CHAPTER 85: 85: A NEW BEGINNING PART X

---

The anvil’s three lines became their opposite. He set the ring with a compass and half a prayer.

Ludo lit the small lamp and set the block under a lens he had cobbled from a broken glass, the better to see where steel wished to be steel and where it would allow art to sit on its lap. Orna held the die steady with a smith’s vice and a grip that could argue with earthquakes. Gael took gravers and tiny chisels, and the room changed as the first chip lifted and fell like a sliver of moonlight.

John watched the way good work makes time move differently. The ring cut clean. The whiskers took shape, easy to read at a glance but not too busy at a thumb’s width. The spark required patience; a spark is a simple thing in the sky and complicated when you ask steel to describe it.

Fizz hovered, mouth closed by force of will and Gael’s warning look. He did not speak. He only opened a small paper packet and let the scent of cardamom sugar brighten the corner of the room like a reminder that life allowed sweetness.

When the cutting was done, the block was warmed in the little forge, brought to a cherry red that asked to be believed, and quenched in oil that smelled like a halfway memory. It hissed, spat, and went dark. Ludo reheated it to a gentle straw, then to a blue, letting the temper slip in and take the brittleness away while leaving the stubbornness where they needed it most.

"Try it," Gael said.

Orna brought a scrap of mild steel, annealed and ready to be bullied. She held it against the anvil. Gael placed the die. John took the hammer. One pound then two pounds, good handle, a head that felt like it had stories and let it fall with authority and exactly a fraction less than more.

They lifted the die.

Fizz squeaked.

On the steel, clean as the first yes, lay the mark: the circle, the whiskers, the spark-point, the anvil’s hint. It was not art in a gallery. It was art a man could carry in a sheath.

"Again," Fizz said, breathless, as if stamps were a fountain he could drink from.

They struck the smaller die into a scrap of leather, then into the end grain of a crate board, then into wax to test a seal. Each time it came up legible and itself. Ludo nodded; Orna grinned a rare, toothy grin; Gael did not smile but something in his shoulders stopped trying to be a mountain.

"Make me a banner," Fizz whispered to the flag as if cloth spoke fluent flattery. "Make me a wind."

They dyed the linen in the yard, Fizz supervising from a careful distance because hot dye eats fur. The black took well. The gold was difficult and then it decided to be generous. The white laid over both like a handshake that meant it. Gael stitched the ring, Orna did the whiskers with a steady, show-off hand, and one of the twins knotted the leather ties that would let a pole talk to the cloth without tearing.

They raised it on a rough pole out front while the light still had a little afternoon left in it. The flag found the breeze and became a moving thing. People in the lane stopped. A child pointed and laughed and then tried to draw the face in dust with a stick. He succeeded on the second try.

"What is that," asked a woman who sold buttons.

"Our mark," John said simply.

"Whose face," she asked, baffled and amused at once.

"Ours," Fizz said, and posed.

She nodded, still baffled, still amused, and walked on, which is how most reasonable people meet new flags in small villages.

A few hours later...

Lists insist on being obeyed. John turned from the flag to the bench where the real day waited with its hands out.

He set the team to tasks that buy freedom. Orna and the twins fitted the last set of south-lane hinges and added a trick to the pins that would keep them from squeaking when spies needed silence. Ludo cleared the flues and found a bird’s nest which he relocated to a rafter beam where the bird would be confused but grateful. Pekk sharpened the farmers’ sledges and left them so sharp they would cut arguments. Kel and Doff filed nails into neat bundles and stamped the first crate with the brand new die until Fizz made a noise like a kettle about to gossip.

John took Spitter Mk.1 and shaved the feed throat a whisper more. He filed a relief at the sleeve’s lip and moved the power rune forward the width of a thumbnail. He ran a test and it spat three bolts before sulking, which was better than two and not yet a song.

"Tomorrow," he told the machine like a stern uncle. "You will learn your manners."

He laid out the base circle for the lab’s array on the plank floor where he had promised himself there would be a floor worth marking. He chalked the groove lines thin and straight. He measured, then measured again because circles are like promises — you do not get to fix them easily if you draw them wrong the first time.

He sent a boy to the glazier with a note: Edges true. Corners wrapped. Deliver before the moon grows thin. He wrote a letter to Moran and put no secrets in it, only a line that made men like Moran smile: Saw your hint about hinges. Ours do not creak. Yours?

He wrote a page for Gael with what to do when he and Fizz left: Keep men on small jobs. Do not sell the new mark cheap. Send someone to Mara every second day with ears open and mouth closed. Feed Orna before she frightens customers. Hide Spitter if the temple comes to count things that do not belong to them.