by Anthony Ryan
“Get back here,” Master Jestin growled and they hurried inside. “You need to get used to real work. Look here.” He held up the rod, its original rounded shape had changed to a three-sided strip of metal about a yard long. “This is an edge. It seems rough now, but melded with its brothers, it will be keen and bright with purpose.”
Dentos and Caenis were told to take over the bellows and Master Jestin started on the other edge, the toll of the hammer a ringing counterpoint to the rasp of their breath as they worked. When the second edge was complete he began on the thick central rod, his blows becoming harder and more rapid, extending the rod’s length to match the edges then tempering the blade to form a raised spine along the middle. By the time he was finished Caenis and Dentos were ready to drop and Barkus partnered Vaelin at the bellows. The smith took a bracket to bind the three rods together at the base and made ready to meld them.
“The melding is the test of a sword smith,” he informed them. “It is the hardest skill to learn. Too hard a blow will spoil the blade, too light and the rods won’t meld.” He glanced over at Vaelin and Barkus. “Heave hard, keep the fire hot. No slacking.”
As they worked, Vaelin praying for an end, he noticed Barkus’s gaze was fixed on Master Jestin, his arms rising and falling without pause, seeming oblivious to the pain, his whole attention riveted on the process unfolding on the anvil. At first Vaelin wondered what was so interesting, it was a man hitting a piece of metal with a hammer. He saw no spectacle in it, no mystery. But as he followed Barkus’s gaze he found himself increasingly absorbed by the sight of the blade taking shape, the three rods fusing together under the force of the hammer. Occasionally the flecks of star silver in the edge rods would flare as Master Jestin took the blade from the forge, glowing so brightly he had to look away. He believed what the smith had said about the star silver being just another metal but still it was unnerving.
“You.” Master Jestin nodded at Nortah as he finished shaping the point. “Fetch the bucket closer.”
Nortah obediently dragged the heavy wooden bucket closer to the anvil, it was nearly full to the brim and water sloshed over his feet as he heaved it into place. “This is salt water,” Jestin told them. “A blade quenched in brine will always be stronger than one quenched in fresh water. Stand back, it’ll boil.”
He took a firm grip on the tang at the base of the blade and plunged it into the bucket, making it steam and roil as the heat seeped into the water. He held it there until the boil subsided then withdrew the steaming blade, holding it up for inspection. It was black, the metal stained with soot, but Master Jestin seemed content with it. The edges were straight and the point perfectly symmetrical.
“Now,” he said. “The real work begins. You.” He turned to Caenis. “Since you lit the forge, you can have this one.”
“Um,” Caenis said, clearly wondering if this was an honour or a curse. “Thank you, Master.”
Jestin carried the blade to the far end of the smithy, laying it on a bench next to a large, pedal-driven grindstone. “A new-forged blade is only half-born,” he informed them. “It must be sharpened, polished, honed.” He had Caenis stand at the grindstone and set it turning with the pedal, demonstrating how to get a good rhythm going by counting “one two, one two” before telling him to increase the speed and hold the blade to the stone. The instant fountain of sparks made Caenis step back in alarm but Jestin ordered him to keep at it, guiding his hands to get the correct angle then showing him how to move the blade across the stone so that its whole length was honed. “That’s it,” he grunted after a while when Caenis grew confident enough to move the blade on his own. “Ten minutes for each edge then show me what you’ve done. The rest of you back to the forge. You and you on the bellows…”
And so they worked and sweated in the forge, seven long days of heaving bellows, grinding edges and working polish into the blades so that the soot disappeared and they gleamed like silver. None of them escaped unscathed, Vaelin bore a livid scar on the back of his hand where a speck of molten metal landed, the pain and the smell of his own skin burning was uniquely sickening. The others suffered similar injury, Dentos coming off worst with a scattering of sparks into his eyes during a careless moment on the grinder. The sparks left a cluster of blackened scars around his left eye but luckily there was no damage to his vision.
Despite the exhaustion, the risk of disfiguring injury and the tedium of the work, Vaelin couldn’t resist a certain fascination with the process. There was a beauty to it: the gradual birth of the blades under Master Jestin’s hammer, the feel of the edge against the grindstone, the pattern that emerged in the blade as he polished it, dark swirls in the blue-grey of the steel, as if the flames of the forge had been frozen in the metal somehow.
“It comes from the merging of the rods,” Barkus explained. “Different kinds of metal coming together leaves a mark. I guess the star silver makes it more noticeable in Order blades.”
“I like it,” Vaelin said, lifting the half-polished blade up to the light. “It’s…interesting.”
“It’s just metal.” Barkus sighed, turning back to the stone, where he was putting an edge on his own sword. “Heat it, beat it, shape it. There’s no mystery there.”
Vaelin watched his friend work at the wheel, the way his hands moved expertly, honing the edge with perfect precision. When Barkus’s turn came Master Jestin hadn’t even bothered to show him, just handed him the blade and walked away. Somehow Barkus’s skill was obvious to the smith, they said little, barely exchanging more than a few grunts or mumbled agreements, as if they had been working together for many years. But Barkus showed no joy in his work, no satisfaction. He stuck to it readily enough, the skills he displayed putting them all to shame, but his face was an uncharacteristic mask of grim endurance whenever they were in the smithy, only brightening when they escaped to the practice field or dining hall.
The next day saw the fitting of the hilts. These were ready-made, almost identical, Master Jestin fitting them to the blades and securing them with three iron nails hammered through the tang, which extended into the hilt. They were then set to work filing down the nail-heads so they were flush with the oak handles.
“You are done here,” Jestin told them at the end of the day. “The swords are yours. Use them well.” It was the closest he had come to sounding like the other masters. He turned back to the forge without another word. They stood around uncertainly, holding their swords and wondering if they were supposed to say anything in return.
“Erm,” Caenis said. “Thank you for your wisdom, Master.”
Jestin lifted an unfinished spear-head onto his anvil and began to work the bellows.
“Our time here was very…” Caenis began but Vaelin nudged him and gestured at the door.
As they were leaving Jestin spoke again. “Barkus Jeshua.”
They stopped, Barkus turning, his expression guarded. “Master.”
“There door’s always open to you,” Jestin said without turning. “I could use the help.”
“I’m sorry, Master,” Barkus said tonelessly. “I’m afraid my training leaves me little time as it is.”
Jestin released the bellows and lifted the spear-head into the forge. “I’ll be here, so will the forge, when you get tired of the blood and the shit. We’ll be here.”
Barkus missed the evening meal, something none of them could remember happening before. Vaelin found him on the wall after paying his nightly visit to Scratch’s kennel. “Brought you some leftovers.” Vaelin handed him a sack containing a pie and a few apples.
Barkus nodded his thanks, his attention fixed on the river, where a barge was making its way upstream to Varinshold.
“You want to know,” he said after a while. His voice held none of his usual humour or irony but Vaelin was chilled to detect a faint trace of fear.
“If you want to tell me,” he said. “We all have our secrets, brother.”
“Like why you keep that scarf.” He gestured at Se
lla’s scarf around Vaelin’s neck. Vaelin tucked it out of sight and patted him on the shoulder before turning to go.
“It first happened when I was ten,” Barkus said.
Vaelin paused, waiting for him to continue. In his own way Barkus could be as closed as the rest of them, he would talk or he wouldn’t, prompting or persuasion would be useless.
“My father had me working in the smithy since I was little,” Barkus continued after a moment. “I loved it, loved watching him shape the metal, loved the way it glowed in the forge. Some say the ways of the smith are mysterious. For me it was all so obvious, so easy. I understood it all. My father hardly had to teach me anything, I just knew what to do. I could see the shape the metal would take before the hammer fell, could tell if a plough blade would cut through soil or get stuck or if a shoe would fall from a hoof after only a few days. My father was proud, I knew it. He wasn’t much for talk, not like me, I get that from my mother, but I knew he was proud. I wanted to make him even more proud. I had shapes in my head, shapes of knives, swords, axes, all waiting to be forged. I knew exactly how to make them, exactly the right mix of metals to use. So I snuck into the smithy one night to make one. A hunting knife, a small thing, I thought. A Winterfall present for my father.”
He paused, staring out into the night as the barge moved further downstream, the shapes of the bargemen on the deck vague and ghostlike in the dim light from the bow lantern.
“So you made the knife,” Vaelin prompted. “But your father was…angry?”
“Oh, he wasn’t angry.” Barkus sounded bitter. “He was scared. The blade folded over and over to strengthen it, the edge keen enough to cut silk or pierce armour, so polished you could use it as a mirror.” The small smile forming on his lips faded. “He threw it in the river and told me never to speak of it to anyone, ever.”
Vaelin was puzzled. “He should have been proud. A knife like that made by his son. Why would it scare him?”
“My father had seen a lot in his life. He’d travelled with the Lord’s host, served on a merchant ship in the eastern seas, but he’d never seen a knife forged in a smithy where the forge was cold.”
Vaelin’s puzzlement deepened. “Then how did you…?” Something in Barkus’s face made him stop.
“Nilsaelins are a great people in many ways,” Barkus went on. “Hardy, kind, hospitable. But they fear the Dark above all things. In my village there was once an old woman who could heal with a touch, or so they said. She was respected for the work she did but always feared. When the Red Hand came she could do nothing to stop it, dozens died, every family in the village lost someone, but she never caught it. They locked her in her house and set it on fire. The ruin’s still there, no-one ever had the courage to build on it.”
“How did you make that knife, Barkus?”
“I’m still not sure. I remember shaping the metal at the anvil, the hammer in my hand. I remember fitting the handle, but for the life of me I can’t remember lighting the forge. It was as if when I started to work I lost myself, as if I was just a tool, like the hammer…like something was working through me.” He shook his head, clearly disturbed by the memory. “My father wouldn’t let me in the smithy after that. Took me to old man Kalus, the horse breeder, told him he’d tried his best to teach me but I just wasn’t going to make a smith. Paid him five coppers a month to teach me the horse trade.”
“He was trying to protect you,” Vaelin said.
“I know. But that’s not how it felt to a boy. It felt like…like he was frightened by what I’d done, worried that I’d shame him somehow. I even thought he might be jealous. So I decided to show him, show him what I could really do. I waited until he was away hawking wares at the Summertide Fair and went back to the smithy. There wasn’t much to work with, some old horseshoes and nails. He’d taken most of his stock to sell at the fair. But I took what he’d left and I made something…something special.”
“What was it?” Vaelin asked, envisioning mighty swords and gleaming axes.
“A sun vane.”
Vaelin frowned. “A what?”
“Like a wind vane except instead of pointing at the direction of the wind it pointed at the sun. Wherever it was in the sky you always knew what time of day it was, even when the sky was clouded over. When the sun went down it’d point at the ground and track it through the earth. I made it pretty too, had flames coming out of the shaft and everything.”
Vaelin could only guess at the value of such an item, and the stir it would cause in a village terrified of the Dark. “What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose my father melted it down. When he came back from the fair I was standing there, showing him what I’d made, I felt very smug. He told me to pack. My mother was away at my aunt’s so he didn’t have to explain it to her. Faith knows what he told her when she came back and found me gone. We spent three days on the road then took ship to Varinshold then came here. He spoke to the Aspect for a while then left me at the gate. Said if I ever told anyone what I could do, they would certainly kill me. Said I’d be safe here.” He laughed shortly. “Hard to believe he thought he was doing me a favour. Sometimes I think he got lost on the way to the House of the Fifth Order.”
Vaelin shook away the memory of hoofbeats and, remembering Sella’s tale, said, “He was right, Barkus. You shouldn’t tell anyone. You probably shouldn’t have told me.”
“Why, going to kill me are you?”
Vaelin smiled grimly. “Well, not today.”
They stood at the wall in companionable silence, watching the barge until it turned the bend in the river and disappeared.
“I think he knew, y’know,” Barkus said. “Master Jestin. I think he could sense it, what I can do.”
“How could he know such a thing?”
“Because I could sense the same thing in him.”
CHAPTER SIX
The next day saw the first practice with their new swords. It seemed to Vaelin that half the lesson was taken up with the correct method of strapping it across the back so it could be drawn by reaching over the shoulder.
“Tighter, Nysa.” Sollis tugged hard at Caenis’s belt strap, drawing a pained grunt. “This thing gets loose in a battle, you’ll know about it soon enough. Can’t kill an enemy if you’re tripping over your own sword belt.”
They then spent over an hour learning the correct method of drawing the sword in a smooth, swift motion. It was harder than Master Sollis made it look. The leather strap holding the sword firmly in the scabbard had to be thumbed aside and the blade pulled clear without snagging or cutting its owner. Their first attempts were so clumsy Sollis ran them twice around the field at full speed, the unfamiliar weight of the swords making them sluggish.
“Faster, Sorna!” Sollis lashed at him as he stumbled. “You too, Sendahl, pick your feet up.”
He ordered them to try again. “Do it right. The faster you can get your sword in your hand and ready to use the less likely some bastard is going to spill your guts out in front of you.”
There were more runs and several canings before he was satisfied they were making progress. For some reason Vaelin and Nortah were attracting most of his ire today, the cane falling on them more than the others. Vaelin surmised it was punishment for some forgotten infraction. Sollis was like that sometimes, often remembering past misdemeanours after an interval of weeks or months.
As the lesson ended he lined them up to make an announcement. “Tomorrow you little buggers are to be let loose on the Summertide Fair. Some boys from the city may try to fight you to prove themselves. Try not to kill any. Some of the local girls may also see you as a different kind of challenge. Avoid them. Sendahl, Sorna, you’re staying here. I’ll teach you to slack off.”
Vaelin, crushed by disappointment and injustice, could only gape in shock. Nortah, however, was fully capable of voicing his feelings.
“You must be bloody joking!” he shouted. “The others were just as bad as us. How come we have to stay?�
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Later, as he sat on his bed nursing a bruised and aching jaw, his anger was no less fierce. “That bastard’s always hated me more than the rest of you.”
“He hates everyone,” Barkus said. “You and Vaelin were just unlucky today.”
“No, it’s because my father’s the King’s First Minister. I’m sure of it.”
“If your old man’s such a biggy big, how come he can’t get you out of the Order?” Dentos asked. “I mean you hate being here.”
“How should I know?” Nortah exploded. “I didn’t ask him to send me to this pit. I didn’t ask to be frozen, nearly killed ten times over, beaten every day, live in this hovel with peasants…” He trailed off miserably, huddling on his bunk, head buried in his pillow. “I thought they would let me leave at the Test of Knowledge,” he said, more to himself than them, his voice muffled. “When they saw my heart. But that dammed woman said I was where the Faith needed me to be. I even started lying about everything but they wouldn’t let me go. That pig Hendril said the Sixth Order would benefit from having one of my breeding in its ranks.”
He fell silent, still hiding his face. Barkus moved to pat him on the shoulder but Vaelin stopped him with a shake of the head. He pulled the small oak chest from under his bed, his most valued possession next to Sella’s scarf, stolen from the back of a merchant’s cart carelessly left near the front gate. He unlocked it and retrieved a leather pouch containing all the coins he had found, won or stolen over the years. He tossed it to Caenis. “Bring me back some toffees. And a new pair of soft leather boots if you find any that’ll fit me.”
The morning dawned thick with mist, a heavy, soft blue haze hanging over the surrounding fields, waiting for the summer sun to burn it away. Vaelin and Nortah sat in miserable silence through the morning meal as the others tried not to appear too eager to leave for the fair.
“Think they’ll be any bears?” Dentos asked casually.