Four spears had bent on the Caul road in a single morning, and Korrin wanted them straight before the next cord went out.
He carried them himself, across the lower ward in the first cold light, with the broken shafts under his arm like a pair of kindling sticks and the heads wrapped in sacking so that the Hard Hands would not see the damage and start asking questions. The Hard Hands had seen it anyway. They had been there when the spears went, on the verge beyond the culvert, when the herder-shapes came up out of the reeds and two of the Hard Hands had put their points into the mud to show they were not afraid of a thing that wore their own kin’s coats. The mud had taken the spears the way mud takes everything. The shafts had cracked on the stones under it. Korrin had watched it happen and had not said a word, because there had not been a word for it that he wanted to use in front of the men.
The Forge yard was grey with morning and full of noise. Gaunt had the great bellows going and the fire up white at the back, and the smoke went out through the yard’s roof-hole in a long ribbon, carrying the smell of hot iron across the Gatehouse roof. Korrin walked in under the arch and stood at the edge of the yard with the spears on his shoulder and waited for the Smith…
