Gerd sat down the kid on the rug of the fire pit where he had left him sleeping at first and handed him the bowl of stew he'd made hours ago, before he had started working on his commission. With a soft smile he saw the kid devour the now cold stew and was tempted to ask him to slow down before choking with a piece of meat, luckily, the bowl was licked clean before he had time to do so
"I see you were hungry" He commented as he grabbed the pot from the hook, it was cold now, but he still grabbed the ladle and served the child another spoonful of the stew. He had barely finished pouring,
"Who would've thought I'd be giving a kid food like this and not get it spit to my face" The stew was not the best in the country, barely even the best of the region, at least it wasn't the worst of the whole empire, but it was very poor, some meat pieces and very few vegetables to really be called a stew, and certainly not enough salt to make it something worth eating for something apart from avoiding starvation. But it was his food and there were no pompous children to appiece, just a very hungry one
As he watched the kid empty the bowl again, Gerd was tempted to fill it back again, specially when the black haired child looked at the floor and raised shily the aforementioned bowl. But he had to shake his head
"No" He said "We still need to have dinner tonight and I don't have the provisions nor the will to make another pot for the day" The child let his arms fall and nodded, still grasping the bowl between his small hands
"You can leave the bowl on the counter" Gerd pointed as he left the pot on the wooden counter, then, after receiving no answer from the child nor spotting some movement he shook his head with a sigh "I will be working on the workshop for some time, you can see if you can find something to do here or you can come watch me" Gerd started walking towards the door that led to the shop, not without noticing the gaze of the kid glued to his back as he opened it
Every kid Gerd had seen before this one had been so energetic and full of life that he had been easily overwhelmed, this one, instead, was so… devoid of everything. He hadn't said a word since he had woken up, he had only shook or nodded his head and Gerd was okay with that, he liked silence, what he did not like was the way he looked at him, as if he was measuring every step he took, it was very unsettling seeing his eyes follow his movements as the child once again appeared on the door of the workshop. Still, at least he was not making his life difficult by deciding to play on the forge while he was working, instead he just… watched. As Gerd Put the proto knives on the furnace he started humming a song again, and he kept doing so as he disassembled the grindstone he caught again the gaze of the child, he sighed and closed his eyes for a second, stopping his song
"I'm prepping everything for quenching" He explained "The metal normally is weak, not hard at all, and we need it to be very hard so we can sharpen it and cut things with it" As he talked he took half a barrel from under the shelves and filled it with water from a barrel that was stored on one of the corners of the workshop "In places much more richer than here they use oil to do this, but here in the north there's not enough to do it, so I just fill the tub with water from the well that I have stored"
"I heard that in the broken isles there are blacksmiths that order their apprentices to take a piss on the water used to quench the metal and this gives it special properties" He said as he watched over the tub "To be honest that seems pretty barbaric but you know, people doing strange things in other places has nothing to do with us. After all, the rest of the empire says the Northerners are the Barbaric ones"
The blacksmith grabbed his metal thongs and looked at the child "You shouldn't look directly into the metal or be near a quenching tub when they are going to dip red hot metal on it for sport, of course that does not apply to me as I am the one doing the dipping" Gerd opened the door of the forge and grabbed on one of the light orange shining knife-like steel pieces "Also I should be doing this with a thick leather apron but I haven't had the time to fix mine" The child still stood on the door of the workshop, his eyes deep on the metal, even if the old man had told him to do exactly the opposite.
'Kids will be kids I guess' Thought the old man, dipping the steel on the tub, a steam cloud raising from it and making its way towards the sky, or, in this case now that it was blocked, the roof. Gerd left the piece of steel cool down inside of the tub as he repeated the quenching process other three times
"After we quench the metal, we need to see how much did we damage the metal" He said, fishing the knives with his thongs from the tub "It makes the metal very hard, but by doing so it can cause it to bend or create some unexpected cracks, luckily, you are before someone who has years of experience working on metal, it's been years since I last fuc-" The blacksmith stopped speaking just short enough of letting a bad word escape his mouth, he was with a kid, releasing bad words was not the best way to go, he coughed on purpose trying to pass it as some spit on the wrong side and continued his explanation "Since i last messed up a quench"
Gerd raised the first knife he had fished out and examined it's spine to see if he could find any bending that had to be fixed before tempering, luckily, he didn't have to do so, not in that knife, nor in the other three
"Now it comes the tempering, it is very similar, the difference here is the temperature to which we heat the steel, which is pretty low when comparing to the quench one, and of course, you need to cool the steel slowly instead of rapidly so we won't be needing the water tub, and you'd ask me 'but Gerd, how do you know which temperature the steel has?'" The blacksmith raised an eyebrow, trying to get the child to react to his words, but no change in his facial expression came to be, so he just kept his monologue "The answer to that question is pretty simple my little friend, The color of the steel will tell you everything you need to know, of course, with each kind of metal that color and heat time will change" He explained "That's why it is tradition for blacksmiths to pass on to their apprentices series of songs that last as much as the heat time for things such as copper, iron, bronze, silver, gold or steel, that's what i was whistling before i started talking to you"
Gerd put the steel knives on the forge once again and started whistling a happy tune, pretty fast paced, but still, it took the forge a couple of minutes to heat up the steel, when he took them from the stone forge the steel knives were of a straw yellow color. One by one he deposited the steel knives on the anvil and let them rest there to cool down naturally
"Now that they are cooling down we can have a rest, well, not like this part of the process is the most tiring, that part is already out of the way" Gerd explained as he sat down on the same low stool he had been using with the grinding stone "Now all that is left is to sharpen and clean the knives, after that, assembling the handles and putting some pins" as he talked, Gerd had an idea "Come here kid, help me decide something" He said, standing up and approaching the workbench, he turned to see the kid slowly make his way up to him and he smiled
"Alright up we go" He said, grabbing the kid from the armpits and sat him on the edge of the workbench, Gerd took different wood types from the shelves and left them in front of the kid "Choose one" he said, and then watched as the kid slowly grabbed one of the blocks of wood, the thing was… that wasn't wood what he had chosen, but the antlers of an ashen deer
"Nice decision" complimented the blacksmith, grabbing the piece of bone that was the antler and examined it as he thought, moving to the shelves and looking for the crate of the handle materials, where he found out that the piece of bone he had on his hands was the only one he had left "Sadly it looks like I don't have enough for this, so we should choose a different one" The kid looked at him and then to the rest of the samples and chose a red wood material, Gerd checked again, he did have enough of that one for the set of knives
"Now I'll show you how to make the handle for the knives, watch closely because we don't have much material to waste"