Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

with a gammy-legged, fusty, coal-black smith?”
    “To say I’ve had one?” She plunged her hands into the washbasin and scrubbed them to the elbow, then turned and leaned against the stand. When she caught sight of his expression, she laughed as well. “You’re sure it’s not your heart that’s broken, Smith?”
    “Not this sennight.” He scowled around the rim of his cup, and was still scowling as she set bread and cheese before him. Others might find her intimidating, but Weyland Smith wore the promise-ring of Olrun the Valkyrie. No witch could mortify him. Not even one who kept Heidrún— who had dined on the leaves of the World Ash—as a milch-goat.
    The witch broke his gaze on the excuse of tucking an escaped strand of his long gray ponytail behind his ear, and relented. “Make me a cauldron,” she said. “An iron cauldron. And I’ll tell you the secret, Weyland Smith.”
    “Done,” he said, and drew his dagger to slice the bread.
    She sat down across the trestle. “Don’t you want your answer?”
    He stopped with his blade in the loaf, looking up. “I’ve not paid.”
    “You’ll take my answer,” she said. She took his cup, and dipped more ale from the pot warming over those few banked coals. “I know your contract is good.”
    He shook his head at the smile that curved her lips, and snorted. “Someone’ll find out tha geas one day, enchantress. And may tha never rest easy again. So tell me then. How might I mend a lass’s broken heart?”
    “You can’t,” the witch said, easily. “You can replace it with another, or you can forge it anew. But it cannot be mended. Not like that.”
    “Gerrawa with tha,” Weyland said. “I tried reforging it. ‘Tis glass.”
    “And glass will cut you,” the witch said, and snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
    He made the cauldron while he was thinking, since it needed the blast furnace and a casting pour but not finesse. If glass will cut and shatter, perhaps a heart should be made of tougher stuff, he decided as he broke the mold.
    Secondly, he began by heating the bar stock. While it rested in the coals, between pumping at the bellows, he slid the shards into a leathern bag, slicing his palms—though not deep enough to bleed through heavy callus. He wiggled Olrun’s ring off his right hand and strung it on its chain, then broke the heart to powder with his smallest hammer. It didn’t take much work. The heart was fragile enough that Weyland wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with the glass.
    When it had done, he shook the powder from the pouch and ground it finer in the pestle he used to macerate carbon, until it was reduced to a pale-pink silica dust. He thought he’d better use all of it, to be sure, so he mixed it in with the carbon and hammered it into the heated bar stock for seven nights and seven days, folding and folding again as he would for a sword-blade, or an axe, something that needed to take a resilient temper to back a striking edge.
    It wasn’t a blade he made of his iron, though, now that he’d forged it into steel. What he did was pound the bar into a rod, never allowing it to cool, never pausing hammer—and then he drew the rod through a die to square and smooth it, and twisted the thick wire that resulted into a gorgeous fist-big filigree.
    The steel had a reddish color, not like rust but as if the traces of gold that had imparted brilliance to the ruby glass heart had somehow transferred that tint into the steel. It was a beautiful thing, a cage for a bird no bigger than Weyland’s thumb, with cunning hinges so one could open it like a box, and such was his magic that despite all the glass and iron that had gone into making it it spanned no more and weighed no more than would have a heart of meat.
    He heated it cherry-red again, and when it glowed he quenched it in the well to give it resilience and set its form.
    He wore his ring on his wedding finger when he put it on the next morning, and he let the forge