Chapter 3: First Shaping

  The river was wider than Edric had expected.

  He stood on the bank and looked at it, brown with snowmelt, moving fast enough to froth where it broke around stones. The ford was marked with posts driven into the shallows, a line of them crossing from bank to bank, and he could see the path the crossing took: a curve upstream to avoid the deepest channel, then a straight line to the far side where the water ran thin over gravel.

  Bramble stood beside him, ears forward, watching the river with the expression of a creature who had encountered water before and remembered not liking it.

  "It's not deep," Edric said.

  The crooked ear flicked.

  Edric stepped into the water and the cold closed around his boots like a fist. He gasped, caught himself, kept moving. The current was stronger than it looked, pushing at his legs, and within three steps the water was above his knees, numbing everything below. The stones underfoot were slippery, worn smooth by years of crossings. He moved carefully, testing each step, one hand on the nearest post for balance.

  Behind him, Bramble had not moved.

  "Come on," Edric called, turning. The donkey stood on the bank, all four hooves planted, his expression suggesting that Edric had lost his mind. The saddlebags shifted as he pulled against the lead rope, but his hooves didn't move.

  The water was cold enough to hurt. Edric's legs were going numb. He could not stand here and argue with a donkey while the river froze him solid from the waist down.

  "Bramble."

  Nothing.

  Edric considered his options. He could pull harder, but Bramble outweighed him and had four legs to his two. He could wait, but his legs were already losing feeling. He could leave the donkey on this side of the river and continue alone, which was not an option at all.

  Nothing for it. He waded back to the bank. Stood dripping on the mud while Bramble watched, placid.

  "We have to cross," Edric said. "The village is on the other side."

  Bramble lowered his head and began examining a patch of scrub grass near the water's edge.

  Edric sat down on a rock. His legs were shaking. The cold had sunk into his bones and it would take time for the feeling to return. He pulled off his boots, poured out the water, wrung out his socks as best he could. The morning sun was weak but present, and he turned his face toward it and waited. Bramble ate grass. The river moved past, indifferent.

  After a while, Edric noticed that Bramble had wandered closer to the water, not into it but near it, sniffing at the mud where the ford began. Considering.

  He didn't move. Didn't say anything. Just sat on his rock and watched.

  Bramble put one hoof in the water. Pulled it out. Put it in again. His ears went back, then forward. He took another step, then another, and then he was walking, slow and deliberate, placing each hoof with care, the water rising around his legs until it reached his belly.

  Edric grabbed his boots, tucked them under one arm, and waded in after him.

  They crossed together. The cold was worse on bare feet, the stones bruising and slippery, but Bramble kept moving and Edric kept moving, and the far bank came closer with every step. When they finally climbed out onto the gravel, dripping and shivering, Bramble shook himself violently and sprayed water in every direction. Edric sat on a stone, wrung out his socks again, and pulled his boots on over numb feet.

  On the far side now. The ford, the posts, the brown water behind them. Caldross was truly behind him, separated by a river that hadn't wanted to let them cross. He stood, stamped some feeling back into his feet, and walked on.

  * * *

  Millbrook appeared in the early afternoon.

  The road curved around a stand of willows and there it was: a cluster of houses around a common well, smoke rising from chimneys, fields stretching in every direction. The houses were built of local stone, roofed with thatch gone grey with age. A barn larger than any of the houses stood at the edge of the village, its doors open to the spring air. Edric could hear chickens somewhere, and the distant crack of someone splitting wood.

  A boy spotted them first. He was sitting on a fence post, whittling something, and he jumped down and ran toward the houses before Edric could raise a hand in greeting. By the time Edric and Bramble reached the well at the village center, people were emerging from doorways and fields, converging without rushing.

  A woman met them at the well. She was about Torben's age, her grey hair pulled back in a practical knot, her hands rough and weathered from decades of work. Her eyes went to the saddlebags first, the shaped iron tools visible through the canvas, the file at his hip. Then back to him.

  "You're young," she said.

  It wasn't a question. It wasn't hostile. It was just a fact, delivered like a comment about the weather. Edric had no idea how to respond.

  "I'm Dalla," the woman said. "You're the first shaper we've seen since autumn." She looked at his hands. His unmarked forearms. "First journey?"

  "Yes."

  She nodded, her expression giving nothing away. "Sit. Eat. Then we'll see what you can do."

  A bench appeared, pulled up near the well by a man who didn't introduce himself. Food appeared. A bowl of soup thick with root vegetables and something savory he couldn't identify. The bowl was smooth in his hands. Thin clay, even-walled, lighter than it looked. His thumbs found the rim and rested there, reading the surface the way they read everything, and for a moment the evenness of the clay held him. Then the soup held him more, and he ate.

  Bread beside it with a crust that resisted his teeth before giving way, and cheese that crumbled dry when he bit into it. Edric ate because his body needed food, but he could feel eyes on him, the whole village watching without quite watching, measuring him against whatever they'd expected.

  Bramble was taken away by the boy who'd spotted them, led toward the barn with promises of hay and water. The donkey went without protest. Apparently strangers were acceptable as long as they came bearing food.

  Dalla sat on the edge of the well and waited for him to finish. She didn't fill the silence with talk. Neither did he. When he set the empty bowl aside, she nodded once and stood.

  "Three plow blades need work," she said. "Urgent. Planting should have started three days ago and the ground's just sitting there. There's a cracked hinge on the barn door, kitchen knives that haven't held an edge in months, a hasp on Widow Tren's cellar that rusted through."

  She ticked them off on her fingers, a list she'd been keeping in her head all winter. The work of a village waiting for hands that could shape metal.

  A man approached while she was speaking. Tall, broad-shouldered, face weathered by years of sun and wind. He carried a plow blade in one hand, the metal dull and chipped, and he set it on the bench beside Edric without a word. His thumbs hooked in his belt.

  "That's Gren," Dalla said. "Watch his hands. He hasn't let anyone near that blade since the last shaper left it worse."

  Gren didn't nod, didn't speak, didn't do anything except stand there and watch. His eyes moved from Edric's hands to his face and back again. Waiting.

  "If you can fix that," Dalla said, "you can fix anything we've got."

  She walked away and left him alone with the blade and the man who owned it.

  * * *

  Edric picked up the plow blade.

  It was heavier than it looked. Iron, not steel, shaped for breaking hard soil, and the moment his fingers closed around it he felt something wrong, not just wear or age. The grain of the metal was knotted, twisted, carrying a tension that hummed against his palms like a sour note.

  He closed his eyes, let his hands go warm, and listened. The iron didn't want to talk to him.

  That had never happened before. Metal always spoke. Sometimes quietly, sometimes reluctantly, but always something. This blade was silent, its grain clenched tight, and when Edric pushed gently with his warmth, he felt the iron pull away from him. Not refusing, exactly. Flinching.

  He opened his eyes. Gren stood where he'd been, arms folded, his face showing nothing.

  "Someone shaped this before," Edric said.

  "Years ago." Gren's voice was flat. "Traveling shaper. Did the whole village, took his pay, moved on. Blade's been wrong ever since."

  Edric turned the blade in his hands, feeling the grain through his fingertips. The previous shaper had worked too fast, pushed too hard, forced the metal into a shape it didn't want. The iron remembered. The grain had twisted trying to resist, and when it couldn't resist anymore, it had locked itself into a defensive knot. Every time someone used the blade, the knot tightened. Every winter, every spring, every season of being forced through soil it wasn't aligned to break, the damage deepened. The blade was afraid of him.

  He set it down on the bench. He rubbed the back of his neck. Out came the file. The worn handle was warm in his grip, heavy with history, and for a moment he missed Torben so fiercely it was hard to breathe. Torben would know what to do. Torben would look at this blade and see exactly where the damage started and how to unwind it. Edric saw only the knot.

  And planting was already three days late. The fields outside the village were sitting brown and open, the turned earth waiting for seed. The weather was holding, but weather didn't hold forever. This blade had to work.

  "I can't undo all of it," Edric said. "Not in a day. The damage goes deep, deeper than I can reach with the time we've got." He turned the blade in his hands. "I can make it hold. Strengthen the grain around the worst of the forcing, sharpen the edge, get you through the season. Maybe two. But the iron needs more work than that. Real work. The kind that takes days, not hours."

  Gren's jaw tightened. He looked at the blade, then out at the fields behind the village, the turned earth sitting empty in the spring light, then back at Edric.

  "Get me through the season," he said. "I'll figure the rest."

  Start somewhere. Torben's voice in his memory. When you can't see the whole pattern, start with what you can see.

  He put his hands on the blade again. This time he didn't push. He just rested his palms against the iron and let his warmth seep into it, slow and steady, not asking anything, not trying to shape. Just present.

  The iron stayed tight for a long time, and Edric waited. His hands were hot now, the heat building in his palms, but he kept it gentle. Non-threatening. The file lay on the bench beside him, untouched. He could feel Gren watching. Could feel the village watching, probably, from doorways and windows, keeping track of the young shaper who was sitting motionless with his hands on a plow blade.

  The grain loosened. A fraction, barely perceptible, like a held breath letting go. The iron's flinch eased toward wariness. Still not trust. But not quite fear anymore.

  Edric followed the opening. Let his warmth flow into that loosened place, felt the shape of the damage underneath. The original forcing had happened near the base of the blade, where the metal met the wooden handle. The previous shaper had pushed the grain sideways, trying to strengthen a weak spot, and the iron had twisted around the intrusion like skin scarring over a wound.

  Slowly. Incredibly slowly. Each knot had to be convinced, not forced. He found one and warmed it and waited until it released, then moved to the next. The file helped, its edge finding the places where the grain needed guidance, but mostly it was his hands, his patience, his willingness to sit with the blade's fear until the fear ran out.

  He couldn't reach all of it. He could feel the deeper damage, below where his warmth could reach in an afternoon, knots wound too tight to loosen in the time the season allowed. He worked around them. Strengthened the grain above and below, gave the iron something to lean on, a structure built around the damage to keep it from spreading. It wasn't the repair the blade deserved. It was the repair the planting needed.

  The sun moved across the sky. Shadows shifted. He was humming. He'd been doing it for a while, maybe since the second knot released, maybe longer. A low, tuneless sound that followed the file's rhythm across the grain, rising when the iron gave and dropping when it held. Not a song. Not anything he could have named if asked. Just the sound his throat made when his hands were deep in patient work and the rest of him had gone quiet, the way a kettle hums on a fire long before it starts to sing. Behind him, Gren's head tilted, but the man said nothing. Someone brought him water and he drank without stopping the work, one hand staying on the blade to hold the connection. The hollow was opening in his stomach, the shaper's hunger that meant he was using more than his body wanted to give. He ignored it. Behind him, Gren hadn't moved or spoken the whole time.

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  When Edric finally set the file aside, the blade wasn't healed. The deep knots were still there, living in the iron like old scars. But the grain around them was strengthened, braced, the edge sharp and the surface work aligned. The iron had found a rough truce with itself, holding because he'd given it reason to hold.

  The blade went on the bench. Edric sat back. His hands were shaking. The hollow in his stomach was a pit. His shoulders ached and his back ached and the light was going golden, late afternoon already.

  Gren stepped forward. Picked up the blade. Turned it in his calloused hands, his thumbs running along the edge, testing the weight and balance. His face showed nothing. Then he nodded, once, and walked away.

  Edric wasn't sure if that was approval or resignation. He didn't have the energy to wonder.

  * * *

  The other plow blades came next.

  A woman named Maret brought hers, setting it on the bench with an apologetic shrug. "It's not as bad as Gren's. Nothing is. But it's been pulling left since autumn."

  The blade was simpler. No damage, no fear. Just wear, the grain stretched thin from seasons of use, compressed along the cutting edge. Edric found the tired places and warmed them, let the iron expand and settle, straightened what had bent. Less than an hour. Maret tested the edge against her thumb and nodded.

  "Pulls true now?"

  "Should."

  She paid him with a basket of dried apples and didn't wait for him to argue.

  The third plow blade belonged to an old man who didn't give his name. He sat on a stump while Edric worked, whittling something that might have been a spoon, and said nothing at all. His blade was the oldest of the three, the iron dark with years of use, and when Edric put his hands on it he felt something different from Gren's damage or Maret's wear. This iron was tired the way a person was tired after a long life, not broken or damaged but spent. Generations of use had stretched the grain thin, compressed it, layered strain upon strain until the metal was holding itself together more from habit than from strength.

  "How long has your family had this?" Edric asked.

  "It was my father's," the old man said, not looking up from his whittling. "And his father's before that."

  Three generations of strain accumulating in the grain, layer on layer. Edric strengthened what he could, sharpened it, gave the iron what it needed for another season. But he couldn't give back what decades of use had taken. The core of the metal was patient and stubborn, still holding because holding was what it had always done, and that would have to be enough.

  "My father used to say you could feel when the blade was happy," the old man said, after Edric handed the blade back. He turned it in his hands, testing the edge with a thumb that had done this same motion ten thousand times. "When the ground was right and the iron was willing. He said it was like the plow was pulling itself."

  The Foundry didn't talk about iron that way. The masters taught technique, discipline, the careful grammar of grain and heat and intention. They didn't talk about happiness. They didn't talk about iron being willing.

  The old man looked at his blade, then at Edric. Nodded once. He walked away, leaving a small wheel of cheese on the bench where the blade had been.

  The barn hinge took longer than Edric expected. The crack ran deep, a fracture from a winter of freezing and thawing, water seeping into the metal and expanding until the iron began to split. He couldn't just seal the surface. He had to find where the damage started, down in the grain, and coax the metal back together from the inside out.

  Two men held the door in place while Edric worked, the hinge still attached, his hands wrapped around the iron. When the last of the fracture sealed, the door swung smooth and quiet.

  "Been squealing for months," one of the men said. He sounded almost disappointed.

  The kitchen knives came in a basket, half a dozen blades sharpened wrong so many times they'd forgotten their edges. Edric worked through them one by one, finding the true edge buried under the damage, coaxing it back. By the last blade, his hands were clumsy and the hollow in his stomach had become something vast and demanding.

  Widow Tren's hasp would have to wait until morning. He could barely see straight.

  * * *

  Dalla appeared with a price in mind. Edric named a number lower than hers and she frowned.

  "That's not enough."

  "It's fair."

  "Fair for the knives, maybe, but not for Gren's blade or the hinge. That was a full day's shaping and then some."

  Edric didn't know how to argue. The number he'd named was what felt right, what felt like enough without being too much. He thought of Torben's lessons about charging for the work and not the time, but Torben had never explained what to do when someone insisted on paying more.

  "Call it even with a place to sleep," he said finally.

  Dalla looked at him for a long moment. "I've watched you price three jobs today. You'll starve before summer."

  "I'll manage."

  She shook her head, but she didn't argue. She just pointed toward the barn and told him there was a cot in the back, near the hay, and that supper would find him.

  Supper found him in the form of a bowl of stew, thick with root vegetables and some kind of meat he didn't ask about. Bread that was softer than what they'd given him at midday. A mug of something warm that tasted like herbs and honey and spread through his chest like slow fire. He sat on a pile of hay and ate while Bramble worked through his own meal nearby, the sound of the donkey chewing a slow rhythm in the still barn.

  The boy from earlier appeared. He sat on an upturned bucket and watched Edric eat with the unselfconscious intensity of a child who had questions.

  "Does it hurt?" the boy asked.

  "Does what hurt?"

  "The shaping. When you put your hands on the metal and it goes all..." He waved his hands vaguely. "Wavy."

  "It doesn't hurt." Edric set down his spoon. "It's warm. Like putting your hands near a fire, except the fire's inside you."

  The boy considered this, his heels drumming softly against the bucket. "Can anyone do it?"

  "No. You have to be born with it. The warmth in your hands." He held up his palm. Even now, spent and exhausted, his hands were warmer than they should be. The shaper's tell. "If you have it, a master can teach you to use it. If you don't, no amount of teaching will give it to you."

  "How do you know if you have it?"

  Edric picked up his spoon again, stirred the stew. "Someone checks. When you're young. They put a piece of iron in your hands and see if you can feel the grain."

  "What's the grain?" The boy leaned forward on the bucket, elbows on his knees, the same posture Edric remembered from his own boyhood when something had seized his attention and wouldn't let go.

  Edric thought about how to explain something he'd never had to put into words. "It's the metal's nature. The way it wants to be. Every piece of iron has a grain, like wood has a grain, and if you can feel it, you can work with it. Shape it. Make it stronger, or sharper, or help it heal when it's been hurt."

  "Like Gren's blade."

  "Like Gren's blade."

  The boy was quiet for a moment. Then: "My hands aren't warm."

  "Most people's aren't. That's all right."

  The boy looked at Edric's hands, resting on his knees. The warmth was visible if you knew what to look for, a faint flush in the skin, a faint shimmer in the air above his palms in the cool barn.

  "But yours are."

  "Mine are."

  The boy stared at Edric's hands for a long moment, his eyes wide, a child looking at something he didn't understand but wanted to. Then his mother's voice called from somewhere outside, sharp and fond, and he scrambled off the bucket and ran.

  The barn went still.

  Edric lay back on the hay and stared at the rafters. The beams were old, dark with age, shaped by woodshapers generations ago. He could almost feel the grain of them from here, that density and patience he'd noticed in the stoneworker's fountain back in Caldross. The whole building was held together by craft, by hands that had known what they were doing, and he was resting inside that knowledge.

  He slept.

  * * *

  Morning came grey and cold, mist rising from the fields, the village stirring slowly into life.

  Edric finished Widow Tren's hasp before breakfast. The widow was older than Dalla, bent with years, and she stood in her doorway and watched him work with eyes that missed nothing. The hasp had rusted through at the weak point where a previous repair had left the grain uneven. Edric smoothed it out, strengthened it, and handed it back. She paid him with a jar of preserves and a look that said she'd expected worse and was pleased to be wrong.

  Breakfast in the barn: porridge with honey, bread with butter, more of the herb tea. The hollow from yesterday was mostly filled. His hands felt like his own again.

  He was packing his things when the woman appeared.

  She was younger than Dalla, close to the age Edric's mother would have been if she'd lived. Her hair was brown, touched with early grey at the temples, and she carried a wooden box with iron fittings, holding it the way you hold something that might break if you breathe wrong.

  "I know you're leaving," she said. "But if you have a moment."

  Edric set down his pack.

  The woman came closer. She didn't quite meet his eyes. Her attention was on the box, on the rusted latch, on the thing she was about to ask a stranger to touch.

  "It was my mother's," she said. "The latch seized when I was a girl. Fifteen years, maybe more. I've tried everything. Oil, a candle flame, prying at it with a knife." She let out a breath. "If you can't open it, that's all right. I've waited this long."

  Her voice was steady. Her hands weren't. The box trembled slightly in her grip.

  "I'm Sarra," she said.

  "Edric."

  He took the box from her carefully. Gently. It was lighter than it looked, the wood worn to a soft smoothness by years of handling. The iron fittings were dark with age, older than anything else he'd shaped in Millbrook, and the latch was frozen shut, green corrosion sealing the mechanism tight.

  Down on a hay bale with the box in his lap. Sarra stood a few feet away, her hands clasped tight at her waist, watching.

  The iron was cold under his fingers. He let his hands warm against it and waited for the grain to open.

  The metal wasn't just old. His hands stilled on the latch. It was layered with something he had no word for. Hands had touched this latch, over and over, for years. Hands opening and closing the box, lifting the lid to put something inside, closing it again. The iron had worn smooth in the places where fingers always landed, and in that smoothness Edric could feel the shape of those fingers, almost. The pressure of them. A mother's hands, patient and familiar. A daughter's hands, smaller, reaching for the box on a high shelf.

  The latch had seized, but not from damage. No one had forced it, hadn't tried to pry it open with anything that would hurt the grain. The mechanism had simply contracted with age, the iron shrinking slowly over years until the moving parts forgot how to move. The box had been loved so carefully that even the latch's failure was gentle.

  Warmth, slowly. More slowly than he'd warmed anything else here. This wasn't about convincing the iron to trust him, not like Gren's blade. This was about reminding it what it used to do.

  The heat seeped into the old iron. The mechanism eased, fractions at a time, the parts that had been locked together for fifteen years remembering that they were supposed to be separate. The corrosion crumbled away from the moving surfaces. The spring, frozen in compression, relaxed.

  The latch clicked. The lid rose, just slightly, hinges stiff but willing, and Edric opened the box.

  Inside: letters tied with faded ribbon, the paper yellowed and soft. A flower, pressed flat and brown with age, its petals so fragile they might crumble at a breath. A small carved bird, worn smooth by handling, the wood dark with years of being held.

  The dried flower smelled of nothing, or of something too faint and too old to have a name. The barn was very quiet.

  Sarra's hands were shaking when she took the box back. She looked at the letters. At the flower. At the bird. Her face crumpled and smoothed, crumpled and smoothed, her jaw working, her fingers white on the edges of the box.

  She closed the lid. Gently. The latch clicked shut, smooth and easy, like it had never been stuck at all. It would open again whenever she wanted.

  She didn't cry. She pressed a small jar into his hands, honey from the weight and color of it, and said "thank you" in a voice that didn't quite hold steady. Then she walked away, the box pressed against her chest, her steps quick and private. Edric stood in the barn doorway and watched her go.

  * * *

  The mist was burning off. The village was waking up around him, sounds of morning, someone calling to someone else across the fields, chickens complaining, the creak of a door. The smell of bread baking drifted from one of the houses.

  In the nearest field, Gren was already at work.

  Edric leaned on the fence and watched. The plow was hitched to a heavy horse, and Gren walked behind, his hands on the handles, guiding without forcing. The blade bit into the earth. The first cut in days, the first true cut since the iron had been wrong, and Edric held his breath without meaning to.

  The blade sank in smooth and sure, the iron cutting through the soil without hesitation, the first furrow opening behind them dark and straight and true.

  Second pass. Gren's shoulders loosened. The tight set of his jaw eased.

  By the third pass, he wasn't watching the blade anymore. He was watching ahead. At the field. At the work that was finally happening, the seed that would go in today because the iron was holding.

  Edric's hands tingled on the fence rail. He could almost feel it from here, through the ground, through the soil that the blade was cutting: the iron running true. The rough truce he'd brokered between the metal and its own history, the grain holding because it had been given reason to hold.

  The old man's words from the day before came back to him. When the ground was right and the iron was willing. The Foundry taught technique. The countryside knew something the Foundry didn't have words for.

  Dalla walked him to the edge of the village.

  The morning had warmed, the mist burned off, the sky clearing to a pale blue that promised a good day for walking. Bramble was loaded and ready, the saddlebags heavier than when they'd arrived. Bread, wrapped in cloth. Dried apples. A hard cheese. The jar of preserves from Widow Tren. The honey from Sarra. Things pressed on him by people who wouldn't hear arguments, who filled his bags while he was sleeping or working or looking the other way.

  Dalla stopped at the last house, where the village ended and the fields began.

  "You took too long on Gren's blade," she said.

  Edric nodded. He had. Half a day for work that should have taken two hours.

  "But it'll hold." She looked at him, her eyes sharp and measuring, the same look she'd given him yesterday when he first arrived. "Better than it was before. Better than the last shaper who touched it."

  "The last shaper did more harm than good."

  "I know. We all knew. Gren most of all." She paused. "He doesn't nod at just anyone."

  "The payment," he started.

  "Was too low. I know. You'll learn." She shook her head, but her mouth twitched at the corner. "Or you won't, and you'll go on undercharging and living on other people's generosity, and the world will go on turning anyway."

  "The girl's box, though." Her voice dropped, the briskness thinning. "Sarra's been carrying that thing around for years. Asking every shaper who came through if they could open it. Most of them said no just looking at it. One tried, gave up, told her the latch was beyond repair." She looked at Edric, and for the first time the appraisal in her face softened. "You opened it."

  "It wasn't difficult. Just old. The iron remembered what it was supposed to do."

  Dalla was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That's what the good ones always say."

  They stood at the edge of Millbrook. The village behind them, smoke rising from chimneys, the sound of Gren's plow cutting the first real furrows of the season. The road ahead, curving south through farmland, disappearing around a stand of trees.

  "There's a crossroads a day's walk from here," Dalla said. "Hamlet called Fenwick. Couple dozen families, mostly farmers. They'll have work for you."

  She didn't offer her hand. Didn't wish him luck. She just nodded, the same brief nod that Gren had given, then turned back toward her village. Her steps were unhurried. She didn't look back.

  Bramble was already walking, the saddlebags swaying with each step. He didn't look back to see if Edric was following. He never did.

  His hands were warm. The honey was tucked safely in his pack, along with everything else the village had given him.

  He still heard Torben's voice pointing out every hesitation, every second-guess, every moment when a master would have moved with certainty and Edric had moved with doubt.

  But the blade was in the ground. The box was open. The village was behind him and the road was ahead, and somewhere down that road were more towns, more people, more metal that needed hands to shape it.

  Behind him, faint but clear, the sound of Gren's plow cutting new earth.