"Hasn't for anyone so far. I wish you the best of luck if you try it, but I learned my lesson about teaching young women to fight for their beliefs when it left my second bedroom empty."

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

"Alright, I think I'm going to start the charcoal burn, then go look for more iron ore, then keep chopping wood to replace what I use. If I can keep having nice, filling meals I'll get stronger instead of weaker, so again - thank you for the hospitality."

"Of course! You're very welcome to it."

And then it will be evening, and it will be morning.

She's exhausted and miserable.

But warm. And not hungry. She'll take it.

She has charcoal. She has a few more chunks of plausible iron ore. She looks for rocks to build a terrible improvised forge with. And spends all day hauling rocks around, with little more than an improvised sledge sort of thing made by taking apart her heat suit's mechanisms.

"I think that'll work. I can take it apart after too, so nobody recognizes it as a forge, if you like. Anything else iron you might want, while I'm at it? Anything iron that sells particularly well - and unsuspiciously?"

"Oh, if you can make more easily, then absolutely, make some rings. They're currency, the biggest type we use. Mostly people stick to bronze and copper, but a fistful of iron rings can buy - a full set of armor old enough to have a name and a bit of magic. I have two iron in my hidden storage I can fetch, rings aren't too regular."

"I can do that! Probably have forty, fifty pounds of metal - almost half my weight - if I'm very careful. Unless your iron is not the iron I know, that seems - much more valuable than I was expecting, I should look carefully at them. I assume this violates the Division of the Harvest somehow...?"

"You know, I'm not sure?," she says, then disappears for a few minutes to fetch the examples. They're pretty bulky, a tight bracelet an inch or so wide. There might be enough for a hoe if she had twice this many. "We made our own bronze and copper rings, and I think we still do. I never heard legal complaints about it. But iron's come from the North and East for as long as we've known it was possible to forge, and not just use star-iron."

"...So they're as valuable as the metal itself is, I think. Not fiat- Not valuable because Kyros says so. Do you mind if I, uh, try some things, tapping, seeing how it takes lightning and magnetism... I can get something like fifteen or twenty rings out of that ore. Four to go into your plow."

"Shouldn't damage them if they're good iron? Then sure, test- this one," she says, picking the one she judges slightly smaller.

She fusses with it. Poking it with the magnets in her lantern and with her compass, carefully completing a circuit with it. Scratching and pressing on it and tapping and listening. Heating it to see how quickly it heats and how quickly it cools again.

Is it just ordinary iron? Probably either wrought or cast, but those are subtly different. Probably wrought if it's meteoric iron pounded into shape, probably cast if it was made using a mold and brittle.

It's... basically wrought iron. It's weird in roughly the same way that Damascus steel is weird, though in a different direction. You probably can't tell, but that's because this iron never went through a bloomery; it was essentially put into a normal oxygen-fed forge fire and then a Forge-Bound smith reached in and manually separated the slag from the good iron. (Not with their hands. The Forge-Bound are mages; it isn't flashy, but they can do amazing things with their tools. And not just on metal.)

Anyway, it's ultimately ordinary, if by premodern standards absurdly high-quality, iron.

At length she passes them back and says, "Huh, those mage-priests of the forge have got something going for them, don't they? I'm impressed! I wonder how, it's not like they'd necessarily have the tools I'm thinking about to replicate it... I can make something similar but they would theoretically be distinguishable if someone really good looked at them carefully. Different source rocks, different method..."

"I've heard a little, but they say they're just really good at using the tools. And they make their own forges and they're really persnickety about it."

"I don't really know which way to be impressed without seeing them work, which isn't going to fly." She shrugs. "Mine is going to be a barely acceptable piece of trash, honestly, because I don't want to be here a month building a proper one people will ask you inconvenient questions about."

"I'll happily take it all the same."

"If you like!"

Sigh.

"That sounds like time to get back to work, to me. I'd be more excited if I wasn't working from raw materials..."

"Bronze-making never looked as interesting as smithing it to me, either. Well, tell me if there's a step where extra hands would be particularly helpful?"

"...Some copper rings wouldn't necessarily be amiss, come to think of it. Or bronze and brass - do you have brass? - If they're so much more common than iron that's a good trade from my perspective, I do need copper and bronze can do like four-fifths of what steel can if you're careful, it'll be a pain and a half to draw them into wire, but you can never have too much copper wire..."

"Sure, I can give you some copper. Ten times the mass of one of those iron seem alright? I think I've heard of brass being used, maybe on ship's keels? But it isn't common, I don't have any around."

"Sure! Right, time to get to work..."

It's another few days for her to assemble a stone forge, load it with charcoal, dig a trough and fill it with water for quenching, make some crude forging tools with the left-over remains of her torn up snow suit, purify the iron ore into some rings and some bar stock, melt down the copper and reshape it into a few small fittings and a lot of wire, and then FINALLY work on a proper weapon of sorts.

"I have three ideas bouncing around in my head. One, a steam bow of sorts - to fire arrows or small copper balls at deadly speed. Two, a lightning sword. It wouldn't have sparks flying off it, but it would discharge energy into whatever it strikes. Three, also lightning, but on a long spear-like prod. More reach. And maybe I make some armor too. I don't really know how to fight with, uh, any of it, though, or what makes good armor, necessarily. What do you think?"

Essa looks in periodically, and looks steadily more impressed with her as it goes on. When it comes to advice on weapons...

"A spear seems better than a sword, especially if you're new to fighting hand to hand. A powered bow... hard to say. Archers need some way to pick their battles; either you fight from a wall or cliff, or you have some spearmen screening for you while you pick your shots. Switching to a sword and shield when they close is an option, if you can carry them easily; spear and bow are harder to keep together in your field kit."

"If your armor doesn't use fancy not-magic then probably just buy some plate you're sure you can march in. Iron no one can pierce but which leaves you too exhausted to dodge can be worse than padded cloth that lets you run away. Even the best armor has weak points, and if you can't move, those will be easy targets. To say nothing of your ability to fight back when tired. There's more, but that's the main thing."

"-Well, I could make an armor that moves on its own eventually, but uh. That would be a serious and intense piece of work. I extremely much appreciate having a veteran's advice on this sort of thing, by the way. What if the bow can fire multiple times very quickly? No, it'll still run out eventually."

...Several more days with Waltana growing increasingly agitated and complaining about not having tools more and more often, she uses her bar stock and some of the wood pieces to make a plow. It's a nice plow, biting cleanly into the dirt and parting it with relative ease, and she claims it's an alloy that oughtn't rust easily, but still just a plow in the end. She turns the rest of the leftover iron into a long, steel-shafted spear with a cloth handle and two separated sturdy steel tips, wickedly curved and closing to a small gap. An arm-sized device with cords leading off it (worn as a sort of backpack) connects to the base of the shaft, and when she depresses a small switch, an electric arc sizzles and crackles in the gap at the tip of the weapon.

"Kind of wasteful to do it that way actually, but wicked intimidation factor, yeah?"

"Several shots helps, especially if they're fast enough to hit someone charging you enough to send them to their knees. But ultimately you want to be able to block something coming at your head from short range, and I haven't seen a bow that could do that well, even if it was tough as iron."

"It certainly is," says a clearly intimidated Essa, "And intimidation is never wasteful. The safest victory is always the one where you didn't have to fight at all. Even a really good swordswoman still risks a crippling every time she fights."

"Mmhm, good. I don't really want to actually fight... I'm torn between trying to join up with Kohl, and making for somewhere nearish an Oldwall I can work in privacy. Point against the first, he'll probably want me to fight. Violence is everywhere around here. Point against the second, I don't know how to grow food. Or build a house the slow and hard way. I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would not be fun or risk free."

"I think this is where I stop having useful advice. If you stayed here a year you'd have enough of the basics of growing food, and more of the muscle you'd need to do it yourself, but I doubt you really want that. Or me, for that matter. If this was what you're like working with few resources, I'm not optimistic about you hiding all that long when you have more, but also you might not need to. You have a good head on your shoulders; I think you'll guess better than me."