliff, and the smiths of Kesh had built their forges along a narrow terrace where snowmelt turned three mossy grindstones. Ashaun passed two farriers shoeing mules and stopped at the last low shed under the bone arch, where an old woman in a leather apron sat squinting through a glass water-globe at a balance spring.
A small iron sign shaped like a split tuning fork hung by the door: Mava of the High Arch, who had repaired siege-springs and temple survey instruments for fifty years without caring whose banner paid the bill.
Ashaun stepped inside, laid two silver coins on the oak bench with her right hand, and drew the narrow bell dagger from its wooden sheath.
Since the night the blade grazed Pip’s shell, three hairline marks—thinner than spider silk and dark as tarnished pewter—had crept diagonally across the dull bronze-gray metal. Ashaun had been afraid to touch a whetstone to it lest it snap like frost-bitten glass.
