Before she went down to the steps, Mara went back into the yard and set the hammer on the rack.
She had used it that afternoon. Nothing important: a cold chisel, a stubborn pin in the apprentice’s kettle hinge, which she had knocked out to show how a pinned hinge would work. She had taken the hammer from its peg without thinking, the way the students did. She had used it. Now it lay on the common bench where she had put it down.
She picked it up.
Iona’s hammer. Steel, a hand’s weight, with an ash handle worn smooth where two hands had held it: her mother’s, for years, and now hers. The head was dull. It was always dull. A plain grey steel face, scuffed, unremarkable.
She carried it to the rack.
On the rack’s shelf, below the pegs, lay a short bar of dusk iron. Lorn’s, from the last delivery, for the students to practice folding. As Mara lifted the hammer to its peg, its head passed near the bar.
And the pale lines showed.
Fine lines. Silver, almost white, across the dull face of the hammer’s head, the way frost shows on a window when the light catches it. And on the bar below, the same lines, answering. Faint. In the dusk, in the furnace’s banked glow, they showed the way they always had when the iron was near.
