Elara Rime's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

The third blade of the morning shattered before Elara Rime finished the first fold. She had gripped the bar with her gauntleted hands, and still the frost had crawled through the leather, through the seams, into the steel. The metal rang once, high and wrong, and broke across the anvil in three pieces. She stared at the shards. Her father had taught her to smith on this anvil. He had died before her hands went cold, and she was glad of that every morning, including this one. The pale fox watched from the doorway. It had followed her up the path again, sitting just inside the fur-lined threshold where the snow ended and her floor began. She had tested it once against a finished blade. Three times, actually. The blade had stayed whole. She still did not trust it. Elara peeled off one glove. Her palm was white at the center, blue at the knuckles. The gauntlets fit her hands. That was all she could say for them. Every steel she had tried for the plating went brittle before she could shape it. Iron cracked. Bronze split. Even the pass-forged billet a soldier had once left in payment had shattered on the second hammer strike. Boots crunched outside. The fox did not move. Rowan Reik filled the doorway. He was the sentinel from the mountain pass, the one in the dented plate with the fox stitched across his chest. Elara had not seen him off his post in the years she had lived here. He should not have been standing in her forge. He held out a bundle of oiled cloth. "Broken spear head," he said. "Need it whole by dusk." She unwrapped it. The metal was dark, almost black, heavier than it looked. A weld scar ran along one edge. She had never seen the like. "What is it." "Pass steel. Old." "Where from." "Doesn't matter." She set the spear head on the anvil. She pulled her glove back on, then paused. She took it off again. She laid her bare hand flat against the black metal and waited for the frost. It did not come. The steel drank the cold and held it. A thin rime crawled out one fingerlength and stopped, as if it had hit a wall inside the iron. Elara pressed harder. Nothing shattered. Nothing even hummed wrong. "How much of this exists," she said. "Enough for a spear." Rowan looked at the ruined pieces on her floor. "Not enough for what you're making." She understood him. He had seen the gauntlet halves on her bench. He had known before he walked in. "Fix the spear," he said. "We'll talk about the rest." The fox stood up in the doorway. Elara took the hammer in her bare hand. The black steel waited under her palm, cold and unbroken, and for the first time in a year the frost had somewhere to go.