Elara Rime's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Elara worked the spear head until midmorning. The pass steel took her frost and gave back a clean weld. She set the finished spear across the anvil to cool. That was when the fox began its trouble. It darted out the door, then came back with something in its jaws. A strip of hide, wet and stiff at one end. It dropped the hide at her boots and stared. She kicked it aside. The fox picked it up and put it back. "Go on," she said. It went. It came back with a splinter of driftwood, pale and salt-scarred, wrong for a mountain forge. It set the wood beside the hide. Then a rag of oilcloth. Then a bent nail. Each time it returned from the treeline breathing harder, and each time it refused to lie down. Elara pulled her glove on and stepped outside. The fox ran ten paces down the path and stopped. Waited. Ran again. She followed. The path bent below her forge into pines she rarely walked. The fox led her past a leaning post carved with a mask, its mouth open in a shout, the paint faded to rust. She had never seen it before. She kept moving. The trees opened onto a clearing. A small hut stood at the far edge, built of driftwood lashed with rope, its doorway hung with layered reindeer hides. Driftwood, this far from any sea. She stopped at the treeline. A girl sat on the ground beside an iron cart piled with battered suitcases. Scrawny, in a patched hoodie, shoes gone through at the toe. Her chin was up. Her hands were shaking. "You the smith," the girl said. Not a question. "Who are you." "Rosa Jeffs. The fox has been coming for two days. I ran out of things to send." She nodded at the hut. "He's in there. He can't walk." Elara pushed the hides aside. A man lay on the floor. Old. Breathing wrong. His leg was black below the knee where something had crushed it. Beside him lay a whale-bone post painted with a faded map, the kind a traveler carried for luck. It had not helped him. "I couldn't lift him onto the cart," Rosa said behind her. "I tried." Elara knelt. She could carry him. She could carry him down to the village before dark if she left now. She thought of the spear cooling on her anvil. Rowan would come at dusk. If she was not there, he would leave, and the pass steel would leave with him. She lifted the old man across her shoulders. He weighed almost nothing. "Bring the cart," she told Rosa. "Fast." The fox was already running ahead down the path, toward the village, away from the forge. Elara followed it. Behind her, on the anvil, the finished spear cooled alone.