Free The Callindra Chronicles Book One - First Quest by Benjamin Fisher-Merritt

keep me from completing your training.” She scrubbed an
exhausted hand across her eyes and followed him. Was that
resignation or something else in his voice?
    Once in the house, she attempted to go
straight to bed, but Glarian forestalled her. He made her sit
before the fire and while he filled the tub from the cistern he
ordered her to stay awake.
    “ I don’t want to bandage
your hands while you sleep; it’s much easier to get them tight when
you’re awake.” He explained, “You can set that hilt down on the
table too. We can start a wall of failed steel for you
tomorrow.”
    Callindra sat numbly and looked at her hands.
To her surprise, the right was still clenching her sword hilt. The
left was raw and bleeding, each of the lines on her palm that a
fortune teller might use to tell her future was bleeding as though
cut with a razor. She set the sword hilt on her lap and saw her
right hand was the same.
    “ That is what happens when
you lose control of your power Apprentice.” Glarian was carrying an
earthenware pot of some lightly fragrant substance and some clean
linen bandages. “This salve is made from the pollen of Brightstar
flowers; it’s a healing balm that will help your hands.”
    He took her hands and carefully dabbed the
salve into her abused palms. It did sting as she feared, but it
faded quickly from the feeling of being jabbed by needles to
something akin to the sun shining on her skin.
    Glarian had finished bandaging her hands and
was holding a cup of warm tea out to her. “Drink this while you are
in your bath. Don’t worry about scrubbing, this is to soak the
soreness out of your muscles. It’s important not to get your hands
wet while they are healing.”
    He gave her privacy to strip and clamber
awkwardly into the bath, he had put some herbs in the water too.
Presently she smelled burning tac and knew he was on the front
stoop smoking. She sat in the tub with the water all the way to her
neck, holding her hands on the sides to keep the bandages dry and
let the tension soak out of her muscles. Her mind was completely
blank but something tickled on the outside of her awareness.
    “ Belach. How comes the
work?” Glarian's voice echoed hollowly.
    “ It is heating for the one
thousand sixteenth and final fold.” A rough voice rumbled like
thunder. “I am using metal from a fallen star and it is reluctant
to melt even under the fires of Majiera. Every time it takes longer
and if the temper is to be properly completed perhaps another
month.”
    “ I will make do for a month.
You have my thanks.”
    “ You can’t come pick it up
yourself you stubborn bastard.”
    Callindra seemed to fly away from her body,
feeling winds rushing past her face. She spun faster and higher,
crossing unknown lands with vast forests, a tree reaching past the
heavens themselves, over rivers so wide they seemed to be lakes,
across an unending sheet of ice to a mountain with cinders and ash
issuing from its summit.
    She plunged down the cone and there stood an
impossibly large creature. It stood taller than a keep in the
center of a pool of molten rock, with horns twice as long as a man
protruding from its head and wings that were larger than the sails
of a ship, even when folded against its back. The creature’s skin
was black but cracked all over and in the seam of these cracks the
light of magma gleamed forth. Enormous black chains, each bigger
around than a wagon ran from a thick spiked collar around its neck
to the four points of the compass, their ends looping around
pillars of sheer ice.
    Standing at a forge that was on a shelf of
rock level with the creature’s head was a man with arms like tree
trunks. The ground beneath his feet was covered with half-finished
and broken weapons, each one appeared to her eyes to be a flawless
masterpiece and yet he trod on them as though they were trash.
Above his head, a myriad of delicate shapes fluttered and flitted
in the heat from the forge. Callindra realized these