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

grateful to my year in the mines for the toughening of my muscle and bone.
    At last, the day done, I realized I had watched the sun’s shine and the night’s shadows streak across the floor of the citadel a hundred times, me all that while crushing rock and nothing more.
    Galabes was gone, his hound with him.  The gnome smiled and sang at me from the vaulted ceiling of the citadel.  I smelled the smoke of cooking fires coming up the mountainside from the tents clinging to the slope.
    I saw Prince Llew in leather apron, gloves, and mask sweating over the forge, scattering my shattered iron ore bits among the charcoals to melt down and purify the metal.  The molten iron, red and yellow, hissing, steaming, drained away down out of the coals through a stone trough at the base of the forge.  It poured hot and liquid into clay crucibles.
    The prince saw me staring at him across the dust and shatter of black stone.  He pulled off his leather mask.  He had fresh blue eyes uncovered by cataracts.  The clean cheeks of a youth.  The heavy muscles of a hero.  He was beautiful.  He was astonishing!
    But he had in his face the twisted frenzy of a man at the work that was his destiny.
    “Hammer!” he shouted at me.  “Hammer the iron for all my blades!”
    “I want my sword!” I bawled at the beautiful boy.
    I threw down the hammers.
    “How long have I been working here?  How many swords have you made with my ore?  What’s the day, the hour, the year?”
    “Who knows, who cares?” said the prince.  “All, all those other swords made from bits you shattered have gone away to season in the Earth or to be welded and cut and filed and sold out into the world into the hands of knights and princesses.”
    “I did all that hammering for them?” I said.
    “For yourself.  For your sword.”
    I kicked away the iron pebbles I had pounded into a heap and said, “No more for any other swordswoman, Prince.”
    I scooped up a heap of ore fragments and said, “Here, make these into my sword.  I work for nothing more now than my own blade.”
    “There it is,” said the prince.
    “What is?”
    “In your hands.  Your sword.”
    “This is a rubble of rock!”
    “It’s an iron made perfect by your sweat and fury and now your spirit of anger.  An iron of which you just now chose every pebble.  Stone invested with your strength and destiny.  But what’s its name?”
    “What name?  It’s rock,” I said.  “Rock has no name.”
    “Too soon,” the gnome sang down from the vaulted ceiling.
    “Yes,” said the boy prince, “too soon.”
    He flung wide his apron and I dumped the iron gravel into it.
    “More!” he cried.  “I need more iron!”
    I swept up more black pebbles and filled his apron overflowing.  He flung the bits into the searing hot charcoal.
    “Bang the gong!” he shouted to an apprentice.
    The gong tolled out a single note that echoed over the valley.  The wind howling through the citadel went silent.  The retainers and knights camped down the mountain slope ceased their usual riot.
    The colossal moment had come.  The greatest sword of the age was about to be born.
    “There’s your iron,” Prince Llew said, pointing at the yellow, steaming glow of liquid metal pouring into the last clay crucible.
    I squatted by the clay pot and watched the gathering together of the iron into a giant puddle of heat and stink and sizzle.  I watched the clay pot run up to white hot and then cool through reds and oranges, through days and nights, to a dull-glowing brown.  It was so great a marvel to see I could not blink my eyes for fear of missing any of it.
    “Are you my sword?” I whispered to the cooling metal.
    Prince Llew had in his boy’s hands the Jerusalem gold coin given to my stepfather by my blood-father Arthur.
    “Here,” Llew said, “is the only blessing on the sword that any child of Britain could crave.”
    He dropped Arthur’s gold coin into the molten iron.  Smoke, steam, hiss, a