The Unbonded

Chapter One: Iron and Cinders

The forge fire had a voice, and Ryn Dallow had learned to read it the way other people read faces.

Right now it was sulking. The coals had gone a dull orange under the crust, and the bellows wheezed instead of breathed, and the horseshoe blank on the anvil was cooling from cherry to a stubborn dark plum. Ryn set his hammer down, pumped the bellows twice, and watched the heart of the fire brighten to that particular white-gold that meant the iron would move for him.

"Too slow," said Tormund Garr from the doorway. "You lost a heat."

"I got it back."

"Losing it costs coal. Getting it back costs more coal." The blacksmith crossed the packed dirt floor, filling the room the way a boulder fills a stream. Tormund was fifty and built like a barn door, with forearms scarred by twenty thousand small sparks and a beard he singed regularly and never trimmed. "But the curve is good. You've got the heel right at last."

It was the closest thing to praise Ryn would get before supper, and he took it, because sixteen years in Hearthridge had taught him that praise in the mountains came the way rain came in autumn: rarely, briefly, and mostly at night.

He brought the hammer down. The iron flattened, sang, curved. Sparks jumped and died on the floor. Outside the open shutter, the village stacked itself down the slope in terraces of gray slate roofs, and beyond the last roof the mountains went up and up until they stopped pretending to be anything but rock.

Hearthridge sat on the western shoulder of the kingdom of Anthorne, three days' hard walking from anywhere that had a name worth writing on a map. Two hundred and eleven people. Forty-one goats. One forge. One well. One shrine to whichever old spirits still bothered listening this far from the capital.

And not a single Bondsmith.

That last fact was the one that sat in Ryn's chest like a swallowed stone.

He worked until the light through the shutter turned the color of weak tea, and then he banked the fire and hung the tools on their pegs in the order Tormund liked, and went out to wash his arms in the trough. The water was snowmelt cold. It always was. He watched the black soot come off his skin in ribbons and thought, as he did most evenings, about the day he'd turned twelve.

Every child in Anthorne was tested at twelve. A Reader came up from the district seat with a lacquered case and a bowl of clear resonance-water, and each child in turn dipped their hands in it while the Reader watched the surface. If a child had resonance—if the essence in the world leaned toward them at all—the water moved. It shivered, or spun, or threw off a thread of light, and everyone in the room made a noise like they'd all been holding one breath together.

Ryn remembered the Reader's cuffs, frayed at the wrist. He remembered the smell of the schoolhouse, chalk and wet wool. He remembered how calm the water had been. Not a tremble. Not a ripple. It had been so still that he could see the whole of his own face in it, twelve years old, hopeful, freckled across the nose, waiting.

The Reader had said, kindly enough, "Unbonded," and written something in a ledger, and called the next name.

That was the word for it. Not failed. Unbonded. Nine people in ten were unbonded; there was nothing shameful in it, everyone said so, and everyone who said so was the kind of person who'd never had to hear it said about themselves.

Because the world ran on bonds. Spirit-beasts were born out of concentrated essence—the living pressure that gathered in old forests and deep rivers and lightning-struck peaks—and they were everything from ember-mice that nested in chimneys to the great apex spirits that appeared in tapestries and coronation songs. And a person with resonance, given the ritual awakening, could bond one. Could share breath and blood and thought with it. Could draw essence through that bond and do things ordinary muscle and iron could not.

Bondsmiths were the kingdom's soldiers and healers and wardens. They rode the roads and closed the passes and stood between villages and the wild things. They got the songs. They got the titles. They got to matter.

Everyone else got horseshoes.

"You're brooding," Tormund said, behind him. "You brood like a hen."

"I'm washing."

"You're washing the same arm you've been washing since I came out here." Tormund lowered himself onto the mounting block with a grunt and stretched out his bad knee. "Caravan's in. Camped in the low meadow. Ten wagons, salt and cloth and some fool selling charms."

Ryn dried his hands. "Ten? That's the biggest since spring."

"They're running the western road because the eastern one's gone bad." Tormund's voice flattened. "Blightstorms."

The word landed heavily in the cooling air. Ryn had heard it a hundred times in two years and had never once seen one. Nobody in Hearthridge had. They were an eastern trouble, a lowland trouble: rolling walls of corrupted essence that swept out of nowhere, blackened crops, curdled wells, and drove wild spirit-beasts into shrieking madness. Two years of them, growing more frequent, and no one in the capital could say why.

"They won't come this far west," Ryn said.

"That's what the eastern road said, once." Tormund pushed himself up. "Come on. Wagon-master's got a cracked axle brace and a purse, and I've got a boy who needs feeding."

They walked down through the terraces in the blue evening. Lamps came on behind shutters. Someone's ember-mouse—the only bonded creature in Hearthridge, and it belonged to old Mistress Prell who used it to keep her bread oven lit—skittered along a wall with its tail glowing like a matchhead, and Ryn made himself not look at it.

That was the thing nobody understood about being unbonded. It wasn't grand tragedy. It was a hundred small looks away.

The low meadow was full of light and noise. The caravan had drawn its wagons into a rough horseshoe around three fires, and mules stamped in a rope corral, and the whole meadow smelled of woodsmoke and grease and unfamiliar people. Children from the village were already circulating like flies at a butcher's, and a woman in a red coat was showing a tray of glass beads to anyone who slowed down.

Ryn found the cracked axle brace while Tormund found the wagon-master, and by the time the two men had finished pretending to argue about price, Ryn had the measurements chalked on his forearm and a bowl of barley stew in his hand.

He ate sitting on a wheel-hub at the edge of the firelight, listening.

That was where he heard the two guards talking.

"—third one this season," the older one was saying. He had a shortsword across his knees and a scar that pulled one eyebrow up in permanent surprise. "Came over the Renn ford like a fog bank. Turned the whole hedge black in a breath. We lost two mules and a boy."

"You said it was a mile off."

"It was a mile off when I saw it. It was on us when I finished shouting." The man spat. "And the crows. All the little wild spirits go mad in it. Sweetest thing you ever saw, a meadow-hare spirit, and it came out of that fog with its teeth showing."

Ryn's stew had stopped steaming. He stared into it.

He should have gone home. Later, he would think about that a great deal—about the ten or twelve heartbeats in which he could have stood up, taken his empty bowl to the pot, and walked back up the terraces to the forge and to bed, and let his life stay the shape it had always been.

Instead he sat, and listened, and looked east at the notch in the ridge where the sky still held a smear of light.

The smear was the wrong color.

It took him a moment to be sure. Dusk over the eastern ridge should have been going violet, then charcoal. This was a sort of yellow-gray, low and thick, like the underside of a bruise, and it was moving—not drifting the way cloud drifts but rolling, tumbling over itself, coming down the pass with the slow inevitability of water finding a drain.

The mules noticed before the people did. Every animal in the rope corral began screaming at once.

Ryn stood up. The bowl fell out of his hand.

Across the meadow, the scarred guard turned, and his face went the color of old paper, and he shouted one word so loudly it cracked in the middle.

"Blight!"