The pot was the size of a cart.
Mara saw it from the office door when she came out into the yard for the first time since the pulse. The doctor had said she could walk, if she kept the sling on and lifted nothing, and she had put on Tavin’s coat over the sling and gone out, slowly, across the frozen ground toward the smell.
It was coming from the main furnace. The yard’s largest, at the back of the forge, the one Tavin used for big stock: a brick hearth with an iron flue that ran out along the forge’s back wall to the chimney. The furnace was banked, its fire low. But someone had built a cradle of iron bars over the flue where it left the furnace, and on the cradle sat a pot. An enormous pot. Black iron, riveted, with handles like a cart’s shafts. Mara recognized it after a moment: the yard’s old quench tank, from before Tavin bought the new one. Someone had scoured it and set it on the flue.
Steam rose from it in the cold air.
Tavin stood on a crate beside it with a wooden paddle the length of an oar, stirring.
