Alan was three minutes late, and the world was about to find out what that cost.

It was not his fault, exactly. The groundskeeper had been asleep. This was a perfectly reasonable thing for a groundskeeper to be at four fifty in the morning, and it had taken Alan six minutes of polite knocking, a whispered apology, and a small tip from his own meager allowance to obtain the key to the Cinder Annex. By the time he had run the length of the east service road with the key clutched in his fist and the cold air burning his lungs, the sky behind the towers had gone from black to bruise-purple, and the great bell of the Rotunda was striking five.

-- Late, -- said a voice in his skull, flatly. -- Three minutes and nineteen seconds. I counted on my fingers.

-- The groundskeeper was...

-- I do not care about the groundskeeper. I care about the clock. -- A pause. -- Open the door, idiot.

The Cinder Annex stood at the end of a cobbled yard behind the Artificery Hall, a squat low building of soot-black brick with a tall chimney and a roof of cracked slate. The department of practical enchantment had abandoned it decades ago for a cleaner, more modern workshop with fewer cobwebs and a better ventilation system. Alan had found it on Monday, after three evenings of discreet questions, and spent two afternoons of his rare free time clearing it out. He had swept the floor, scrubbed the anvil, replaced a rotted bellows strap, and bought, from a coal merchant on Candlewick Lane, a hundredweight of the best charcoal his budget could stretch to. It had cost him nine silver bits. He had not told anyone, because it was a matter of principle, and because Helga's forge had to be ready before she asked for it.

He unlocked the door. He lit the lamp. He knelt on the swept brick floor beside the cold forge, laid his palm against the iron lip of the hearth, and felt for the warmth in his chest.

-- Helga, -- he said. -- Please come out.

The light that rose between his fingers was a deep fierce orange, the color of a coal fanned to life. It did not bloom, and it did not spread. It roared, briefly, like a draft in a chimney, and out of it, with a thud of boots, a woman landed in the middle of the floor with a hammer on her shoulder.

She was not tall. That was the first thing he noticed. She stood perhaps a head shorter than Valeria, and a hand shorter than Alan himself, but there was nothing small about her. She was built like an iron stove, square and solid and compact, with wide shoulders and a deep chest and thick strong forearms corded with muscle. Her hair was the bright dense red of heated copper, bound up on top of her head in a messy knot from which several wild curls had already escaped. Her face was round and freckled and streaked with soot, and she had a short flat nose and a stubborn jaw. She wore a heavy leather apron over a plain work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a pair of heavy boots caked with something black. The hammer on her shoulder was enormous. Its head was bigger than Alan's skull.

She was a grown woman, entirely. Every line of her face said so, from the weather in her eyes to the faint lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked around the Cinder Annex with narrowed eyes, taking in the cleaned anvil, the new bellows strap, the stacked charcoal.

-- Hm, -- said Helga.

It was a very small sound. It was not approval. It was something very like approval that did not wish to be seen.

-- Three minutes and nineteen seconds late, -- she said. -- And you swept the floor.

-- It was dirty.

-- It was supposed to be dirty. It is a forge. -- She kicked a pile of charcoal with the toe of her boot, and nodded slowly. -- Good coal. Where did you get it?

-- Candlewick Lane.

-- What did it cost?

-- Nine silver bits.

-- You were robbed, -- said Helga, and a flicker of something quite different crossed her face. -- By about two. But it is honest coal. I will not hold it against you. -- She spun the hammer from her shoulder to her hand in a casual, effortless arc, and pointed it at him. -- First lesson. Ore. Sit down, boy.

She had laid out a row of twelve stones on a plank across two barrels. They were lumps of various sizes, grey and brown and rust and black, none of them especially interesting to look at. Each one was marked with a stroke of white chalk. She stood behind the plank with her arms crossed and her chin lifted like a general reviewing a very small army.

-- Twelve samples, -- she said. -- You will identify each by name, by use, and by its worth in the Candlewick market. I will give you fifteen minutes. If you get more than six right, I will not throw the hammer.

-- And if I get fewer than six?

-- Then I will throw it at the wall behind you. -- She considered. -- Probably.

-- Probably?

-- I have good aim. Probably is a courtesy.

Alan sat on an upturned crate and looked at the stones.

He did not know a single one of them.

-- Metal does not lie, -- said Helga, watching him. -- That is the first thing I teach. A man can say anything. He can say he is a hero, or a friend, or a master craftsman. A stone will not say anything. You hold it. You scratch it. You weigh it. You listen. It tells you exactly what it is. Whether you are clever enough to hear it is your problem.

He picked up the first stone. It was dull and heavy and cold. He turned it over in his hand. He could not tell what it was.

So he did what he did with every problem he could not solve. He made a table.

He found a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil in his pocket, and he began to draw a grid. Down the left side he wrote the numbers one to twelve. Across the top, he wrote columns: color, streak, weight, hardness, sound, smell. It was a ridiculous exercise. It was also, he thought, a way to turn an unanswerable question into twelve small answerable ones.

He scratched each stone against a flat black tile Helga had left on the plank, and recorded the streak. He weighed each one in his palm against a lead sinker from his pocket. He rapped each one with the pommel of a screwdriver and listened to the ring. He sniffed them, which made Helga make a disgusted noise.

-- What are you doing?

-- Collecting data.

-- That is not how it is done.

-- It is how I do it.

-- ... Hm, -- said Helga.

The quarter hour went faster than he expected. He began to see patterns. The heavy ones with the red streak sounded different from the heavy ones with the black streak. The pale ones with a metallic sheen were softer, and scratched. He found that the third and eleventh stones were nearly identical in weight but not in sound, and that this seemed to matter. He wrote it all down in his small cramped hand.

Helga stopped watching him from across the room, and drifted closer. Then closer. By the time he reached stone nine, she was standing just behind his shoulder, looking down at the grid. She said nothing. She was breathing through her nose, in the careful way of a person pretending not to be interested.

-- That one is pyrite, -- she said abruptly, pointing with her hammer. -- Fool's gold. It looks fine, but it is garbage. You will sound like an idiot if you call it gold in Candlewick.

-- Thank you, Senior. -- He wrote it down. -- It sounds different from the gold-colored one. Lighter. Brittle.

-- Yes, -- said Helga, grudgingly. -- That is correct.

When the time was up, he had recorded his guesses on his sheet, and he held it out to her with both hands, as one gives a document to a magistrate. Helga took it. She read it from top to bottom, her lips moving slightly. A muscle ticked in her jaw.

-- Nine, -- she said. -- Of twelve.

-- That is better than six.

-- It is better than six. -- She turned the paper over, and then back, as if checking for a trick. -- You do not know what half of them are called. You wrote hard grey one with oily sound.

-- I did not know the name.

-- But you knew what it did. -- She looked at the stone on the plank, and her thumb went out and stroked the dull grey surface, slowly, absently, the way a person strokes the neck of a horse. Her face had gone soft and intent, and she did not seem to know she was doing it. -- You did not have to know the name. You listened to it. That is the right way.

Alan said nothing. He had learned, over the past week, that the best thing to do when one of the five revealed something without meaning to was to look away.

-- Hmph, -- said Helga, and snatched her hand back. She cleared her throat loudly, and when she spoke again, her voice was twice as rough as before. -- Right. That is the theory. Now the practice. You need money, boy.

-- I do?

-- Everyone needs money. Metal costs money. Food costs money. Spirit stones cost money. Do you think the five of us can live on air? -- She jabbed a thumb at the door. -- There is a rack of broken blades in the corner. Work orders. Local students, tradesmen, a few idiots from the guard. They pay us to fix them. We take the commissions, we split the pay, we buy materials. That is how a smith eats.

-- Is that, ah, permitted?

-- It is a free forge. Nobody has asked who is using it.

Alan went to look at the rack. It held a dozen weapons in various states of disrepair. A chipped hatchet. A hunting knife with a loose tang. A rusted short sword. A small dagger, mean and thin, with a notch gouged out of the blade.

-- That one belongs to Tobias, -- he said. He had recognized it at once. -- It is my roommate's. He dropped it down a stairwell. I told him I would see if the groundskeeper knew someone.

-- The groundskeeper knows no one. -- Helga took the dagger and turned it in the lamplight. She sniffed. -- Cheap steel. A Candlewick special. Four silver bits at most. It is worth about three to fix, and I would ask five.

-- Tobias cannot afford five.

-- Then he gets it for four.

-- Three, -- said Alan.

-- I just said three was the cost.

-- Then three, and he will pay it, and I will take nothing for my work, since I am only holding the anvil. -- He took a breath. -- And I will pay a fair share for the use of the forge and the coal.

Helga stared at him.

-- You want to pay me for holding the anvil.

-- I would like to pay for what I use.

-- It is a free forge.

-- The coal was not free.

-- It was your coal.

-- It was my coal, which you are using. -- He stood very straight. -- I would like to pay a fair share. Please, Senior Helga. It matters to me.

-- ... You are the strangest person I have ever met, -- said Helga.

-- I have been told.

-- It was not a compliment.

-- I took it as one, -- said Alan.

She made a sound in her throat that might have been a laugh, or a growl, or a very small cough. She set the dagger on the anvil and picked up the hammer.

-- Fine. You hold the tongs. Watch the color of the steel. When I say now, you turn it. If you turn it early I will break your fingers. If you turn it late, I will break my own. Understood?

-- Understood.

They worked for twenty minutes. She heated the blade in the forge, pumping the bellows with one hand while the other held a pair of tongs, until the notch glowed a dull cherry red. Then she laid it on the anvil and struck, a clean ringing blow, a second, a third. The sound filled the little building, deep and bright and exact. Sparks leapt from the steel and died in the dark. Alan held the tongs, and watched the color, and turned the blade at her word, and for a long time neither of them said anything.

It was, he realized, the first time in a week that nobody had been trying to tell him how to stand. It was only work. It had a rhythm. It was hot, and loud, and filthy, and the heat of the forge soaked into his bones and loosened the stiffness in his shoulders. He found that he did not have to think about anything. There was only the steel, and the hammer, and the next blow.

When it was done, the dagger lay on the anvil, whole and bright, with a clean new edge. Helga held it up to the lamp, squinting along the blade.

-- Not bad, -- she said. -- For cheap steel.

-- It is very straight.

-- It is straight because I made it so. -- She turned it over. -- You held well. You did not flinch. Most people flinch at the sparks.

-- I was concentrating.

-- You were scared. You did not show it. -- She looked at him sideways. -- That is a good habit for a smith.

There was a pause. Alan began to reach for his purse, because the commission was done and the coal was used and it seemed proper to settle accounts. But Helga said, -- Wait, -- in a strange gruff voice, and turned abruptly away.

She bent over a wooden crate in the corner. She rummaged in it, and he heard the dull clink of metal on metal. When she straightened, she was holding a small pasteboard box, the kind used for storing nails. She did not look at him.

-- Take it, -- she said. -- Scrap.

-- I beg your pardon?

-- Scrap. It is scrap. Leftovers from a job. -- She thrust the box at his chest. -- I would only throw it in the furnace. You might as well have it.

Alan took the box, and opened it. Inside, wrapped in a twist of soft cloth, lay a ring.

It was a plain band, narrow and unadorned, of a dull dark grey metal that seemed to drink the light. It had no stone, no engraving, no ornament of any kind. It looked like nothing at all. It looked like a washer from a machine. But when he lifted it between two fingers, he felt something humming in the metal, faint and steady, like a held note.

-- It is an anti-shock ring, -- said Helga, very fast. -- For mana. It takes the sting out of backlash. It is nothing special. Trash. I made it from a lump of waste ore that was sitting in the corner, in about ten minutes, with my left hand. You should not take it seriously.

-- Senior Helga...

-- I am serious. It is scrap. I banged it out. It is nothing. -- She was not looking at him. She was staring at the wall, and the back of her neck had begun to turn a dull and unmistakable red. -- If you do not want it, I will throw it in the furnace right now.

-- I am not going to refuse a gift.

-- It is not a gift. It is scrap.

-- I will not refuse the scrap, then, -- said Alan carefully. He looked at the ring, and the faint hum in the grey metal, and thought about the way her thumb had drifted over the ore. He did not believe, for even a moment, that it had taken her ten minutes. -- But I would like to pay for it.

Helga's head snapped round.

-- You would what?

-- I would like to pay. At the scrap rate, if you prefer. I believe the current rate for waste iron at the Candlewick yard is, ah, three copper bits a pound. This weighs perhaps an ounce. -- He counted in his head. -- So a quarter of a copper bit. But I think it is only decent to round up. Three copper bits. Please.

-- Three copper bits, -- said Helga, in a strangled voice.

-- If that is acceptable.

-- For a ring.

-- For the scrap, -- said Alan firmly. -- I would not wish to take work you did without proper compensation. I do not like owing people things.

She stared at him for a long time. Her face did something complicated. He watched her struggle through three or four separate reactions, in order, like a person trying on hats, and settle, at last, on a furious scowl.

-- You, -- said Helga, -- are an idiot.

-- Yes, Senior.

-- A complete, unbelievable idiot.

-- I know.

-- Give me the coins.

He gave her the coins. She snatched them from his palm, and her fingers touched his, calloused and warm and rough as brick, for the barest instant. She closed her fist around the copper bits, turned her back on him, and stalked to the corner of the workshop, where she took out a small leather pouch from under her apron, and dropped the coins into it. The pouch clinked. She tightened the drawstring with a savage tug.

She stood there for a moment, with her back to him, holding the pouch in both hands. When she turned around, her face was perfectly blank.

-- Material fund, -- she said stiffly. -- For the next job. That is all. It is not for anything.

-- I understand.

-- Do not look at me like that.

-- Like what?

-- Like you understand. -- She scowled. -- Put the ring on. If it does not fit, I will not fix it. I do not do sizing.

He slid it onto the third finger of his left hand. It fit perfectly. It fit as though it had been made around the finger, to the exact width of the knuckle, with the barest breath of room to spare. He turned his hand in the light. The grey metal looked dull, and plain, and warm.

-- It fits, -- he said.

-- Lucky guess, -- said Helga, quickly.

-- It fits exactly.

-- Then I am a good guesser.

And as he said it, the ring began to hum.

It was a very faint sound, almost below the threshold of hearing. It was a thin, pure, trembling note, and it came from the metal on his finger, and it answered something in his chest. The hollow beneath his ribs rang back, soft and silvery, a small round tone like a bell struck in the next room. The two notes met. They twined. They settled into a single sustained chord that hung in the air of the Cinder Annex for the space of three breaths, and then faded.

Helga was staring at him.

She was staring at the ring, and then at his chest, and then at the ring again. Her thumb was moving against her own palm, rubbing over the calluses in slow circles. Her face was very still. For the first time that morning, she looked not irritated and not embarrassed, but completely, silently, intensely awake.

-- ... Huh, -- she said, very quietly.

-- Was that supposed to happen?

-- It is nothing, -- said Helga. She cleared her throat. -- Resonance. It happens with cheap alloys. Do not mention it.

-- Senior...

-- I said do not mention it.

But she was still staring at the ring, and Alan was not so foolish as to believe her. He said nothing. He tucked his hand into his pocket, and felt the ring warm against his finger like a small, stubborn ember.

-- Time, -- said Helga abruptly. -- We are done. The session is over. Release me. Go and eat something. And wash your face, you look like a chimney sweep.

-- Thank you, Senior Helga. For the lesson. And for the, ah, scrap.

-- Shut up, -- said Helga. -- Go away.

The orange glow flared and folded into his chest. The Cinder Annex was empty. The forge ticked as it cooled.

Alan stood alone in the half-dark, with soot on his hands, and a ring on his finger that sang when it was near his heart.

-- So, -- said Nyx lazily, from the depths of the Lobby. -- Scrap.

-- Scrap, -- said Alan.

-- I have never seen a person so thoroughly lie with a straight face, -- said Nyx, with deep and affectionate satisfaction. -- That woman has been hammering at something in the back of the Lobby since Sunday night. I thought it was snoring. It was a ring.

-- She said it was ten minutes.

-- She is a blacksmith, kid. A ring like that takes a week.

He looked at the ring. He did not say anything. He had thought, for a moment, that he might say something kind. But the words did not come. He only turned his hand slowly, and watched the grey metal catch the light, and felt something warm and unfamiliar and a little frightening settle in the center of his chest.

-- Your ears, -- said Nyx, gently, -- are not red.

-- No.

-- That is much more worrying.

He did not answer.

-- Tomorrow, -- said a different voice, cool and brisk, from the front of his mind, -- is Saturday. There is no schedule for Saturday.

-- I am aware, Senior Valeria.

-- I would like to point out that the Agreement does not prohibit summoning on weekends.

-- It does not, -- said Alan warily. -- But Article Three limits the daily allowance.

-- It also does not prohibit asking.

-- I will, ah, consider it.

-- I would also like to be heard, -- said a warm, quiet voice. -- Regarding Saturday. In the interest of fairness. Since I only had Wednesday.

-- Senior Seraphina, I...

-- Of course, dear. I would never insist. -- A very faint pause. -- I would only like it noted that Valeria asked first.

-- I asked second, -- said Valeria coldly. -- I asked at dawn.

-- It was a matter of seconds.

-- It was a matter of principle.

-- Please, -- said Alan, in a small tight voice, and put his face in his hands. -- Not both of you. Not at the same time. It is only Friday morning.

Somewhere in the Lobby, quite distinctly, he heard Nyx start to laugh.