She’d asked leave of the master whose work it was with a look and received a mute nod, and the watching knot waited for her to lift the folded billet and tilt it against the light, the way any smith on the continent would.
Instead, she brought it up beside her ear, closed her eyes, and flicked the edge with her fingernail.
*Tiiing...*
The dwarves traded glances over their beards. She flicked it again, lower down, head tilting, long elven ears angling toward the steel like it had started talking, and the muttering around her died into baffled silence.
"Sixty-four folds," she said, eyes still shut. "And every weld is clean. How, at this size?"
The master whose billet it was stared at her, then down at the tally-marks punched into the billet’s end, sixty-four, by his own hand, and forgot entirely to be afraid of her. "Hydraulic hammer for the first thirty." He glanced at Brokk. Brokk did not rescue him. "...The rest by hand. Lass. The rest by hand."
"Would you show me the hammer?"
He showed her the hammer. Of course he showed her the hammer.
The hall, however, was no longer looking at hammers. An apprentice hanging over the third-tier rail went round-eyed and lost her running battle with protocol.
"You listened?! How?!"
Her master cuffed the back of her head on principle, growled about manners in front of guests, and then turned back to Kaelira and waited for the answer along with everyone else.
"Every weld line is a string," Kaelira said, most of her attention already on the hydraulic hammer. "Strike the edge and they all sound together. Clean welds ring in tune. A cold shut buzzes against the rest. You quiet yourself and count the voices." She glanced up, found some three hundred dwarves staring at her, and misread it pletely. "...I couldn’t hammer-test anything in a hidden forge. The neighbors would have reported the noise. Listening was the only test I could afford."
Nobody said a word.
They tested steel by striking it, by breaking a corner off, by biting an edge in acid and reading the scar. Proud, loud, honest methods that had served the mountain since the first forge was lit, and not one dwarf in this hall or any other had ever thought to ask the steel quietly and let it answer. A dwarven forge hall had never once in its existence been quiet enough to try.
And even if they had...
’Is this a natural advantage of an elven smith?’ they wondered.
Somewhere along the tier above, a hammer-butt knocked twice against an anvil’s horn, and a second answered from the stock racks, the same low double-knock, there and gone.
Elowen’s head came up. ’They dare?!’ she seethed inwardly.
She knew that sound. Every royal guard who had ever stood a post at an alliance ceremony knew it: the smith’s salute, the knock the mountain’s masters gave a masterwork at its unveiling, the highest courtesy their craft possessed. Dwarven envoys used to boast that kings waited whole reigns to hear it twice.
And they were giving it to the heretic elf and her Holy Son. Casually. In passing. As if the Son of the First Elf were some... colleague, to be appraised and found impressive.
Her fists found her hips. This was all wrong. These creatures were supposed to be in terror of him, on their faces before him, not grading him on their sooty little anvils, and the sheer presumption of it made her want to draw her sword on principle.
But nobody consulted her. The tour rolled on.
Kaelira, for her part, had certainly heard the knocks. She’d filed them as more smithy noise and gone back to the steel.
It was Brokk who finally said it out loud.
The First Hammer had been watching the heretic elf orbit her hall for the better part of an hour, her expression fossilized. When Kaelira leaned over an anvil to study its face, Brokk’s eye caught on the woven necklace lying against Quinlan’s collarbone where he leaned beside her. Leaves, seedpods, resin. Forest trash, by every dwarven standard that mattered.
Arranged in interlocking geometric bands that repeated with fanatic precision.
"Whose work is that?" Brokk demanded.
"Mine," Kaelira said, straightening to her full height, braced by ancient habit for the verdict.
Brokk looked at the necklace for a long moment. Looked at Kaelira. Looked at the necklace.
"Good geometry," the First Hammer said. "Wasted on leaves."
It took Kaelira a visible second to understand she’d just been plimented and recruited in the same breath. The smile she fought down won anyway, and around the anvil several dwarven masters grinned into their beards at the sight.
"I don’t understand you people," she said. The words came out before she could stop them. "Elvardian law states that elves who craft are criminals. I was sentenced to die in a conscript wave for owning a shabby forge, thanks to the law that only exists because you people wanted it." Her hands had closed at her sides. "So why are you looking at me like... like that? Why are you not disgusted?"
She parted her arms wide, and declared to the entire hall, "I’m an elf who loves smithing! I cherish it more than anything! My dream is to bee the greatest smith ever, surpassing every single ancestor you have!"
"Hoho..." Multiple old dwarven eyes lit up with petitive fire upon hearing those sacrilegious words e from the elf’s delicate lips.
But they were gazes of pure challenge.
Soon, however, the grins died. The hall’s older silence came back, but changed, weighted now with a grievance much older than the war.
"We," Brokk said, and the word carried an ocean of contempt, "wrote nothing. Kings wrote it. Councilors wrote it."
She turned her head and spat, with great accuracy, into a slag channel. "You know what a smith is to the crown of the mountain, elf? A tradesman. A tool that feeds itself. There’s never been a hammer at that council table, not in any meaningful capacity. Oh, some of them held a hammer once. Doesn’t matter. A seat at that table turns a smith into a politician, and a politician counts.
"They count us like they count the anvils, and when they demanded your ban, they consulted us exactly as much as they consulted the anvils. Same with their war. It ran on our steel and it ran on our sons, and the first time the crown asked this hall what it thought of either was never."
"The ban was fear," old Dain said from his bench, quiet. "Their fear, never ours. You elves outlive us by thousands of years, and the crowns couldn’t stomach what your hands might learn from ours in all that time. So they made sure your hands never got near."
"Aye..." another old smith nodded, grim. He looked at Kaelira, and his old eyes were wet and steady at once. "Girl, a smith would sooner ban kings. Half this hall spent its whole life wondering what elven hands would find in the metal, given the chance. And the law said we’d die before we ever saw it."
Kaelira stood very still in the red-gold light.
Quinlan watched the verdict she’d carried since her sentencing, the one she’d braced for at the gate, in the salon, in every elven street, the one that said what you are is a crime, e apart in the one hall where it should have been strongest.
All those years of hiding her hands, and the people whose law had hunted her had spent those same years wishing they could watch her work. The room that was supposed to hate her had been waiting for her.
Her eyes had gone bright, and her voice, when she found it, came out smaller than her shoulders. "...Given the chance," she repeated.
Then she turned, and the whole smithy watched the heretic elf’s attention land on the stock racks of the lowest tier.
"Oi, lass..." the murmurs began.
Kaelira sent Quinlan a look, mischief all over her face. "Will you...?"
Quinlan’s response was pulling his sleeves up. "Just a quick little piece."
"Yes!" she smiled, heart beating rapidly.
"Wait, what are you-" Elowen began, but was interrupted when the duo said together in perfect sync:
"We’re crafting."
The elf’s face scrunched just as hundreds of dwarven eyes shone as they leaned forward, curious.
It was time to show the royal smithy how a primordial and his elven lover went about the dwarf race’s sacred craft!
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