Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear Page A

lie cold—or as cold as it could lie, with seven days’ heat baked into metal and stone. It was the eighth day of the forging, and a fortnight since he’d taken the girl’s coin.
    She didn’t disappoint. She was along before midday.
    She came right out into the sunlight this time, rather than lingering under the hazel trees, and though she still wore black it was topped by a different hat, this one with feathers. “Old man,” she said, “have you done as I asked?”
    Reverently, he reached under the block that held his smaller anvil, and brought up a doeskin swaddle. The suede draped over his hands, clinging and soft as a maiden’s breast, and he held his breath as he laid the package on the anvil and limped back, his left leg dragging a little. He picked up his hammer and pretended to look to the forge, unwilling to be seen watching the lady.
    She made a little cry as she came forward, neither glad nor sorrowful, but rather tight, as if she couldn’t keep all her hope and anticipation pent in her breast any longer. She reached out with hands clad in chevre and brushed open the doeskin—
    Only to freeze when her touch revealed metal. “This heart doesn’t beat,” she said, as she let the wrappings fall.
    Weyland turned to her, his hands twisted before his apron, wringing the haft of his hammer so his ring bit into his flesh. “It’ll not shatter, lass, I swear.”
    “It doesn’t beat,” she repeated. She stepped away, her hands curled at her sides in their black kid gloves. “This heart is no use to me, blacksmith.”
    He borrowed the witch’s magic goat, which like him—and the witch—had been more than half a God once and wasn’t much more than a fairy story now, and he harnessed her to a sturdy little cart he made to haul the witch’s cauldron. He delivered it in the sunny morning, when the dew was still damp on the grass, and he brought the heart to show.
    “It’s a very good heart,” the witch said, turning it in her hands. “The latch in particular is cunning. Nothing would get in or out of a heart like that if you didn’t show it the way.” She bounced it on her palms. “Light for its size, too. A girl could be proud of a heart like this.”
    “She’ll have none,” Weyland said. “Says as it doesn’t beat.” “Beat? Of course it doesn’t beat,” the witch scoffed. “There isn’t any love in it. And you can’t put that there for her.”
    “But I mun do,” Weyland said, and took the thing back from her hands.
    For thirdly, he broke Olrun’s ring. The gold was soft and fine; it flattened with one blow of the hammer, and by the third or fourth strike, it spread across his leather-padded anvil like a puddle of blood, rose-red in the light of the forge. By the time the sun brushed the treetops in its descent, he’d pounded the ring into a sheet of gold so fine it floated on his breath.
    He painted the heart with gesso, and when that was dried he made bole, a rabbit-skin glue mixed with clay that formed the surface for the gilt to cling to.
    With a brush, he lifted the gold leaf, bit by bit, and sealed it painstakingly to the heart. And when he had finished and set the brushes and the burnishers aside—when his love was sealed up within like the steel under the gold—the iron cage began to beat.
    “It was a blacksmith broke my heart,” the black girl said. “You’d think a blacksmith could do a better job on mending it.”
    “It beats,” he said, and set it rocking with a burn-scarred, callused fingertip. “ ’Tis bonny. And it shan’t break.”
    “It’s cold,” she complained, her breath pushing her veil out a little over her lips. “Make it warm.”
    “I’d not wonder tha blacksmith left tha. The heart tha started with were colder,” he said.
    For fourthly, he opened up his breast and took his own heart out, and locked it in the cage. The latch was cunning, and he worked it with thumbs slippery with the red, red blood. Afterwards, he stitched his chest up with