What the Guildmaster Didn't Say

The Guildmaster called it a maintenance failure. He called it that twice, in two different rooms, to two different groups of very frightened smiths, and both times he would not look directly at the forge while he said it.

Wren noticed that. Wren noticed most things nobody asked her to.

That night, while the rest of the apprentices slept in the loft above the tannery, she climbed the scaffolding around the sky-forge with a stolen lantern and her heart going twice its normal speed. Up close, the forge didn't look dead. It looked like it was holding its breath.

She pressed her palm flat against the cold iron casing — a thing she'd been told never to do, on pain of a beating she'd never once questioned — and the breath she'd heard in the yard came again, closer now, unmistakably a pulse.

"I know you're in there," she whispered, feeling extremely foolish.

The metal under her hand went warm.

Not hot. Not the searing heat a working forge should carry. Just warm, the way a hand is warm, and for one impossible second Wren felt something on the other side of that iron press back.

She snatched her hand away and nearly fell off the scaffolding.

Behind her, at the base of the ladder, Old Tobin stood holding a lantern of his own, his face grey in the dark.

"You heard it too," he said. It wasn't a question. "Then may the mountain help us both, girl, because I was hoping I was the only fool left who could."