The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) by Kit Maples Read Free Book Online Page B

spirits of the world while you work my blades for others…”
    “I’m to make blades for other men and women?” I cried.  “This is an outrage!  I paid Arthur’s coin…”
    “Make my blades first,” said the prince, angry.  “Make them cut through iron and flesh and bone.  Invest them with the holy spirits inside you…”
    “What holy spirits in me?  I’m a slave from Carbonek Castle.  The drippings from a dead king.  The kidnapped child of a beggar-knight and his voiceless hound.  Now enslaved to a lunatic prince who sleeps away winter on a bed of coals.  I’ve no holy spirits in me.  I barely have the power to hold my flesh to my bones!”
    Prince Llew said, hot and fierce, “Find the spirits in you.  Fail and I let your sword rot in the Earth and your Fate with it.  Whatever is left of you will drift through the hollow places between the stars, cold and despised, forever.”
    “Great Jesu!” I cried, trembling.
    Now Prince Llew spoke, in his young man’s voice, like a sword-tailor measuring a client.  “The blade meant for you will have to be exceptional.  You’ve short arms, the arms of a merlin.  No great swordswoman has short arms.  The blade I make you will learn to compensate.”
    “How will it do that?” I said.
    “Grow and shrink, as every great sword must when it finds its champion.  I’ll pour the iron thick.  I’ll weld the iron and steel in the hottest wind.  I’ll cut a fuller deeper than most, for lightness, flex, and power.  I’ll hammer the blade long.  But what I do for the sword is nothing.  You must mine its ore yourself, smelt it, pour it with me, beat it with me, cut it with me, and beat it again until we have pounded hot, raw, waiting spirit into the metal.  I’ll make the first cut in the steel but you’ll have your hands on mine as I do it.  At the moment of tempering I’ll lay on the clay and speak the ritual but you’ll speak the name to be given the blade.  This sword must have a great name for a great character.  The name will tell me in which part of the universe I can find you to bless or curse you as I in my death await the turning to the next world.”
    I was stunned by all this astonishing news.  The digging, the melting, the shaping, the cutting, the inspiriting.  The curse.
    “I’ll do it all, Lord Prince, I swear by every god and goddess!” I cried, terrified.
    “Swear by all the stones you want,” said Llew, “but if you don’t give the sword the name it was born to have, the moment you put hands to the hilt I’ll destroy you and the sword and there’ll be a hole in the universe where your Fate once waited!”
    Galabes shouted, “Great Lord Prince, I’ve never heard you set a curse like that!”
    “It’s succeed or die, Old Thief, for your last try to bring us back the High King, and that demands a great blessing and a greater curse.”
    Llew said to me, “Tell me, Arthur’s brat, what will you have from me?  Say it into the world so the contract cannot be changed.”
    “The sword!” I gasped.
    Galabes in fury and Caval in silence turned to face the old man.  “Now you name your own tests, Monster,” said Galabes.  “Speak them into the world so they can’t be changed.”
    “First, quest for the blackest and purest ore.  Second, cut the raw steel with me.  Third, name the finished blade.  A trinity for the world’s most perfect sword.”
    “What do you say to that, my daughter?” Galabes said to me.
    “Agreed,” I said.  “All of it.”
    What else could I say?  I had no past to return to and my future without a sword would be despair and a drowning death in the Saxon flood.
    “Turn your cheek to me,” the prince commanded, pulling a singed ironworker’s glove over his fighting hand.
    I did.  He smashed his gloved and withered fist into my cheek.  It was not much of a blow but I was so surprised I nearly tumbled.  Who was this defunct prince to dub me knight with a slap?
    “Now the