Chapter 39: The Blizzard’s Wrath

The foundry was a suffocating hell of black smoke and screaming heat.

Arthur stepped past the spilled, glowing slag. Heat blasted his pale face. He ignored the coughing apprentices. He ignored Master Smith’s furious roaring.

He walked straight to the corner and sank to his knees beside the pile of ruined cast-iron plates.

He reached out with his left hand and dragged the shattered side panel across the dirt. The iron was still warm. He ran his thumb along the jagged, fractured edge.

Porosity.

“Master Smith,” Arthur called.

His voice was a wrecked, dry rasp, but it cut through the chaotic din of the foundry.

Master Smith whipped around. The massive blacksmith was covered in soot, his leather apron scorched, and his chest heaved. He looked at the thirteen-year-old lord kneeling in the dirt, then at the thick linen bandages binding Arthur’s right arm to his chest.

“My Lord,” Smith choked out, wiping a massive hand across his forehead. He pointed a trembling finger at the scrap pile. “Goddammit. That method is cursed. The green sand holds the shape, but the iron fights it. The moment it cools, it tears apart in the mold. We’ve already lost twenty plates since midnight. We’re just wasting iron at this point.”

“You aren’t wasting iron,” Arthur said, his eyes locked on the porous metal. “You are boiling water.”

Smith blinked twice with a confused look.

Arthur painfully pushed himself up from the dirt. He walked over to the nearest wooden casting bench. A wooden mold box sat half-packed with the damp, blackish-green sand.

“The sand mixture is wrong,” Arthur said, staring at the bench. “It’s too wet. When you pour molten iron at two thousand degrees into a sealed box of wet sand, the water in the clay instantly flashes into steam. The steam has nowhere to go. It gets trapped inside the liquid iron. It cools, expands, and blows the plate apart from the inside out.”

Smith stared at his hand, then at the mold with a questioning look. “If we dry the sand, the mold crumbles before we pour.”

“There is a threshold,” Arthur said. He nodded toward the bench. “I can’t pack it as you can see. My arm is dead. You are going to be my hands, Master Smith. Step up to the bench.”

The giant blacksmith hesitated, then stepped up beside the pale boy.

“Grab a handful of the green sand,” Arthur ordered. “Squeeze it into a tight ball in your fist. Go as hard as you can.”

Master Smith scooped a handful of the dark sand and crushed it in his massive fist, following the spoken instructions.

“Open your hand.”

The blacksmith opened his hand. A perfect, solid lump of sand sat on his palm.

“Now snap it in half,” Arthur said.

Smith pressed his thumb into the lump. It broke, but it crumbled slightly at the edges, leaving wet, dark smears across his calluses.

“It’s too wet,” Arthur diagnosed instantly. “It shouldn’t stain your skin. Add dry silica and rework the pile.”

For the next ten minutes, the foundry fell into a tense, singular rhythm. The young heir stood over the blacksmith’s shoulders, using his hands as his own. They adjusted the ratio of clay and sand, mixing, squeezing, and breaking.

Finally, Smith snapped a lump in half. It broke with a sharp, clean fracture. No crumbling. No wet smears on his palm.

“There,” Arthur breathed, a slight tremor in his voice. “That is your new baseline. Not a drop more water. And you need to pierce some ventilation holes through the top of the sand mold with heated wire. That should give the steam a chimney to escape.”

Master Smith stared at the cleanly broken sand in his hand like it was gold. “Ventilation holes,” he muttered. “By the Gods. It’s so simple. You never cease to amaze me, boy.” He added with a wide grin, patting the young heir’s back.

A little too strongly.

Arthur flinched under the blow, then turned around.

The six apprentices had stopped moving. They were standing in a loose semi-circle, covered in soot.

One of them kept rubbing his hands together. Another stared at the floor.

They were waiting.

Waiting for the young lord to start shouting.
Or worse.

Arthur didn’t do either. He looked at them with the same cold, dead eyes of an auditor.

“A cracked plate takes four hours to clean, recast, and cool,” he said quietly. The foundry was so silent they could hear the distant drip of snowmelt outside. “Four hours is ten finished stoves. Ten stoves heat fifty people.”

He pointed his left hand at the scrap pile in the corner.

“There are twenty broken plates in that pile. That is one hundred people who are currently marked to freeze to death in their beds. We do not have the margin to fail again.”

Arthur met the eyes of the oldest apprentice.

“If we produce twenty stoves a day, the outer rings die,” he stated, his voice cold as steel, just reciting the math. “If we produce thirty, they live, but they lose fingers and toes to frostbite. We need forty. That is the quota. You do not sleep until we hit forty. Understood?”

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“Yes, my Lord,” the apprentices echoed, their voices pale and hurried.

Arthur nodded once. “Then start pouring.”

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The screech of an ungreased iron wheel echoed against the frozen shale.

Arthur stood at the mouth of the main adit, his breath pluming in the frigid morning air. His right arm was still strapped tightly to his ribs, the linen bandages stained yellow with old medicinal paste. But he didn’t feel the ache. Not right now.

Four workers, their faces blackened with soot and pale with exhaustion, leaned their weight against the thick hemp ropes. Their boots dug into the hardened mud.

With a final, unified grunt, they hauled the heavy wooden mining cart over the threshold of the tunnel.

It was overflowing. Over half a ton of raw, glistening black coal.

One of the miners, a thick-shouldered man with a scarred cheek, wiped his brow, leaving a streak of black grease across his skin. He looked at Arthur and gave a short, exhausted nod.

“That’s the fifth cart this morning, my Lord,” the miner rasped, his breath misting. “The lower drops are completely dry. That mud-baked iron monster of yours hasn’t stopped pumping for a week. The water level is holding steady ten feet below the lowest coal seam.”

Arthur felt a tight, heavy knot in his chest finally loosen.

They were making real progress.