Rhynie, Aberdeenshire - c. 570 CE
The silver came from the northern mines—pure, no Roman alloy.
Derelei watched Tadc pour it into the mold, liquid metal catching firelight, flowing into the cavity where a boar would take shape. But before the pour, he had added the earth. A pinch from the leather pouch marked with the boar's sign, ground fine, stirred into the molten silver. Earth from Craig Phadrig, where the springs were older than Rhynie's own.
"The ancestors knew," Tadc had told her when she first brought him the pouches. "My grandfather spoke of it. The smiths in Ireland did the same—added earths from sacred places to strengthen the metal. He never knew why it worked. Only that it did."
Now she watched him complete the pour, his hands steady with decades of practice. The workshop was hot, close, smelling of charcoal and burned wax and the particular scent of silver giving up its liquid form.
"Steady," he murmured. "The boar requires patience. Rush the pour and you'll trap air in the belly."
She didn't interrupt. Metalwork was Tadc's domain. What the metal would mean was hers.
The mold had been her design—not the boar's form, which followed generations of Pictish tradition, but the details. The spirals at the joints. The symbols along the spine. The warnings on the belly where a practitioner's thumb would rest.
"The heart-stone fragment," she said when the pour was complete. "You added it?"
"A grain, ground fine, same as the…
