The gate-hinges were the first thing Idrin had wanted from the Hold that could not be found in the granary, and he had been thinking about them, on and off, for a week. The old pins had come out of the stone in the first days, when the doors came up from the flags. They had been pitted and brittle, and one had snapped clean in Harrow’s hand when he tried to set it, and the two new doors hung in their frame on nothing but the grace of the gate itself. It was a poor arrangement. The gate did not seem to mind it, but Idrin did, and Harrow said that a gate which was not properly hinged was a gate that did not believe in itself, and that he did not want to be the mason who built a door for such a thing.
“Iron,” said Idrin.
“Iron,” agreed Harrow.
“Where is it?”
“In the Forge,” said Harrow. “Where else would a Hold keep iron? Only the Forge is cold.”
It had been cold for two hundred years, Tallow said, and the Chamber’s minutes record that it had been cold for a very long time before that. It stood at the far end of the Mason’s Yard, a squat stone building with a tall black chimney and a wide open mouth where a fire had once burned, and the mouth was full of grey ash and bird’s nests and the bleached bones of some small animal. The bellows hung from a beam above it like a pair of dead lungs. The anvil stood in the middle of the floor on a block of oak. Idrin had walked past the building a dozen times and never once gone in. He had thought of it as a ruin. Harrow thought of it as an unfinished sentence.
They lit it on the fourth morning. Idrin did the lighting himself, because nobody else would, and because he had an odd stubbornness on the subject of his own hands. He had collected dry marsh-reed from the bank below the causeway, where it grew in brittle grey stalks that snapped like kindling, and he had piled it in the grate with a handful of old wood-shavings that Harrow had found in the stores. Then he took a flint from his pocket and struck it, once, twice, three times, and on the fourth the spark caught and the reed took light.
It caught too fast. It leapt up in a sudden roar of yellow flame and black smoke, and the smoke came rolling out of the open mouth and across the yard. Idrin coughed and stepped back. Harrow stood well clear, with his arms folded, counting the seconds under his breath.
“You need a bellows,” said Harrow.
“We have a bellows.”
“We have a pair of old leather lungs hanging off a beam with the leather gone stiff. You’ll not get a fire to draw with those. Not with that smoke coming back down the chimney.”
Idrin had already thought of the bellows. He had got a stepladder from the kitchen and had climbed up it, with Harrow steadying the foot, and had taken the bellows down from its beam and carried them over to the forge. They were huge and heavy and had a smell of old tallow and mould. The leather was cracked along the folds. He had cut the strap that held them shut with his own knife, and it had been his spare saddle-strap, the one he kept for the grey, because nobody in the Hold had a better piece of hide. He had cut it without thinking, and had only remembered afterward, and had decided not to be sorry.
He was trying to work the bellows, with his right hand on the handle and his left hand clamped under the crack to hold the leather together, when a man came out of the smoke.
He came out of it all at once, as a man walks out of a doorway that has been hidden by a curtain. He was short and very broad, with a barrel chest and thick arms and a leather apron that had been scorched in so many places it was more holes than leather. His face was broad and red and flushed with heat and temper, and his hair was a shock of iron-grey that stood straight up from his scalp as though it had been struck by the forge-spark. He had a pair of tongs in one hand and a hammer in the other. He looked at the fire, then at the chimney, then at the bellows in Idrin’s hands, and then at Idrin, with an expression of enormous and unforgiving disgust.
“Whoever lit that,” said the man, “is a fool who hasn’t checked the flue.”
Idrin stood up. He was still holding the bellows. “I lit it.”
“Then you’re a fool,” said the man, “and you’ve not checked the flue, and you’re working those lungs like a bandit taking a purse, and the leather’s cracked, and that strap’s the wrong sort of hide for a bellows, and I object to it.”
“Who are you?”
“Gaunt,” said the man. He thrust the tongs at the chimney, as if to point out a fault. “Smith. Forge. That’s the trade. I’ve been stood in the smoke since the spark caught and I’ve been listening to a man stamp about my yard for half an hour, and I take exception to the noise, and I take exception to the fuel, and I take exception to the bellows.” He paused, and his face worked through several contradictory expressions in rapid succession, before settling on a deep, reluctant scowl. “And I protest at being woken for a set of hinges.”
Idrin took a breath. He set the bellows down on the floor, very carefully, and straightened his back.
“You woke because the fire was lit.”
“I woke because the fire was lit by a prince who wants hinges,” said Gaunt, “and no smith in his right mind would wake up for that. It’s a waste of iron and a waste of a good morning.” He turned, with an air of enormous dignity, and began to inspect the forge, prodding at the reed with the tongs, peering up the chimney, running a thick thumb along the blackened lip of the hearth. He muttered as he went. It was not cursing, exactly. It was a steady, satisfied, grumbling monologue, the sound of a man who has been waiting a long time for an excuse to complain and has finally found one that suits him.
Harrow had come up behind Idrin. He was counting the bricks of the chimney.
“Will he make the hinges?” Idrin asked, under his breath.
“He’ll make them,” said Harrow. “He’s already decided to. He just needs somebody to object to first.”
Gaunt straightened up with a grunt. “I’ll make your hinges,” he said, without turning round, “if the hinges are mine.”
“They’re the Hold’s hinges.”
“They’re my hinges, because I’ll be the one who strikes them, and I’ll be the one who can say they’re good. If they’re the prince’s, I’ll not make them, because no man should be asked to make a thing he didn’t think of.” He turned, then, and fixed Idrin with a glare of enormous indignation. “Well? Do you agree that they’re my idea?”
Idrin had spent his whole life among men who wanted to be recognised for their ideas. He had learned, in the Chancery, that the quickest way to get a clerk to do anything was to let him believe it had been his notion from the start. He had also learned, in the cellar, that this was a habit he would have to break. He did not think about that now. He thought about the gate-hinges, and about the cold iron that waited somewhere in the Forge, and about how many days it would take to find another smith in a Hold that had nobody else.
“They’re your idea,” said Idrin.
“Good,” said Gaunt. “Then I’ll take exception to the bellows.”
He did. He took exception to the bellows for a quarter of an hour, in a steady rising cascade of complaints, while he took the leather from Idrin’s hands, examined every fold, snorted at the cracks, and then, very gently, eased the lungs back onto the forge and began to work the handle. The strap that bound them was a Lessary saddle-strap, and Gaunt pronounced it a disgrace. The leather was tired. The valves had dried. The whole contraption, he said, was a shameful thing for an honest smith to be seen with, and he would not stand for it another hour.
Then he worked the handle, and the bellows drew, and a long, deep, steady breath of air came out of the box and roared through the mouth of the forge, and the reed-fire leapt up and turned from yellow to white. The smoke went up the chimney in a single clean rope. The forge began to glow.
Gaunt stopped working the handle. He stood motionless, with his hand on the wood and his head bent to one side, listening. Then he gave a short, grudging grunt, and slapped the leather sides of the bellows with the flat of his palm.
“Excellent health,” he said.
Idrin could not help it. He laughed. It came out of him in a short surprised sound, and Gaunt turned round and glared at him so fiercely that he stopped at once.
“You take exception to my laughing?” said Idrin.
“I take exception to the bellows,” said Gaunt, with some dignity, “and to your face, and to the look of you. But I’ll allow the laugh. It’s a rare thing in this Hold, and I’ll not waste it on an argument.” He turned back to the forge, and his voice dropped, and when he spoke again it was a rumble, quite different from the bellow he had used before. “Bring me the bar.”
It was a short length of iron, rough and black and pitted, which Harrow had dragged out from under the bench where it had lain since the Forge went cold. Gaunt took it in the tongs and held it in the white heart of the fire until it glowed a dull, angry red. Then he laid it on the anvil, took up the hammer in both hands, and began to strike.
He struck nine times. Each blow was deliberate and heavy and perfectly placed, and each one sent up a shower of red sparks and a clear, high, singing note that rang out through the forge and went out through the open door and down into the yard. The note went down through the flags, Idrin could feel it, down under the cobbles and into the stone. It came up again a moment later, faint and clear and perfectly in tune with the strike, as a bell answers its own ringing from the bottom of a well.
Harrow was standing in the yard with his back to the wall. He had been counting the strikes aloud. He stopped at nine, and his lips moved, and then he said, in a voice that carried quite clearly through the doorway, “Nine.”
“Nine,” said Gaunt, without looking up, and struck the iron once more, very softly, and laid the hammer down. “Now we’ll see what it wants.”
Idrin did not see what it wanted. He saw Gaunt standing over the anvil with the sweat pouring off his face and his chest heaving and the glow of the bar reflected in his eyes. He saw the iron cooling on the block, going from red to black. He saw the grey smoke drift slowly out of the chimney and up into the flat morning sky.
Afterward, when the forge was quiet and the bellows had been hung back on their beam and the reed-fire had burned down to a steady orange heat, Gaunt went over to the bench where the old chain from the gate lay coiled, the one that had been cut away from the arch when the doors came up. He picked up a length of it, weighed it in his hands, and turned it over. He ran his thick thumb along one of the links, and frowned.
“It’s warm,” he said.
“It’s been in the cold for a week,” said Idrin.
“It’s been kept warm for two hundred years,” said Gaunt. He dropped the chain back on the bench with a clank and rounded on Idrin, his face flushed and furious. “By something. Something that never once let it go cold. And I protest that, Highness. I protest it very much.”