A bench of patterns: good parts, bad parts, and a few that were both. Ferrus weighed them with the same mercy he gave ore. Living metal shone on his forearms; the light off his hands looked like thought. He chased tolerances like prayers—edges trued to a hair, faces stoned until they forgot their casting. She, for her part, kept reaching past good toward more—not to gild, but to find the lesson that waits at the thin line where failure teaches.
"Ornament lies," he grunted, holding up a gilded failure.
"Beauty can teach when it serves truth," she countered, and produced a piece that was ugly and perfect.
He laughed—a bright crack of sound seldom heard—and asked to keep it. "To be reminded that sometimes ugly is exactly right." He did not smile often. He did now. Then he fixed her with a foreman's straight look. "Tell me, Princess: what jewel does an heir truly need—to prove worth, and to make you smile?"
"None," she said. "Only my brother's arms. That is enough to make me happy."
Ferrus's mouth softened. He set to work anyway: from cable and adamant links, from a shaving of living metal that answered his hands, he made her a necklace—spare and beautiful by function—and set it at her neck. She, not to be outdone in making, pressed into his palm a small stone she had formed in the quiet beyond: pretty fragments folded together until they kept her warmth. Ferrus slipped it into the hidden pocket at his gorget and carried it with him thereafter, even in the end.