They say she did not find the Grove.
They say the Grove sent for her.

Long before she came to Tremen, a smith in a village whose name no one remembers was keeping something.

An old man. Older than he should have been. Fingers like roots, eyes like coals.

He had a piece of iron that would not behave like iron.
Dark. Threaded with silver that moved when you weren't looking directly at it. Warm when it had no right to be.

When she came and sat at his door and would not leave — and the metal did not resist her the way it resisted everyone else — he knew the waiting was over.
He taught her the work. And when he died he left her nothing but the tools and the ingot, wrapped in cloth.

You will know where it belongs. When you find the Tree, you will know.

She wandered years with it.

And then one evening, south of Tremen — the stag.
White as winter. Eyes that caught no light. Antlers like bare branches against a grey sky.
No tracks where it stood.
She followed the direction it had gone.

Three days later, she came to the valley.

When she saw the Tree, the ingot rang. Not loud. The way something answers when it hears its own name.
She stood a long time at the edge of the clearing.
Then she unrolled her tools, and asked where to find good stone for a foundation.

She has not left since.

What she made with the rooted iron, she has not said.
Only that it took three days and nights, and that when it was done the forge burned silver at the edges — just for a moment — before it came back to itself.

She wears it always. Close to the skin.
Those who have glimpsed it cannot agree on its shape.