The bridge iron had come up from the marsh in the bottom of a flat-bottomed boat, two days after the Gallows-tax men had gone, and Gaunt had declared it unfit for anything but a dogs’ kennel. He had said so in the Forge yard, and in the kitchen, and once in the cellar, in front of the Chamber, where he had objected to the iron for the better part of an hour. Then he had picked up the first bar in the tongs, held it to the light, run his thumb along its edge, and fallen silent for a while. When he spoke again it was in a voice that Idrin had not heard from him before, low and hoarse and full of a kind of reluctant respect.
“It’s Crown iron,” said Gaunt. “And it’s good. It’s the best I’ve held since I woke. They made it in the Lessary foundries for a bridge, and they never finished the bridge, and the iron’s been sitting in the reeds like a dog that’s been left at the gate. It wants to be worked.” He turned the bar in the light. “And it wants a steady hand on the tongs.”
“Then you’ll hold it,” said Idrin.
“I’ll not,” said Gaunt, with some heat. “I’m the smith. The smith doesn’t hold the first heat, Highness, the smith strikes it. You hold it. The prince holds the iron, and the smith strikes it true, and that’s the way of the Forge, since the first forge was lit by the first fool.” He looked at Idrin from under his grey brows with an expression of enormous and unforgiving pride. “Unless you’re afraid of it.”
Idrin was not afraid of it. He was not certain, afterward, whether that had been courage or simple pride, but he had been told by a smith that he was afraid, and he could not bear it. He took the tongs.
They were heavier than he had expected. The jaws were blunt and black, polished in the middle by two hundred years of hands that were no longer there, and the handles were worn to a smooth shine under his fingers. He set the bar in the jaws and tightened them. The bar was short and thick and cold, and its weight came up his arm and into his shoulder with a dull, familiar drag. He carried it toward the fire.
“Hold it in the heart,” said Gaunt. “Not the edge. The heart. Let it come up slow. And don’t you dare look at me while you do it, or you’ll drop it on your foot.”
Idrin held the bar in the heart of the forge. The reed-fire had been built up for the morning, with fresh charcoal from the Hold’s stores, and it roared white and yellow at the centre, and the heat came off it in a wall. He felt his face burn. He felt the iron grow warm in his hands and then hot, and he saw it begin to change, the grey skin of it blackening, then reddening, then coming up through the colours in a slow steady bloom from dull red to cherry to gold. It was beautiful. He had not expected that.
Then the tongs slipped.
It was not a great slip. It was a fraction of an inch, a shift in the jaws as the handle grew slick with sweat under his palm, and the bar tilted in the grip and began to fall toward his boots. Idrin lunged for it. He caught it with his left hand, the free hand, without thinking, because the bar was going to hit the flags and split and send its sparks up into his face, and the hand came up of its own accord and closed on the iron.
The pain was instant and enormous.
It went through his palm and fingers in a single white scream of heat, deep and total, as if the bone of his hand had been plunged into the fire. He heard himself make a sound that was not a word. He tried to let go and his fingers would not open. They had locked round the hot iron as though the weft had closed them, and he could smell his own flesh cooking, a thick, sweet, dreadful smell that he would remember for the rest of his life.
Then the bar was out of his hand and on the anvil, ringing like a bell, and Gaunt had him by the wrist, and they were both on their knees on the flags of the Forge with the smoke rising round them and the reed-fire roaring behind.
The Hold felt it.
Idrin could feel it going out through the body in a wave of cold and heat, a bloom that ran through every Hand that was awake. He felt it reach the kitchen, and he heard, very far off, the clatter of a pot dropped on stone. He felt it reach the wall, and Ysra’s voice came out of the stair in a sharp gasp, and then she was counting, fast and high, a number that stuttered at every step. He felt Korrin’s reaction, which was a short vicious curse in the Lessary dialect, the kind a soldier uses when the surgeon’s knife is out. He felt Harrow’s breath catch. He felt, in the cellar, a sudden flat silence from the stair where the two marsh-men sat, and it was not a silence of pity.
“Let go,” said Gaunt. “Let go of the iron, you fool, let go of it now.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. Open your hand.”
He could not open it. The fingers would not move. They had gone into a clench that was not his own, and they held the memory of the iron, and the more he tried to move them, the harder the clench became. He was shaking. He could see the blood on his palm now, and the blisters rising across it in a row of pale bubbles that split as he watched, and at the heel of the hand the skin had gone grey and waxy and smooth, like the surface of a candle.
“Sella,” said Gaunt, through his teeth, not loudly. He had got up. He was standing in the smoke with his hands on his hips, looking at the door. “Sella! Come here! The prince has taken the bar!”
A woman came out of the smoke.
She came through the Forge door without any hurry at all, as though she had been walking toward the building for some time and had only now decided to arrive. She was tall and thin and grey-haired, wearing a long leather apron over a dark wool dress, and she carried a bundle of tools in a roll of leather under one arm, and in her other hand she held a small brass lamp. Her face was calm and pale and very intent. She looked at Idrin’s hand, held in his lap, and then at his face, and her mouth flattened into a line of dry, practical concentration.
“Burnt,” she said.
“Yes,” said Idrin.
“Deep,” said the woman. “Across the palm, and into the first two fingers, and the heel’s gone to the bone, I’d think. You’ll have a scar where the grey is. It’ll pull, and the knuckle won’t bend properly again, not for a year at least, and maybe not ever.” She set the lamp on the flags. “You’ll live. I’ll say that now, so you can stop being frightened of it. You’ll live, and you’ll keep the hand.”
Idrin stared at her. He had expected pity. He had expected a flurry of cloths and a soft voice. He got the diagnosis first, delivered flatly, the way a clerk might read out the value of a stock, and then, after a moment, the other thing.
“That’s the comfort,” said the woman. “Don’t expect more.”
She knelt down beside him and took his wrist in her cold, dry, surprisingly strong fingers. She turned his hand over, slowly, and looked at the blisters with her head tilted, and then she pressed one finger very gently against the row of small bones at the base of his fingers and held it there, listening to something he could not hear.
“Hold the lamp,” she said to Gaunt, without looking up.
Gaunt picked up the brass lamp and held it, and began at once to object. “It’s at the wrong angle.”
“It’s at the right angle for seeing bone,” said the woman, “and you’ve got your thumb over the flame. Move your thumb.”
Gaunt moved his thumb and objected to it.
Sella worked. Her fingers were quick and sure and cold on the small bones of the hand, and she moved them one at a time, testing each joint, pressing and releasing, while Idrin gritted his teeth against the pain and tried not to look. She did not speak while she worked. Once she made a small sound of dissatisfaction and adjusted something in the heel of his palm, and the pain went up his arm like a bolt of lightning and then, abruptly, faded to a dull steady ache. When she had finished she wrapped the hand in a strip of clean linen she had taken from her roll, binding it firmly, and tied the knot with a single neat pull.
“There,” said Sella. “You may keep the scar as a souvenir of your carelessness.”
“I wasn’t careless.”
“You were a prince holding a bar of hot iron in a forge where you’d never been,” said Sella, “and you let it slip, and then you caught it with the wrong hand, and you’d not let go when the Hold told you to. That’s careless. It’s also brave. I’ve seen a good deal of both, and they look the same on a table.” She stood up, her knees cracking, and looked down at him with an odd, measuring expression. “The bend you’ll lose, Highness, is the bend you’ve been using to hold things you should have let go of. That’s the comfort I’ll give you, since you asked for one.”
She did not wait for a reply. She went to the bench by the door, where the old gate-chain lay coiled, and she opened her leather roll and took out a small book bound in black cloth, with a stub of pencil tied to its spine by a red string. She opened the book on the bench, and turned to a clean page, and began to write.
Idrin could see her hand move. He saw her write a line in her neat, clipped, upright script. Prince, Idrin. Left hand. Forge, first heat. Burn, deep, palm and two fingers. Scar, permanent. Then she wrote a number beside it, a small figure in the margin, and underlined it twice, and when Gaunt asked her, sharply, what it was, she only closed the book and tapped its cover with one finger.
“That’s his ledger,” said Sella. “I keep the bones of the Hold. Every injury gets a line. Every line gets a name and a number, and the number’s the one I’ll not explain to anybody until it’s time.” She looked across the Forge at Idrin, and her grey eyes were perfectly calm. “I’m counting you, Highness. It’s what the Mend is for.”