The pickaxe bit into the stone seam near Minoc’s lower mine with a dull clink, not the clean ring I’d hoped for. Thirty swings that hour, maybe more—my shoulder ached with the count, though the weight in my pack was honest: nearly fifty iron ingots, rough and warm from the forge I’d left behind just past midday. I’d stoked that fire myself, cranked the bellows till my arms burned, watching the coals glow like embers of a dying argument. There’s something about the heat of the forge, how it doesn’t lie—either the metal yields, or it doesn’t. That day, it did, barely.
But it wasn’t the mining or the smithing that stuck with me—it was the tongs. Old things, pitted near the hinge, borrowed from a dead man’s bench two winters back. Halfway through shaping a broadsword for the guard vendor, they snapped. Just gave out, red-hot iron slab teetering on the anvil, smoke curling from the crack in the handle. I stood there, heart hammering, smelling my own sweat and the burnt tang of failed steel. I could’ve cursed, could’ve kicked the anvil like a greenhand—but instead, I just sat on the soot-stained stool and laughed. Me, Grimm, who once hauled a dragon’s rib out of the Yew mines, undone by a pair of rusted tongs.
I ended up selling what I could to Bran the Smith, the one-eyed vendor near Minoc’s east gate. He didn’t haggle, not much, just grunted at the ingots and tossed me a pouch—light as a breath, near empty. Gold’s been scarce lately. But he did hand me a new set of tongs, ironbound and cool to the touch. “Don’t break these,” he said. “They were mine once.”
Tonight, I’ll sleep with them on my chest, like a promise. Tomorrow, I go deeper into the mines. There’s rumor of a silver vein behind the old tunnel collapse. Might need stronger tools. Might need more than that. But I’ve got my pick, my fire, and now, a pair of tongs that know what work means.<|im_end|>
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