Chapter Two: Garran's Warning

Maret's hinges were delivered.

Corin couldn't have said afterward exactly how he'd managed it — the walk down the lower path, the knock at her door, the brief exchange while she inspected the work with the careful attention of someone who had been ordering ironwork long enough to know what good looked like. She'd nodded. He'd nodded. He'd walked back.

The scale was in his coat pocket the entire time. Wrapped in his spare work cloth, the one he kept folded at the bottom of the pocket for handling hot metal. Not because he'd thought to wrap it — he'd done it without deciding to, fingers moving on their own while some quieter part of his mind worked through what he was holding.

It was still warm when he got back to the forge.

He knew because he checked. Three times on the path down, twice on the path back. Each time he pressed his fingers against the cloth and felt the heat underneath. Not hot. Not the heat of something burning or something alive. More like the warmth of a stone that had spent all day in the sun, the kind that persisted long after the light was gone.

Except there had been no sun. And the stone — if it was a stone — had been buried in wet mountain earth.

The forge was quiet when he returned. The travelers were asleep. Bram had banked the coals and gone to bed, leaving a lamp burning low on the workbench in that particular way of his that meant he'd noticed Corin wasn't back yet but had decided to trust him anyway. Corin turned the lamp down further and lay on his cot in the corner and did not sleep for a long time.

He thought about telling Bram.

Bram was the obvious answer to most problems. Three years of apprenticeship had established that clearly enough. When Corin didn't understand something about the work, Bram explained it. When Corin made mistakes — and he made them, still — Bram corrected them without making it a lesson in how to feel small. When Corin had arrived at seven years old, thin and uncertain, handed over by a distant uncle who had too many mouths and too little patience, Bram had put him to work immediately, as though usefulness were the best possible welcome. Corin had understood later that it was.

Bram had answers. Bram was good with answers.

But Corin lay on his cot and pressed his fingers against the wrapped scale and felt its warmth against his palm, and something in him resisted. Not suspicion. Not secrecy for its own sake. Something closer to the feeling he got when he found a flaw in a piece of metalwork — that particular pause before he was certain, the space between noticing and knowing.

He wanted to be certain first.

He fell asleep still thinking about it.

In the morning, the merchants were gone before the sun was fully up. The young couple had left earlier still, anxious to make the pass before the mud set. By the time Corin woke and started the coals, the only evidence of the previous night was a circle of boot-marked dirt near the fire and Garran's upturned crate, which no one had moved.

Garran himself was sitting in the doorway of the forge, watching the village come to life in the pale morning light. He had his cup again. Corin didn't know where the cup kept coming from.

"The others left," Corin said.

"I noticed." Garran didn't look back. "Road'll be passable by midday. I'm in no particular hurry."

Corin started the coals and tried not to look like he was thinking about anything specific.

Bram arrived an hour later with bread from the baker two houses down and the look of a man who had reviewed the day's work in his head before breakfast and found it satisfactory. He handed Corin his portion without ceremony, asked whether the hinges had been delivered, nodded once when told they had, and set to work.

It was a normal morning. It was supposed to be a normal morning. Corin kept the scale in his coat pocket and did his work and told himself he was simply waiting for the right moment.

The right moment came at midmorning, when Bram sent Garran for a second cup of something from the house next door — the old widow Pessel kept a small hearth fire and a pot of something perpetually hot that wasn't quite tea and wasn't quite anything else, and Bram had a long-standing arrangement — and Corin found himself alone with the blacksmith for the first time all morning.

He set down his tongs.

"Bram."

Bram looked up from the thing he was adjusting, a gate latch that had come in that morning with a bent mechanism.

"I found something last night. On the back path."

Bram waited. That was one of his qualities. He could wait in a silence without filling it, which was rarer than people gave it credit for.

Corin reached into his pocket and unwrapped the cloth and set the scale on the edge of the workbench.

Bram looked at it for a long moment without touching it. Then he set the gate latch down and came closer and looked at it some more. He turned it with one finger, the same way he turned finished work to check it from different angles. He didn't say anything.

"I almost walked past it," Corin said. "I thought it was a stone."

"Mm." Bram picked it up. Turned it over. Held it toward the light from the doorway. Set it back down. "You touch it?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"It was warm."

Bram pressed a finger flat against the surface, held it there for a moment, then moved it away. He said nothing, which was not the same as having no reaction.

"What do you think it is?" Corin asked.

Bram considered this with the same seriousness he brought to every question worth answering. "I think it's old," he said. "Older than anything I've seen come out of this mountain before. The color's wrong for any local stone." He turned it again. "Too regular for a natural formation. Something made this shape. Or grew it." He looked up at Corin. "You're thinking scale."

"Yes."

"So am I." He set it down. "I don't know what from. I know hides and I know scales and I know the shed skins of the mountain lizards, and this isn't any of those. It's too large and the grain is different." He crossed his arms. "You could bring it to the district seat. There's a naturalist there, I think, or was. Man who studies animal remains."

"Or?"

Bram looked at him steadily. "Or nothing. That's what I have. I don't know what it is, Corin." He paused. "Where exactly did you find it?"

"Just off the back path. In the depression past the rock shelf, where the ground drops before it levels."

"Nothing else near it?"

"Not that I saw. I wasn't looking, though. It was dark."

Bram made a sound that was not quite an answer. He looked at the scale once more, and there was something in his expression that Corin couldn't read — not quite concern, not quite interest, something in between that he filed away without being able to name it. Then Bram picked up the gate latch and went back to work, which was his way of saying the conversation was over for now but not permanently.

Corin wrapped the scale back in the cloth and put it in his pocket.

It was Garran who saw it.

Not deliberately — Corin hadn't planned it, hadn't even been thinking of the man when it happened. He'd been standing at the side bench near the doorway, working through a set of smaller pieces, and the cloth had slipped when he reached for his file. The scale slid partway out and caught the light from the doorway, and Garran, who had been sitting exactly where he'd been sitting all morning, simply looked at it.

He went very still.

It lasted perhaps three seconds, that stillness. Then he picked up his cup and took a slow sip, and when he lowered it again his expression was the same as it had always been — pleasant, attentive, giving nothing away. But his eyes came back to Corin's pocket.

Corin rewrapped the scale. His hands were steady. He didn't know why they were steady.

Bram had gone next door to speak with a neighbor about a fence repair. They were alone.

"You found something," Garran said. Not a question.

Corin looked at him for a moment. "On the path last night."

"May I see it?"

There was no reason to refuse. There was also no particular reason to agree. Corin reached into his pocket and set the scale on the bench between them.

Garran looked at it without touching it. The pleasant expression remained on his face, but the thing behind it had changed. He was very, very still in the way that some people got still when they were working hard to keep everything inside exactly where it was.

Then, carefully, he reached out and touched the edge of it with two fingers.

He pulled his hand back.

"Where on the path?" he asked.

"The depression past the eastern rock shelf. Just below the second switchback."

"How deep in the ground?"

"Not deep. It was protruding. I nearly walked past it."

Garran nodded slowly, as though this was information he was measuring against something else he already knew. "How long do you think it had been there?"

"I don't know. The soil around it had compacted. Years, at least."

"Who else has seen it?"

Corin hesitated. "Bram."

"Who else? Anyone outside the village?"

"No. The merchants were asleep. I brought it straight back."

Garran's eyes moved briefly to the doorway, then back to the scale. "Did anything happen when you touched it? When you first picked it up?"

Corin considered lying. He considered it genuinely, for a moment, and then dismissed it the way he dismissed most impulses he didn't respect in himself. "It was warm. I thought it was the ground at first. But it wasn't the ground. It stayed warm. It's still warm now."

Garran looked at the scale for a long moment. He didn't say anything. He had the look of a man reading a letter he'd been expecting and still found difficult to receive.

"What is it?" Corin asked.

"I want to ask you a few more questions first." Garran's voice was unhurried, but something in it was different from the comfortable, measured way he'd spoken the night before. The ease was still there, but it was working harder now. "Is there anyone in this village who travels regularly? Merchants who come and go, or someone with connections to the district seat?"

"There's a wool merchant. Old Fenris. He goes south twice a year."

"When was his last trip?"

"Spring. Maybe six weeks ago."

Garran nodded. "Does he speak to officials when he's there? The kind who keep records of what comes through the mountain regions?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. He talks about prices and weather." Corin looked at him. "What kind of officials?"

Garran picked up the scale again, very carefully, and held it so the light from the doorway passed across its surface. His expression was unreadable.

"The black is unusual," he said, quietly, more to himself than to Corin. "The grain is — yes." He set it down. He looked at Corin with something that was almost a question but had already decided on the answer. "How much do you know about dragon history?"

"What we were taught. The Compact. The founding of the Houses. The basic lineages."

"And before the Compact?"

"Almost nothing. It was a long time before they kept records, according to the schoolmaster. Before the Dragon Houses organized things."

"According to the schoolmaster," Garran repeated, with the neutrality of a man who had opinions he was choosing not to share.

Bram's footsteps on the path outside. Garran heard them half a second before Corin did and moved his hand away from the scale. By the time Bram came through the doorway, Garran had his cup up again and Corin had the scale back in his pocket, and nothing about the scene announced itself as anything other than what it appeared.

Bram looked at the two of them with the measured attention of a man who had known Corin for ten years and travelers for a lifetime. Then he went to his workbench and picked up the gate latch.

Garran rose from his crate and announced, pleasantly, that he ought to see to his horse before the midday mud softened the road. He thanked Bram for the fire and the hospitality, with the particular warmth of a man who genuinely meant it. He picked up his traveling pack from beside the door.

Then he paused and looked at Corin. "I'll be leaving soon. Would you walk me to the stable?"

The stable was at the north end of the village, a three-minute walk. The morning was cool and bright, everything washed clean by the storm. A dog watched them from a doorstep. Two children ran past with no interest in either of them.

Neither of them spoke until the children were gone.

"You must not show that to anyone," Garran said.

"You haven't told me what it is."

"No." He was quiet for a moment. "Not because I'm trying to deceive you. Because I'm not certain enough to say, and I won't say something like this without being certain." He looked at the path ahead. "But I'll tell you what I know, which is less than what I'd like. That object is old. Older than anything you'd expect to find in a mountain path in a village like this. The scale — and it is a scale — comes from something that doesn't exist in any natural record I know of. Any natural record that's still in circulation." He paused on that phrase for a moment, and then continued. "The warmth isn't natural either. Scales don't retain heat. They don't generate it. Stones don't, either, not the way you described. Something about that object is — responding."

"Responding to what?"

"To being found, perhaps. To being held." He stopped walking and turned to face Corin with a directness that was different from his manner of the night before. The pleasantness was still there, but it was standing aside. "I need to know you understand what I'm about to say."

Corin looked at him steadily. "I'm listening."

"You must not show it to anyone. Not Bram. Not anyone who passes through. Not anyone from the district seat or the merchant routes or the Dragon House surveys."

"Bram has already seen it."

"I know. That can't be changed. But no one else. And if anyone asks about unusual objects found in the mountains — anyone official, anyone with a seal or an authority behind them — you know nothing. You found nothing." His voice was unhurried, but the weight behind it was not. "Can you do that?"

"Probably," Corin said. "If you tell me why."

Garran was quiet for a moment. Around them the village moved in its ordinary morning way — smoke from chimneys, chickens somewhere out of sight, the distant sound of someone's wheel on the cobbles.

"Why would anyone be looking for a scale that's been buried in a mountain path for years?" Corin asked. "Who would even know it was there?"

"No one knew it was there," Garran said. "That was its protection." He looked at Corin. "You've changed that now."

"Accidentally."

"Yes. Accidents like this have consequences regardless." He picked up his pack and resettled it on his shoulder. Started walking again. "There are people — and I mean people in positions of some authority and considerable reach — who are interested in objects of this particular kind. Objects connected to certain parts of history that aren't widely discussed."

"History like what we talked about last night."

The brief pause. "Among other things."

"Like what your grandmother told you," Corin said. "What the young woman said. The one who wouldn't be bound."

Garran stopped again. He looked at Corin for a moment with an expression that was impossible to read entirely but had something in it that was almost like relief. The look of a man who'd suspected he was talking to someone who paid attention and had just been proven right.

"I'm going to ask one more question," Garran said. "And I want an honest answer."

"All right."

"When you touched the scale. When it became warm." He looked at him carefully. "Did you feel anything else?"

Corin thought about the path in the moonlight. The silence after the storm. The warmth rising through the cloth into his palms, slow and steady and coming from somewhere deeper than the surface of the thing.

"It felt intentional," he said finally. "Like it was answering something. I don't know what."

Garran held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once, the way Bram nodded when a piece of work came out right.

"Keep it hidden," he said. "Keep it safe. Don't go looking for answers in any official place."

"And if someone comes asking?"

Garran looked down the road toward the pass, where the mud was already beginning to dry in the morning sun. "Then you found a stone," he said. "An interesting stone. Nothing more."

He began walking toward the stable.

"Garran." Corin stopped him one last time. "You said someone may be looking for it. How would they even know it exists?"

Garran didn't turn back immediately. When he did, his expression was careful and considered and giving away only what he'd decided to give.

"Because," he said, "if I'm right about what you found, someone has been looking for it for a very long time."

He turned and walked the rest of the way to the stable.

Corin stood in the morning light and felt the warmth in his pocket pressing steady against his side, and did not move until long after Garran had gone.

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"Some worlds are waiting to be found."