Free The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) by Kit Maples

it,” said Llew.  “It’s pure iron now.  I can make it into good steel.”
    The gnome sang a new song that sounded like autumn harvest and the snugging down of houses for coming winter.
    I was startled to see that spring had passed and summer with it.  Ice was growing on the distant mountain peaks.  Had we sat by the pit all those many months?
    I looked at Prince Llew.  He was still a young man, clean-limbed, sleek, and nimble.  But a sprout of gray was cutting through his hair and cataracts had begun to close his eyes.
    “What’s happened to you?” I said to him.
    “My dreaming time is coming too quick this year,” he said.  “I smell an early winter.  Hurry!  We have to forge the iron again, four or five times more, to slake out of it the last corruption.  Then we pour the rods and bars of iron and steel and soak them in spirit water and wait...”
    “More waiting?  Make the sword now!”
    “Wait for my dreaming time to pass,” said the prince, “when I have the power to teach you to make the perfect blade.”
    “I’m sixteen,” I said.  “Nearly at middle-life.  I haven’t time for dreams.  I must have my sword to make something of myself in this desperate world.”
    “Can you cut steel?  Weld iron bars?  Wrap a pommel that will not slip in your hand in the dripping blood of battle?  Inlay a pommel that whispers a sword’s soul-name to save your life?”
    “You know I can’t do any of that.”
    “You will learn to do it in the time between today and tomorrow.”
    But tomorrow wasn’t tomorrow.
    We flung the three libras of iron seed onto the charcoal of the citadel forge and melted it down, searing out its imperfections.  We let the forge cool, the charcoal and iron seed together, and gathered out of the chill coals the littered remains of my iron.   It was hardened drips and dribbles and blobs of iron and not one big, glorious seed with its weighty promise of power.
    The bits of clean iron I recovered from the dead coals seemed to me wasted and awful.  It was bitter to me to hold in my hands so little after so much work and hope.  I could not see how a great sword could be made of so little.
    Prince Llew and the gnome sang together in a wordless song as we heaped the bits together in a final forge-fire.  Boiling golden liquid dripped out of the forge into stone and clay molds shaped like rods and bars.
    “The bars are steely iron for weight and power,” said Llew.  “They make the spine of the sword.  The rods are iron, too, but we hammer them into steel for the biting edges of the sword.”
    “Let’s do it all now!” I cried, grabbing up the cold bars and rods.
    A bitter wind howled through the citadel.  I heard the retainers in their tents down the mountainside packing their animals to escape back to their masters and castles before the early snow fall.
    The swordmaking season was done.
    “Ring the gong,” said the prince.
    The gnome clambered up into the vaulted ceiling and banged the gong.
    The white streak in the prince’s hair had spread to a uniform gray.  His cheek was no longer flush and smooth but crabbed and pocked.  His teeth were greening.  His back stiffening and bending.  The yellow hairs in his nose protruding.  Cataracts growing thick over his blue eyes.
    The coals in the forge were still hot.  Llew flung his leather and fur blankets onto the coals to warm them for his winter’s sleeping dreams.
    “Put the rods and bars into the wine bath,” he said to me as he curled up in his hides to sleep.
    “But we can make the sword, season or not,” I said.
    “The Mosella now.  The blood later.”
    The prince closed his eyes and slept.
    In his dreaming sleep, he withered into a man so ancient he looked to me something almost beyond this life.
    I dropped the rods and bars in their appropriate order into the stone trough filled with wine.  As the metal went in, the wine iced over.  I could see the makings of my sword in there, frozen away from