Merlyn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 19

The boar's life had not been enough. Merlyn knew it the moment the coin cooled in his palm. Two days later, in the seer's workshop, he felt the truth in his own blood. The rune-coin lay against his chest on its cord, and it was drinking from him. His hands trembled at the forge. His breath came thin. The rune had sealed for a boar's price, but the sacrifice it wanted was greater. Now it took the rest from the carver. He traced the coin's face. The blood-line he had cut across it was warm, feeding. A slow leak from his own veins to fill what the boar could not. If he let it run, it would empty him the way forge-sickness had emptied his father. The door opened. The short, heavy step. Kjell. "You've gone gray," Kjell said. He set his axe by the wall. "Not old-gray. Sick-gray." "The coin is bleeding me," Merlyn said. "The boar was too small. The rune reached past it and found me." Kjell crossed the room. He lifted the cord, felt the coin's heat, and dropped it. "Cut the cord." "Cut it and the rune turns loose. It takes whatever stands closest." Merlyn's blind face turned toward him. "That is you." Kjell was quiet. Then he pulled a rune-marked coin from his belt and set it on the table. An old one, stamped, worn smooth. "Feed it this instead." Merlyn's fingers found the coin. Metal, not flesh. "It wants a life, not silver." "Then bind the debt to the metal." Kjell's voice did not rise. "You carve. I hold. Same as before. Read the second coin as the offering. Move the price off your blood and onto it." Merlyn thought of his father, working the stone with ruined hands. He would not die feeding a coin. He set both coins together on the anvil, his own and the old Viking one. He pressed his palm across them and opened the blood-line again, wider. Kjell laid a hand over his wrist and held it steady. "Read the lines," Merlyn said. "If it turns to me, pull it wide." He raised the hammer. His forearms glowed. He struck a binding rune into the old coin, joining it to the first. One strike. Two. The bleeding coin flared hot, then dragged at the new metal instead of his chest. The old coin cracked down the middle. Both halves went cold. The cord slackened. Merlyn's breath came back into him all at once. He sat down hard on the bench. His hands still shook, but the pull was gone. The debt had passed into the broken coin and died there. Kjell picked up the two halves and looked at them. "It's spent," he said. "But the sight-rune still holds a boar's price. Not yours." Merlyn nodded slowly. The rune was safe now. But it was still too weak. To buy back his eyes, he would have to pay the greater price himself.