The iron brace did not break with an explosion. It broke with a quiet, metallic ping that was lost beneath the gusting mountain wind.
Jon sat in the freezing slush beside the fifteen-ton block of fractured granite, his hands resting on the cold iron of the lower support strap. The metal was two inches thick, four inches broad, forged from high-carbon charcoal iron by Master Cole forty years before. It was still bolted to the living limestone of the western quarry wall by its lowest expansion bolt, but the upper half of the brace had been twisted forty degrees by the falling keystone, torn across its center grain like a ribbon of dry parchment.
He ran his bare, soot-stained fingers along the jagged fracture.
The break was clean, crystalline, revealing the silver-grey core of the metal beneath the dark surface slag. It had not failed because the blacksmith had burned the iron; it had failed because forty tons of granite dropping through twenty feet of air generated a shear force that exceeded the molecular tensile limit of forged metal.
“It took forty tons,” Jon murmured, his voice hollow, deadened by the silence of the amphitheater.
Beside him, Sir Cael Ardent stood motionless in the snow. The Crown Bearer had not put his steel gauntlets back on. His bare hands hung loose at his sides, the knuckles red with cold, his eyes fixed on the heavy canvas sheet that Garek and two town spearmen had drawn over Alden Bram’s body.
