"Forged iron is stronger. Keeps its shape better. And it's easier to make complicated shapes with it, yes - You can make a garden spade or horseshoes or nails out of wrought iron but a plow or other such things really ought to be forged if they're going to last."

"Oooh, maybe that's the thing that was different between the plough I saw and the other iron things! Do you have any pieces of forged iron I could look at, even if you don't make it here?"

"My anvil's forged." He points. "Have a look, maybe you can tell if it's any good with magic? I don't know how magic works, of course."

Regular and magical staring at the anvil! Does it have the property the plow had?

Nope! But there's something else - with such a big chunk of metal she can even feel that the center's a tiny bit different than the edges.

"It's different from the plow I looked at . . . the center is just a little bit different from the outside, do you know what that might mean?"

"One bit of iron's not quite the same as another, there's impurities, and how it was heated and hit and cooled matters. Maybe the center stayed hot longer than the outsides?"

"Maybe! Can I touch more things to see what they're like?"

"Of course, little witch. Just ask for my help with anything heavy."

"Thank you Señor!" And she scurries around looking at everything metal and touching most of it and trying to find some patterns in the things her new sense tells her.

Most of the iron items are broadly the same, with tiny differences in the exact feeling of the iron. Hot iron feels subtly distinct from cold iron. The tiny scraps and filings on the floor aren't perceptible to her magic sense, despite being metal. The smith has some brass and pewter things too. Pewter is heavy and dense and vaguely unpleasant. Brass is interesting, it's like copper but also not.

if she sweeps enough of the little filings into a pile at least the size of a coin, can she detect them then? 

...As a very faint, wispy, cloudy sort of feeling, yes.

"Hmm. Want me to heat these and hammer them together into one lump, see what you make of that?"

"Ooh, yes please! Also, how is brass like copper?"

"Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. You can mix two metals together and get a more useful kind of metal sometimes, and that's what an alloy is. Copper and zinc are too soft by themselves, but brass is shiny and doesn't corrode much."

"Wow! I wonder if I could identify zinc from having looked at brass and copper."

"Too bad I don't have any. I wonder if you should go find a university or a forgeworks when you're a bit older. Identifying metals could be mighty useful some places, I would imagine."

"That would be great, if it turned out to be useful." Can she push just a tiny little bit of magic into the pile of scraps, while covering it with her hand so it doesn't go all over the place if it works?

It's like trying to stuff air into a dust bunny. Unclear if she's even doing anything.

"Being able to move metal around would be useful too I think. I wouldn't take girls as apprentices normally, but maybe to some smiths witches are special."

"Maybe! I want to find more different ways to move things. Right now all I can do is dump magic into them so they fly off. I want to learn to move things around slowly in whatever direction, if that's something my magic can do."

"I don't think I can give you any advice other than practice helps with most things. I wish you luck, though. If you get any good at it, maybe I'll pay you a bit to help out here! That'd be interesting."

"I'd like that. I'll come talk to you again if I get better control of moving things."

She skips off home to eat lunch and help clean up and then practice more.

A month goes by - not uneventfully - but seemingly very quickly. The monks invite her back to read their books whenever she likes. Amat visits a couple of times and lets her borrow one of the nice-but-not-super-nice brooms they give to new couriers for a day, which makes flying much easier especially in terms of stability, even if it makes it harder to turn than a plain kitchen broom. The smith indulgently answers her questions about metal as best he can.

She eventually gets good enough at moving metal things around without hurting anybody or anything. The trick is to move mana in and out of the metal at the same time, which takes some practice all by itself. Now people will come to her when they need anything big and mostly metal moved, like one family letting another borrow their plow.

And then a witch she doesn't recognize shows up, wearing very boyish clothes and riding a 'broom' that is made of metal. Or mostly made of metal, at any rate.

Moving metal things is always fun, especially once she learns to do more than fling them into the air, and she's happy to save her neighbors some time and effort if it comes with an excuse to practice.

She's excited to see the new witch arriving, of course. And oh wow metal broom is she going to get to try to fly on it?!? She's going to stand here and stare at it with saucer eyes for a bit before remembering to say, "Hello!".

She waves cheerfully and descends some more. She's very pale and has shockingly blonde hair.

"Hello! I am Freya, I'm with the United Defense Force, an international army of witches working to defend the world. I can sense other witches with my special, so I think I've found the young Margaretta Perez we've heard about?"

She'll be generic for the first little while, since she doesn't know anything about the potential recruit's personality or circumstances yet.