The silence on the castle walls of Fort Karst held for three heartbeats after the ancient coronet rolled into the mud.
Then, from the middle of the crowded wall-walk, a man stepped forward.
It was Thomas Miller. The master blacksmith was clad in his scorched ox-hide apron, his muscular arms blackened with coal dust, his broad face streaked with sweat despite the freezing wind. He carried neither a sword nor a spear, but his five-foot iron forging hammer. The tool that had shaped three hundred iron clamps for the lower water tanks.
Miller raised the hammer in his right fist, his voice rumbling out from his deep chest like the grinding of millstones.
“I swear by my fire and my anvil!” Miller shouted, his gaze fixed on Ren Prime. “I give my word freely to this stone! If the wall breaks, it breaks through my ribs first!”
Beside him, Master Mason Kael raised his square-headed mallet. “I swear by the straight-line and the mortar! The foundation will stand while my hands have marrow!”
“I swear by the needle!” cried an old seamstress from the lower bailey. It held a brass needle-point arrow high above her head. “I’ll bind the bandages of every man who bleeds for our children!”
