The Castle Behind Thorns Read Online Free PDF Page B

and had first struck hot metal before he could write his own name. So Sand was able to stand in Grandmère’s stead in the smithy, and help Grandpère with his commissions.
    Those weeks at his grandparents’ house, uninterrupted by his father’s constant talk of university, had changed his life. After working with his even-tempered grandfather and learning at his side; after hearing the stories of his mother, who had died of fever when he was young, and his uncle, who had died in the League War; after hearing his grandfather’s profound and resolute sadness that none of his blood would carry on his work, Sand wanted nothing more than to become a blacksmith.
    When he returned home, Sand told his father: He would not go to Paris or Angers. He would not study at a university. He would become his father’s apprentice. And if not his father’s, his grandfather’s.
    They had fought about it that day, and for many days to come. It had been a most unhappy year in the little house across the valley.
    Their last fight had come to pass because his father had turned down a huge commission, claiming he didn’t have the hands for it. His father wouldn’t take an apprentice, nor would he let Sand work on the commission with him. Sand didn’t see the sense in it.
    â€œYou’re too busy with your learning to help me with the job. So don’t think about it,” his father had said.
    â€œIt’s all I think about!” Sand had cried, before he ran from the house. Once out on the grass silvered with winter’s last frost, he felt like he could breathe again. So he kept running, toward his grandparents’ house three miles away, until he stopped at the spring of Saint Melor.
    Agnote must be so worried.
    He prayed to Saint Eloi to send his stepmother a sign. “Let her know I am safe. Let her know I am well. And if you have time, let her know I require rescue! Let her look to the smoke here at the Sundered Castle and worry on it!”
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    W ITH THE KITCHEN IN hand, Sand wanted to figure out the other necessities of life, like bathing and sleeping and fresh clothes. Everything depended on tools, however. For half of the castle’s mending, Sand needed a working smithy; for a quarter, he needed needles and thread; and for the final quarter, he needed all manner of things he didn’t even know about.
    What Sand knew of needle-making, he could balance on the end of one finger. Fortunately, he found a few needles that were only bent, not snapped, and those he put to good use with the longest segments of thread he could find, sewing up his bedclothes and a few outfits to change into, as his ash-rubbed clothing grew smelly.
    Getting the smithy back together, however, would take time. Charcoal burned just as well in halves as it did whole, so that was one problem avoided. The magical force that had sundered everything in the castle had occasionally made some very odd choices in its destruction—Sand found a hammer that had been broken only at the wooden handle and not any of the metal parts, and another hammer whose handle was whole while the metal was broken. He spent what seemed like endless hours fitting the right parts together.
    Reconstructing one of the forges wasn’t so hard, either—Sand just had to stack the broken bricks and wet some clay to line the forge. And fixing the bellows presented little difficulty; he’d mended bellows with Grandpère before. As for an anvil, unless he could figure out how to weld one back together or recast a new one, he was going to have to work with what he had. He had seen blacksmiths work off metal-wrapped bricks in a pinch, and half an anvil was better than that .
    Smiths working with very heavy items used small wooden cranes to raise those items into place onto their anvils. Both of the cranes in the smithy were more like firewood, postsundering, but with a little tinkering, some braided linens acting as rope once