The forge floor at Hearth was clean enough that Tavin’s boots squeaked on it.
Mara noticed it before she noticed anything else. They came down the lit passage from the gate, the three of them and a clerk from Halvek’s office walking behind them with a clipboard, the observer from the terms, and the passage opened into a drum like Lorn’s: round, tall, a walkway running out over a drop to a central platform, and at the center, hanging in its rings, the heart. Hearth’s heart. Larger than Lorn’s, perhaps a third larger. Its rings turned in pale fire. Its folded surface glowed faintly along its channels.
And the floor was clean.
At Lorn the walkway’s grating had been blackened and scarred, scorched where something had burned on it or under it long ago, the red paint of Iona’s paths chipped and faded. It had been honest. A floor that had been worked on. Here the walkway’s plates were bare steel, bright, without a mark. No scorch. No chips. No paint at all. When Tavin stepped onto it his boot soles squeaked on the polished metal like a wet finger on glass.
“Someone wipes it,” Tavin said. He had stopped. He was looking down at the plates. “Every night, by the look. No smith’s floor looks like that.”
