On the fifth morning Gaunt announced that he would not make a single nail until the Hold had iron, and he announced it to the Forge yard with his arms folded and his feet planted on the cobbles, as though he expected the whole Hold to come out and argue with him. It did. Idrin came first, because it was his gate, and because he had promised the hinges to the Chamber for the feast of the summer turn and had no intention of breaking his word. Harrow came next, because he had been setting the Forge yard flags and had been interrupted in the middle of a count. Tallow came after with the minutes. Pell came last, wiping her hands on her apron and looking as though she had been dragged from the bread by an emergency that she did not quite believe in.
Korrin came with them, on a short length of chain that Harrow held in his left hand. He had been brought up from the cellar at the change of the watch, and had said nothing on the stair except to correct the chain’s length twice. Now he stood by the Forge door with his cuffed wrists folded in front of him and his face as flat and calm as a plate.
“The Hold has iron,” said Idrin.
“The Hold has a chain,” said Gaunt, “and the chain is the gate’s, and the gate isn’t an iron-monger’s shop. I’ll not cut a link from it to make a nail, and you’ll not ask me to.”
“There are bridge rails in the stores.”
“There are half the bridge rails in the stores, and the other half are in the marsh, under a raft.” Gaunt jabbed the air with his finger. “I’ll not make nails from rails. Rails are for bridges. A nail is for a wall. You don’t make a nail out of something that was meant to carry a man across a river, unless the river’s already had its say.”
“That’s a fine distinction for a smith who’s been sulking since dawn.”
“It’s a fine distinction for a smith who knows the difference between iron and sulking,” said Gaunt. “Which is more than a prince who’s never held a hammer.”
Idrin set his jaw. He had been on the receiving end of worse arguments in the Chancery, but they had been conducted in silk and courtesy, and the cut of Gaunt’s tongue was not like that. It was like being struck across the face with a wet towel, rough and warm and entirely unexpected.
Harrow was counting the stones in the Forge yard. He had reached the far wall and was going back over them, one at a time, with a mason’s slow touch on each. “Not enough hammers,” he said, to the air, when he came back to the door. “There’s three in the Forge, and one of them’s got no head. We need a dozen. You can’t drive a nail with a hammer that’s lost its head. That’s a stone’s argument, not mine.”
“Nobody asked you for an argument,” said Gaunt.
“Nobody asked you for a nail,” said Harrow, and returned to his count.
Korrin had been watching the exchange with the same flat, interested stare he gave to everything. Now he spoke, in his clipped voice, with the chain jingling at his wrists.
“The granaries of Lessary should be opened by force,” he said. “Their carts are full of iron. The Crown’s wagons come up the Lessary Road every month, loaded with rails and ingots and nails for its own bridges, and the Crown’s men ride in front with their tallies and their clean hands. Take the carts. Take the iron off the carts. Take the granary keys off the Crown’s men and open the stores and eat what’s in them, and leave the Crown’s men on the road to explain it.”
There was a short silence in the Forge yard.
Then Gaunt said, very loudly and very clearly, “Yes.”
Everyone turned to look at him. He had gone red, not with anger, but with a kind of fierce surprise, as though he had been struck by an idea he had been carrying all his life without knowing its name.
“Yes,” he said again, and put his hands on his hips. “The Crown’s carts. The Crown’s iron. That’s what we’ll do. I’ve been stood here for an hour saying that the Hold needs iron, and the Lash has just told me how to get it, and he’s right, and I’m glad he said it, because I’d not have said it myself.” He jabbed a thick finger at Korrin. “And the Lash can go and be quiet now, because I’ll not have his being right in my yard.”
“I’m not being right,” said Korrin, in a voice of cold, bitter satisfaction. “I’m being useful. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s the same thing,” said Gaunt, “in a Forge.” He paused, and his face worked. “But your method’s a disgrace. You’d have us ride down the Lessary Road and take the carts with the Crown’s men still in them, and that’s not a plan, it’s a brawl. A brawl kills the carter, and then the Crown sends a hundred men up the road to hang us, and the Hold’s got no iron and no carts and no smith. I object to it.”
“There,” said Korrin. “You’re objecting. That’s your trade.”
“It’s my nature,” said Gaunt, with a sort of enormous satisfaction. “And I’ll make the nail when I’ve had my say.”
Pell had come forward, bread-floured and impatient, and she stood in the middle of the Forge yard with her hands on her hips and her face red. She looked from Gaunt to Korrin to Idrin, and then at Harrow and Tallow standing side by side by the wall, and her mouth twitched.
“You’re all boys,” said Pell. “The whole lot of you. Standing about in the yard like children who’ve broken the same plate and can’t decide who’s to blame. I’ve got bread in the oven. Gaunt, you’ll make your nail or you’ll go hungry. Korrin, you’ll stop being right, or I’ll give your share to the goats. Harrow, you’ll count the flags later, they’re not going anywhere. Tallow, you’ll stop writing that down, you’re making the boys nervous.”
“I’m not writing anything down,” said Tallow, who was writing. He turned a page and read back, in his flat exact voice: “The argument concerns iron, and the nail, and the hinge, and the Crown’s carts. It has so far been conducted by six parties, of whom one is the cook. The number of objections raised in the Forge yard, to this point, is between six and nine. The range depends on whether Gaunt counts himself twice.”
“I count myself twice,” said Gaunt, “every morning, out of respect.”
Tallow wrote that down too.
They made the nail in the end. It was not Gaunt’s idea, though he would later claim it was, and it was not Idrin’s, though Idrin had been the one to ask. It was Harrow’s. He stood at the forge door with his arms folded and his feet apart and said, quite calmly, that a gate needed a nail, and that the nail should be made from the iron of the old chain, cut from the very link that Gaunt had pronounced warm, and that he would set it himself in the gate-post when it was done. Gaunt objected to that for ten minutes. Then he took the old link from the bench, and the tongs, and the hammer, and he went to the forge.
He made the nail in less than an hour, and then, because a smith who is angry always makes a spare, a second one as well, which he threw onto the bench without looking at it. He did it with his lips pressed tight and a scowl that did not move from his face, and he struck the iron nine times as he had struck the bar, and each stroke rang through the flags and came back up out of the earth. The nail when it was finished was short and square-headed and plain, with a point like a needle. Gaunt held it up in the tongs and squinted along its length, and then he gave a short, rough grunt that might have been pride.
“Put it in,” he said, and handed it to Harrow.
Harrow took the nail in his palm. He looked at it for a moment without speaking. Then he went out of the Forge and across the yard to the gate, with the others following at a distance, and he stood in front of the gate-post. He laid his left hand flat on the stone. He lifted the nail in his right, and set its point against the place where the iron ring met the rock.
“A nail is the worst thing a mason can drive into a wall,” said Harrow quietly. “It’s a hole. It’s a split in the stone that the stone didn’t want. You put a nail in a wall, and the wall has to hold it for ever, and it never forgets it’s there.”
“Then don’t drive it,” said Gaunt, from the Forge door. “Set it. A mason who doesn’t understand nails shouldn’t be anywhere near a gate.”
Harrow pressed. The nail went into the stone without a sound, and sank to its head, and the gate-post took it. The whole arch gave a deep low hum, like the note of a bell struck very gently, and the sound went through the cobbles and up the iron ring and across the open arch and out over the marsh. Idrin felt it in his teeth.
The gate received the nail as a woman receives a kiss from a man she has been refusing for a long time. It did not pull away. It took the iron into its body and held it there, softly and completely, and every one of them who was standing in the yard knew it, without anyone having to say so.
“There,” said Gaunt, from the doorway, with enormous and deeply suspicious satisfaction. “It’s in. Now it can complain to someone else.”
They went back into the Forge to see to the hinges. Idrin was the last to leave the yard. He stood at the gate for a moment, with his hand on the warm stone, and then he turned to follow the others, and as he did he heard something drop. It was a small hard sound, a metal ring on the flags, and he looked down and saw that the spare nail, the one Gaunt had thrown onto the bench, had rolled off the anvil in the Forge somehow, and out through the door, and had fallen point-down between two of the flags of the yard. It had dropped into the crack and lodged there, straight as a plumb line, and the stone had closed over it.
Gaunt came out and knelt, grumbling, with his big hands on the flags. He tried to lift the flag. He tried again. Harrow knelt beside him, counting. Pell came out of the kitchen with the bread-cloth over her shoulder to see what the noise was about, and stood with her hands on her hips and her eyebrows up, watching the two men search the cracks for the best part of an hour, and neither of them could find it again.
In the morning, Idrin was told, when Harrow came to lift the flag and check the seating for the new hinges, the nail was found an inch higher than it had been the night before. It was standing up out of the crack on its point, very straight, with its square head toward the sky. Harrow counted it, and then said nothing for some time.
“The gate’s taken a step up,” said Harrow at last, quietly, “to be out of the way.”