Vinland's Iron Harvest

• Chapter 1 The Ash at the Edge of the World
• Chapter 2 Blood in the Bog
• Chapter 3 The Furnace on the Point
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Birch Woods
• Chapter 5 The Smelter’s Oath
• Chapter 6 Winter of the Cold Forge
• Chapter 7 Red Water and Charcoal
• Chapter 8 The Skræling Tide
• Chapter 9 The Anvil's First Voice
• Chapter 10 Roots of the Longhouse
• Chapter 11 The Bellows' Breath
• Chapter 12 Iron in the Frost
• Chapter 13 The Assembly at Straumfjörð
• Chapter 14 Shadows of Markland
• Chapter 15 A Pact of Copper and Steel
• Chapter 16 The Melting Pot
• Chapter 17 Timber and Tides
• Chapter 18 The Blacksmith's Daughter
• Chapter 19 Fire on the Headland
• Chapter 20 The Great Sedge Meadow
• Chapter 21 Tempered Blades
• Chapter 22 The Long Night's Harvest
• Chapter 23 Beyond the Great Sound
• Chapter 24 The Iron Seam
• Chapter 25 A Realm of Ash and Oak
• Chapter 26 The First Decade's Crown

The grey Atlantic did not care about the dreams of Norsemen. It broke against the dark, jagged fangs of the northern peninsula with a rhythmic, deafening roar, throwing salt spray high into the cold air where it mingled with the constant drizzle. Standing on the rise of the headland, Leif Eriksson tightened his wool cloak against the damp wind and stared out into the grey expanse. Behind him lay the small, sod-walled settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows—a scattering of low, turf-roofed longhouses that looked more like natural hummocks of the earth than the foothold of a new empire.

It had been ten winters since the first longships scraped their keels against the gravel of this bay. Ten winters of scraping by, of burying their dead in the shallow, rocky soil, and of wondering if the gods had forgotten them at the very edge of the creation. The timber was rich and plentiful, far better than the stunted scrub of Greenland or the deforested hills of Iceland, but wood alone could not hold a settlement against the wilderness. They needed iron. Without it, their axes grew dull, their nails rusted into orange powder, and their weapons became useless bars of soft metal.

Down in the depression between the ridges, a thin column of pale smoke struggled upward against the wind. It was not the clean, blue smoke of dry birch logs burning in a hearth, but the heavy, yellow-grey reek of wet peat and roasting earth. Leif walked down the slope, his boots sinking into the spongy moss of the great sedge meadow. The ground here was a treacherous skin of green and gold, hiding black water and deep, sucking mud beneath.

Beside a shallow pit dug into the turf stood Skofte, a man whose back was permanently curved from years of leaning over hearths and anvil stones. His face was smeared with soot, his beard singed at the edges where the sparks of his craft had caught it. He was poking at a pile of dark, crumbly stones with a charred birch pole. Beside him stood a wooden tub filled with a thick, reddish-brown slurry that smelled of rotten eggs and wet clay.

"Is this the treasure of your new world, Leif?" Skofte asked, his voice like grinding stones. He did not look up as the leader approached. He spat into the mud, his saliva black with charcoal dust. "We sailed across the monster-filled sea, past glaciers and cliffs of ice, to dig up petrified dog shit from a swamp."

Leif knelt by the tub, ignoring the water that immediately soaked through the knees of his wool trousers. He reached into the dark water and pulled up a chunk of the material. It was heavy, far heavier than the surrounding stone, and its surface was bubbly and pockmarked, like cooled froth from a giant’s kettle. It was bog iron, the rust of the earth concentrated by the slow decay of the marsh plants and the chemical mysteries of the stagnant water.

"It is iron, Skofte," Leif said, his voice quiet but steady. "It is the same ore your grandfather took from the bogs of Norway to forge the swords that won his farm. It is the same ore that made the axes of the sons of Ragnar."

"The bogs of Norway had dry pine for charcoal and clay that didn't crumble like dry bread when you put it to the flame," Skofte grumbled, finally looking up. His eyes were red-rimmed from the smoke. "This land is wet. The wood is wet. The turf is wet. Even the stones seem to sweat. We have built three kilns, and three times the clay has cracked before we could even get the draft started. If we cannot smelt, we cannot forge. If we cannot forge, we are nothing but sheep waiting for the wolves."

Leif stood and looked across the meadow toward the forest line. The trees stood thick and dark, a wall of spruce and fir that seemed to press down toward the sea. Somewhere in those woods, they knew, were the people who had lived here long before the longships arrived. The Norse called them Skrælings—men of the woods who moved like shadows and watched from the edges of the clearings. So far, the encounters had been few and wary, traded glances across cold rivers and brief exchanges of furs for bright cloth. But peace at the edge of the world was a fragile thing, held together only by the perception of strength. If the native people realized that the steel of the newcomers' axes could not be replaced, that their spears were growing soft and blunt, that peace would vanish like morning mist over the bog.

"We must have a successful smelt before the first snow," Leif said. "The ships from Greenland will not come this year. The ice in the eastern straits was too thick when the last traders left. We are on our own, Skofte. If we do not have iron to repair the ship-nails, we will be trapped here. And a Norseman trapped without a ship is already dead."

Skofte sighed, a sound like a bellows deflating. He kicked a piece of the roasted ore into the pit. "We need better clay for the furnace wall. The stuff we dug from the riverbank is too sandy. It melts when the heat gets high enough to separate the slag. And we need charcoal—dry charcoal, not the spongy, half-burned birch we’ve been scraping out of the pit-kilns."

A young boy, barely twelve winters old, came running down the path from the longhouses. It was Hallvard, Skofte's apprentice and nephew. His face was pale, and he was panting heavily, his breath blooming in the damp air.

"Uncle! Leif!" the boy gasped, clutching his knees. "The search party... they have returned from the southern ridge. They found something in the high woods. Hallstein says you must come quickly."

Leif’s hand instinctively fell to the pommel of his sword. It was an old blade, passed down from his father, Erik the Red. The iron was good, forged in the old country, but even it showed signs of the relentless dampness of Vinland. A fine patina of red rust clung to the guard, no matter how often he greased it with seal fat.

"Did they meet anyone?" Leif asked, his eyes narrowing.

"No," Hallvard said, shaking his head. "Not people. A place. Hallstein says it is a place where the earth itself is dead."

Leaving Skofte to his smoky grumbling, Leif followed the boy up the muddy path through the settlement. They passed the great hall, its thick turf walls green with grass, looking like a natural hillock save for the smoke escaping through the roof vent. A few women were working near the doorway, scraping seal skins with bone scrapers. They worked in silence, their shoulders hunched against the wind. The optimism of the first landing had long since faded, replaced by the grim reality of daily survival in a land that offered no easy gifts.

They climbed the ridge behind the houses, entering the shelter of the spruce forest. Instantly, the wind died, replaced by a heavy, dripping silence. The air smelled of decay, of centuries of rotting pine needles and damp moss. The light was dim, filtered through the thick canopy of evergreen boughs.

After an hour of climbing over fallen logs and navigating around black peat bogs, they found Hallstein and three other men standing in a small clearing. The trees here were different. The spruce had given way to ancient, towering birches and occasional hardwoods, their leaves already turning the color of beaten copper in the autumn cold.

In the center of the clearing lay a massive mound of dark grey ash, nearly circular and several paces across. It was overgrown with wild berry bushes and fireweed, but the shape was unmistakable. It was an old hearth, far larger than any campfire.

"What do you make of this, Leif?" Hallstein asked, leaning on his spear. He was a broad-shouldered man with a scar that split his left eyebrow, a souvenir of a youthful raid in the Hebrides.

Leif walked to the edge of the mound and knelt. He cleared away the rotting leaves and dug his fingers into the earth. It was not soil. It was thick, compacted charcoal dust, mixed with fragments of burnt bone and glassy, dark stones. He picked up one of the stones and held it to the light. It was heavy, with a greasy luster.

"This is slag," Leif whispered, his heart quickening. "But not from our fires. This is old. The moss has grown three fingers deep over the edges."

"Did the Skrælings build this?" Hallvard asked, his eyes wide with fear. "Do they have iron?"

"No," Leif said, tossing the slag back onto the pile. "The Skrælings we have met do not know the forge. They use stone and bone, tipped with copper they find in the western hills. This is something else. Look at the bones."

He pointed to a fragment of white, calcined bone sticking out of the ash. It was flat and broad, clearly not from a deer or a seal.

"Whale," Hallstein muttered, kneeling beside him. "They used whale bone to temper the fire, or perhaps as flux. Only men of the sea would have whale bone in the deep woods."

"Or perhaps the sea was closer when this was built," Leif said, looking around the clearing. He could hear the distant rumble of the surf, but here in the woods, it sounded like a ghost's warning. "This is a furnace site. A great one. Someone was making iron here before we ever set foot on these shores."

"But who?" Hallstein asked, looking around the dark woods as if expecting the builders to emerge from the shadows of the spruce. "The Irish? The monks who sail in their hide-boats?"

"The monks do not forge," Leif said. "They pray and they die. This is the work of men who knew the fire. Look at the size of the ash heap. They burned hundreds of cords of wood here. They stayed for seasons, perhaps years."

He stood up, wiping the black soot from his hands onto his trousers. The discovery was both comforting and terrifying. It proved that the bog iron of this land could be mastered—that someone had done it before. But it also meant they were not the first to try to tame this coast, and whoever had preceded them had vanished, leaving nothing but ash and bone to be swallowed by the forest.

"We take what we can use," Leif commanded. "Hallstein, get the sledges. We will dig up this ash. It is already half-burned and dry. It will make better fuel for Skofte's kiln than anything we can cut from the wet woods. And search the area. If they built a furnace here, there must be a clay source nearby that can withstand the heat."

As the men set to work, Leif walked to the edge of the clearing where a small stream trickled through the moss. The water was clear, but the rocks in its bed were stained a bright, rusty orange. He followed the stream bed down a short slope and found what he was looking for.

Where the water cut through the side of the ridge, a seam of greyish-blue clay was exposed. He reached out and pinched a wet lump of it between his fingers. It was smooth, without the gritty feel of sand that ruined the river clay. It felt fatty, sticking to his skin like grease.

He smiled, a rare expression on his weathered face. "The earth provides," he muttered to himself. "But always at a price."

By nightfall, the settlement was alive with a new kind of energy. The discovery of the old furnace site had broken the heavy lethargy that had settled over the men. Under the flickering light of whale-oil lamps, the longhouse was filled with the sound of sharpening stones and the low murmur of planning.

In the forge hut, a small structure built half into the hillside to protect it from the wind, Skofte was examining the clay Leif had brought back. He had mixed it with a handful of the ancient ash and shaped it into a small bowl, which he now held over the open hearth fire.

"It holds," the smith said, his voice bearing a reluctant note of approval. "The ash keeps it from shrinking too fast as it dries. We can build the chimney with this. If we build it thick enough, it will hold the heat of the bellows."

"And the ore?" Leif asked, leaning against the doorframe. Outside, the rain had started again, pattering against the turf roof.

"The ore is good enough," Skofte said, setting the clay bowl down. "But we must roast it first to drive off the sulfur. If we don't, the iron will be hot-short—it will crumble under the hammer like dry peat. We need a roasting bed of dry wood, then we crush it into pieces no larger than a hazelnut. It is slow work, Leif. My hands are stiff, and the boy is still clumsy."

"Then I will give you more men," Leif said. "Tomorrow, everyone who is not fishing or guarding the cattle will work for the forge. We will dig the clay, we will haul the ash, and we will crush the stone. By the time the moon is full, I want to see the first bloom of Vinland iron."

Skofte looked at him, his dark eyes reflecting the orange glow of the embers. "And if it fails? If we burn our wood and our strength and get nothing but slate and slag?"

"Then we will have to learn how to live like the Skrælings," Leif said quietly. "With stone arrows and bone knives. And when the winter comes, we will see if our gods are stronger than theirs."

He turned and stepped out into the wet night. The wind was blowing hard from the northeast now, carrying the smell of ice and salt. He looked out toward the bay, where the dark shape of their last seaworthy ship, the Deer of the Surf, rode at anchor. Her timbers were groaning in the swells, her ropes creaking like old bones. She was their only bridge back to the world they knew, and she was rotting from the inside out.

Leif walked down to the water's edge, the cold tide washing over the toes of his boots. He reached into his pouch and pulled out a small iron nail, bent and rusted, that he had found in the ruins of the old furnace site. It was crude, but it was strong. He held it in his palm, feeling the cold weight of it.

The iron harvest had begun, not with the clash of swords or the roar of feasts, but with the quiet scraping of wooden shovels in the cold mud and the desperate hope of men who had reached the end of the world and had nowhere left to run.

The cold light of dawn did not break over the eastern hills; it leaked into the sky like grease on wool, gray and heavy with the promise of more sleet. Long before the hearth-fires in the great hall had been stirred from their ashes, a line of men crawled out from the low turf doorways of the longhouses. They carried wooden shovels tipped with whalebone, hazel baskets, and iron-bound buckets that had seen too many winters.

At the head of this miserable parade walked Skofte, his joints popping with every step he took down the slick path toward the great sedge meadow. Behind him, Hallvard shivered inside a grease-stained wool tunic that was three sizes too large for him, his small hands buried deep in his sleeves to save them from the biting wind. The boy’s nose was red, and his breath came in short, nervous puffs.

"Keep your chin down, boy," Skofte grunted, not turning around. "The wind only takes what you offer it. If you open your mouth to complain, it’ll steal the heat right out of your belly."

"I'm not complaining, Uncle," Hallvard said, though his teeth chattered a rhythmic accompaniment to his words. "I'm only wondering if the water in the bog is always this cold. It looks like old iron itself."

"It is cold because it is old," Skofte said. He stopped at the edge of the marshy flat where the ground gave way to trembling moss and pools of stagnant water the color of strong beer. "And it is iron. Or it will be, if you keep your back straight and your shovel moving."

The work was brutal, monotonous, and filthy. To reach the bog iron, the men had to strip away the thick, springy layer of living turf and the black, wet peat beneath it. This was not the dry, crumbly peat of the Icelandic hills, but a heavy, clay-choked muck that clung to the shovels like wet dough. Every spadeful weighed as much as a young pig, and the water filled the holes as fast as the men could dig them out.

By mid-morning, the meadow resembled a battlefield. Great black trenches scarred the green skin of the earth, and the air was thick with the sharp, sulfurous stink of disturbed rot. Men stood knee-deep in the freezing mire, their bare legs turned a mottled, dead-looking purple by the water. They scooped the dark, heavy nodules of ore from the bottom of the trenches, tossing them into the wicker baskets.

Leif Eriksson stood on the low ridge above the bog, watching the progress. Beside him was Torstein, a tall, silent hunter whose skin had been burned to the color of old leather by the salt winds of the Greenland sea. Torstein carried a longbow of yew wood, its string kept dry beneath his wool cloak. His eyes were not on the diggers, but on the dark line of the spruce forest that bordered the meadow to the south.

"The woods are too quiet today," Torstein said, his voice barely louder than the rustle of the dead sedge grass. "Usually, the jays are screaming at this hour. Today, even the squirrels are hiding."

"The wind is from the north," Leif replied, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. "The forest beasts know when the snow is coming."

"It’s not the snow they’re hiding from," Torstein muttered. He pointed with his chin toward a thick clump of alder bushes near the stream that fed the bog. "Look there. The crows have landed in the branches, but they aren't feeding. They're waiting."

Leif squinted through the gray drizzle. He saw nothing but the tangled gray branches of the alders and the dark water of the stream. Yet, his instinct, honed by forty winters of survival on the fringes of the known world, told him that Torstein was right. There was a tension in the air that had nothing to do with the coming storm.

Down in the trenches, the work had ground to a halt near the stream bed. Hallstein, who was leading the digging crew, had stopped his shovel. He was staring down into a deep pit where the black peat had slumped away from the side of the bank.

"Leif!" Hallstein called out, his voice carrying a strange, tight note that brought the other diggers to a halt. "You should see this."

Leif scrambled down the slippery bank, his boots sliding in the greasy clay. He walked to the edge of the pit and looked down.

Lying in the black water at the bottom of the trench was a man. Or rather, what remained of one. The peat had preserved him with terrifying perfection. His skin was the color of dark, oiled oak, tanned by the acidic waters of the bog until it looked like fine leather. His hair, long and matted, had been stained a brilliant, unnatural shade of rust-red. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up toward his chest as if he were merely sleeping off a heavy draft of ale.

But he was not sleeping. Around his neck was a thick, braided rope of hemp, twisted so tightly that it had sunk deep into his throat, disappearing into the dark folds of his leathery skin. His face was twisted into a grimace of agony, his lips pulled back to reveal teeth that were white and perfect, unlike the worn-down stumps of the Norsemen who lived on gritted meal and dried fish.

"A sacrifice," Skofte whispered, crossing himself with a soot-stained thumb. Though he was a baptized man, old habits died hard in the wild places of the world. "The old ones used to put men in the bogs to buy the favor of the earth. My grandmother told of such things in the peat mosses of Jutland."

"This is no ancient ghost," Leif said, kneeling at the edge of the pit. He reached down and touched the man’s shoulder. The skin was cold and firm, like thick leather that had been left in the rain. "Look at his clothes. He wears no wool. His shirt is made of soft, scraped deer hide, sewn with sinew so fine you can barely see the stitches. And look at his belt."

Beside the dead man’s hip lay a small pouch of sealskin. Leif reached down and lifted it from the water. The leather was soft, still retaining its hair. He untied the thong and tipped the contents into his palm.

There were no coins, no silver rings, no iron knives. Out tumbled three small, flat pieces of copper, beaten into the shape of fish, and a single arrowhead made of a dark, glass-like stone that shone with a purple sheen in the dull light.

"He is a Skræling," Hallstein said, his hand dropping to the axe at his belt. "One of the forest people. But how did he come to be here, under three feet of peat?"

"He didn't walk into this bog on his own," Leif said, pointing to the rope around the dead man's neck. "And he wasn't buried by his friends. This peat has been disturbed, but it was done winters ago. See how the layers have settled back together? He has been here since before our longships first sighted the headlands."

"If they kill their own and throw them into the mud, they are no better than wolves," Skofte muttered, spitting into the water beside the corpse. "It’s a bad omen, Leif. We dig our iron from the same mud where they hide their dead. The iron will be cursed. It will break in the hand when the shield-wall meets."

"Iron has no memory of the mud it came from, Skofte," Leif said, his voice hard. "It only remembers the hammer and the fire. Get him out of the pit. We cannot dig where he lies, and I'll not have the men whispering about ghosts while they should be working."

Two of the younger men, shivering with a mix of cold and dread, used their wooden shovels to lever the leathery corpse out of the black water. It rose with a wet, sucking sound, the limbs stiff and heavy. As they rolled it onto the gray grass of the bank, a sharp cry rang out from the forest edge.

It was not the cry of a bird, nor the howl of a wolf. It was a high, thin wail that vibrated with a desperate, animal grief.

Before the Norsemen could raise their shields, three figures burst from the alder thicket. They did not run like warriors; they lunged forward with a reckless, frantic speed, their bare feet slipping on the wet stones of the stream. They were thin, their bodies wrapped in gray furs and deer hides that made them blend perfectly with the autumn woods. Their faces were painted with streaks of black grease and red clay, giving them the appearance of walking corpses.

The foremost of them, a tall man with wild, gray-streaked hair, carried a long spear tipped with a broad point of white stone. He did not aim it at Leif or Hallstein. He was staring directly at the leathery body lying on the bank, his eyes wide with a mixture of horror and fury.

"Stand!" Leif roared, drawing his sword. The iron blade cleared the scabbard with a dull scrape, its red-rusted guard catching the dim light. "Shields up! Form on me!"

But the diggers were scattered along the trench, their weapons lying on the dry bank yards away. Only Hallstein and Torstein were ready. Torstein’s bowstring twanged, a sharp, clean sound in the damp air.

The arrow, tipped with a scrap of old iron, struck the second runner in the shoulder. The force of the blow spun him around, but he did not fall. He let out a grunting yell, tore the arrow from his flesh with a bloody hand, and kept coming, his flint knife raised high.

The gray-haired leader reached the bank where the dead man lay. With a savage cry, he drove his stone-tipped spear toward Hallstein’s chest. Hallstein, a veteran of three voyages to the western islands, caught the thrust on the iron boss of his shield. The stone point shattered against the iron with a sound like a cracking nut, sending sharp flakes of flint biting into Hallstein’s cheek.

Hallstein grunted, blood welling from the cuts, and swung his short-handled axe in a vicious arc. The blade caught the gray-haired man in the side of the neck. It was a heavy blow, but the axe was old and its edge had been dulled by hours of cutting wet birch roots. It did not sever the neck; instead, it bit deep into the bone, lodging there with a sickening crunch.

The Skræling did not fall immediately. He grabbed Hallstein’s coat with both hands, his fingers locking into the wool with the strength of a dying man. He pulled Hallstein down toward him, his bloody mouth open in a silent scream of defiance, dragging the Norseman into the freezing mud of the trench.

"Help him!" Leif shouted, leaping down from the ridge.

He was too late to stop the third attacker, a younger man whose face was completely blacked with soot. This one had bypasses the warriors and was lunging toward the pile of baskets where the boy Hallvard stood frozen in terror. The young Skræling’s hand was raised, holding a heavy celled axe of polished green stone.

Hallvard did not run. He could not. His legs had turned to lead in the cold mud, and his eyes were locked on the gleaming stone blade that was about to split his skull.

Skofte, his curved back surprisingly quick when moved by anger, swung his heavy wooden peat-shovel like a club. The broad blade of the shovel, bound with thick whalebone, caught the young Skræling hard across the side of the head. It was not a killing blow, but it had the weight of a seasoned smith's arms behind it. The young man went down in the mud, his stone axe flying from his hand into the deep water of the trench.

Leif reached them a second later. His sword came down in a swift, practiced stroke, ending the young man's struggles before he could rise.

The skirmish was over as quickly as it had begun. The silence of the forest returned, heavier now, broken only by the ragged breathing of the men and the wet, bubbling gasps of the gray-haired leader who lay in the mud with Hallstein’s axe still buried in his collarbone.

Hallstein scrambled out of the ditch, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand. His breath came in great, ragged gulps. He looked down at the gray-haired man, who was now still, his eyes staring blankly up at the gray sky.

"They came for him," Hallstein said, his voice shaking slightly as he pointed to the leathery corpse from the bog. "They weren't hunting us. They saw us digging him up."

"They knew he was here," Leif said. He cleaned his sword on a tuft of dead grass, his face grim. "He was one of theirs, buried in our meadow before we ever built a fire here. They must have been watching us since we started digging."

Skofte was kneeling beside Hallvard, who had finally collapsed into the mud, weeping silently from the shock. The smith’s rough hands were surprisingly gentle as he checked the boy’s head for injury. Finding none, he lifted his nephew by the collar and shook him, not unkindly.

"Up, boy," Skofte said, his voice rougher than usual to hide his own trembling. "You're not hurt. You've got more mud on you than blood, and most of that belongs to the other fellow. Get to the longhouse and tell the women to get the kettles hot. We’ll have wounded men to tend to before this day is done."

Leif walked over to the three dead Skrælings. He looked from their painted faces to the leathery corpse that had started the violence. The connection was clear now. This bog was not just a source of iron for his people; it was a cemetery for the people who had lived here before. Every spadeful of muck they took to feed their furnace was an insult to the spirits of the forest.

"We cannot stay here today," Torstein said, joining him. He was scanning the forest line, another arrow already nocked on his string. "There will be more of them. They don't travel in threes when they hunt."

"We take what we have dug," Leif said. "And we take these three. We will bury them on the high ridge, far from the water. We must show them we are not beasts who leave our dead to the crows."

"And him?" Hallstein asked, pointing to the leathery man from the bog.

Leif looked at the ancient corpse. Its face seemed to mock him, the tanned leather lips curved into a slight, cynical smile.

"Put him back," Leif said quietly. "We have no use for their ghosts. We only want their iron."

They loaded the baskets of raw bog iron onto the wooden sledges, their movements hurried and silent. The gray-haired leader and his two companions were carried up the ridge to the edge of the spruce woods, where the ground was too rocky for proper graves. The Norsemen piled heavy stones over them, building three small cairns that looked like gray teeth against the dark green of the forest.

By the time they returned to the settlement, the first flakes of snow were beginning to fall. They were small, dry flakes that did not melt when they hit the cold earth, but rolled like tiny white beads across the dead grass.

The atmosphere in the great hall was thick with apprehension. The women worked in silence, tending to the cuts on Hallstein’s face with poultices of boiled moss and grease. The men sat near the long hearth, their axes and spears leaning against their knees. The dream of a quiet winter, of securing their foothold through honest labor and trade, had vanished with the first blow in the mud.

In the small forge-hut, Skofte was not thinking of the dead. He was staring at the baskets of dark, bubbly ore that sat in the corner. His hands were still dirty from the bog, but his eyes had a feverish brightness.

"It’s good ore, Leif," he said as the leader entered the low-roofed room. "I’ve broken a few of the nodules. They're rich. Heavy with metal, light on sulfur. If we can roast them tonight, we can start the smelt tomorrow."

"The men are afraid, Skofte," Leif said, leaning his back against the timber doorframe. "They think the iron is bought with blood. They think the Skrælings will burn the furnace before we can get the draft started."

"Let them be afraid," Skofte spat, poking at the coals of his hearth with an iron rod that was worn down to the thickness of a willow wand. "Fear makes a man watch his back. But fear won't keep his roof from falling in when the winter storms come. Only iron can do that. If we don't build that kiln, we might as well lie down in the trenches ourselves and let the peat take us."

Leif was silent for a long moment, listening to the wind howl through the gaps in the sod walls. He knew the smith was right. The blood had been spilled; there was no washing it back into the earth. The only way forward was through the fire.

"We start the roasting bed tonight," Leif said. "I will set guards at the edge of the clearing. If the forest people want another fight, they will find us standing behind shields of seasoned oak, not wooden shovels."

He turned to leave, but stopped as his eyes fell on the small, green stone axe that Skofte had brought back from the bog. It lay on the workbench, its polished surface catching the light of the forge fire. It was beautifully made, the balance perfect, the edge sharp enough to shave a man’s beard. It was a tool of survival, made by a people who had mastered the stone because they had no other choice.

Leif reached out and picked it up. It felt cold in his hand, but it was heavy and solid.

"They are not weak, Skofte," Leif said softly, tracing the smooth green stone with his thumb. "They have lived here for a thousand winters without our iron. If we are to stay, our steel must be better than their stone. It must be stronger than their grief."

"It will be," Skofte said, his hammer striking his small anvil stone with a clear, sharp ring that seemed to challenge the wind outside. "Or we won't live to see the spring."