Cinder Gap

High in the mountains, the forge at Cinder Gap is carved straight into the rock, and Corin Ashby has kept its fires burning alone for eleven years.

He is thirty-five, broad-shouldered and stubborn, auburn-bearded and tanned dark by the furnace, and he has long since stopped expecting anyone to climb the pass for anything but plow points. Then, on a freezing November night, an orc fills his doorway.

Varrok is thirty-nine, warlord of the Ashmaw clans, built like the mountain itself. His green-gray skin is crossed with scars, his long black braids fall past his shoulders, and two small tusks frame a mouth that rarely smiles. He carries his fathers ancient blade, broken in battle, and in nine days he must swear the peace with it whole, or not at all.

Corin has never worked clan star-iron. Varrok has never trusted a human smith. To save the blade, they will have to work side by side at the anvil, through long sweltering nights of fire and steel, with nothing between them but a leather apron, a leather kilt, and a growing heat neither can ignore.

The warlord asks before he touches. The smith answers out loud. And every night the forge burns a little hotter.

But a warlord belongs to his clans beyond the ridge, and a smith belongs to his mountain. When the blade is finished and the oath is sworn, can two stubborn men find a way to keep the fire they started?