The First Heat

Ashsong

A short novel of Halvard Ashsong, Forgebearer of Kaldkloft

I. The First Heat

Halvard Ashsong took his first breath to the sound of a hammer falling.

The anvil’s voice rolled through the timber bones of the longhouse and into his mother’s hands as she pulled him into the world. Outside, the Kaldkloft birches wore a coat of hoarfrost and the Petra river kept its slow speech beneath a lid of ice. His father, Einar Ashsong, didn’t hear the midwife’s call until the third blow. He set his hammer down on the quench-trough, wiped the salt from his brow, and came inside smelling of iron and ash.

“Strike,” he whispered, laying a rough finger on the boy’s soft chest. “Breathe.” Another touch, over the tiny ribs. “Listen.” He bent his head and the long gray of his beard brushed the child’s cheek. “You came on the right cadence, little coal.”

They named him Halvard, and above the long hearth Einar carved three words into the beam: Strike · Breathe · Listen.

Halvard being carried by his father, Einar

The Ashsong forge was part home, part chapel. Its doors were old oak with feather-stones hammered into the lintel, a pinch of salt under the threshold, a pinch of ash at the corners. On the ridgepole perched a little iron bird the size of a child’s thumb, the clan’s raven-mark. When wind came off the Petra, the iron bird chattered as if telling the roof a secret.

From the beginning, Halvard learned his father’s way: first the blow, then the breath, then the stillness in which a thing revealed what it wished to become. Nails, buckles, hinges, and hoes—all answered if you listened. By twelve, he could shoe a skittish mare without a curse or a welt. By fifteen, he could hear, or believed he could, the shallow hum that ran through the old stone of the bridge as if the river itself sang through it.

“What do you hear?” Einar asked one dusk, while the boy’s ear pressed to the parapet.

“Something like a… drum under the water.”

“That’s the Ley. We don’t command it,” Einar said. “We place signs where it holds. That’s our second vow.”

“The first is to feed,” Halvard recited.

“And the third?”

“To keep the rhythm in craft and in conflict.”

Einar smiled. “Good. Remember pride hides in the third blow. If you strike it for vanity, the world will crack where your mark lies.”

Halvard nodded, filing the words among the other bright things he intended never to forget: his mother’s laugh when geese chased his shoelaces, the clean bell tone of the anvil when the metal was just right, the winter moon caught like a coin on the edge of the Petra’s black ice.

For a while, the world held

Strike - Breath - Listen