Chapter 149: Forge Friends

My father came down to the yard on Monday.

At five. In his plain shirt, like Avarn. Still pale, still slow on the stair, but down. He didn't say anything. He just came and stood by the water trough next to Eliza, with his arms folded, and watched.

Alistair let three passes go by. Then he turned around, very slowly, with his stick in one hand and his wooden sword in the other, and walked over to the water trough, and tapped my father on the left shoulder with the sword.

"You stopped watching me," said Alistair.

"I was watching Garrick."

"That's what I said."

My father looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, and took the sword out of Alistair's hand, very gently, and gave it back to him hilt first, and went and stood on my right while Avarn went and stood by the trough. And for half an hour the King of Greykeep and the last sworn captain of the old Greykeep Guard took turns hitting me on the blind side while the god of the sword said Again.

I caught it seven times out of twenty. Carol counted.

* * *

At nine o'clock in the harbor office at Westmere, Davren did the sums.

"Forty-five ships," he said. "Three rings each. Pins. Brackets. Bolts for the frames. Iron straps for the keel bed. Do you see?"

"One," said Carol.

"That's a hundred and thirty-five rings," said Davren, "that have to be true. Perfectly true. The pins in exact line. If they bind by a hair the stone won't stay level, and if it won't stay level it can't listen, and then it's just a very heavy rock in the bottom of a ship." He looked across the table at my grandfather. "Garrick did three in a night."

"I did three in a night," said my grandfather, "under protest, and I'm eighty, and my forge at Greykeep takes an hour to get hot enough to do anything, and there's no iron left in Westmere that isn't holding something up." He folded his arms. "Forty-five nights. If nobody dies. And somebody might, and it'll be me."

Eleanor took a peppermint out of the jar and didn't say anything, which is how you know Eleanor has no answer.

Then the door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and somebody came up very quietly, the way a carpenter walks in a house where the floor's still being laid.

* * *

Julian.

Adriana's brother. Prince of Lyradon. Married to Elowen, with a little boy called Roddick who's three and says Up to anything taller than himself. Julian's quiet. He's got a carpenter's hands, because my grandfather taught him, and a carpenter's way of looking at things, as if he's checking whether they're square.

He stood in the doorway of the harbor office with his hat in his hands.

"I've brought somebody," he said. "He asked me to come ahead. He asked me to ask first." He looked at Tamar. "He's at the boundary stone on the north road. He won't come any further unless somebody says he can."

"Who?" said Tamar.

Julian looked at my grandfather. And my grandfather, very slowly, put his face in his hands.

"Oh," said my grandfather. "Oh, it's him."

* * *

You could see him from the top of the Hold.

That's how big he is. Two miles up the north road, where the coast path comes over the last of the hills and the old boundary stone of Westmere stands in the gorse, there was a shape. Sitting. Very still. Dark, like a hill that's been rained on. And all through it, in long cracks, like the cracks in the bottom of a hearth when the fire's been banked, a dull red light.

Every bell in the Hold had started ringing by the time we got up there. The watch on the north wall had seen him at dawn, and gone very white, and told Edric, and Edric had said Wait, and they'd waited, and he hadn't moved. He'd just sat there by the boundary stone since sunrise with his hands on his knees.

Surtr.

The end of the world.

* * *

I should explain about Surtr, for anyone who wasn't there.

In the war, before Carol and I could walk, Surtr came down out of the burned north with Othellos's armies and set the world on fire. Kingdoms. Forests. Lyradon's old stone bridge, where Julian's father King Roderic stood and held the pass until it fell under him. They called him the end of the world, and they weren't exaggerating. Where he walked, the ground went to glass.

And then the war ended, at a ford in a burned forest. And afterward Surtr walked down the pass road alone, to the broken bridge where King Roderic died, and sat on the stones. And Julian, who'd been a boy when his father died there, came out of Lyradon and sat down across from him.

Nobody knows what they said. Neither of them has ever told. Surtr told Iselle once that Julian asked him what he wanted, and sat on the broken stones with him all night until he knew.

Now he forges iron for Lyradon's bridges, and argues with my grandfather about handrails, and made little Roddick an iron horse that stays warm all winter. He walks down the pass road once a year, on the anniversary, to the bridge. At a walk. And he asks. Every time. For everything.

He'd never once come to the sea.

* * *

Westmere hadn't been in the war. Not really. The fire never came this far south. But everyone had heard. The old men in the Hold street had told the stories for twenty years. And the Kethran sailors had been on the red ships five days ago, below decks, while a fire god screamed on their bows.

Fire was not a popular thing in Westmere that week.

The people on the Hold wall were very quiet. The Kethran sailors on the quay below had all stood up. Somebody's child was crying. Up at the boundary stone, Surtr sat with his hands on his knees and didn't move.

"He'll wait," said Julian. "All day, if you want. All week. He's very good at waiting now." He turned his hat around in his hands. "You can say no."

Tamar looked at the shape on the hill for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

* * *

I didn't say anything. It wasn't mine to say. It was Tamar's harbor.

But I thought about the Knock, rocking at the end of the north pier with the Castellan's lamp in her stern. And the stone in her keel, hanging in three rings. And the four words cut in it, in both alphabets, set with my father's frost.

Tamar was thinking about it too. I could see him.

"Any who come and ask," said Tamar, very quietly.

He took a breath.

"Tell him yes," he said.

* * *

It took Surtr an hour to walk down the north road into Westmere.

He went slowly. On purpose. Julian walked beside him, at his knee, the way you'd walk beside a carthorse in a town. And Surtr banked himself down as he came. I watched the red go out of his cracks, step by step, until by the time he reached the first houses at the top of the town he was just dark, like a stone chimney on a cold night. Children ran out to look and their mothers dragged them back in, and he stopped every time, and waited, until they'd gone.

He's twelve feet tall sitting down. Standing, he's taller than the Hold gate. His eyes are like two coals. Not burning. Just warm. The kind of coals you'd leave in a grate overnight so the room's not cold in the morning.

He came down the hill to the harbor, and stopped at the top of the steps, and looked at the sea.

"Big," said Surtr.

His voice is like a landslide a very long way off. You feel it more than hear it.

"Yes," said Julian.

"Wet."

"Yes."

Surtr looked at it for a long time.

"Don't like it," he said. And then, carefully, the way a child says a long word it's been practicing: "But. Will. Try."

* * *

The dragons rose when he came down onto the North Sands.

Every one that could fly. Thirteen, in a storm of sand and the last of the snow, while the eight from the west lifted their heads in their snow beds and watched. Up off the beach and into the air over the tideline, and hung there, wings out, and the sound came off them. Not the underground bell. Not the note they'd sung for Ashlar. A different one. Low and harsh, like a saw going through green wood.

Aurethar came down in front of Surtr so hard the sand jumped.

He's bigger than Surtr. Not by much. They stood face to face on the North Sands, the old gold dragon with his crooked wing and the stone giant with the dead red in his cracks, and every dragon in the sky over them was making that sound.

"You," said Aurethar.

Surtr didn't move.

"You burned the north," said Aurethar. "You burned the passes and the valleys and the forests and the villages. You came down the long valley with the giants and the fire." His voice cracked. "And the storm-king had to draw the sword. Because of you. And the valley went to glass. And Ashlar lay down on it with his wing over forty soldiers and breathed it in, and it melted his throat, and he never said one word again for twenty-two years." He breathed out smoke. "He died on this beach on Friday. Of that. Of you."

* * *

Surtr didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he did a thing I'd never seen him do. The red came back into his cracks. All at once. Not like fire. Like a blush. Every crack in him lit up, dull and deep and red, from his feet to his head, the way a man's face goes red when he's been told something he didn't know and can't bear.

"Didn't," said Surtr. "Know."

"Now you do."

"Gray one?" said Surtr. "In the valley? Under the white?"

"Ashlar," said Aurethar.

Surtr looked down at his own hands. Huge. Dark. With the old red still in the cracks of the knuckles.

"I saw him," he said. Very slowly. "From the pass. Lying on the glass. After. With his wing up." A long, grinding breath. "Thought he was dead. Thought I did that." He shut his coal eyes. "Was glad."

The sound from the dragons in the sky went up a tone. Like the saw had hit a knot.

* * *

I walked out between them.

I don't know why. My legs just did it. I walked out onto the sand between Aurethar and Surtr, with the dragons' sound all around me and my left side gray and quiet, and I turned my head to see them both, the way Alistair says. Aurethar on my right. Surtr on my left. My blind side.

Put something you trust on your blind side.

I didn't know if I trusted him. I did it anyway.

"Aurethar," I said. "He told me something. Ashlar. Before he died. Can I tell you?"

Aurethar looked down at me. One great gold eye.

"Tell me."

"He said to tell my father it wasn't his fault. The sword. He said he had to. He said he'd have done it himself." I swallowed. "And the last thing he said. He was saying it to me, I think, and to the old captain from the valley, both at once. He said Steady, lad. You're doing fine." I looked at Aurethar. "He didn't say one word about Surtr. Not one. He had twenty-two years to be angry, and an hour to say it, and he spent all of it telling people it wasn't their fault."

* * *

Aurethar didn't say anything.

But behind me, someone was walking across the sand. I heard it on my right. My father. Barefoot. He'd come across the harbor on his little plates of frost, and up the beach, and he walked past me and stood on Surtr's other side. Not between them. Beside Surtr. On the same side.

"I drew the sword," said my father quietly. "In the valley. I'm the one who made the glass."

"Because of him," said Aurethar.

"Because of both of us," said my father. "He brought the fire. I brought the white. And Ashlar lay down between us and paid for it." He looked up at Surtr. "We both made glass that day. Didn't we."

Surtr looked down at him for a long time.

"Yes," said Surtr.

* * *

The sound from the sky stopped.

Not all at once. One dragon at a time. Green first. Then Calder. Then the copper one with the torn wing. Then the others. Until there was only Aurethar, on the sand, in front of a stone giant and a barefoot king.

And behind Aurethar, a very old voice.

"Little one."

Sabrenne. Lying in her snow bed at the top of the tideline. Too weak to fly yet. But she'd lifted her head, and her old gold eyes were on Surtr.

"I don't know who he was," said Sabrenne. "I was in chains for three hundred years. I wasn't here for his war. I don't know what he did." She breathed out, slowly. "I only know who's asking."

Aurethar looked back at her.

Then he looked at Surtr. For a very long time.

"Ask, then," said Aurethar.

Surtr lowered himself down onto one knee in the sand. Slowly. With a sound like a hillside settling. So that his coal eyes were level with Aurethar's gold one.

"May I," said Surtr, very carefully, "work. Here. On your beach. Please."

Aurethar breathed out. Smoke. Not fire.

"Hm," said Aurethar.

Which, from Aurethar, is yes.

* * *

Davren's forge-bed took an hour to lay.

He'd built one before, for the feast at the Lyradon bridge, a long bed of river stones with iron grates over them and Surtr underneath for the heat. He built this one on the North Sands below the tideline, out of the black wreck ribs and the stones of the old net stakes and everything iron Tamar's sailors could find that wasn't holding anything up. My grandfather built the anvils out of the Hold's old mooring bollards. Julian built the frames.

And then Surtr lay down on his side along the length of it, the way a dog lies along a hearth, and put one great hand flat under the grates, and opened his cracks. Just a little.

The stones went red. Then orange. Then white.

"Hot enough?" said Surtr.

"That's—" said Davren. He held his hand out over it, and snatched it back, and looked at it, and grinned like a boy. "That's perfect. Do you see? That's—"

"Two," said Carol.

* * *

Then we ran out of iron.

That took about twenty minutes. Davren and my grandfather and Surtr went through everything Tamar's sailors had brought down to the sand. Old anchors. Broken chain. Hoops off rotten barrels. A rusty brazier from the Hold kitchen. Enough for one set of rings. Maybe two.

"Forty-three ships short," said Davren. He sat down on the sand. "There's no iron. Not here. Not this side of the Lyradon mines. Do you see?"

Carol didn't count that one.

I was looking at the harbor.

At the forty-five red ships still at their moorings. With their sails hanging. And on every bow, still, where Kessavel had chained a piece of Cindrel to burn, a long black chain. Hanging loose. Links as thick as my wrist. Nobody had wanted to touch them. Nobody had known what to do with them. They'd just hung there for six days, like something nobody wanted to look at.

"There's iron," I said.

* * *

Iselle understood before anyone else. Of course she did.

She put her hand in her pocket and took out the padlock. The one from the gangplank of the Knock. Black iron. Shaped like a fist. She'd been carrying it since yesterday. She stood on the sand looking at it.

Then she walked down to the forge-bed, past Davren, past my grandfather, all the way down to where Surtr lay along the stones with his great hand under the grates. She held the padlock out to him on her open palm.

"Can you melt this?" she said.

Surtr looked at it. At her. At the fist shape.

"Yes," he said.

"Will you?"

"If you want."

"I want," said Iselle. And she put it on the grate herself, and stood back, and watched it go. Red. Orange. White. And then soft, and then running, and then just iron. A bright little pool on the stones. No fist. No shape at all.

* * *

The freed Hushed came down to the North Sands after that.

Nobody asked them to. Word went up the hill to the lower court of the Hold, where my grandmother's kettle was going and my grandfather's horses were lined up on the benches, and they came down. Two hundred and fifty-one of them. In a line. And every one of them, as they came, put their hand in their pocket. Because every one of them had kept it. The padlock that fell off their hand on the cobbles on Thursday. I don't know why. I don't think they knew either. You keep a thing like that.

Corran Hale went first. He put his on the grate and stood there while it melted, with his daughter holding his arm.

Then Davi Marsh. Then Lisbet Fane. Then Tomas Pell.

Then Ada. She came down the sand with Marra, and she held her padlock out to Surtr on her open hand, the way Iselle had, and signed at him in mill-talk, very slowly. He didn't understand. I told him what she'd said.

"She says thank you," I said. "She says she's not afraid of fire. She's from a mill. Mills have furnaces. She says it's just warm."

Surtr looked at Ada for a long moment.

"Warm," he said. "Yes." And the cracks in him went gold. Just for a moment. The way they do when something moves him, Julian says. "Just warm."

* * *

Then the Kethran sailors went out to the red ships in the harbor boats and took the black chains off the bows.

All forty-six. The Knock's too. Link by link. Kessavel's chains. Cindrel's chains. The ones that had held a burning god to the bows of their ships while they hid in the holds. They rowed them ashore and carried them up the sand in long black heaps, and put them down by the forge-bed, and stood back.

And Surtr melted them.

All afternoon. Very slowly. Very carefully. Link by link, with his great hand under the grates and Davren calling the heat and my grandfather at the anvil with his spectacles on the end of his nose and the hammer going, and the iron coming off the stones bright and soft and shapeless. And my grandfather and Davren and the Westmere smiths and two Kethran sailors who'd been farriers before they went to sea taking it and drawing it out and bending it, and bending it, into rings.

Kessavel's chains. Made into the rings that hold the stones that say Any who come and ask.

* * *

Surtr is very easily distracted.

I hadn't known that. Julian says it's always been so. That it's the thing nobody in the war would have believed. That the end of the world gets distracted by ladybirds.

That afternoon it was the phoenixes. A dozen of the young copper ones had come down off the chimney pots to sit on the warm stones at the edge of the forge-bed, because it was the warmest place in Westmere, and Surtr kept looking at them. Then the goat, which ate part of his toe. Then Fenrir, who lay down against his back because it was warm, and groaned, and Surtr turned his head to look and the heat under the grates went sideways.

"Surtr," said Julian.

"Sorry."

Then Jörmungandr surfaced in the harbor with the nine on his back, going around, and Surtr stared at that for a full minute.

"Surtr."

"Sorry."

Then a small boy from the Hold street walked right up to his knee and said "Are you a mountain?" and Surtr said "No. Sorry," and the boy looked very disappointed, and Surtr looked at Julian, and Julian sighed, and Surtr picked the boy up very carefully in one cooled hand and put him on his shoulder, where he sat for the rest of the afternoon shouting at the dragons.

"Surtr."

"He asked."

"He didn't ask."

"He looked like asking."

Julian put his hand over his eyes.

* * *

And my grandfather argued with him. The whole time.

"That ring's a hair out of true," said my grandfather.

"Is true."

"It's a hair out. I can see it from here."

"Can't see. Have spectacles."

"I've got spectacles so I can see. That's what they're for." My grandfather held the ring up to the light. "A hair. The north side. Same as the handrail."

"Handrail. Is right."

"The north handrail on that bridge is a quarter of an inch too high and it has been for twenty years."

"Is exactly right."

"Then why do I bang my elbow on it every time?"

"Elbow. Too low."

Julian, at the frames, didn't look up.

"They've been having this argument for twenty years," he told me. "Every year at the bridge. If either of them ever won, I think they'd both be very sad."

* * *

By sundown there were thirty-three sets of rings on the sand.

Thirty-three. True. Every one. My grandfather had held every ring up to the light and found nothing to say, which Julian said was the most he'd ever seen him concede to anyone. And the black chains were gone. All forty-six. And the two hundred and fifty-one padlocks.

Surtr lay along the forge-bed with the heat banked down to embers and his coal eyes half shut, and the small boy asleep on his shoulder, and Fenrir asleep against his back, and two phoenixes asleep in the crook of his arm.

My father went and sat down beside him.

On the sand. In the dark. With his back against the stone of Surtr's side, where it was warm. And for a long time neither of them said anything at all.

* * *

I was close enough to hear. On my right side.

"Never said sorry," said Surtr at last. "To a dragon."

"No," said my father.

"Can't now. He's gone."

"He'd have said it wasn't your fault," said my father. "He said that about everyone. Garrick told you."

"Was, though."

"Some of it." My father was quiet a while. "Some of it was mine." He tipped his head back against the warm stone. "I sat on the glass all that night, you know. After. I didn't know what else to do."

A long rumbling silence.

"Me too," said Surtr. "Other end. Of the valley."

My father turned his head and looked up at him.

"Didn't know," said Surtr, "you were there."

"I didn't know you were," said my father.

They sat there a long time after that. A stone giant and a king, in the dark on the North Sands, by a forge full of melted chains, with a small boy and a wolf and two phoenixes asleep on them, both of them thinking, I suppose, about a night twenty-two years ago when they'd sat at opposite ends of the same valley of glass, all night, not knowing the other was there.

* * *

Mary's book. Monday. Written on the North Sands by the light of the forge-bed, sitting on one of my grandfather's bollard-anvils, with Melody holding the lantern and the ink very warm.

Monday. 5 a.m. Uriah in the yard. Alistair tapped him on the left shoulder and said you stopped watching me. Uriah laughed. Garrick 7 out of 20.

9 o'clock. Davren: 135 rings. No iron. Garrick Valewood: 45 nights and somebody might die and it'll be me.

Julian. Surtr at the boundary stone since dawn, waiting to be asked. Tamar said any who come and ask. Tamar said yes.

Surtr looked at the sea. He said big, wet, don't like it, will try.

The dragons rose. Aurethar told him about Ashlar. He didn't know. He went red all over. Garrick stood between them and told Aurethar what Ashlar said. Uriah stood beside Surtr and said we both made glass. Sabrenne said I only know who's asking. Surtr knelt and asked. Aurethar said hm.

No iron. Garrick said there's iron. The chains on the red ships. Iselle melted her padlock first. Then all 251 freed Hushed. Ada says it's just warm.

Surtr melted all 46 of Kessavel's chains. They are rings now. 33 sets by sundown. Garrick Valewood couldn't find anything wrong with any of them.

Surtr was distracted by phoenixes, the goat, Fenrir, Jörmungandr and a small boy. Julian said Surtr 14 times. Carol counted.

Uriah and Surtr sat by the forge. They were both in the valley that night. Opposite ends. All night. Neither knew.

And under that, in enormous capitals, every one of them very slightly scorched into the page, as though each letter had been made by pressing a warm iron nail very carefully into the paper and lifting it off again before it could burn through, with the S backward and then crossed out and done again the right way:

SURTR. I ASKED. I'D LIKE IT NOTED.

And under that, small and neat, in a carpenter's chisel hand:

He's been practicing "noted" since Thursday. J.