Chapter 4: The Smith's Bargain
The sound of iron on iron rang through the morning air.
Grimbeorn had been with us for three weeks now, but I hadn't truly understood what he was until today. He'd helped with construction, hauled timber, done the work of three men without complaint. But watching him stand before the ancient forge foundation, tools spread around him like surgical instruments, I saw something else entirely.
A master.
"Arnor-make," he said, running a massive hand along the cracked stone. "Good bones. Your ancestors knew their craft."
I crouched beside him, studying the ruins I'd walked past a dozen times without really seeing. A stone hearth, collapsed on one side. Iron fittings green with age. The ghost of a bellows housing.
"Can you rebuild it?"
Grimbeorn's laugh rumbled like distant thunder. "Rebuild? Boy, I can make it better. Give me iron, coal, and five strong backs. Two weeks."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: CRAFTSMAN ASSESSMENT COMPLETE]
[GRIMBEORN — MASTER SMITH]
[SMITHING CAPABILITY: UNLOCKED]
[BUILDING AVAILABLE: BASIC FORGE]
[REQUIREMENTS: 20 IRON ORE, 15 COAL, 40 LABOR-DAYS]
I blinked at the blue text floating in my vision. The System had been quiet lately—tracking resources, noting progress, but offering little new. This was different. A path forward.
"You'll have everything you need," I said. "Starting today."
Grimbeorn studied me with eyes that had seen more than his years should allow. Half-Beorning, Halbarad had said. The great skin-changers of the Anduin valley, diluted through generations but never quite bred out. I didn't know if Grimbeorn could become a bear. I suspected he didn't need to.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why what?"
"Why trust me with this? I walked into your camp three weeks ago. A stranger. You gave me food, shelter, work. Now you're building me a forge." His jaw tightened. "I've met lords before. They don't give gifts."
Fair question. Honest answer.
"Because I need weapons," I said. "Thirty-two people volunteered to fight for this place. Right now they're holding sharpened sticks. When the orcs come back—and they will come back—sticks won't be enough."
"So I'm useful."
"Everyone here is useful. That's why they're here." I met his gaze without flinching. "But yes. You're useful in ways others can't be. I need a smith. You need protection. We both get what we want."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—Grimbeorn didn't seem the smiling type—but an easing of tension.
"Straight talk," he said. "I can work with straight talk."
He extended a hand like a forge hammer. I took it. My blistered palm protested; I ignored it.
"Show me what you can do."
The militia training ground had become a graveyard of failed equipment.
Bent blades. Cracked spear shafts. Dented helmets salvaged from the ruins that had proven more decorative than protective. Grimbeorn surveyed the pile with undisguised contempt.
"This is what you're fighting with?"
"This is what we have."
He grunted, reached into the pile, and pulled out a blade so bent it formed almost a right angle. Dúnedain steel, I recognized—old, valuable, ruined by poor storage and worse handling.
"Watch."
He carried the blade to the campfire we'd been using for cooking. Workers paused their breakfast, staring as the massive man knelt and thrust the steel into the coals.
"Hotter," he ordered. Someone fed the fire.
The metal began to glow. Orange, then yellow, then the pure white of summer sun. Grimbeorn pulled it free with bare hands—I saw the calluses, thick as leather armor—and laid it across a flat stone.
Three strikes.
His hammer rose and fell with mechanical precision. Each blow sent sparks arcing through the morning air. The sound was different from construction noise—cleaner, sharper, almost musical.
When he held up the blade, it was straight. Perfect. Gleaming.
"The steel remembers what it was," Grimbeorn said. "It just needs reminding."
A murmur ran through the gathered workers. I heard hope in it—the first real hope since the orc sighting.
"How many can you make?" I asked.
"With a proper forge? Ten blades a week. Fifteen if I train apprentices." He tested the blade's edge against his thumbnail, nodded approval. "Spearheads are faster. Twenty a week. Arrowheads, fifty."
Twenty spearheads a week. In a month, my militia could be properly armed. In two months, we might actually survive.
"Start today. Take whoever you need."
I assigned five workers to forge construction and spent the rest of the morning walking the settlement.
The palisade stood complete now—eight feet of sharpened stakes encircling our position. Not impenetrable, but enough to slow an assault. The gap in the ancient wall had been reinforced with timber bracing. Our shelter situation had improved to roughly sixty percent adequate, with the remaining families rotating through the better structures on a schedule Thorwen had devised.
Food remained the constant pressure.
[RESOURCE STATUS]
[FOOD SUPPLIES: 12 DAYS]
[POPULATION: 47]
[DAILY CONSUMPTION: 4.2 UNITS]
[HUNTING YIELD: 3.8 UNITS (AVERAGE)]
The math refused to balance. We were burning supplies faster than we replaced them, a slow death by arithmetic if nothing changed. Trade with Bree had to happen soon.
I found Halbarad near the eastern watchtower, staring toward the mountains.
"They're still out there," he said without turning. "Maeglin found more tracks this morning. Further east than before, but fresh."
"How many?"
"Small groups. Scouts, not raiders." He finally looked at me, grey eyes troubled. "They're learning our patterns. Our guard rotations. The weak points in our defenses."
"Then we change the patterns."
"We have been. Daily." His voice carried the weight of decades spent fighting this enemy. "The tribes aren't usually this patient. Something's organizing them. Making them think beyond the next meal."
Something.
I remembered my meta-knowledge—fragmented, imperfect, but present. Orcs in the north during this period were scattered, tribal, without the coordination of Mordor's forces. Whatever was leading them wasn't in the books I'd read.
A butterfly effect? Something I've already changed?
The thought chilled me more than the wind.
"Double the scouts," I said. "I want to know the moment anything moves."
[AMON HEN-DÎR — EVENING]
The forge construction had progressed faster than expected.
Grimbeorn worked like a man possessed, directing his crew with grunts and gestures that somehow conveyed more than words. The bellows housing was already rebuilt, leather stretched over wooden frames. The hearth's cracked stone had been replaced with fresh-cut blocks from a nearby quarry Maeglin had discovered.
I brought him dinner—the same thin stew everyone ate, no larger portion—and found him still hammering at sunset.
"You should rest."
"Should is a word for comfortable men." He didn't stop working. "My forge in the East was larger. Better equipped. Took me twenty years to build. The things that drove me out burned it in an hour."
I set the bowl on a flat stone, waiting.
"You want to know what happened," Grimbeorn said. Not a question.
"Only if you want to tell."
The hammer paused. He straightened, joints popping, and finally looked at me.
"Half-breed," he said. "That's what they called me. The skin-changers to the north didn't want me—too human. The men in the villages didn't trust me—too bear. I found a valley, built a forge, kept to myself. Traded good steel for supplies. Bothered no one."
His voice roughened.
"The orcs came from the mountains. Not raiders—settlers. They'd found a valley too, just over the ridge from mine. For three years we ignored each other. Then their warchief decided he wanted my forge."
"You fought them?"
"I killed eleven before they brought me down." His hand closed around the hammer shaft. "They left me for dead. Took my tools. Burned everything else. I've been walking west ever since."
Silence stretched between us. I understood something about Grimbeorn then—the same thing that drove me, probably. The need to build something that couldn't be taken. To create walls strong enough that no one could burn what you loved.
"The orcs here won't take this place," I said.
"Big words from a small lord with a smaller army."
"Small today. Not forever." I picked up his untouched dinner bowl and pushed it into his hands. "Eat. Tomorrow we finish the bellows. Next week, you start arming my people. And when the orcs come—when, not if—they'll find something harder to burn than a lonely forge."
Grimbeorn studied me for a long moment. Then he sat on the forge's stone foundation, broke bread, and ate.
Behind me, somewhere in the darkness, his mule made a sound between a snort and a laugh.
I slept four hours that night.
The dreams were the usual mixture—fragments of Oliver Smith's old life bleeding into Aldric's new one. Hospital rooms and orc tracks. Excel spreadsheets and militia formations. A woman's voice I couldn't quite remember, calling a name I no longer answered to.
Dawn found me on the palisade, watching the eastern sky lighten.
Grimbeorn was already working. The rhythmic clang of hammer on steel echoed through the quiet morning like a heartbeat. Like a promise.
Two weeks, he'd said. Two weeks and you'll have a proper forge.
I counted the days in my head. Counted the food supplies. Counted the orcs in the darkness.
The numbers still didn't add up.
But for the first time since claiming this ruin, I believed they might.
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