His father used to say: a house does not begin with walls. A house begins with the stove.
Kres did not sleep his first night on the mire. He kept a fire burning on a dry rise between two black alders and listened to the bog breathe. It truly did breathe: sighing in bubbles, squelching, calling back and forth in the voices of birds he did not know. Twice that night, two green lights floated between the hummocks, moving steadily, unlike any beast. He threw on more deadwood and said into the darkness, "I am not proud. I am stubborn." The lights lingered, then went away. A wolf, perhaps. Or perhaps the master of this place had decided to see whom they had sent him.
In the morning he began with the stove, as his father had taught him. He dug a hollow into the rise, coated it with clay and ran a flue through the turf. The ember from the clan hearth, smouldering all the way in its tinder box, went into the new stove, and the fire caught at the first breath as though it had been waiting. Without a fire, a house is empty, and anything may settle in an empty house: so the old folk said. Now he had a house. A dugout in a bog, but a house.
There was almost nothing to eat. He set snares for woodland birds, stripped bulrushes and dug for sweet root. He grew so thin that he had to knot his belt twice. But he learnt the mire the way a man learns another's temper: where the rise would bear him, where the moss lied, where a second bottom waited beneath the duckweed. On the bog, his lame leg proved no weakness. He was already used to mistrusting every step.
He did not survive by guesswork. A counting rhyme came together in his head of its own accord, as though someone had drummed it into him long ago: water, warmth, food, stores. In that order and no other. He always boiled his water, even when it looked clean. It was a great deal of bother, but his belly never once twisted, and on a bog that was the difference between life and death. He dug the latrine pit far away and downstream, clear of his food and water. He could not have explained why it had to be so, but the other memory insisted.
By the end of the first month he had built a little stone bathhouse beside the dugout: a pit with a hearth, roofed in turf, its smoke left to blacken the walls. He heated the stones red, splashed them with bog water and thrashed himself with a birch switch until his ears rang, steaming the cold out of his body and the bitterness out of his head. Afterwards he sat on the rise, flushed from the heat, looking at the stars through the alder branches, and for the first time thought not of what he had lost, but of what he would build.
And at night something rustled behind the stove. Not quite a mouse, not quite a polecat: it rustled with the measured assurance of a master in its own house. Kres began leaving a heel of bread on the hearth ledge. His father had done the same, as did everyone whose house was alive. By morning the bread was gone. He nodded and said into the dark corner, "Stay. It is merrier with two." From that night, the dugout ceased to be a pit in the bog. It had one of its own.
And then he came to the red water.
A stream seeped from beneath a ridge of moss, its water rusty and thick, with an iridescent film across the surface. Livestock shied from water like that. People spat over their shoulders and walked away. Kres squatted beside it and laughed for the first time in a month.
He remembered his father. Remembered so clearly that it hurt beneath his ribs: his father, black with soot, seating him, seven winters old, on his knee and rolling a heavy brown nodule across his palm, like a roasted turnip. "Look, son. Where the water is rusty, the earth hides blood. The blood of the earth is stronger than bronze. The South takes three skins for bronze, while here wealth lies underfoot, only no one knows how to take it."
The blood of the earth. Bog iron.
Kres cut turf until evening. The nodules lay in a seam beneath the moss: brown, heavy and pitted. An entire vein, unopened and untouched. Take as much as you could carry. The clan had sent him to die in the richest place in the Great Forest and never even knew it.
He sat beside the stream until dark, already knowing what he would do next. And it was then, as he rose, that he saw the notch.
Old and grown over, cut into a black alder at the very edge of the rise: two slanting strokes and a half-circle. His father's mark. His father had marked timbers for the smithy that way.
His father had been here.
Kres examined the alder from every side and felt every crack in its bark. Beneath the roots, in a birchbark-lined hollow, lay a box. Inside were three fist-sized blooms of dark iron and a scroll of birchbark covered in his father's hand: how much charcoal to use, how long to keep the draught going, when to break open the furnace. One more thing had been wrapped separately in a scrap of cloth.
A twisted rivet the length of a finger. Not his father's work: foreign, finely made and plainly far stronger than anything from these parts. A mark like a bird's wing had been stamped into its head. No such iron was forged in the hamlet or anywhere in the Forest. Iron like this came from only one quarter of the world.
The north.
Kres sat in the darkness, holding the cold rivet, and did not hear the bog breathe. His father had known this place and kept silent about it. His father had hidden northern work here. His father, whom the hamlet had believed an incomer from nowhere.
Where did you come from, Father? And whom were you hiding from?
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