“Here, boy,” Curan said, grasping Ban’s elbow. “Smear the mud on your forearms, chest, shoulders, and face. It will keep the heat away while you reach in and pull out the bloom.”
A wide bucket of gray mud waited, and two of the apprentices had already begun slathering it on. Ban tugged his shirt off and obeyed, welcoming the cool, heavy feel of it through his fingers. For good measure, he slid it through his hair, too, slicking it back. He and the apprentices became animate clay men, eyes glinting, and teeth, too, when they laughed at each other.
He drew a spiral over his heart and said, My heart is the root of the island, in the language of trees. Curan nodded approval; it had not been one of his instructions.
“You all remember the charm?” the wizard asked. “You may need it more than once, for the iron these days is sleepy. For every six blades we used to forge successful, we get only one good, living bloom now.” His gnarled blond hair was braided back in three ropes, tied together with pieces of iron coins and silk. A leather apron protected his chest, painted and sewn with marked spells for steadiness and even heat. The apprentices and Ban nodded, ready.
Together they went to the first chimney, where the ore Ban had harvested himself cooked. With a long-handled hammer, one apprentice knocked the thin layer of clay away from the door at the base. Heat flared out, licking with fire, followed by a thin stream of melted slag, red-hot. Ban lifted tongs and positioned himself to reach in with them, blinking at the heat drying his eyeballs and cracking the mud on his skin.
“They will be hard, the chunks of iron, but the surface gives, like a sea sponge or loam beneath your feet,” Curan said.
Breathe in the fire, out a long hissing spell: words in a hard, symmetrical pattern the iron enjoyed. Ban crouched and angled the tongs into the furnace mouth. Fishing through the roast, his nose filled with hot burn and smoke, Ban whispered the spell again. He closed his eyes, listening to the fire. It spat merrily at him, happy to be so furiously hot: Dancing from heaven, hot as stars, it sang.
He whispered the secret name of iron, and finally his tongs clasped onto something that felt right. He pulled. The iron dragged at the guts of the chimney. Ban coaxed it, sweat on his lips and trailing down his neck and sticking at the corners of his eyes. The bloom of iron worked free, born from the desperate heat, and Ban smiled.
Backing away with that glowing hunk clasped in the tongs—white-hot, orange, and dark, shadowed black—he turned to the stone altar slab on the ground. He set the bloom down, but did not release it from the tongs.
Curan tapped it with a short hammer, gently. Iron, he said in the language of trees, then shaped the words for fire and earth. Flecks of orange-black fell away.
“Good,” he said.
Ban fixed his stance, holding the tongs with both hands and his shoulders back, and he began the slag charm. As he spoke it, Curan and the apprentices hammered the bloom of iron, working the slag away, the impurities, in a heart rhythm, a rhythm the wind picked up and Ban felt in the soles of his feet. He’d not touched anything like this since he was a child, working magic with his mother, or dancing with Elia. Alone as a wizard in Aremoria, he had not been offered such a chance, either.
The iron formed under their hammers into a long, soft rectangle, shining like a sun.
I burn! the iron cried in triumph.
Ban laughed at its joy, feeling an echo of it rumble through his arms.
Curan gave him an understanding smile, though one of the apprentices’ brows creased, as if he did not hear. “It speaks easily with you, Ban Errigal, and very clear,” the wizard said.
“It called to me from the marsh, when we were harvesting,” Ban said. “I asked the roots for my own material—the quietest, strongest ore. To become a sword for a Fox.”
“The island listened.” Curan clapped his hand on Ban’s bare, muddy shoulder. The iron wizard frowned a moment but said no more, going to oversee his students remove blooms from the remaining chimneys.
“I hear that bright magic!” called a distant voice in a happy yell.
Ban turned south, toward the path from the Innis Road.
A soldier approached on a fine-shouldered chestnut mare, in the dark blue coat of Lear’s retainers, but unbuttoned over a dirty white shirt. His sword belt slung over the saddle and tapped his horse’s shoulder with every trot. The soldier unbuckled the chin strap of his leather helm and tossed it to the rocky earth, swinging off the saddle before even pulling his horse to a stop.
Vibrant hair flared off his skull, half stuck down with sweat. “Stars and granite!” cried Rory Errigal—the brother barely behind Ban in age, but always ahead in legitimacy. Rory raised his arms wide as if he could make love to the whole valley. “What a fine place this is, and finer still to be home at last!”
The heir to the earldom was buoyant and as bulky as his father, with a thatch of red hair and matching red freckles thick over the rough white skin of Errigal, the same color as the coarse sand of the beaches. His thin beard and eyelashes
