Wyatt Mercer, the blacksmith who had been rejected on five separate matchmaking dates, walked against the flow of people upon the County Court steps and grasped the hand that the entire town dared not touch—a hand searing with heat. Maren Ashe, whom he had married, was the sole survivor of the great fire fifteen years earlier and the last surviving heir of the Longline clan, living under a pseudonym; she had spent the entire night rekindling his entire set of tools and using her own fire to temper his blades—at the cost of her own scales being reduced to ashes. When his cousin Silas arrived at his door armed with a forged sacred sword and a "Dispossession Order," Maren signed a waiver document, left behind a single scale still bearing her body heat, and vanished into the mountains alone. Wyatt did not follow her into the mountains—he had entered the National Swordsmithing Championship. Nine minutes after the championship night concluded, he walked into the sealing ceremony of the Clan Council carrying a two-hundred-year-old bronze plaque from the Sword Testing Workshop, a piece of steel坯 bearing the workshop's mark, and a stack of accounting records. During a trial strike, the forged sword shattered into three pieces.
