Something Less Depressing
Gandazi brought the hammer down on the steel again, and again, and again. Her hammer beat a constant staccato tune as she struck the metal, shaping it, working it, moving it. It would be nothing too important: Master Snerra had her shaping bolt-heads of the more mundane sort, bodkins, broadheads, that sort of thing. At best her work will be stored and used in a time of war. At worst it will be melted back down. All depends on how good she is; all depends on how capable she--
"It's kind of a waste of time, isn't it?"
She looked up from the forge, ready to swing, only to see Andvari standing there, gormlessly, clad in his own leather training suit. She quirked an eyebrow and then got back to beating the little bits of metal. Anyone else, she'd have swung. But that was her fellow apprentice. More importantly, "ale me up, thoughtless tongue?"
He'd picked up the not-bad habit of offering his fellow apprentice ale in return for her ignoring his slips of the tongue. And he was handsome. A little. Somewhat. Bah.
(Most men were more handsome when offering ale, a tragic condition, but he retained some of his even between ale offerings, a sure sign something was deeply wrong with her)
He blinked, grabbed a wooden tankard and filled it with the good stuff, setting it on the table. She pounded the metal twice, and saw it was done, and dipped it in the oil to cool; and even as she did that, she grabbed the tankard and began to drink. She gave the twirl of a wrist as a sign to continue, seeing him all but fidgeting, at least by his standards.
"We're both aiming to work with Gromril and Wutroth, right?" He picked up one of the cool bolt heads and examined it, seeing a mirror polish that was so fine moonlight could bounce off of it in Master Snerra's workshop. "So why spend so much effort trying to master common steel, when by rights we should both hope to have ingots of Gromril to work with?"
"I'm sorry to let you know this, rich boy, but we didn't all come from the better part of the hold: why, some of us even had to get used to defenses of stone and wood." She chuckled, a little amused, at his own twitching. Much better than how they had started off, before she had realized three-fourths of the seemingly asinine idiocy he'd said had been a reasonable enough thought jumbled all out of order by nerves, poor bastard, and the other fourth had been purely the shock of acclimitizing after leaving home behind. "For that matter, some of us didn't get our start mining proper but had to go looking for bog iron."
Terrible. Not the iron itself, really, not after a little effort to purify it: but long, hot, muggy days in swampy Norscan territory, or else and even better, long, cold, soupy nights, working through trying to find deposits of the stuff for the clan. A way to make a living for a clan far from an upswing, aye, but a bitter, frigid bunch of hours for such a thing, whose main virtue over any other kind of iron was a cheap resistance to rusting: No Rune work, but something, at least.
Bog iron and a scarce handful of Runesmiths. What a thing to be one of the rare ones of the clan to be found with The Gift. A path to prosperity and wealth: but no way, no how, was she going to abandon those who'd brought her up. So she'd learn to forge with steel, better than any of her competitors could with Gromril and Dragon Bone, without driving them to bankruptcy.
So she'd keep practicing, not just until she could always get it right, but until she could never get it wrong.
"I'm not a rich boy, Gandazi." He didn't make the usual comparison to Tholinn, probable as not because it was a bad time to make such a statement.
Her hands tightened some, though they then loosened as she allowed that she might have the skewed standard instead of him. "Mr. Priests-of-Smednir-Make-Up-My-Entire-Family is just feeling smug he's good at something, hm?" And it was true, her fellow apprentice was a better metalsmith than her and just about every other dwarf of about their age by rights, though one got the distinct feeling Snerra had his anvil positioned in such a way to see her metal work and remind him he still had a way to go himself.
Or perhaps it was to situate herself between the clients and the apprentice before he could run his mouth and start an incident, who could say really?
Andvari was puffing himself up some at her words, good-naturedly enough: it was his most tolerable trait, really, that he was never an ass about these things. Let him talk, don't overreact to some nonsense that came out of his mouth without thinking too much, and you'd find he was near as sunny as Snerra herself underneath all the inability to converse. Probably a part of what had convinced her to take him as an apprentice.
An intriguing difference from the other Dawi their age as well, though she'd not be thinking about that for some time.
"Aye, and they taught me well. Andvari Ulthersson will not shame his kin today, thank you much!"
"A good attitude, Beardling and Plaitling!" How had Master managed to sneak up on them? Her ears worked well enough, she swore, and Andvari could do a half-tolerable impression of an Elder with his ability to listen without trying too hard: and yet Snerra had appeared from nowhere and immediately begun filling the already wild space of her workshop with her presence. "But a true Runesmith needs the grit and werewithal to do the things they don't want to do sometimes! That's why, Andvari, you will be meeting Loken's apprentice for my next shipment of Moraidyr Shells, and you, Gandazi, will be meeting with the Prince's huskarls for their new banner!"
They both paled even as Snerra's smile only brightened. "I know the two of you can do it!"
