Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

street and three doors down. Like most businesses in this part of Haven, it was little more than eight feet wide, with two horizontal shutters at the front. The top was supported on tall posts to provide an awning for the bottom, which, supported on two shorter posts, acted as a display counter for tools, nails, hinges, handles, and whatever other bits of ironwork the proprietor thought might lure a customer inside. The brightly painted sign depicting a bell flanked by two ornate candlesticks above a decorative anvil declared the owner to be a master smith capable of crafting more refined objects than mere horseshoes and hammers. But what had always set Edzel’s shop apart from the others and what had kept Hektor, Aiden, and many of the boys their age coming in and braving the smith’s legendary temper was that in his prime, Edzel Smith had made toys of extraordinary skill: tops and jacks, metal whistles, tin flutes, and polished iron marbles, lead guardsmen with arms and legs that actually moved, and tiny, beautifully crafted Heralds and their Companions, painted a heavy, enameled white. Hektor remembered saving his pennybits for months just to be able to afford a single articulated watchman no bigger than his forefinger when he’d been nine years old. Edzel’s daughter, Ismy, had given him another when he was twelve.

He glanced down to the end of the Close where it opened up onto Saddler’s Street before loud shouting issuing from Edzel’s shop jerked him forcibly from the memory.

“I tell you, I’m bein’ thieved from!”

Edzel Smith stood in the middle of the shop shaking his fists in rage. A squat, heavyset man in his late sixties, his gray hair thinning on top and gray beard covering a jutting and belligerent chin; years of forge work had bent his back and twisted his hands, but his arms and shoulders were still covered with thick, corded muscle, and his temper was as volatile as ever.

“Don’t you try an’ shush me, boy!” he continued, his face turning a dangerous purple. “I know when I’m being thieved from, don’t you try an’ tell me otherwise! I had thirteen thimbles, thirteen, on that there back worktable and not a one less! I had a full box of lath nails, that’s twenty-four exactly, an’ now there be naught but nineteen!”

The boy he was shouting at, his son Tay, a tall, broad man of almost thirty-five and a full smith in his own right, did his best to look if not believing then at least respectful as Edzel stomped about, shaking his fists in near apoplectic rage. Usually at work at the forge behind the shop, Tay entered this world of crammed shelving and angry fathers as seldom as possible, but with the rage on him, Edzel was more than Tay’s long suffering wife, Trisha, who helped him run the shop, could handle.

“Boggles maybe?” Tay suggested, trying, without success, to lighten his father’s mood.

“Bollocks it’s boggles!” Edzel shouted back. “I know boggles! I seen a boggle when I was a little, walkin’ home from the forge at twilight one summer, an’ it ain’t them. It’s her, I tell you!” He spun about to shake one fist out the open doorway. “That’s who it is, that heartless, thievin’ stepmother of yourn! An’ I’ll have the Watch on her! See if I don’t!”

“Now, Da,” Tay said, trying to keep his voice reasonable. “You know Judee h’aint been near the shop since she moved out two years ago.”

His father’s face darkened still further. “You mean since she took half my hard-earned brass an’ opened that spiteful rat-infested trap she dares call an iron shop with your ungrateful half-wit of a brother, you mean, is that what you mean!?” Edzel demanded, his voice turning even more shrill.

Tay sighed. In the nearly twenty years since his mother’s death, his father’d had three other women in his . . . in their . . . lives, and each one had finally been driven away by Edzel’s unpredictable temper, made worse now since age and arthritis had driven him from the forge and into the shop full time. Judee’d lasted longer than most, long enough to give Tay and his younger sister, Ismy, a half-brother before she too had left them. But this time she’d gone no farther than along Anvil’s Close to open up a rival iron shop of her own with their brother Ben, who’d just gotten his blacksmith’s papers.

And whose business was doing much better than theirs, if truth be told, Tay admitted.

He glanced around the shop. It wasn’t that it was small or cramped or dirty. It was roughly the same size as any other shop in the Close with a tiny back room for small repair jobs and a front room laid out neatly with a long sandalwood table in the center and sturdy iron shelving on three of four walls, with the larger goods on the bottom and the smaller on the upper. The more valuable were locked in an actual glass and iron-barred case behind a wide, golden oak counter that Edzel polished every morning with ferris oil until it shone.

And it wasn’t that their goods were particularly expensive; their prices were comparable to any other shop in Haven. No, Tay told himself for the hundredth time as he watched a customer step just inside the door, listen for a few moments to his father’s language, then carefully back out again. It was the shop owner himself. They had to do something about Edzel before the business failed entirely, and a few misplaced thimbles were the least of their worries. But he had no idea what the something should be.

Tay turned as Trisha came in from the tiny back kitchen alcove, her expression exasperated.

“I tried to get him to go in for some tea,” she said in a strained voice. “But he won’t have it.”

Tay nodded. “We need to fetch Zo-zo,” he said, trying to hide the strain in his own voice. “She’s the only one that can calm him down now.”

She frowned. “Meegan brought her by first thing this mornin’,” she said doubtfully. “She’ll be at Judee’s for the rest of the day now.”

“I know, but he’ll rant himself into a fever if he keeps on like this. Ask Judee, will you, just for a few minutes, for me, please? Ask her?”

“I’ve sent for the Watch!” his father continued to no one in particular. “An’ don’t you think I won’t call the Guard too if that shiftless lot up at the Iron Street Station House don’t get here soon. I told that Dann boy to fetch Sergeant Thomar, he’ll get her sorted out in a hurry!”

Tay turned. “Thomar Dann’s retired, Da,” he said gently.

“Then he’ll fetch Egan instead.”

“Egan’s dead. He died in the Iron Market fire last month, remember? He’ll probably get Egan’s son, Hektor. He just made sergeant. You remember Hektor, Da?”

Edzel glared at his son with a malevolent expression. “Course I remember him,” he shouted. “I chased him away from Ismy when he were thirteen, an’ gave him a damn good thrashin’ to boot. I don’t care if that boy fetches Hektor Dann or the Monarch’s Own Herald. I want someone here, and I want ’em here now!”

“Mornin’, Edzel.”

As one, both smiths whirled about to see Hektor and Aiden standing in the shop doorway. Edzel’s expression never changed. “Bout time you two showed up,” he snarled as Trisha made her way past them with a sympathetic expression. “Get in here an’ do your job! I could be missin’ half my shop for all the protection I get! I’ll call the actual Guard an’ have them do your job for you if you don’t give me satisfaction right this very minute!” He fixed Hektor with a rheumy-eyed glare. “See if I don’t!”

Hektor nodded, struggling to remember that he was twenty-one and not thirteen and trying to keep as neutral an expression on his face as possible. “So, what exactly are you missing . . . sir,” he said, using the noncommittal but respectful tone he’d learned from generations of Danns in the Iron Street Watch.

It did not mollify Edzel. “I told that brother of yourn when I sent him!” he snarled back. “I had twelve silver spoons in that there locked cabinet,” he said, thrusting a gnarled thumb behind him. “I was giving ’em a good cleanin’ last night. Now there’s naught but eleven! You just go look and see!”

Hektor squeezed behind the counter to peer into the cabinet in question. Three shelves contained a collection of delicate metalwork, including eleven silver spoons. About to ask if Edzel was sure he’d put all twelve away last night—a question that would certainly have caused another round of shouting—he was interrupted by Aiden.

“Didn’t know you worked in silver, Edzel,” his older brother said absently, studying a long- handled toasting fork with a discerning eye.

“I don’t,” Edzel snapped, snatching it away from him. “Tay’s makin’ ’em a locked case to protect ’em against fire. But there’s more what’s gone walkin’ too: thimbles, nails, one stylus, two boat hooks,” he said, counting each one off on his fingers, “a diagonal, a rounded bill, an anvil swage, two hot punches, a driver, an adze blade, an awl, an edge shave, three whole palm irons, a seat wheel, a cleave, an’ nine pair of arms and legs!”

The long list of unfamiliar words, ending in arms and legs, caused both Hektor and Aiden to stare at him, and Edzel spat at the floor in disgust. “For lead soldiers, you idiots, what else would they be for? An’ don’t you go lookin’ at me like I lost my wits neither, I done a full inventory just last week, an’ I know my stock! All them things is missin’!”

At that moment, Trisha returned with a small girl of around three years old in her arms. The child caught sight of Edzel and threw her own arms out, nearly hurling herself from Trisha’s in the process.