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

banging flash of light, and the coin was absorbed into my metal.  Arthur was in my sword.
    I squatted there on the citadel’s stone floor for more hours or days watching the metal blob congeal and harden as the heat went out of it.
    At last, young Prince Llew, with old Galabes behind him and the silent hound, as though the prince needed their protection against me, reached into the crucible and took out the lump of iron.
    “This,” he said, “is only the seed of your sword.  It needs the purification of the earth to become the blade you want.”
    I followed the prince out of the citadel and across the mountain to a meadow of sheep and goats.  Galabes and the hound followed me.
    “Dig a hole,” the prince said to me.
    I dug a pit.
    “Plant it,” he said, handing me the iron seed.
    “In the ground?  Bury my sword?  It will rust and rot!”
    “Plant your nameless sword.”
    “I’ll name it now,” I said.  “Work the iron into steel and weld up my blade, Prince.  Don’t waste it in the ground.”
    “Plant it.  Purify it.  Wait for the moment to dig it up.  If it comes out of the ground clean and pure, it’s the true foundation of your sword.”
    “If not?”
    “You go to Armenia again and do your digging as you should have done it.”
    I had the seed iron in my hands, four or five Roman libras in weight.  It was my sword, my iron, my ore, my labor in the pits, my misery of all these last two years.  I could not let it go into the ground.
    “Bury it,” said Galabes.  He swatted me across the head.
    I dropped the iron seed in my sudden fury of reaching for my scramasax to cut the old fool.  But the hound was there between us, watching me in its silence.  The dog that was the last of the thin line of Arthur’s great battle hound as I was the last of the thin line of Arthur’s human leavings.  I put away my sword and my fury.
    The iron lay at the bottom of the pit.  The prince shoveled dirt on it.
    Galabes and the hound trudged away across the mountain.
    The boy prince said, “Leave it there a month, a year, ten years…”
    “Ten years?”
    “Until the weak and evil in the iron is eaten out.  Then we make your sword.”
    I sat by the covered pit.
    “What are you doing?” said the prince.
    “Waiting.”
    “We have swords to make.”
    “This ‘seed’ is my sword.  I’ll wait here for it to be ready for me.”
    “You’ll come with me as my bound slave to make my swords for sale!”
    “I paid for this blade.  I don’t need to slave for you.”
    “You’ll slave to learn to make your own sword.”
    “Teach me when this seed sprouts out of the ground.”
    “Why would I bother to teach you then?”
    “Because you know what this sword is to be.  I don’t know what it will be.  But you do, Prince.”
    Llew sat beside me by the covered pit.
    I said to him, “Do you know my sword’s name?”
    “No, and now I’m frightened to hear it when you first speak it out into the world.”
    We sat by the buried seed all the day that was months of days and nights.
    At last the smiling gnome came across the mountain peaks to squat beside us.  She began to sing another song without words.  We knew the ripening had come.
    Prince Llew dug out the earth and I reached into the pit to haul out my iron.
    It was rotted, rusted, pitted, eaten away.  Demons and acids in the soil had attacked it.  It was no longer the gleaming smooth metal I’d dropped in the pit but a ruin of my iron.
    I keened in agony.  I howled at the gods and cursed them all.  The fury that was in me could have killed them with my scramasax if I had the gods near enough.
    But the prince took the ruined seed from my hands and said, “Half the weight or two-thirds of the libras put into the ground has been eaten away.  Good, good!  It’s pure enough.  We’ll finish the purification in fire and hammer.”
    “But it’s ruined!” I cried.  “Weak and shot through with disease!”
    “Disease has been eaten out of