Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) by Hilari Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

spirit of that stupid rock for so long that her legs were half asleep. The frustratingpart was that it did have a spirit: old, deep, and oddly gentle. Soraya was sufficiently adept with the Suud’s peculiar magic by now that she could sense it. She just couldn’t yield herself to it as she could with fire or water, or, as she had recently learned to do, with air.
    Air was easy, once you realized how vast and loose was the spirit that filled it—so easy that just thinking about it made a sudden breeze swirl around Soraya, reflecting the turbulence in her soul.
    She damped the connection swiftly, noting Maok’s scowl, for control was something else Maok was trying to teach her. But Soraya couldn’t suppress her smile. Air’s spirit was so merry and open that even an instant’s joining lightened her heart.
    “Don’t go near the smelting oven,” Maok told her. “The way you are now, the fire might flare up.”
    Soraya nodded, turning away. She had no desire to visit the smoldering pit where the ore was cooked—“smelted,” the peddler called it.
    “It is not that you hate,” Maok called after her. “It is that hate blinds you.”
    At least she’d spoken in Faran, so the rest of the camp wasn’t made privy to Soraya’s private life.
    Soraya was sufficiently grateful to Maok for guarding her emotional privacy that she took care to close off her own ability to readpeople’s emotions as she passed through the camp, walking away from the peddler and the apprentices who clustered around the central fire. A fire that had required only bellows and an anvil to turn into a forge.
    Another of the things that had surprised Soraya was how little equipment was needed to turn rock into sword blades. The peddler admitted that the sophisticated blast furnaces in the mines, and the elaborate forges in Mazad, with their array of bellows, tongs, awls, and other tools, were more efficient. But he said that these primitive expedients would still do the job. Perhaps even better when it came to smelting the Suud’s iron, for rumor had long claimed there was something special about the ore found in the badlands. Kavi said he didn’t want it heated too thoroughly lest whatever made the ore so special “burn off.”
    The path to the open trench where the Suud mined iron ore led past the crude pit where lumpy packets of ore were baked into an astonishingly soft, spongy matter the peddler called “bloom.” The bloom held soft iron, but it was still caught in its matrix of rock. The men who ran the smelter had to beat the bloom until the other elements scattered out and only a lump of iron remained—a very hard iron, which the peddler said would be too brittle to be useful on its own.
    Soraya didn’t hear any thumping sounds from the furnace, so she guessed they must be heating the ore. But she still obeyedMaok’s instructions and walked wide around the smelter pit. It was a new and unsettling development in her magic, that she had become so aware of the shilshadu of things that sometimes they reacted to her presence even when she didn’t intend it. Remembering how hard she had struggled to reach the shilshadu of inanimate things—even of live things at first—Soraya could only smile.
    Maok said this was a stage most Speakers went through, and that it would pass as she gained more control. The Suud who manned the bellows were protected by the smelter pit’s chimney, but Soraya knew that too hot a fire could ruin the ore they worked on, causing the iron to melt out of the rock and form nuggets at the bottom of the fire pit that were so hard and brittle as to be completely unworkable. And while most of the heat from a sudden burst of fire would go up the chimney, some of it might wash back out of the clay pipes where the men who worked the bellows piped in air. The last thing Soraya wanted was to burn someone, so she left the path, picking her way through the bushes that grew near the stream that provided the camp with