The flat note was the torch.
It took her a quarter of an hour to understand it, standing at the cradle with the bar in the clamp and the torch in her hand and Sera behind her asking what, what is it. The bar was not dead. She tried it with the file and it rang. The bar was fine. It was the heat that was wrong: the Tern’s hand torch burned hot and narrow, a point of flame, and she had put that point on the bar and heated one spot too fast, and the grain at that spot had lost its order before the rest of the bar had warmed at all. The flat note was the sound of grain gone stupid.
Slow heat first, notebook II said. She had read it and not understood what slow meant. It meant spread. It meant warming the whole piece at once, gently, so the grain softened together and kept its pattern.
She widened the torch’s flame to a soft broad fan and held it far back. She warmed the bar again, a second bar, for minutes instead of seconds. When she tapped it, it rang. Clear and high.
“Now the ring,” she said.
