Read Chapter 5: The Blacksmith's Debt

Dawn came with the ring of hammers.

Elara woke to it, the sound echoing up from the courtyard below her dormitory window—not the soft chime of the Academy bell, but the heavy, rhythmic clang of metal on metal. She pressed her palm to the cold glass and saw a plume of smoke rising from the forge shed near the stables. That was new. The Academy hadn't had a working smithy in years, not since the old master had retired. The supply wagons brought everything from the village now.

She dressed quickly, her uniform still stiff with unfamiliar starch, and slipped out before Fiora could stir. The morning air bit at her cheeks as she crossed the cobbled yard. Ignis was already waiting at the paddock fence—not in it, she noted with a small, warming pride, but beside it. He watched her approach with one amber eye half-lidded.

"You're early," she murmured, reaching up to touch the warm ridge of his snout. He made a low, rumbling sound that might have been contentment. "There's a blacksmith. That's a good sign, isn't it? They wouldn't bring a farrier if they didn't intend to keep us flying."

Ignis said nothing, of course. But his tail flicked, and she could have sworn he was amused.

The forge shed was loud even from fifty paces. Inside, a young man in a leather apron bent over an anvil, hammer rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Sweat darkened the collar of his shirt, and his arms were scarred in the particular pattern of a man who'd spent his youth too close to fire. He looked up as her shadow fell across the doorway, and his face split into a grin she hadn't seen in three years.

"Elara of the long-shanked pony!" Kael set down his hammer and wiped his hands on his apron. "Or is it Lady Elara now? They told me you'd been chosen, but I didn't believe it until I saw your dragon parked outside like a prize stallion."

"Kael." She stepped into the heat of the forge, and the smell of coal and oil washed over her—familiar, grounding, the smell of her childhood. "You're the blacksmith? Since when?"

"Apprentice," he corrected, rolling his shoulder. "Master Harden took me on two winters ago. My father's hands went bad, you know. The shakes. Couldn't hold a shoe to a hoof, let alone weld a joint. So Harden needed an assistant, and I needed to eat." He gestured at the rack of iron shoes hanging on the wall. "And now the Academy needs a dragon-farrier. Turns out there's only three men in the province who know how to make a dragon shoe that won't crack under the weight. Harden's the best, and I'm the one with two good hands."

Elara laughed, and it surprised her—how easily it came, how light it felt in her chest. She'd been holding something tight since the choosing ceremony, coiled and watchful. Kael had always been the antidote to that. "You're still the most insufferable braggart in the province."

"Learned from the best," he said, and winked.

A dragon shoe was not a horse shoe, she knew that much. It had to be broader across the toe to distribute weight over the grasping talons, and the apprentice master who trained her had made her repeat the dimensions until they were carved into her skull. But seeing Kael's work up close—the careful curve, the flare of the heel that would grip a dragon's pad without cutting the softer flesh—she realized theory was nothing compared to craft.

"This is good work," she said, running a finger over a finished shoe. It was still warm from the quenching bath. "Master Harden taught you well."

"Master Harden taught me what he knows." Kael's tone shifted. He grabbed a rag and started wiping his hands slowly, deliberately, with the air of a man about to say something he'd rehearsed. "But there are things I learned on my own. Things that don't come from an anvil. And I need a favor."

Elara's fingers stilled on the shoe. "Kael—"

"You owe me, Elara. You haven't forgotten."

She hadn't. The river, four years ago. The current had been swifter than it looked, and she'd been a fool to wade in after that stray lamb. Kael had pulled her out downstream, blue-lipped and coughing, and she'd spent the rest of that summer watching him from across the village green, feeling the weight of an unpayable debt.

"I haven't forgotten," she said quietly.

"I need you to speak to Lady Voss."

The forge heat felt suddenly oppressive. "About what?"

Kael's jaw set. "About my apprenticeship. Master Harden wants to sign me over to the royal armory. A good post, he says. Better pay. A future." He spat the last word like a curse. "But that future is in a city, shoeing parade horses for nobles who'll never see a real battle. I want to stay here. There's talk the Academy wants to open its own forge, permanent. A man could make a life here."

"Kael, I'm a stable hand who got lucky." She laughed, but it was hollow now. "I haven't got any influence. I'm on probation. Lady Voss looks at me like she's waiting for me to fail."

"You were chosen by Ignis," Kael said flatly. "The dragon who rejected a dozen noble heirs. You walk into that hall and every eye turns to you. That's not nothing. That's the closest thing to power a commoner can touch in this kingdom."

"And you want me to spend it on—" She stopped herself, and the pause was a mistake. She saw it land like a blow on his face.

"On me," he finished. "On your friend who pulled you out of the river."

"Kael, it's not that I don't want to help—" But the words were already too heavy. She was thinking of Cedric's sneer, of the written exam she'd barely scraped past, of the flight at dawn that she was nowhere near ready for. If she went to Lady Voss with a favor for a blacksmith's apprentice, she would be confirming every accusation Cedric had made. That she was a charity case, that she didn't belong, that the Academy's resources were wasted on her worthless petitions.

She could not afford that. Not yet.

"I can't," she said. "Not now. I'm sorry."

Kael's hands stilled on the rag. For a moment, he just looked at her, and she saw something in his eyes that she'd never seen before—not anger, exactly. Disappointment, deeper and colder.

"Right," he said. He turned back to his anvil and picked up his hammer. "You've got your own battles. I understand."

"Kael—"

"You said you hadn't forgotten." His voice was flat, controlled. "I believe you. But remembrance isn't the same as repayment." He struck the iron, a ringing blow that filled the shed. "Tell me when it is."

Elara stood in the doorway for a long moment, the heat curling against her back, the words stuck in her throat. Then she turned and walked out into the cold morning.

Ignis was where she'd left him, but his head was raised, his nostrils flared. He looked past her at the forge, and she could have sworn she saw a glint in his amber eye that was almost accusatory.

"You don't know the whole story," she muttered.

The dragon made a low sound. It was not a comfortable one.

She reached the paddock fence and gripped the rail until her knuckles went white. Behind her, the hammering started again, steady and relentless. She thought of the rider who'd vanished into the nesting caves. Of the locket hidden in her mattress ticking. Of Fiora's mother in the records office, and all the files that must be sitting there, dusty and full of answers no one wanted to speak aloud.

She couldn't help Kael. Not yet. Because helping him would require her to be someone with power, someone whose word carried weight. Right now, she was nothing—a stable hand who'd been chosen, a girl with a secret locket and a head full of questions she didn't dare ask aloud.

But she could change that. She would change it.

She turned toward the library, and Ignis's wings rustled behind her, a sound like a page turning.