The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

symmetrical. The nails were long and feminine. (I shuddered at the length, Naglfar’s materials.) Perfect replicas. The level of detail, down to the fingerprints, etched in perfect hairline scratches. All this, meant to be nailed to a hoof, and never seen by anyone but the farrier. 
    Farrier? The word surfaced in my brain like something fished up from the bottom of a lake. One of the fingers wore a wedding ring, an old-fashioned solitaire, but the diamond and gold were iron too. 
    The horseshoe clattered on the floor. I’d been imagining cobbling, tanning hide, working the leather, using small nails to make a pair of shoes, but this was something else. There were no horses here, not that I’d seen, though this was horse country. 
    There were things I could make of iron, maybe, dim memories of high school. A nail. If I was lucky, a basic horseshoe, for a normal horse. The bend was tricky, pounding the metal into the proper shape to fit a hoof. Nothing like what lay at my feet, a macabre wonder of craftsmanship. Craftswomanship? Had Olivia Weyland somehow made that shoe?
    You’ll find part of me here…. Perfect replicas of fingers, down even to perfect fingerprints.
    Had Olivia Weyland somehow become that shoe? 
    Oil lamps and an anvil, rust on everything in the room. No footprints, but the mark of a hand, small. A great furnace, waiting for a fire.
    Smoke, rising above the burned-out square of earth. 
    I knelt to check the hearth, and make sure it was cool. The thought of leaving a fire still burning beneath my land was a bad one. The forge was cold, but as my fingers sifted through the ashes, one of the bricks of the hearth shifted as well. There, beneath it, I found the instructions Dusha Chuchonnyhoof had promised.
    They were written on parchment, rather than paper. At least, I hoped that the skin I held had once been that of an animal. The lines were in a hand I did not know, pointed and full of flourishes. 
     
    A Method for the Binding of the Goblin Chuchonnyhoof
     
    Necessary to complete the binding are the hands of two who are themselves bound by vow, bound by love and bound with their hands atop the anvil. Only two such hands made into shoes will hold the Goblin bound in its proper form, so that it may walk among others in the shape of a man.
     
    Images unfolded in my mind as I read. I saw this room, and two young people, their hands clasped together over the anvil, Lischen March, identical to her great-niece, and a man who must have been Michael Miller. I could not see his face, but she was weeping.
     
    The blacksmith must also be bound, by vow and to the line Weyland. The binding of love is not here required, though it may strengthen that which is here done. It must be a blacksmith who stands at the forge, for the work of a whitesmith will strike false.
     
    I saw just their hands, and the surface of the anvil, slick with blood. It seemed as though I could smell the heat of the forge and the blood too.
     
    The shoes will be made of iron, for there is iron in the blood, and without both, the shape cannot be made to hold. The iron shoes must be quenched in the blood of those whose hands have been given, those hands made iron.
     
    In my mind, the result of this ceremony, a set of horseshoes like the one that Olivia had left. Hands, perfect, twinned together, still faintly glowing from the heat, steam rising from them.
     
    And when this is done, the shape of the Goblin shall be held in the form of man, and the souls shall be preserved, and what is lost will be returned, and made perfect.
     
    There were the iron shoes, nailed to a pair of hooves, and there was a man matching the description Olivia’s letter had given of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, and there was Lischen March and Michael Miller, and they were whole and hale.
    And there was my son, Rowan Mays, smiling.
     
    And should the binding be prevented, or left incomplete, the shape shall be twisted, and the death shall be the death of iron.
     
    And