King and his son standing at the Royal Gallery in the library. Since when was his father taking commissions from the King? He didn’t ask the question.
He looked more intently at the twisted mess, and furrowed his brow. How would it become a thing of beauty? But he kept that to himself too. Something else was burning, a question brighter than the chaos of inquisitiveness in his head. This was what he wanted to know.
“How many swords are you expecting to make? This is a lot of steel.”
When his father spoke, it took his breath away.
“One. Just a single blade. I am nervous, Joss.”
For once he didn’t correct the use of his name. He barely registered it, in fact. One blade? He didn’t know a lot about smithing, but this was a lot of metal. His father did look nervous, and that was telling. If his father was uneasy, then he should be terrified. But his inquisitive streak was burning bright too. He wanted to learn. He would succumb absolutely to his father’s word. Only a fool turns down a lesson, and this was a fine opportunity at that.
“What do we do first?”
His father smiled, but it was also part grimace. “We break this bastard up. Only a third of this bloom is fit for use, and we need to ease that third out. And we need to split that third into three piles: char-rich; char-poor; and char-neutral. It’ll take all morning, but only then can we begin.”
His father lied. It took them all day.
He was working with his top off, skinny body on show, and when his brother returned home, the bastard laughed and sauntered straight through to the forge room. Brother two was barely more sympathetic, but he didn’t care. He may have actually been enjoying himself. He and his father would take it in turns to angle the crowbar into the metallic mess, targeting clear points of differential. The other would then use a heavy mallet to force the bar in, and the material apart. By the time the sun was sinking, they had three very distinct piles of impossibly valuable material. That and a rather larger one of waste. It was satisfying. He could get used to that sensation.
And he ached all over too, having exercised muscles that he’d only sporadically used in the past. At least, he’d rarely used them. His father seemed unaffected by the day’s exertion. When his father finally dragged his eyes from the piles of metal, Mother was deep and the shadow of dusk hid his father’s facial features. Somehow though, his mood shone through the darkness. He was smiling.
“Did you enjoy the work?”
He nodded hungrily, revelling in the delicate thread that had been woven between them. Until this moment, he had been the bastard who’d refused his role as a daughter. And a rebellious little vandal at that. Here and now, for just the briefest moment, he was a son. He almost wanted to cry, but that was not for now. That would be for later. In private. He still had a reputation to uphold.
His father came over and slapped him on the shoulder. The smile now only sharpened one side of his face, but somehow that was even greater. That was a smile reserved for the finest deeds of offspring. And it was pointed his way. He shivered.
“Perhaps we will work this blade together. Would you like that?”
Yes he bloody well would. In that moment, it was all he could think about.
________
And he did grow to love the work. It suited his curious side and it fanned the child in him. He had spent all of his youth playing the adult; hiding from the bullies and hiding from his family. Here though, he was his father’s son. Here he was a young smith hoping to inherit a great trade. Here he found happiness. Genuine happiness.
And he found purpose too. He rarely even read Delfin’s book. He hoped it could last. By the Father of Paths, he hoped it would last.
His brothers refused to work Mahani steel. They considered it a terribly poor substitute, and as he quickly learned, it was. The Mandari did not have easy access to the great iron ore supplies of the Gorfinian Black Mountains, nor the Dead Sentinels even further into the desolate hunting grounds of the Rhagastos. They would not even have much access to that immaculate steel imported from the Other World, though no doubt they caught some. No. The Mandari were mineral poor, and as a consequence, their steel blooms – being formed of iron dust at best – were patchy and sub-standard.
Yet somehow they made the finest weapons in the known world. How?
It was something his brothers had no time for. They were too busy rushing through trade, drinking, whoring, and every now and then visiting their wives. They helped their father when he insisted, but it was always begrudging. They would not learn. And so the Mandari ways stayed without their grasp.
But he was hungry where his brothers weren’t, and he absorbed the lessons like a sponge. Each meticulous stage was a miracle, because what the Mandari did with the steel was incredible. Beauty from a beastly mass of ore. There was magic in the act.
First the char-poor steel was worked through an unrelenting process. It took an age to bash that piece of metal until it was near enough a quarter of its original size. But it was essential, because with the heating and hammering, impurities were ejected and faults were closed up. The steel was made strong and complete, the heart of a weapon, and because this was char-poor, the steel was remarkably flexible.
And then the real work began.
The other two steel compounds, char-rich and char-neutral, were heated and layered, bashed also, but folded over one another. Then they were reheated and forge-welded into a single piece of gleaming steel. And the folding created an impossible balance between deadly hard, but subtly flexible. And then, because the folding was done in perpendicular layers, the toughness of the resulting steel was – according to his father at least – unrivalled.
In this exercise he was ignorant, but he hungered to learn, and that was what differentiated him. He drank the knowledge and digested it in his sleep. The whole process consumed him.
After ten days and nights, and from an eye-watering volume of base metal, they had forged a single edged sabre of exceptional quality. And looking back, it had been manufactured from materials that should not have been usable. That was astonishing. And with each passing day, his brothers’ smirks slid into something else entirely. He liked to think it was jealousy. In fact, he had adopted a smirk himself, and he wore it often when his father stood beside him. He enjoyed wearing his pride. It was still a novel experience.
This was one of those moments. It was late evening, the smithy was illuminated by torches, and a cold wind brought bumps to the skin. His brothers were staring upon what he’d made. His father spoke with a mischievous quality.
“Go fetch some rusty old steel, will you Joss.”
Oh the gift! Oh the bloody gift. He walked right across the forge-room and picked a bland looking broadsword that Jeb had only recently finished. “Will this do?”
His father – father! – was smiling broadly, but he did not speak. Not yet. Jeb, by contrast, offered a glower. This was an entirely new sort of hatred.
“Aye. That will just about serve.” His brother’s eyes lit up like a spitting furnace, but he had the immunity of his father. Not that he feared Jeb in any case. His father made him hold out the broadsword, firm as he could, and he braced himself. And then his father proceeded to slash down with the new forged Mandari steel. It bit deeply into the wide weapon, and left a mighty gash in the body of the blade. Jeb would need to re-work it, and he laughed. His father smiled too.
“Still think this is sub-standard steel?”
Oh the joy. Oh the humanity! Was this the crest of a wave?
He left the forge-room, but Jeb caught him on his way out. “I’ll get you for this.”
But he didn’t care. In that moment, he was invincible. In that moment, and perhaps forever.
________
His whimpering prayers morphed jarringly into a screaming whimper. All went dark around him. No, it had not been light. But he’d been able to see his attackers, and now he co
uldn’t. Moisture saturated his brow, sweat turning his clothes clingy. But his clothes were still on.
Including his trousers. His arse relaxed.
He was in bed. The scant bed-sheet was heaped limply on the floor. It was the middle of the night, and all was dark around him. His breathing was loud in the silence.
What was that? A dream? A nightmare? It had all seemed so real. The Farmyard Friends were all over him. Punishing him. His breath raced and he tried to slow it, forcing his lungs to a steady rhythm. His hands were crushing the rough canvas sheet that covered the straw of his bedding. This was most peculiar. And scary.
And the worst of it was that he didn’t know why he should be scared.
How many years of his life had been scarred by that history? And he’d been released from that humiliation for three years now. He was free of the horror of the Friends. But he’d never had a nightmare until now. Not one. Something hot and aggressive coursed through him, and he recognised it. It was the same thing that had driven him in the past. It was the inner-anger that drove him to succeed. It was a fear of loss. And then he understood. He’d never had these emotions before because he’d never had to fear loss, but now he did. And the sensation was haunting his dreams.
But what did he really have to lose? Only Delfin’s precious volume had brought the protective streak out of him before, but that text was