She looked up to find kindness in Heluda’s eyes, “If I had another way to do this, I would,” the woman told her quietly.

Daja lifted her right hand and held it over the iron. She was trembling. “Must I touch it?” she asked. Heluda nodded.

Daja laid her plain hand on the iron bar. It was solid-no wonder Heluda had needed both hands to lift it. As she wrapped her fingers around it, Daja was slammed with feelings. She was the bar. Violent force rammed her from behind, blowing her off the vast iron shield she was welded to. Fire raced in her wake. She plunged into cold snow that hissed and shrank from her.

Biting her lower lip, Daja released the iron. Sometimes she felt a thing bearing down on her like a storm just over the horizon. She sensed that now. If she turned the full weight of her power on this piece, curved and twisted half around by an incredible burst of heat, her life would change. She could put it off. She could. She could be safe a day more, a month more. Sooner or later, the accounting demanded in this metal bar would come due and she would have to pay it, but she did not have to do that today.

“Are you done?” Heluda inquired.

Daja shook her head and set her right hand on it. Then she flexed her left hand, feeling the brass that coated it grip her flesh. She reached out, seeing the hand as a stranger might: bright golden metal, dark brown skin, trembling fingers. She laid her metal palm on the twisted bar, and clenched both hands around it.

She was inside the iron and on the inside of her own skin. Somehow her hands were bigger. They had strange bumps in the joints. No, they weren’t hers, exactly. There was a man in her skin, a big man. He strained to pull the iron bar, his sweat oiling her skin from the inside.

Didn’t he understand about the iron stick, the bent one that men used to open the furnace door at her back? Why didn’t he use that instead of hands? The crooked, heavy bar was a quicker, easier way to help her do her job.

He dragged, and dragged, and dragged, until she did as she was supposed to. She drew on the massive iron door that shielded her from the fire on the other side, pulling it until the shield moved, letting a wash of heat pass her. She felt the heat inside the furnace, steady and calm, as it always was during the coldest hours. The fire didn’t fool her. She knew how quickly it could roar up when men tossed wood onto it.

The hands that were her and not her let go, leaving a taste of her brass skin on the iron handle.

Daja plunged into the furnace of her power, drawing strength to reach to that image of her brass hands. One of them held a large round thing. That hand tossed the round thing into the furnace. Then both brass hands gripped Daja-the-furnace-door-handle, pushing her and the iron door at her back slowly into place, between the fire and cold air. Daja’s brass hands released her iron self and vanished.

As the iron handle, she didn’t have long to wait until her people came to open the door at her back. They never grabbed her with their weak hands: she would have seared them to the bone. Instead they used the crooked pry bar to lever her and her door open.

They threw wood past her, into the heat, then began to close the doors against the rapidly growing blaze. There was a thwap that made her entire world shudder. A very hard thrust knocked her clean off her door and twisted her around on herself. She blasted through a man’s body. On she flew, into the open air and cold snow.

Heluda was talking as Daja pulled free of the iron. Daja barely heard. She tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, but it too was dry. She blindly felt for a tea glass.

“Let me,” Heluda said. Picking up Daja’s glass, she muttered in Namornese. She went to the door and flung it open to reveal the maid who sat there waiting for any request. “Get me some proper mugs, and a cloth soaked in cold water.”

Daja heard those words as if they were spoken at a distance. Her face was numb. A chasm had opened in her belly; she swayed on its edge. In her mind she saw Ben as he knelt before his stove, sifting embers in a gloved hand. She saw a black bone hand with a gold ring, and a half-melted figure of a local goddess. “Not-” she croaked.

“Hush,” ordered Heluda. “I don’t want anyone to overhear.” When the maid returned with a tray, the magistrate’s mage took it. “Back to the kitchen,” she ordered. “Don’t come within a week of this room, understand?”

Heluda closed the door and set the tray on a table. With a hand movement she threw a magical barrier over the door. Then she took the wet, folded cloth and laid it across the back of Daja’s neck. The coolness made Daja shudder, and straighten. She had been sitting folded over, as if kicked in the stomach.

Heluda poured tea into both mugs. “Here.” She thrust Daja’s mug into her hands and folded the girl’s fingers around it. “It’s not sweetened.”

Daja sipped carefully. Hot and strong, the tea burned its way down to that chasm in her belly. She took another sip, then a third, and a fourth. At last she put the mug down and shifted the cloth on her neck, holding the ends against the pulse points under her ears. Like the tea it helped to clear her head, but neither cloth nor tea stopped the quiver of her lips or the sting in her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” she told the woman. “It-it’s iron, and metal can’t lie to me, but-it makes no sense.”

“I saw the gloves here,” Heluda explained. “You smith-mages, you’d no more start a fire to destroy than you would beat a dog to make him vicious. Either I am well past my game and I never spotted you as a danger, or something you made left the mark of your magic on the furnace door. If that piece hadn’t blown clear, we might never have picked up the trace of your power. Of your gloves, used by the person you made them for.”