Chapter 10

  Rues and Alyra approached the doors to the forge, which were standing flung wide open to let the heat disperse into the street. They stopped to let the sounds of the forge wash over them. Rues recognized the sharp tang in the air of the hot steel and the slightly sulfurous smell of the coal burning in the forges, causing the memories of her family to tear brutally at her for a moment. She stopped to stand just inside the door, chest heaving as she pulled the thick heavy air deeply into her lungs. The fire of the forge, burning through her lungs and into her veins, was strengthening her resolve. Forgotten, the heavy hammer dangled lightly from her hand, its haft by which she held it hardened by generations of sweat worked into it. Rues flexed her fingers around the haft, her deep breaths grounding her in the moment.

  “Which of you is the smith here?” Rues asked of the two leather-aproned men, each sweating over an anvil and hammer.

  “I am. What do you want?” asked the older man who had only a small gray crown left wreathing his head.

  “I was hoping that I could use your forge to make repairs,” Rues replied.

  “Can you pay?”

  “I can work for you in trade. I was apprenticed.”

  The deep raspy laugh from the blacksmith echoed across his forge. “Lass, that is the best laugh I have had in a long while, a little slip of a girl, a smith's apprentice.” The blacksmith turned to face them for the first time. His brow furrowed as he noticed the size of the hammer that sat naturally in her hand.

  “That is quite a hammer for such a small “apprentice.” Can you actually swing it enough to do real work?”

  “Try me and see if I can. You let me effect our repairs in your forge with work in trade. If I can’t, we’ll find another place to work.”

  “You're a feisty one, aren’t you? Hmm. Tell you what, I’ll try you out. Can you weld? I have a shovel with a crack in it. Start with that, and we will go from there.”

  Rues took another deep breath. “Alyra, you can rest there while I work.” She pointed at a bench along the forge wall. Rues stripped off her cloak, rolled her sleeves, and donned a leather apron taken from a peg on the wall.

  The crack did not appear too bad on inspection, though the metal was thin and fatigued from years of work. “It’ll need to be built up if the weld is to hold. Do you have some extra steel I can add to it?” Rues asked.

  “Along the wall.” The blacksmith pointed as he stood over to watch her make her selections. He was obviously testing her.

  Rues surveyed the scrap closely, then selected a thin bar of steel about the length of her hand. She set it in easy reach of the hot forge, then knocked the pin from the socket of the shovel and deftly removed the shaft. After brushing it with a coarse bristle brush a few times, she thrust the broken shovel deep into the coal bed. Slowly, she began working the bellows as the coal heated the steel. After several minutes, Rues grabbed the nearby tongs and pulled the shovel blade to check the steel’s temperature. “Do you have a loadstone to check the state?”

  “No,” the smith replied.

  “Flux?”

  “Tub on the shelf,” he said, pausing his work to watch her.

  Rues quickly took the pot of flux from the indicated shelf, and with the tongs, pulled the blade from the fire. A quick run of a file over the blade showed that it was almost ready. She placed the blade back in the coal, adding the thin steel bar to the fire with it. Rues then prepared the tools she needed to complete the weld. She dipped a finger in each of the quenching buckets to determine the contents and temperatures of them. Then she took one of the large stones from the edge of the coal bed and dropped it into the oil to bring the temperature up.

  She knew that the cold would crack the hot steel.

  Next, she took the steel from the forge and began to thin the area along the crack using soft taps down both edges. She turned the blade over and began treating the other side in the same fashion. Taking a deep breath, she whispered to Alyra, “now the tough part.”

  She worked rapidly, sprinkling both the shovel blade and the filler bar with flux, and setting the thin filler into the shallow along the crack.

  She worked the metal carefully and steadily with her large hammer.

  “I hope she knows what she is doing, or this guy is going to get mad for us wasting his time,” Alyra mumbled to herself. Rues started to hum softly while she worked. Alyra recognized the tune as a lullaby Rues’ father always sang when they were little. She watched Rues’ progress with her work and was fascinated by what she saw. Her hammer’s soft ringing and the cacophony in the forge provided a counterpoint to the lullaby Rues hummed.

  After a few minutes of working the blade, Rues slipped the shovel back into the fire. “Once it is hot, we will harden and temper it, then we should be about done with this and can get to the real work we came for.”

  Rues pulled the hot shovel from the coals and wedged it into a vise upright.

  She then filed the edge to a clean line with a slight taper from the face to the back. After reheating a second time, she quenched it in the warm oil.

  When it had cooled, she leaned in closely and looked it over.

  The repair on it was completely invisible. The smith walked over and watched as Rues ran her hands over the repair and examined it.

  “Well, I have to say, that is good work. Even I can’t tell where the repair was done,” complimented the blacksmith.

  “It’s hardened but will need to temper before it is done. Don’t let your apprentice mess up my work. He needs to focus more on the fire and less on his beard.” Rues replied.

  She had watched him touch his beard over and over while she worked.

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  “Oh, ho!” The smith laughed. “I will temper it myself. A bargain is a bargain. You are welcome in my forge for whatever you need to do. If you need work, I have plenty that you can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  Rues took the wrapped bundle containing the old sword from Alyra and opened it.

  “That is what you need to repair?”

  The shock on his face was evident as she removed the unfitted broadsword blade.

  “I started the work at a campsite a couple days ago, but I didn’t have the tools to do it right. I need to clean it up and finish the work.” Rues handed him the blade to examine.

  “What tools did you have when you worked this?” the smith asked.

  “My father’s... my hammer, a chunk of stone for an anvil, and a piece of limestone for the edge. I used some sand to clean it up. It is crude, but much improved from when we acquired it.”

  “You did this work with that?” he asked incredulously. He handed back the blade to Rues. “Hmm. Finish it properly then. I should like to see it when it’s done.”

  He turned and walked back to his anvil.

  Rues took a deep breath and thrust the sword blade into the fire to begin her work. She tossed the guard and pommel onto the anvil after scrutinizing them. “Functional but inelegant,” she muttered. She pushed each of them into a hotter part of the forge with a pair of tongs and piled the coke over them quickly. She put Alyra on the bellows.

  “Slow, easy strokes. It’s not a race, and the bellows will get heavy faster than you think.”

  Rues took the guard from the coals and quickly drew it out into a more graceful shape.

  She made it slightly wider and shaped the edge of the guard where it would align with the blade into a hard angle. The guard took on a graceful curve, its face now an acute angle that would break any hardened blade. Rues put it back into the fire.

  She took the pommel from the flames now and began to reshape it into a hexagon with two flat faces on the front and back. She heated it until it was easy to work with a cold chisel and, with quick gentle taps, carved a hammer into each face.

  She reheated the pommel and guard one last time, then quickly hardened them in the oil and set them into the fire to temper. Rues began to hum her lullaby again as she started to work on the blade. Gently coaxing a narrower profile from it, she moved steel from the center to the damaged areas. This created a profile with a long fuller that ran down both faces of the blade.

  She exhaled heavily as she set down the hammer on the anvil and slid the now whole blade back into the fire. Then she slumped down on the bench next to Alyra.

  “Something is wrong here... I should have had to heat the blade several times during the repair, but it never cooled off,” Rues whispered to Alyra.

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “No. I’m not sure what is going on. I’m letting it sit in the fire to reheat, and I’m going to quench like normal and see what happens.”

  Rues watched the fire and slowly ran the bellows. She allowed the temperature of the blade to normalize for a while before she brought it all the way up to quenching temperature.

  “I’m about to quench it. Make sure you are well back in case the blade shatters,” Rues said to Alyra as the master of the forge walked over to watch the process.

  Rues pulled the sword smoothly from the fire and cast a careful eye over it.

  She looked for the consistency of the color of the blade down the length, the iridescent red along the edges, and the slightly darker red through the thicker cross-sections on the edges of the fuller. For the first time all day, the forge was silent as Rues and the smith listened to the sound of the blade being quenched. She slid the length of the blade deftly into the tall tub of oil and moved it around to cool it; the hot steel caused the oil to flare up on the top. The sudden flare up startled Alyra but was ignored by the smith and his apprentice.

  Letting out a deep breath, Rues took the blade from the oil and wiped the length of it with an old piece of cloth. “That should about do it unless I misjudged it,” Rues said to Alyra. “I didn’t hear anything crack.”

  “I think you judged it well, girl,” rumbled the smith, handing her a file. “You do better work than my lazy apprentice.”

  Rues ran the file down the blade, knocking off some scale that was left.

  “Thank you. My father was a good teacher. The file is skating smoothly. Once we temper, if it will flex a bit and return, and we should be done.” She placed the blade back into the forge near the edge to warm it for tempering as she rested for a few minutes.

  After the blade was taken out and had cooled sufficiently, she took the point in one hand and the shoulder of the blade in the other and pressed the middle over the anvil.

  She bent it several inches out of true and let it return.

  “Thank you for letting me use your forge for the repairs.”

  “You know your way around and do good work. If you are ever in need of a place, you have one at my anvil for the asking. It is a fair wage for the job, and there are rooms behind that I let out if you don’t have somewhere. “

  “Thank you for your kind offer, but we have to be getting back. It is already getting late. Alyra, we should go before Glem comes looking.”

  ***

  Glem glanced up from his contemplation of the city and watched as the doors to the blacksmith’s shop fully opened. He spotted the gray-haired blacksmith talking to two familiar girls. Glem quietly walked up behind the group and listened to the blacksmith’s praise of Rues’ work, but he was not surprised. He had already witnessed what fine work Rues had managed to achieve with the sword when she had used the crude tools at the campsite.

  A mischievous grin erupted on Glem’s face as he shouted, “I thought I told you two to stay out of trouble!”

  Rues and Alyra both jumped in surprise and turned to glare at Glem. He defused the situation he had created by wrapping an arm around each of them.

  “I hope the girls didn’t give you too much trouble, good smith,” Glem said, unworried about the situation from the expression on the smith’s face.

  “No trouble at all, this one,” he said, looking over at Rues, “I was just offering a job. The work she did today was well beyond the capabilities of most journeymen and nearing a master’s work. But she told me she was only an apprentice?”

  “Her father was her master, and his standard was exacting. In his eyes, she was only an apprentice—and barely, at that,” Glem replied, pulling Rues in closer to him at the mention of her father.

  “Then that is a man I would like to meet,” replied the smith.

  “He's gone,” Rues softly replied, turning away from the smith.

  “Well, my offer stands, Rues,” the smith said. “If you ever need a place, you have one at my forge. I don’t know how long you will be here in town or if you are just passing through, but I have a lot of work that needs to be caught up on, and I’m turning work away. If you wanted to work here while you are in town, I would pay you, or we could work something out.”

  Rues looked over at Glem. “I don’t think we are going to be here that long, are we?”

  “Unless something changes, no more than three days,” Glem replied to the smith.

  The blacksmiths demeanor showed that he felt disappointed their acquaintance would be short.

  “Thanks for mending the shovel,” the smith said to Rues as they turned to leave. It seemed he had finally admitted that the young apprentice was not going to be working with him.

  “Thanks for letting me borrow your forge for my repairs,” Rues replied with a wave.

  As the group walked away from the forge, Alyra began to gush to Glem about Rues’ skill. “You should have seen it. She makes it look so easy.”

  “Of course, she does,” Glem replied. “Hush about it now until we are back to our room.”

  Glem thought back over the conversation that he had heard in the market. The fear in those conversations cast a pallor over their discussions during the walk back to the inn.