Alden Bram did not touch his porridge again. He stood beside the heavy oak block that supported his two-hundred-pound shop anvil, watching with a craftsman’s suspicious squint as Jon stepped across the packed stone-dust threshold of the shed.
Without a word of preamble, Jon opened his fingers and set the two sheared halves of the iron forearm brace down on the polished steel face of the anvil.
They landed with a sharp, double ring that made the sparrows in the mill-house eaves scatter into the fog.
For three breaths, the only sound in the lean-to was the wet slap of the millwheel paddles turning in the race and the faint hiss of damp birch bark settling in the charcoal brazier. Bram did not step back. He leaned over the anvil horn, his broad nostrils flaring as he caught the smell coming off the fractured iron—not the clean coal-smoke of a smithy, but the acrid, unmistakable stench of sulfur, blistered linseed oil, and roasted limestone dust.
“This broke under forty tons of grey granite at the western quarry five days from now,” Jon said, keeping his voice low and flat, the way a carpenter calls out a split joist before the roof sags. “Marshal Ors sent a ten-year-old boy named Darek under a white truce flag toward the False Gate you framed in the Old Hill haulage tunnel. The boy’s four-ply canvas coat was sewn full of alchemical heat charges. You threw your weight onto the frozen trip-chain to drop the…
