The Blacksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  At least I hadn’t pissed off the Earth or Air Guilds. Yet.

  The stars were out when Sam came back to the barn with a dark lantern, and his arms full. “There’s bread,” he said, dropping one sack. “And meat, cheese, apples…”

  “There’s enough here for six men,” I mumbled, around a mouthful of bread and cold pork. “Take some of it back, or you’ll get a caning when your aunt and uncle notice.”

  “Will not. My aunt picked it all out.”

  “She did what? For God’s sake, you didn’t tell her—”

  “I said a friend of mine was on the run. Didn’t say who.”

  “Both of you can get in the stew for helping a wanted man.”

  “She’s done it before.”

  After a bit I remembered to chew. “She’s done it before.”

  “You’re not the first wanted man to come this way.”

  “But, still…”

  “What would you do if a wanted man came by your place?”

  I thought about it, and admitted, “I’d let him sleep in the barn, and send him on his way with a full stomach and more food in his bag.”

  “Thought so.”

  I stopped arguing and ate. When my stomach was full, I leaned back with a sigh. “Tell your aunt she’s the best cook in fifty miles, and as big-hearted as an earth mother. But there’s something else I need your help with. In fact, this is why I came looking for you.” I pulled Master Clive’s seal out of my pocket. “Do you know what this is?”

  He nudged the lantern open a little further and peered at it. “No.”

  “It’s a swordsmith’s seal.”

  “A what? Oh!” His eyes went wide. “You are the best, Master Duncan. I knew it. How did you get it? Master Randall didn’t have a son. Was it his?”

  I shrugged. If that’s what he wanted to think, I’d let him.

  “Oh, but…” His face fell. “It’s not doing you any good, is it? Her Iciness is still after you.”

  “’fraid so. The Royal Guild can’t help, and they might not, anyway. They’re probably pissed off at me for disgracing them.”

  He closed the lantern until just a sliver of light was showing, and sat with his arms around his knees. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t have any right to take the seal out of Frankland, either. Hide it for a month or so, until I’m long gone, then take it to Master Clive. He’ll know what to do with it.”

  “Can’t. Master Clive left Blacksburg. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

  I rolled the seal in my palm. “Not surprised. Where did he go?” Sam shrugged. “Did he take that monster sword with him?” Another shrug.

  I said, “If he’s not there…take it to the Air Guild and ask them to send it to the swordsmiths.”

  He wouldn’t take the seal. “I’m coming with you.”

  “The hell you are. That would be a damned fool thing to do.”

  He beat on his knee with a fist. “Why should I stay in Frankland, when not even a swordsmith can get a fair deal? There aren’t any aristos in New London. Life’s got to be better there.”

  “It may be, but we’ve got to get there first. If you come with me, you’ll get in trouble.”

  “If they catch us.”

  We argued, circling the same ground dozens of times, until his head was lolling and his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He kicked off his boots and lay down in the straw. “Talk about it in the morning,” he mumbled. I blew out the lantern, and stared into the darkness while I waited for his breathing to get slow and regular.

  I needed sleep, too, but Sam’s family was in danger with me here. I found his boots by feel and dropped the seal in one, then picked up my pack and the sacks of food and eased out of the stall. At the door I stopped and listened. Nothing moved. Even the mice must have gone to sleep.

  The fuss over the earl’s brat would die down, too, sooner or later. They always did. There were enough stories about manhunts fizzling out that Mildred and Hazel must be right. If the Water Guild didn’t think a man likely to kill again, they didn’t work hard at finding him. The longer I stayed free—and the further south I got, where no one knew me—the odds of staying free got better. As long as I didn’t do something stupid, like falling in a river, or stepping on a water wizard’s toes. Or taking on someone else to be responsible for, and losing any hope of using the boar magic to escape capture. Having somebody to talk to would make the journey easier, and I liked Sam’s company, but it was too dangerous, and I already had too much on my conscience.

  Maybe someday, if I was lucky, I’d see Sam again. Even after leaving Frankland, I’d have to work a year, maybe two, to earn enough to pay for passage to the New World. He could finish his apprenticeship, sail out of Liverpool, and be in New London before me.

  Maggie and her beau might be on their way already. That brat pawing her was probably all the push she needed.

  And I wouldn’t get there if I didn’t keep moving. I pulled the door closed and walked away before I could change my mind.

  My eyes are better than most at seeing on a moonless night. Starlight and glimmers off the river were enough to let me follow the towpath into Blacksburg. I held my breath slinking across the bridge, but no water wizard rose up to block my way. Once across, I turned south, away from the river, and dove into the welter of narrow streets.

  Blacksburg at night is darker than the inside of a mole’s belly. The houses all jammed together block out the moon, when there is one, and starlight isn’t strong enough to cut through the murk. The night watchmen carried lanterns, but I couldn’t very well ask them for help. Here and there lamplight or candlelight through a window would show where some unfortunate soul couldn’t sleep, and I’d thank them under my breath for lighting my way while I dodged from shadow to shadow.

  Where I couldn’t see, I moved by feel and memory, and barked my shins and banged my head and cracked my elbows and stubbed my fingers and bloodied my nose and cursed under my breath. I made enough noise I was sure the watchmen would raise an alarm, but the only people that seemed to notice were a pair of footpads who ran from me like the devil was chasing them and a drunken whore who called me darling and started singing loud enough for half the city to hear. The watchmen did come for her, but I was two streets away by then.

  By first light I was on the southern outskirts, and deep into farmland by late morning. I walked across fields and stiles until I was dead on my feet and my eyes were full of sand. I stumbled into a sheltered hollow under a stand of trees, and settled down to eat my lonely dinner and sleep until dusk. I spread out my coat on the ground and tipped up the bag of bread. Master Clive’s seal fell out, and rolled across my coat.

  Stone Soup

  I reached into the bag and crammed a roll in my mouth without taking my eyes off the seal. The leaves overhead moved in the breeze, and the light caught it, making it shine against the rough brown.

  Only magic could have made it jump from Sam’s boot into my pack. Of course something that valuable would have a don’t-lose-me spell on it. The day was already hot, but I shivered, wondering what other spells it had.

  The Swordsmiths’ Guild had had some powerful wizards in its early days. What would they have thought about the trouble I’d caused? They’d be disgusted, I should think.

  After a while, I put the seal in my pocket, and lay down to dream about the Fire Warlock chasing me with lightning bolts.

  South of Blacksburg I didn’t know the lay of the land, and had to stick close to the road. After several days I figured I was far enough south nobody would recognise me, or know I was on the run if they did. Acting fearful, like I had something to hide, would draw the wrong kind of attention, so I stopped slinking along behind hedgerows and dodging from tree to tree, and walked the road like I owned it. And whistled, like I was on holiday, but every step further south was harder to take than t
he one before. Sleeping outdoors in my clothes didn’t help my looks, but except for my size, I blended in with the growing flocks of beggars, tramps, and evicted tenants carrying all they owned on their backs.

  Every day the roads got more crowded with hungry families streaming towards the cities and towns. At first, every new story pissed me off, but after a while I went numb. The newcomers pouring into the towns made it easier to slip through without notice. I was grateful to them, and hoped they never realised I was the one who had scared the dickens out of their landlords.

  We were all hungry for news, as well as food. A week or so after seeing Sam, word spread that the dead aristo hadn’t been shielded. Talk about marching on their overlords died out, and commoners began treating the flap over the dead earl’s brat like a great joke. The aristos knew we were laughing about how gullible they were, and hated it. They started forcing out freeholders as well as tenants, and arresting mums and dads in front of their children for no good reason. Gossip also said they were calling in the Frost Maiden, and laughing when she was nastier to the commoners than she’d ever been before.

  And then there was the story about the king going berserk and screaming at the Fire Warlock for not helping the Frost Maiden catch Lord Edmund’s murderer. I flinched when I heard that; I didn’t want the Fire Warlock any more pissed off at me than he already must be. No one else acted like it was bad news. Most seemed to relish the idea of a commoner tweaking the king’s nose. At first only a few brave men, or fools, said that outright; most snickered in their beer. They got louder, though, after the rumour started that the Frost Maiden had looked the king in the eye and called him a halfwit for insisting she catch the man.

  Why any fool would believe such rubbish was beyond me. The claptrap that started in early August that the magic guilds planned to take apart and remake the Water Office was worse. Whenever that came up I’d shake my head, thank them for their time, and walk on down the road.

  The magic Hazel had pumped into me ran out the second week in August, and my luck along with it. In normal times, a man could work his way down the length of North Frankland chopping wood, mending fences, reaping—whatever needed doing—in exchange for a meal. There was always someone eager to hear the latest news, and most people knew not to ask questions a traveller might not want to answer.

  But these weren’t normal times. With so many being forced out, many farms weren’t being worked, and where they were, farmers were running out of patience with strangers asking for handouts. I spent more and more time hunting for food. I pulled in my belt, and had to learn to call a day a good one when I got five miles further south, or my stomach didn’t gnaw at me.

  The townsfolk were getting fed up, too, and put guards at the gates to keep out the riffraff. I would have been happier going around, but the bridges were in the towns, and I didn’t have any choice. When the guards hassled me, I pulled out my master’s certificate and waved it under their noses. “I’m a master blacksmith,” I’d say, “on my way to London after a tramping holiday.” Raising my voice and demanding to see the nearest alderman usually bought me passage through, but at the cost of attention I didn’t want.

  One night I stumbled across several families camped in an apple orchard, and added to their soup pot the grouse I’d brought down with my slingshot and the sack of peas I’d helped myself to from an abandoned garden.

  “I’d’ve felt guilty about helping myself,” I told the woman doing the cooking, “if there hadn’t been pods rotting on the plants.”

  “Nobody to pick them, I suppose,” she said. “Forced out of their homes, just like us.”

  “It’s a crying sin, the waste is. There’ll be a lot of hungry people this winter.”

  “It’s not all going to waste. We hauled a load of cabbages to town this morning. Sold them all. Yesterday I picked beans and Jack dug onions. Sold them, too.”

  Her husband grinned over his bowl. “And the best part of it is, the lord doesn’t know we’re here. We’re not paying any rent. Taxes, either.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “He’ll notice, sooner or later.”

  “Not until the middle of September, at the earliest. I promised Hannah we’d be gone by then.”

  “Why not til then?”

  “You hadn’t heard? The king ordered all the aristos to Paris for a meeting at the end of the month.”

  “Did he now?” I scratched at my beard and tried to remember when I’d last seen an aristo on the road, or wrecking a farmer’s wheat field galloping after a fox. “That would explain why I hadn’t seen any lately. But the lord must’ve left somebody in charge.”

  “The steward here is a lazy bastard who won’t put one foot in front of another when his lord’s not watching. We’re safe enough.”

  “What’s the meeting in Paris about?”

  “What I heard,” Hannah said, “is that the Fire Warlock wants to knock some sense into the aristos. They’re going to hang a magic mirror and show the aristos what really happened when that swordsmith up north killed that earl’s whelp.”

  I choked on my soup. Several minutes of coughing later, I managed a strangled, “Swordsmith?”

  “That’s what they’re saying in town.”

  “It makes sense,” Jack said. “Nobody short of a wizard or a swordsmith would’ve dared talk back to an aristo in the first place.”

  When we had emptied the soup pot, I moved away from the fire and sat with my back to an apple tree. Don’t draw attention to yourself, Granny Mildred had said. What could I do now? After that meeting, every aristo in the whole frostbitten country would know what I looked like. If I stuck to the roads, my days as a warm body were numbered. I would have to slink through the woods, and use the boar magic, even more than I’d used it on the way to Blacksburg.

  Hazel had warned me not to overdo it, but odds were I wouldn’t have much choice. I was wondering how it would feel to get stuck thinking like a boar, when another tramp wandered into camp, and killed my hopes of leaving Frankland alive.

  “The king is offering a reward,” the man said, “for capturing the murder­ing swordsmith—”

  “Murdering?” Hannah’s voice rose. “And him a swordsmith? King Stephen’s got a lot of nerve calling a respectable man like that a murderer.”

  “Hey, don’t yell at me. I’m just repeating what the town crier said.”

  “You didn’t have to repeat it word-for-word. That aristo sounded like the one doing the murdering, and I’m glad he got his just rewards.”

  “Look, woman, I’m just saying—”

  “Well, watch how you say it. What else?”

  “The murd—sorry, the town crier said the man they’re after is a swordsmith from Abertee named Duncan Archer, and he’d be easy to spot. Brown hair, brown eyes, square jaw, good teeth, and the girls say he’s good looking. Arms like tree trunks, a chest like a barrel, and so tall he has to duck going through the church door. Can’t be many like that.”

  Hannah edged between me and newcomer, her skirts blocking the firelight. “Never seen him. Even if I had, I’d not—”

  “They’re offering two hundred and fifty gold franks for him, dead or alive.”

  Two hundred and fifty franks? More than what anybody at the campfire could expect to see in their entire lives. Nice to know I was worth that much. Would’ve rather found out some other way.

  Everybody around the fire went quiet. Thinking about what they could do with that money, no doubt. Then Jack said, quiet and slow, “There’ll be murdering done, and not by that swordsmith either, if anybody collects on that reward.”

  The newcomer shrugged. “Maybe. The townsfolk didn’t like the news. They threw things at the town crier and shouted him down.”

  Hannah said, “Huh. And there I thought they didn’t have any sense, living in a town like that.”

  I stayed with my back against the tree, movin
g only to finger the seal in my pocket, until well after they had banked the fire, and everybody had settled down and started snoring. Then, moving as quiet as I could, I walked towards the road. I stepped out from under the trees and stopped. A flash of light, like moonlight off a knife, had caught my eye. The flash came again. The shadow behind it separated from the deeper shadows and eased into the open.

  “Can’t sleep?” I said, no more than a whisper.

  “Not tonight.” Jack’s reply was no louder. “Not for worrying about my neighbours’ health. A man might think he could wander into town by himself in the middle of the night. He could get hurt that way.”

  “Never a good idea to travel at night,” I said. “Lots of trouble out there.”

  “Speaking of trouble.” The knife disappeared into the man’s boot. “I’ve heard that out west, in Cornwall, there are tunnels under the channel the Water Guild will never find. Idle talk, maybe. Never been there, myself.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, and stepped onto the road.

  He said, “If you ever see that swordsmith, thank him for me, will you?”

  “For what? Scaring your landlord into throwing you out?”

  I thought he grinned. “I’ve been wanting out from under his thumb for years, but I couldn’t get Hannah to move. Now, I don’t think she’d go back even if we could. But what I meant was, for showing us how little it takes to scare them. We won’t all be so cowed anymore.”

  He slipped into the shadows. I turned south, and walked until dawn.

  Some demon pounded my head with a sledgehammer on every jolt of the wagon. I couldn’t see, but heard other horses, other wagons. We were getting close to the town. I would be mighty glad when we left this rutted cart track. With one final jolt, hard enough to make a sack of turnips fall over and bounce on my head, we were off the track and onto cobblestones. With a clacketa-clacketa-clacketa, the sledgehammer turned into a hundred finishing hammers going at me all over.