Chapter 48: Dominic’s Spears
When Pops woke up the next morning, the first thing he did was to check the apprentice quarters to see if Dominic had made it to bed or if he was still working.
There was no need to go inside the room, the door wasn’t fully closed to soundproof it, and he could hear the boy snoring away and mumbling in his sleep about spearheads from down the hallway.
It was a rite of initiation for the new Apprentices to work day and night most days until they got their speed up to par, and none of the Journeymen actually expected that the apprentices would be able to get the first task that they were assigned done by dawn.
Instead, they would pretend to relent in the morning after breakfast and send their apprentices to bed for a few hours, only to drag them out of bed for lunch and put them back to work finishing the previous day’s tasks.
So, as the new apprentice candidate had made it back before he woke up, Pops went to the forge after breakfast to see how Dominic had done.
As he walked, the old Dwarf realized this vetting process was all just for show. There were no other Weaponsmith Apprentices in the forge for the Intake Exam. There were farriers, one Armourer, and a number of other trades, but no other Weaponsmiths.
How could Dominic lose a contest when there were no other competitors? The Palace had tricked them into a guaranteed placement. The Royal Family knew his personality well enough to know that he wouldn’t simply abandon his Apprentice once they were already settled in here.
Pops strolled into the forge, where he was met with a round of thunderous applause, and a line of smithy workers forming a walkway to the workstation where he had left his apprentice working last night.
The first thing that he noticed when he arrived was the sand table that had been set up to make spearheads ten at a time, and the row of forge tools carefully rearranged on the wall in the order that they were needed to craft spears, instead of the standard order that they had been in the day before.