Torva’ox.”
“Savage, huh?” Paige said. “Seems refined enough to do the job.”
Ira seemed confused by the tone in her voice, so Milosh explained, “We call you savages. Just another name for Skinner.”
But Cole was too tired to argue semantics. Pulling the Jekhibar from his pocket, he waved it in Ira’s face and asked, “So Skinners must have these things too, right?”
“No,” Ira replied without making a move toward the polished stone. “You people are crude, just as crude as your country, and it serves you well. You draw on as much of the Torva’ox as any man, which isn’t enough for my craft. It is enough for yours, though. As for the shapeshifting wood and blood rituals you do . . . I call them savage. Not another word for Skinner either.
Paige shouldered past Cole until she’d inserted herself into the narrow space between him and Ira. “What do you need the Jekhibar for?”
“You see these weapons I made?”
“Yeah.”
Motioning to the walls that practically shone with firelight reflected off of the edges of so many blades, he said, “These can all be Blood Blades. They just need a little juice.”
Cole’s knuckles crackled as his fingers closed even tighter around the stone. “You can try to take this from us, but you know it won’t be easy.”
Stepping away so her back was to a wall, Paige followed Cole’s lead as if there were no other way. “Or even possible.” The look she gave her partner showed a hint of surprise mixed with a liberal dose of hope that he knew where the hell he was going with this.
Ira hadn’t moved, but Milosh cursed under his breath and took half a step forward before Sophie stopped him. “Nobody said anything about taking it from you. I know how valuable these weapons are, but enough people have already died for them.”
Cole said, “All I want is to put this historical feuding shit aside for good. Whatever it is between Skinners and Amriany, it’s too petty to keep going now. Our country is overrun, and if yours isn’t yet, it won’t be long before that changes for the worse.”
“I was going to give you blades,” Ira said. “No need for such dramatics.”
“I’m not talking about a weapons exchange. I’m talking about an alliance. A real one.”
“Even you don’t know which Skinners you can trust,” Sophie said. “Why should we trust them?”
“You’ll trust the ones we do, just like we’ll trust the Amriany that you do.”
“And what becomes of our two people then?”
“We form a group that has the weapons and intel of both. With our nymph connections, we can even make it easier for us all to work internationally.”
“And you save your proposal until now instead of when we were all talking before?” Milosh grunted. “Very sneaky.”
“I only just thought of it now,” Cole admitted. “But it’s not like I’m asking for anything that will hurt either one of us. Sure, we’ll both lose some of the whole secret society thing, but it’ll save us having to figure out new ways to tiptoe around each other when the next big emergency crops up.”
“And,” Paige added, “if we join forces on a larger scale, maybe those big emergencies won’t crop up so often.”
“I suppose this starts now?” Milosh asked. “By you Skinners loading up on all the Blood Blades you can carry?”
“Just enough for me and Paige,” Cole replied. “Plus a few for us to divvy out to the Skinners on our nice list.” When he saw the glances going back and forth between the Amriany, he added, “You know. Like the naughty and nice list? You’ve got Santa over here, right?”
Ira stomped over to Milosh and slapped a hand on the shoulder that only had a stump attached to it. “Yes, we do, and you are looking at him. I wasn’t going to let you walk out of here carrying nothing but those sticks!”
“And I wasn’t going to let you leave this country before I proposed something similar to this alliance of yours,” Sophie said. She nodded to Paige and then looked at Cole with newfound respect. “I’ve heard you two were worth watching. Of course we figured there would be good things coming from her, but I wasn’t sure about you, Cole. Until now.”
“Uh . . . thanks?” he replied, as if unsure whether he should feel flattered.
“Don’t worry,” Ira chuckled. “She is still not so sure about me either. Let me see what you brought all the way out into this damned forest.”
Even though he’d been guarding the Jekhibar with his life until now, Cole no longer had any qualms about putting it into the blacksmith’s rough hand. Ira immediately held it to his ear and smiled. Extending the stone toward Cole, he said, “Listen to that one sing! I haven’t heard one that good in a long time!”
Rather than take the stone back, Cole leaned in toward it with about as much expectations as someone trying to hear the ocean through a seashell. Unlike that cheap beach trick, however, this one actually lived up to the hype. The sound that came from the Jekhibar was a single, perfect note that resonated only when his ear was directly in front of it, less than an inch away.
“Usually it is a soft purr,” Ira explained. “This one couldn’t hold more juice if you crammed it in using a bar.” He winced. “Crow bar? You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Paige said as Cole moved away. “What do you need to do now?”
Ira turned from the others and walked toward a large workbench while flipping the Jekhibar in his hand like a smooth rock he was about to skip across a lake. “The hard part is done. All that’s left is to put what’s in here into all of these fine blades.”
Once again Cole looked around at the weapons hanging from the walls. He hadn’t been able to count them before and surely couldn’t do it now. Giving voice to the same thoughts going through his mind, Paige asked, “How long is that going to take?”
Without a word, Ira went to one of the blades dangling from a hook on a rack placed higher on the wall. It was about four inches wide at one end and tapered down to about half that length before forming an angular point at the other end. The hook fit through a metal stem meant to be hidden inside a handle. Ira grabbed that blade and held it up so the Skinners could see it curved to form a subtle wave shape just under two feet long. Gripping the blade in the middle with one hand, he tapped the Jekhibar against its tip and slowly raked it along the flat metal surface while muttering words that didn’t sound close to the Amriany dialect or any other language Cole had ever heard. One by one the symbols etched into the blade shimmered, and when the dim light in them faded, that section of the weapon had the imperfect sheen of a silvery lake muddled by murky patches of shadow. It was the same mix of light and dark marking the very first Blood Blade that Cole had ever seen.
“This,” Ira said proudly once he’d moved the Jekhibar all the way down the blade, “is for you.”
It took Cole a few seconds to realize the blacksmith was staring directly at him. “Oh,” he said tentatively. “I’ve already got a weapon. I’m kind of attached to it.”
“I know you are, but I will make it better. Give it here.”
When he didn’t move, Cole felt a familiar elbow prodding him in the side. “Go on,” Paige said. “You’re the one that wanted to build bridges.”
Cole drew the spear from the harness strapped across his back. He held it out to Ira, only to have the weapon pulled away with enough force for the thorns to draw his blood. He’d become immune to that pain, but seeing the blacksmith hack at the spearhead using the newly charmed Blood Blade was a whole other kind of agony. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
It only took four chopping cuts, delivered beneath the spot where the metallic varnish had been applied to the tip of the spear and angled upward, to chop off the end of the weapon and leave a neat little point. From there, Ira carved a shallow notch into the point and handed the weapon back. “Concentrate,” he said while positioning the Blood Blade so the prongs from which it had been hanging were fitted into the notch. “Close the wood. Grow it back. Do whatever it is you savages do. Just fit the pieces together.”
Cole grabbed the spear so the thorns in the handle pierced his palms. Emotions helped when it came to shifting the weapon’s shape, and there were plenty of them boiling inside him at the moment. In a matter of seconds the wood flowed up and out, to slip between the prongs and meet again. Ira nodded slowly and watched the process while prompting Cole with a few instructions as to where he should move the spear or which portions needed to be
