The anvil rang out a second before dawn.
Marek Durren felt the strike travel up his wrist, through his elbow, and into the bone of his shoulder, a familiar pain that had become its own kind of language. The blade beneath his hammer glowed the pale orange of a winter sunrise, and the coal smoke curled up around his arms like something alive. His shop sat at the eastern edge of Ashvale, where the road bent toward the river and the trees grew thick enough to muffle the wind. The walls were fieldstone and old timber, blackened by years of heat, and the smell of the forge had soaked so deep into the wood that no rain would ever wash it out.
He checked the edge with his thumb, then set the hammer down.
The sword was nearly finished. Eighteen inches of folded steel with a fuller cut along the spine, a crossguard shaped like outstretched wings, a grip wrapped in leather so new it still smelled of the tanner's yard. He had been working on it for the better part of three days, and it was the best thing he had ever made. He hated it for that.
At the door of the shop, a shape shifted in the grey half-light.
"You're early," Marek said, without looking up.
"I was told to be." The voice came from a man in the faded crimson of an Imperial legionnaire, his cloak pinned at the shoulder with a brass badge that had gone green at the edges. He was young, barely old enough to shave, and he stood the way soldiers stand when they are trying not to look nervous. "Sergeant asked me to collect. Said the captain wants it before the column moves."
Marek straightened, rolling the stiffness out of his neck. The legionnaire's eyes were on the sword.
"It's done," Marek said. "Quench and temper, final polish. You can take it now, if you've got coin."
"I've got the warrant." The young man fumbled at his belt and produced a folded paper, creased soft from being carried too long. "From the command post at Greymoor. Signed by the quartermaster."
Marek took it without unfolding it. His hands were black with soot, and the paper would have been ruined anyway. He set it on the bench and turned back to the sword, lifting it by the grip. The blade caught the first thin line of daylight cutting through the door and threw it back, brighter than it had any right to be.
"Here," he said. "Hold it level. Feel the weight."
The legionnaire took it carefully, the way a boy holds a child he has been asked to mind. His face changed when the balance met his palm. He looked up at Marek, and for a moment the nervousness was gone.
"It's lighter than I thought."
"It should be. Your captain will wear it for ceremony, not for war. A heavier blade tires the arm before the speeches are done." Marek reached for a rag and began wiping his hands, though it did little good. "Keep the edge off the scabbard when you sheathe it. And don't let anyone talk you into letting them test it against a helm. Officers always want to do that, and the blade isn't built for it."
The young man nodded, still holding the sword. Then his eyes drifted past Marek to the far wall of the shop, where the unfinished work hung in racks, and beyond them to the back, where a bundle wrapped in oilcloth sat on a shelf.
"Are you taking commissions?" the legionnaire asked. "My sister is to be married, and I had thought perhaps a knife."
"I'm not."
The answer came out harder than Marek had meant. He softened it with a breath and added, "I'm finishing out my contract with the village. After that, I'm moving on."
"Moving on where?"
"Away."
The legionnaire looked at him a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he tucked the sword back into its scabbard, the motion awkward, and counted out coins from a leather purse onto the bench. Marek didn't check the count. Imperial soldiers were honest when it came to money. It was everything else they lied about.
"If you're ever near Greymoor," the young man said, "the forge at the corner of the Square. Ask for Havel. They'll remember me."
"I'll remember the name."
The legionnaire left. His boots were loud on the packed earth outside, and Marek listened to them fade down the road toward where the column would be forming in the common. He stood a long moment with the coins on the bench and the smoke settling around his shoulders.
Then he crossed the shop, took the bundle from the shelf, and unwrapped it.
Inside was a cavalry saber, shorter than the one he had sold, with a leather grip gone dark with sweat. The crossguard was plain. The blade had been sharpened so many times that the fuller had nearly disappeared. Along the spine, where the maker's mark should have been, someone had cut three short slashes with a file. Marek's own mark. He had done it the night he left the Iron Company.
He ran his thumb along the slashes and remembered the weight of it in his hand at the ford of the Ashenmere. He remembered the sound the horses made crossing the shallows. He remembered the signal horn, and the way the light fell across the marsh when the order came down.
Three years.
He set the saber down, wrapped it again, and went to the door. The morning had come in earnest, and Ashvale was waking around him. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the village. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. The road toward the river was empty now, but he could hear the faint sound of the column in the distance, wheels on gravel, a sergeant's voice carried thin by the wind.
Marek stepped out onto the threshold. The air was cold and tasted of iron. He had known for a week that the Iron Company would be passing through, and he had spent most of that time deciding whether to run or to stay. He had not decided yet, and that was its own kind of answer.
From across the common came the sound of a door opening. He turned.
A woman came out of the low stone house opposite, a child on her hip and another clinging to her skirt. She was tall and lean, her hair pulled back in a knot that had been red once and was now the color of an old penny. She crossed to the well without looking at him, set the older child down, and began to draw water. The rope creaked on the pulley.
"Sera," Marek said.
She didn't look up. "You finished the sword."
"You heard the hammer."
"I hear everything in this village. You know that." She set the bucket on the lip of the well and straightened, and he saw that she had not slept. "The legionnaire came. I saw him leave. He was carrying it like it was made of glass."
"It is made of iron. He should know the difference." Marek folded his arms. "How are the children?"
"Warm. Fed. Asking again when their father is coming home." The words were flat, without complaint, and that was how he knew she was close to the edge. "I told them the same I told them yesterday. That he isn't. And that we are not leaving until spring."
Marek said nothing. Sera Thornwall had arrived in Ashvale eleven months ago with four children and a cart that had lost a wheel on the ford. She had been a scout in the border militia, and before that a farmer's wife, and before that nothing he had ever been able to pin down. She had a way of looking at a man that made him feel he had already confessed more than he meant to.
"You could come with us," she said. "When we go."
"Where?"
"South. Past the Blackmoor. My cousin has a farm near the Greymoor road. She says there is work, if a man is willing to do it."
"I've done enough of other men's work, Sera."
She turned then and looked at him full. Her eyes were grey and clear, and there was no softening in them. "That isn't what I meant, and you know it."
He did know it. He had known it since the night she had found him at the back of the forge, drunk on something she had brewed from roots and bitterweed, with the old saber across his knees and his sleeves rolled up to show the brand the Iron Company put on every man who served out his term. A running wolf, on the inside of the right forearm. He had told her more than he had meant to. He had told her about the ford at Ashenmere. About the order. About the men who had not come back.
He had told her he had been a cavalry scout, and that he had deserted three years ago.
"You should not have told me that," she had said, when the talking was done.
"I know."
"If they find you, they will hang you."
"I know."
"And still you are standing in the door of your shop, in a village with a name they will remember, waiting for a column of the Iron Company to ride past your door."
"Yes."
"Why?"
He had not answered her then, and he would not answer her now. The truth was something he had carried so long it had become part of his posture, a slight forward lean, as though he were bracing against a wind that never stopped. He had deserted because the order at Ashenmere was wrong. He had deserted because the men who had not come back were his friends, and the man who had given the order had slept well that night and ridden on at dawn. He had deserted because the Iron Company did not ask questions of its scouts, and he had been one of the ones who knew enough to be useful, and dangerous.
He had deserted because he had not been brave enough to do anything else.
"The column will be here by midday," Sera said. "You have six hours. If you want to be gone before they reach the common, you should go now."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you stand here and let them see you, and you find out what kind of man you are." She picked up the bucket. "I've told you before. I'm not going to tell you again."
She carried the water back toward her house, the older child trotting at her side. The door closed behind her.
Marek stood alone in the doorway. The smoke from his forge drifted past him into the cold morning air, and the sound of the column on the road grew slowly louder. He listened to it the way a man listens to rain when he has left something out to dry.
Six hours.
He went back inside and began to put out the fires.
He worked quickly, without the careful attention he usually gave to the work. The coals in the forge went first, smothered under a blanket of green ash that hissed and steamed and turned the air in the smithy bitter. The quenching trough he left half full. The tools he racked in order, hammer beside hammer, tongs beside tongs, as though the next smith to use them would know his system and respect it. The anvil he cleaned with a rag, the scars of years of work wiped down to the gray iron beneath.
The sound of the column was louder now. Closer. He could hear the jingle of harness chains, the low murmur of voices kept quiet by discipline or by fatigue. He could hear the hoofbeats of the lead riders, distinct from the heavier tread of the infantry behind them. He could hear the creak of the supply wagons, and beneath it all, like a bass note under a tune, the slow groan of wheels on bad road.
He took the last of his belongings from the chest in the corner: a spare shirt, a pair of woolen socks, the half loaf of bread Sera had given him the day before. He tied them into a roll with a piece of cord and slung it over his shoulder. He did not take much else. A smith on the road needs little beyond his hands.
He paused at the door.
The sun was full up now, and the smithy lay in clear morning light, the forge cold, the coals dead, the anvil standing like an altar in an emptied temple. He had lived here for eleven months. He had mended plowshares and cart wheels and the hinges of Sera's gate. He had shod the few horses Ashvale still owned and forged the nails that held the new beams in the meeting hall. He had done the work, and the work had been enough, and the quiet had been enough, and now he was leaving it.
He was leaving it because of the column. He was leaving it because of what he had been. He was leaving it because a man can outrun his past only as long as his past does not see him first.
He reached for the door latch.
Then he heard the sound from the road.
It was not the sound of the column. It was a single footfall, stumbling, then another, and then a gasping that might have been a cough or might have been a man trying to speak and finding that his lungs would not obey him. Marek froze with his hand on the latch. The footfalls came closer, weaving, and then there was a heavy thud against the side of the smithy, as though someone had fallen against the wall.
Marek opened the door.
The man on the step was tall and thin, dressed in the rough coat of a peddler, though the coat was torn across one shoulder and dark with something that was not rain. His face was pale beneath a smear of road dust, and his eyes were half-closed, and his breath came in short, ragged pulls that hurt to hear. Under one arm he clutched an iron coffer, small, heavy, sealed with wax that had been pressed with a sigil Marek did not recognize.
The man looked up at him. His mouth moved.
"The Ashwake," he said. The word was almost inaudible. "It is coming."
Then his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed forward across the threshold.
Marek caught him before he hit the ground, more from instinct than from decision. The man was lighter than he looked, all bone and cold skin, and the iron coffer dug into Marek's forearm as he took the weight. The stranger smelled of woodsmoke and old sweat and something else beneath, something metallic and sharp that Marek recognized after a moment as old blood. He had smelled it on himself often enough, in the camps after a skirmish, when the wind shifted wrong.
He dragged the man inside. It was not easy. The man was dead weight, and the coffer caught on the door frame, and Marek had to wrestle it through with one hand while keeping the stranger's head from striking the anvil stand. He got him to the back of the smithy, behind the quenching trough, where there was a heap of clean sacks he sometimes used for packing. He laid the man down on them and pulled the coffer from his grip.
The coffer was cold. Not cold the way iron is cold on a winter morning. Cold the way a stone is cold that has lain deep in the earth for a long time, and has forgotten what warmth is.
Marek set it aside. He knelt beside the man. The stranger's breathing was shallow but steady, and the pulse at his throat was slow but present. Marek loosened the man's coat and saw the wound beneath: a long slash across the ribs, half-healed and then torn open again, the edges ragged and weeping. The man had been hurt days ago. He had been walking since.
Marek tore a strip from one of the sacks and pressed it against the wound. The stranger did not stir. Marek worked quickly, the way he had learned to work in the camps, where the wounded came in waves and the surgeons were overrun and the smiths were pressed into service because their hands were steady and they had no squeamishness about iron. He cleaned the wound with water from the trough. He packed it with a poultice of yarrow and comfrey he kept in a jar on a shelf, a remedy Sera had taught him. He bound it tight.
The stranger's eyes opened.
For a moment the man stared at the ceiling of the smithy with a look of great confusion, as though he had expected to find himself somewhere else. Then his gaze came to Marek, and something in it sharpened.
"The coffer," the man said. His voice was thin and far away. "Do not open it."
"I won't."
"Swear it."
Marek hesitated. He had a soldier's distrust of oaths, having heard too many of them broken. But the man was watching him with an intensity that had nothing to do with his wound, and Marek found himself saying, "I swear it."
The stranger's eyes closed. His breathing evened out. Within a minute he was asleep, or something like sleep, his face slack and his body still.
Marek sat back on his heels. He looked at the coffer. He looked at the door. He looked at the coffer again.
Then there were voices outside.
"Marek Durren." The voice was loud and carried the snap of someone used to being obeyed. "Corporal Havel, of the Iron Company. Show yourself."
Marek went to the door and opened it. The corporal stood in the road with two men behind him, both armed, both watching the smithy with the flat, professional attention of men who had been told to be watchful. Havel was a young man, slight, with a narrow face and eyes that missed nothing. His hand rested on the pommel of his saber as though it lived there.
"Corporal."
"We are looking for a man on foot. Tall, thin, dressed as a peddler. He may be wounded. He was seen on the eastern road an hour past dawn." Havel's eyes moved past Marek into the smithy. "Have you seen such a man?"
Marek thought of the stranger behind the quenching trough. He thought of the coffer. He thought of the sigil pressed into the wax, which he had not recognized but which had the look of something old and not of the Iron Company.
"No," he said.
Havel studied him. The two men behind the corporal shifted their weight, and one of them let his hand drift to his belt.
"You are certain."
"I have been at the forge since before dawn. I have seen no one."
Havel nodded slowly. His eyes stayed on Marek's face for a long moment, reading something there that Marek could not name. Then the corporal said, "The column passes in six hours. You will be required to provide what service the village can give. A forge, some iron, a smith to shoe the cavalry horses. You will present yourself at the common."
"Yes."
"Do not fail to present yourself."
The corporal turned and walked back toward the road, his men falling in behind him. Marek watched them go. He stood in the doorway until the sound of their boots had faded into the larger sound of the column.
Then he closed the door and went back to the stranger.
The man had not moved. His breathing was still slow, still steady, and the blood had not soaked through the bandage. Marek knelt beside him again and put a hand on his shoulder. The skin was cold. The stranger's eyes opened.
"They were looking for you," Marek said.
"Yes."
"Who are you?"
The stranger looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "I am a man who has been running for a long time. And I have run as far as I can."
"Why here?"
"Because it is small. Because the Company does not care about small places." The stranger's mouth twisted. "And because the Ashwake will come here whether anyone cares or not."
Marek did not ask what the Ashwake was. He had heard the word in the camps, spoken in low voices by men who should have known better. It was a name for a thing that had no name in any official ledger, a shape in the dark that the scouts had reported and the officers had dismissed. Marek had not believed in it. He had been wrong about a great many things.
"You cannot stay here," Marek said.
"No."
"I will take you into the hills. There is a place, a day's walk, where the column will not search."
The stranger closed his eyes. When he spoke again his voice was very faint. "Why would you do that?"
Marek thought of the column on the road. He thought of the order at Ashenmere. He thought of the men who had not come back, and the man who had ridden on at dawn.
"Because I have not been a good man for a long time," he said. "And I would like to be one again, before the end."
The stranger looked at him. Something passed across his features, too quick to read, and then it was gone.
"Then help me stand," he said. "We have a long walk ahead of us."
Marek took his arm and lifted him. The iron coffer lay where he had set it down, cold and sealed and waiting. He did not look at it again. He helped the stranger to the door, and they went out into the morning, where the sound of the column was very near, and the hills stood dark against the east.
They made slow work of the slope. Marek had cleared the floor and shuttered the forge against the winter wind, but the path up to the wood was rough, rutted by the spring melt and now frozen into ridges that caught at the boots. The stranger leaned on his arm and did not speak. His breath came in thin plumes, and once his knees buckled and only Marek's grip kept him from the ground.
The cellar beneath the wood was a thing Marek had never expected to need. He had dug it himself in the second autumn after Sera Thornwall and her children had come to Ashvale, a precaution against the bandit companies that sometimes strayed west from the contested marches. It was dry, and low, and stocked with a cask of water and a sack of dried apples and a blanket that smelled faintly of lanolin from the shearing season. He had told Sera the location once, and no one else, and she had looked at him with that measuring look she had, the one that said she understood what he had done and why and would not ask him to explain.
He helped him down the ladder and settled him on the blanket. The stranger's skin was the color of old paper, and his eyes, when Marek's torchlight found them, were ringed with a bruise of fatigue that went past the flesh. He looked, Marek thought, like a man who had been running for longer than any man should run.
"Rest," Marek said. "I will bring food."
The stranger caught his wrist. The grip was stronger than it should have been.
"Listen to me," the stranger said. "The coffer. You must not open it."
Marek nodded. "I will not."
"You must not open it for any reason. Not for the column. Not for the Thornwall woman. Not for me, if I ask. If I ask, it will not be me."
Marek pulled his wrist free, gently, the way one frees a hand from a child.
"Sleep," he said. "I will be back at nightfall."
He climbed the ladder and pulled it up after him and set the trapdoor in place, and a cover of old leaves and pine needles, and stood for a moment in the wood with his hands at his sides. The column was louder now. He could hear the clink of harness and the lowing of the draft oxen and the voice of an officer calling a halt. He turned and walked down the path toward the forge, and the morning met him with the smell of iron and frost.
He worked through the day. He did not know what else to do. He built up the fire and set the bellows to breathing and laid out the tools in the order he had learned from his master in the eastern forge, a man now thirty years buried in a village that did not exist. He took down a billet of iron that had been waiting for a commission he would never be paid for, and he put it in the coals, and he waited for it to come to the right heat, and he drew it out and began to shape it.
He did not know what he was making. His hands knew. They always had. The iron sang under the hammer in the high sweet note that meant the carbon was right and the grain would close, and the shape that emerged was a thing he had never been asked to make and never thought to design. It was a key. It was long, and the bit was cut in a pattern he did not recognize, a pattern of interlocking rings that turned in upon themselves like the arms of the Long Vael, the dynasty that had ruled the eastern provinces for three centuries before the line had failed and the Iron Company had risen on the ruins. He did not remember cutting that pattern. He did not remember deciding to make a key at all. When it was cool he held it in his hand and felt the weight of it, and he set it on the bench beside the coffer, and he went on with his work.
The column passed at noon.
He heard it on the road, the long slow procession of the Iron Company on the march, the tramp of feet and the rumble of the supply wagons and the creak of the leather. Havel's voice rose above the rest, barking an order at a driver whose ox had stumbled, and Marek heard the corporal's rough laugh and the answering laugh of the men, and he kept his head down and his hammer rising and falling. A scout passed the forge at a trot and did not look in. A lieutenant passed at a walk and did look in, and Marek met his eyes across the forge yard and the lieutenant moved on.
At dusk the column was gone. The road stood empty in the last of the light, and the village was quiet, and Marek walked up to the wood with a basket of bread and a jar of the broth Sera Thornwall had left at his door that morning without a word.
The stranger was awake. He sat against the wall of the cellar with the blanket around his shoulders and the coffer at his feet, and his eyes when they found Marek in the torchlight were clear and very tired.
"You are a smith," the stranger said.
"Yes."
"I thought I smelled iron on you. When you carried me down. The blood remembers, even when the mind forgets."
Marek set the basket down. He broke the bread and poured the broth into a cup he had brought, and the stranger ate and drank without speaking, and Marek sat across from him and waited.
"I am sorry," the stranger said at last, "for what I have brought to your door."
"It is not your fault."
"It is my fault that I am here. It is my fault that they followed. It is my fault that the coffer is in your house instead of a hundred leagues east, in the tomb where it should have stayed."
Marek said nothing. The torch guttered. The cellar smelled of damp stone and lanolin and the faint iron scent that the stranger had named, and beneath it the older smell, the one that was not a smell at all but a presence, a sense of something sealed away and waiting.
"What is in it?" Marek asked.
The stranger looked at him for a long time.
"A name," he said. "A name that was never meant to be spoken again. A name that the Long Vael sealed away when the line failed, because to speak it would have been to call the thing it named back into the world. They thought they had buried it. They thought the tomb would hold."
"And it did not hold."
"No. It did not hold. The seal was broken, by whom I do not yet know, and the name came out into the air of the world again, and the thing it named stirred in its sleep, and the Ashwake began."
Marek thought of the word he had heard in the camps. He thought of the shape in the dark the scouts had reported and the officers had dismissed. He thought of the way the coffer had vibrated on his bench in the night, and the crest he had seen in the torchlight, the arms of the Long Vael, a dynasty dead for three centuries.
"You are one of them," Marek said. "Of the Long Vael."
The stranger did not answer. He looked at Marek, and the look was the look of a man who has carried a weight for longer than he can remember and has set it down at last in a place he did not choose, and he closed his eyes.
"Guard it," he said. "Until I am well. Then I will take it from you and go, and you will not see me again."
Marek nodded. He took the empty cup and the basket and climbed the ladder, and he pulled it up after him, and he walked down the path to the forge in the dark.
The night was long. Marek sat by the dead forge and listened to the wind in the pines and the silence of the empty village, and the coffer sat on the bench beside him, and the key he had made without knowing he was making it lay beside it, and he did not touch either. He thought of the order at Ashenmere. He thought of the man who had ridden on at dawn. He thought of Sera Thornwall and her children asleep in the cottage at the edge of the village, and he thought of the cellar in the wood and the stranger within it, and he thought of the name that was sealed away and the thing it had named.
He did not sleep. At the first grey of the morning he rose and went to Sera's door and knocked, and she came with a shawl over her shoulders and the child at her hip, and he told her what he had done. He told her about the cellar and the stranger and the coffer. He did not tell her about the key. He did not tell her about the name.
She listened. She did not interrupt. When he had done she was silent for a long time, and the child watched them both with the grave attention of a child who has learned early to read the weather of the adults around her.
"You have done what you could," Sera said at last. "That is all any of us can do."
"I have brought trouble to your door."
"You have brought a wounded man to a place where he can be kept from the column. That is what you have done. The trouble was coming whether you opened your door or not. The Iron Company does not care about small places. You told me that yourself, once, in the field camp at Ashenmere."
Marek looked at her. She had not forgotten. She had remembered every word he had said, and the day he had said it, and the place.
"What will you do?" she asked.
"Guard him," Marek said. "Guard the coffer. Wait until he is well enough to go."
"And then?"
"Then he goes, and we are left with the question of what was in the tomb and what the Ashwake is and why the seal failed. But that is for later. That is not for today."
She nodded. She reached out and put her hand on his arm, and the touch was brief and firm, and then she stepped back into the cottage and closed the door, and Marek walked back to the forge in the early light.
He worked that day, and the next, and the next. He kept the fire low and the forge hot enough to shape, and he did the small commissions the village needed, a hinge, a latch, a shoe for Sera's mule, and he walked up to the wood at dusk and brought the stranger broth and bread and news of the column, which had passed beyond hearing now, which had gone on toward the capital and the war that waited there. The stranger mended. His color came back. His eyes cleared. By the fourth day he was sitting up, and by the sixth he was walking in the cellar with the blanket around his shoulders, and on the seventh he climbed the ladder himself and stood in the wood and breathed the cold air and looked at the hills.
On the eighth morning he came down to the forge. Marek was at the anvil, working a bar of iron into a hinge strap, and the stranger stood in the doorway and watched him for a time before he spoke.
"You made a key," the stranger said.
Marek set the hammer down.
"I did not mean to," he said.
"No. The coffer made you. It calls to the craft in a man, and the craft answers, and the thing it makes is always the thing it needs. That is why the seal was broken. That is why I was sent to find it. The smith who broke the seal did not know what he was doing. He thought he was making a piece of work. He was making a key."
"To open it."
"Yes. To open it. To let the name out into the world. And the name has been out ever since, and the Ashwake follows it like a hound follows a scent."
Marek picked up the hammer. He looked at the bar on the anvil. He set the hammer down again.
"Will you open it?" he asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I am the last of the Long Vael, and the seal was my forebears' work, and I will not undo it. The name will go back into the coffer, and the coffer will go back into the tomb, and the Ashwake will follow it back into the place it came from, and the world will be rid of it. That is what I am for. That is what I have walked a thousand leagues to do."
He stepped into the forge. The morning light fell across the coffer on the bench, and the crest of the Long Vael stood out in the iron of the lock, clear and plain and undeniable.
"Give me the key," the stranger said.
Marek looked at the key on the bench. He looked at the coffer. He looked at the stranger, who stood very still in the doorway with the light behind him, and whose face was the face of a man who has come to the end of a long road and is not sorry to be there.
Marek picked up the key.
He held it in his hand for a moment, and he felt the weight of it, and he thought of the man he had been at Ashenmere, and the man he had tried to be since, and the man he might yet become if the world allowed it. He thought of Sera Thornwall and her children. He thought of Havel and the column marching east. He thought of the Ashwake and the name and the tomb.
He set the key in the stranger's outstretched hand.
The stranger closed his fingers around it. He did not smile. He bowed, a little, the way a man bows to another man who has done him a service, and then he turned and walked out of the forge and up the path toward the wood, and Marek heard his footsteps on the frozen ground, and then he did not hear them any more.
Marek stood at the anvil. He picked up the hammer. He set it down again. He went to the door and looked up the path, and the wood was empty, and the hills stood dark against the east, and the morning was very clear.
He turned back to the forge. He built up the fire. He set the bellows to breathing. He took up the bar of iron and laid it in the coals and waited for it to come to the right heat, and the village was quiet around him, and the column was far away, and the name was sealed again, and the smith of Ashvale went on with his work.