Gaunt flexed his right hand over the bellows and announced to the forge that the Coldharbour iron was brittle.
He had not yet touched a bar of it. The bars were still in their crate by the yard gate, wrapped in sacking against the damp and stamped with a little scale that Gaunt said looked like a grinning fish. But he had been told the iron was from Coldharbour, and he had been told a Coldharbour factor had sent it, and he had decided on the strength of those two facts that it would crack under a hammer like a biscuit under a boot.
“Brittle,” he said again, louder, so that the bellows-boy in the corner would hear it and repeat it to the Lowgate smithy.
Korrin stood in the doorway of the forge with his arms folded. He had come in out of the rain and had not yet decided whether to come any further, and he looked at the furnace and at the crate and at Gaunt with the expression of a man who was being asked to believe something about a stranger’s iron on the word of a man who had never been wrong in front of witnesses.
