Excerpt from the latest project: To Bury Their Parents.

Korina sat in the long hall. An ingot rested in front of her, and a heavy hammer. A girl sat on the edge of the hearth with her.
Fourteen. Tall, pretty, good teeth. She had big hands, which was a good sign.
“Take the hammer,” Korina said. “Use it to flatten out this bar.”
The girl picked up the hammer and pushed the ingot around into a position she liked. “Is it very hot in the forge?” she said.
“Very. And smoky. Loud. Lonely.”
The girl frowned, jabbed half-heartedly at the metal. The hammer clinked and bounced. The whole bar, not held in place, also bounced. It flipped over with a clatter. “A profession,” she said. “A calling.”
“For the right person.”
“A home. Maybe a family.”
What boy would want you? Now you are young and succulent. Soon all your nails will be broken and your hair full of soot. Soon you will have eyes only for the fires and no time to dandle a child on your hip.
“Try again.” Korina did not know if she meant the girl’s answer or her hammering.
But the girl held the bar still and beat at it once more. She used her strength this time. The hammer bounced, sending a shock up her arm. Korina had felt it enough times to know it when the girl dropped the hammer. “Ow.”
“Too hard,” Korina said. “Hit it just hard enough. Firmly. When it bounces, work with it. The bounce saves your energy.”
“I’m not strong enough,” the girl said.
So I fear. “You could be. Here, watch me.”
Korina took the hammer. She began to beat the ingot. A small crowd gathered, youngsters mostly, those not assigned yet to apprentice. Nearly all had already failed this test. Her arm rose and fell fast, tapping more than beating, warming the metal. “The strength is not in the force of the blows but in keeping them up. This is a long march, not a sprint to the finish. The work takes patience. Determination.” Slowly, as it warmed, the metal grew more malleable. It began to distort. “Enough,” she said. “Here. You do it.”
The girl tried. Korina gave her that much. In the end, though, she only bruised her knuckles. The steel grew cool under her ministrations, cold and stubborn. And the noise it made was wrong. It should have rang out, chimed, sang with her. But the note was sour.
Korina had tried every day but found no candidates.
Later, back at the forge that was her real home, she let herself despair.
I need an apprentice. None here can make the metal sing the right note.
There was only one answer to such a question and she hated it. Even the long hall was too far from home, even a bath in the lake too much time away from her work. The fires were not her friends but her lovers. The molten metal was not a thing to be worked but her blood.
I am not strong enough to go away from this place.
She had a bag, a canvas thing left as a gift one morning from some grateful villager. They had even dyed it. Black and heavy, stitched well enough to carry tools without breaking. It sat unused at the bottom of a toolbin under hammers and awls and shapers, under a file and a rasp.
I am not strong enough.
But she dug out the bag, because such a question really had just one answer.
The forge had more than enough tools for working bronze and those she left. She had spent the past months making new tools. Tools for working steel. Those she packed with care into the canvas bag. They clinked as she hefted it. A heavy thing. Too heavy. But the forge needed an apprentice. She was not strong enough to leave this place in search of one.
But I could be.