Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

As he made to follow his younger brother, her expression turned serious. “Really, Aiden, get that old fool sorted out, will you? His rantin’s bad for business, an’ not just for him; for the whole Close.”

“We will.”

“You tell him he’s scarin’ his grandbaby. That might do it.”

He nodded, catching up with Hektor as he made—with some reluctance—for the small iron shop across the street and three doors down. Like most businesses in this part of Haven, it was little more than eight feet wide, with two horizontal shutters at the front. The top was supported on tall posts to provide an awning for the bottom, which, supported on two shorter posts, acted as a display counter for tools, nails, hinges, handles, and whatever other bits of ironwork the proprietor thought might lure a customer inside. The brightly painted sign depicting a bell flanked by two ornate candlesticks above a decorative anvil declared the owner to be a master smith capable of crafting more refined objects than mere horseshoes and hammers. But what had always set Edzel’s shop apart from the others and what had kept Hektor, Aiden, and many of the boys their age coming in and braving the smith’s legendary temper was that in his prime, Edzel Smith had made toys of extraordinary skill: tops and jacks, metal whistles, tin flutes, and polished iron marbles, lead guardsmen with arms and legs that actually moved, and tiny, beautifully crafted Heralds and their Companions, painted a heavy, enameled white. Hektor remembered saving his pennybits for months just to be able to afford a single articulated watchman no bigger than his forefinger when he’d been nine years old. Edzel’s daughter, Ismy, had given him another when he was twelve.

He glanced down to the end of the Close where it opened up onto Saddler’s Street before loud shouting issuing from Edzel’s shop jerked him forcibly from the memory.

“I tell you, I’m bein’ thieved from!”

Edzel Smith stood in the middle of the shop shaking his fists in rage. A squat, heavyset man in his late sixties, his gray hair thinning on top and gray beard covering a jutting and belligerent chin; years of forge work had bent his back and twisted his hands, but his arms and shoulders were still covered with thick, corded muscle, and his temper was as volatile as ever.

“Don’t you try an’ shush me, boy!” he continued, his face turning a dangerous purple. “I know when I’m being thieved from, don’t you try an’ tell me otherwise! I had thirteen thimbles, thirteen, on that there back worktable and not a one less! I had a full box of lath nails, that’s twenty-four exactly, an’ now there be naught but nineteen!”

The boy he was shouting at, his son Tay, a tall, broad man of almost thirty-five and a full smith in his own right, did his best to look if not believing then at least respectful as Edzel stomped about, shaking his fists in near apoplectic rage. Usually at work at the forge behind the shop, Tay entered this world of crammed shelving and angry fathers as seldom as possible, but with the rage on him, Edzel was more than Tay’s long suffering wife, Trisha, who helped him run the shop, could handle.

“Boggles maybe?” Tay suggested, trying, without success, to lighten his father’s mood.

“Bollocks it’s boggles!” Edzel shouted back. “I know boggles! I seen a boggle when I was a little, walkin’ home from the forge at twilight one summer, an’ it ain’t them. It’s her, I tell you!” He spun about to shake one fist out the open doorway. “That’s who it is, that heartless, thievin’ stepmother of yourn! An’ I’ll have the Watch on her! See if I don’t!”

“Now, Da,” Tay said, trying to keep his voice reasonable. “You know Judee h’aint been near the shop since she moved out two years ago.”

His father’s face darkened still further. “You mean since she took half my hard-earned brass an’ opened that spiteful rat-infested trap she dares call an iron shop with your ungrateful half-wit of a brother, you mean, is that what you mean!?” Edzel demanded, his voice turning even more shrill.

Tay sighed. In the nearly twenty years since his mother’s death, his father’d had three other women in his . . . in their . . . lives, and each one had finally been driven away by Edzel’s unpredictable temper, made worse now since age and arthritis had driven him from the forge and into the shop full time. Judee’d lasted longer than most, long enough to give Tay and his younger sister, Ismy, a half-brother before she too had left them. But this time she’d gone no farther than along Anvil’s Close to open up a rival iron shop of her own with their brother Ben, who’d just gotten his blacksmith’s papers.

And whose business was doing much better than theirs, if truth be told, Tay admitted.