The Weight of Silence
The forge breathed like a living thing, its bellows wheezing in and out with a rhythm older than either of the young people who tended it. Smoke coiled up through the chimney hole and dispersed into the pale morning sky above Hollowmere, mingling with the mist that clung stubbornly to the thatched roofs and the muddy lanes below. Eris stood before the anvil with a pair of tongs in one gloved hand, watching the iron bar within the coals shift from dull grey to a furious, breathing orange.
"You're daydreaming again," Kael said, not unkindly, as he hauled a fresh sack of charcoal toward the hearth. Sweat already darkened the collar of his tunic despite the hour, and soot smudged one cheekbone like a bruise. At seventeen he had the build of a man twice his age, shoulders broadened by years of hammer and heat, though his eyes still held the easy warmth of the boy she remembered from childhood games in the millpond.
"I was counting the heartbeats before the iron loses its color," Eris said, and let the excuse fall, deliberately flat, into the space between them. It was true, in a manner of speaking. She had counted them. She had also calculated the precise moment the metal would reach…
