The village forge shop at Kilnstep sat built against a damp limestone cliff behind the pottery sheds. There, the charcoal smoke could vent naturally up a fissure in the rock.
On the morning of Day 63, the shop smelled of hot forge-scale, wet cool water, and the pungent tang of hornbeam shavings. Master Bran, the village smith, stood over his anvil with his leather apron split down the center to clear his thighs, watching Kezra Venn and Fellis Dain test the edge of a curved, hornbeam-handled gouge on a block of scrap pale limestone.
“If you’re going into the high Spine country to find survey anchors cut a hundred years ago, you won’t be finding clean stone waiting for you,” Bran said, pumping his leather bellows with one hand to keep the charcoal heart cherry-red. “Water gets into those old chisel cuts, freezes every winter, and seals the grooves with stone-hard lime crust and iron-wash. If you go at an ancient anchor with a broad cold chisel, you’ll shatter the lips of the cut, widen the groove past half an inch, and ruin the shape before your book can recognize the mark.”
Kezra held the narrow gouge up to the daylight. The tool was six inches long, forged from a snapped spring-steel cart leaf, with a half-round nose barely three-sixteenths of an inch wide. Fellis had turned the handle from seasoned hornbeam, fitting a brass metal ring at the shoulder so a wooden mallet wouldn’t split the wood under repeated…
