Borin Ironforge's Arc

Chapter 13 of 20

The next morning a farmwife came to the forge for a new plow blade. She stood in the doorway and would not step in. Someone had told her the old dwarf let a stable boy ruin good iron. Two more customers turned away by noon. Borin knew the source. Derek Malone had been talking again, poisoning the town before Finn could ever stand alone. The boy had passed every trial in the fire. Now he would fail out here, in the square, over words. Borin gripped his beard and made a choice. Rumors died in daylight. He would drag them there. He walked Finn to the market square, where Derek held court by the well. Derek was a broad young man with a loud mouth and a crowd that laughed on cue. He saw them coming and grinned. "There he is," Derek said. "The stable boy who plays at smithing. Tell them, old man. Tell them a real hammer would break in his soft hands." Borin said nothing. He set the repaired warhammer on the well's stone lip. Its split head was welded smooth. Its haft ran straight and new. "This was broken clean through," Borin said to the crowd. "Head split. Haft snapped. My boy smelted the steel, welded the seam, cut the haft. Alone. No hand of mine on it." He looked at Derek. "You say his work fails. Test it." Derek snatched the hammer. He swung it hard against the well stone, twice, meaning to shatter it in front of them all. The head held. The haft held. The ring came back clean. Derek swung a third time, red in the face. The stone chipped. The hammer did not. A cold voice cut the square. "I'd know that steel anywhere." Aelindor Starweaver stepped from the inn's warm doorway, the elven hero who had bought a blade here weeks past. He wore the sword at his hip. He had learned the boy forged it and had taken it gladly. "That sword saved my life on the pass," Aelindor said. He drew it and let the crowd see the pattern in the steel. "Finn Ashwood made it. I carry no finer blade in three kingdoms." He pointed the tip at Derek. "You beat that hammer with all your weight. It laughed at you." The crowd laughed then, at Derek. He dropped the hammer and pushed through them, gone. By dusk the farmwife returned. She placed her coin on the anvil and asked Finn, not Borin, to forge her blade. Two others waited behind her. Borin watched the boy take the orders in his own name. The rumors were dead. The town had its new smith. And that was the trouble. Finn no longer needed him here. The last reason to stay had just walked out the door with Derek. It was time to tell the boy the truth.