A good year's work, and one that would bring profit to the Sisterhood.
Tomorrow she would take them to the Autumn Harvest Fair and return with beasts and provisions.
Her swords always brought high prices at the Fair, though not as high as they would be sold for elsewhere. Merchants would buy them and carry them to select purchasers, in duchys and baronies and provinces that had nothing like the Sisterhood of Spell and Sword. But before they were sold again, they would be ornamented by jewelers, with fine scabbards fitted to them and belts and baldrics tooled of the rarest leathers.
She found this amusing. What brought the high price was what she had created; swords that would not rust, would not break, would not lose their edges. Swords with the set-spell for each season; for Spring, the spell of Calm, for Summer, the spell of Warding, for Fall, the spell of Healing, and for Winter, the spell that attracted Luck. Valuable spells, all of them.
Daughter to a fighter, and once a fighter herself, though she was now a mage-smith, she knew the value of being able to keep a cool head under the worst of circumstances. Spring swords generally went to young fighters, given to them by their parents. the value of the spell of Warding went without saying; to be able to withstand even some magic was invaluable to-say-a bodyguard.
With one of her Summer swords, no guard would ever be caught by a spell of deception or of sleep. Wealthy mercenaries generally bought her Fall swords-or the noble-born, who did not always trust their Healers. And the younger sons of the noble-born invariably chose Winter blades, trusting to Luck to extract them from anything. the ornamentation meant nothing; anyone could buy a worthless Court-sword with a mild-steel blade that bore more ornament than one of hers. But her contact had assured her, over and over again, that no one would believe her blades held power unless they held a trollop's dower in jewels on their hilts. It seemed fairly silly to her; but then, so did the fact that most mages wore outfits that would make a cat laugh.
Her forge-leathers were good enough for her, and a nice, divided wool skirt and linen shirt when she wasn't in the forge.
Once every four years, she made eleven swords instead of twelve, and forged all four of the spells into a single blade. those she never sold; keeping them until one of the Sisterhood attracted her eye, proved herself as not only a superb fighter, but an intelligent and moral fighter. those received the yearswords, given in secret, before they departed into the world to earn a living.
Never did she tell them what they had received. She simply permitted them to think that it was one of her remarkable, nearly unbreakable, nonrusting blades, with a simple Healing charm built in.
After all, why allow them to depend on the sword?
If any of them ever guessed, she had yet to hear about it. there was one of those blades waiting beneath the floor of the forge now.
She had yet to find someone worthy of it. She would not make another until this one found a home. that's what I was,' whispered the sword in the back of Elspeth's mind.
The scene changed abruptly. A huge building complex, built entirely of wood, looking much like Quenten's mage-school. There were only two differences that Elspeth noticed; no town, and no stockade around the complex. Only a forest, on all four sides, with trees towering all about the cleared area containing the buildings. Those buildings looked very old-and there was another difference that she suddenly noticed.
Flat roofs: they all had flat roofs and square doorways, with a square-knot pattern of some kind carved above them.
She was tired; she tired often now, in her old age. A lifetime at the forge had not prevented joints from swelling or bones from beginning to ache-nor could the Healers do much to reverse her condition, not while she continued to work. So she tottered out for a rest, now and then, compromising a little.
She didn't work as much anymore, and the Healers did their best. While she rested, she watched the youngsters at their practice with a critical eye. there wasn't a single one she would have been willing to give a sword to.
Not one.
In fact, the only girl she felt worthy of the blade wasn't a fighter at all, but was an apprentice mage-now working out with the rest of the young mages in the same warm-up exercises the would-be fighters used. All mages in the Sisterhood worked out on a regular basis; it kept them from getting flabby and soft-as mages were all too prone to do-or becoming thin as a reed from using their own internal energies too often. She watched that particular girl with a measuring eye, wondering if she was simply seeing what she wanted to see.
After all, she had started out a fighter, not a mage. Why shouldn't there be someone else able to master both disciplines? Someone like her own apprentice, Vena, to be precise.
Vena certainly was the only one who seemed worthy to carry the year-blade.
This was something that had never occurred in all the years she'd been forging the swords. She wasn't quite certain what to do about it. She watched the girls stretching and bending in their brown linen trews and tunics, hair
