“It’s kinda puny, though,” said one young boy a year or two older than Stanis, after careful inspection.
She nodded seriously. “I think you’re right. Ambris is big enough that only a strong warrior could hold her. This sword was built for a small person—like me or you.”
The boy gave her a little grin of solidarity.
“A big strong warrior like our King Myr?” asked someone else.
She sheathed her sword before someone decided to touch it and got cut. “Exactly like our King Myr.”
Stanis, evidently deciding the topic of Ambris had been covered enough, said, “Do you know any other stories? Other ones about swords an’ gods an’ stuff? I like ’em with blood an’ fight’n, but Tobin says that it might scare the young’uns.”
Aralorn grinned and started to reply, but noticed that Wolf was waiting nearby. Beside him was Edom. “It looks like I’ll have to wait and tell you a story another time. Remind me to tell you the one about a boy, his dog, and a monster named Taddy.”
Edom came up to her. “Thank you for the break,” he said with a short bow. “I am most grateful. But Wolf says he needs you more than Myr needs another hand at the trenches.”
“Watching the children is better than digging?” she asked.
He grinned. “Absolutely. Hey, Stanis, how about you help me get a game of Hide the Stone going?”
And a moment later they were all running for the bushes to search for just the right stone.
“So you wield Ambris now?” Wolf commented, walking toward her when Edom and the children were gone.
She hopped to her feet. “Of course. I am Aralorn, Hero of Sianim and Reth, didn’t you know?”
“No.” She heard the smile in his voice. “I hadn’t heard.”
She shook her head and started for the caves. “You need to get out more, have a few drinks in a tavern, and catch up on the news.”
“I think,” he said, “even as isolated as we are here, I should have heard of the woman who wields Ambris.”
Aralorn laughed. “Half the young men in Sianim paint their maces black. And at the Red Lance Inn of the Fortieth’s favor, just a few blocks from the government building, there’s a bronze ceremonial lance on the wall that the innkeeper swears is Nekris. I guess we don’t have to worry about the ae’Magi, you and I. We’ll just take Nekris and Ambris to destroy him.”
After a few silent steps, she said, “I will admit, though, that when I found it in the old weapons hall at Lambshold, when I was a kid not much older than these, I used to pretend I’d found Ambris.”
She drew the sword and held it up for his inspection. It gleamed pinkish gold in the sunlight, but aside from the admittedly unusual color, it was plain and unadorned. “It was probably made for a woman or young boy, see how slender it is?” She turned the blade edgewise. “The color is probably the result of a smith mixing metals to make it strong enough not to break even if it is small enough for a woman. Even the metal hilt isn’t unusual. Before the population of magic-users began to recover from the Wizard Wars, there were many swords made with a metal grip. It has only been in the last two hundred years that metal hilts have become rare.” As if he needed her to tell him that. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “That’s what happens when I’ve been storytelling to the children.”
“How long did you pretend she was Ambris?” asked Wolf.
“Not long,” she said. “No magic in her. Not human, not green, not any. And I was forced to concede that the Smith’s Weapons would be rife with magic.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Not to mention bigger, as is fitting for a weapon built to slay gods.”
“She might not be Ambris, but”—Aralorn executed a few quick moves—“she’s light and well balanced and takes a good edge. Who can ask anything more than that? I don’t need a sword for anything else, so she suits my purposes. I don’t use a sword when a knife or staff will do, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally killing a magician.” She sheathed the sword and gave it a fond pat.
The route that they took from the cave mouth to the library was different this time. Aralorn wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate or just habit. Wolf traversed the twisted passages without hesitating, ducking the cave formations as they appeared in the light from the crystals in his staff, but she had the feeling that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t need the light at all.
The library was as they had left it. Aralorn soon started skimming books rather than reading them—even so, the sheer volume of the library was daunting. Once or twice, she found that the book that she arrived at the table with wasn’t the one that she thought she had picked up. The fourth time that it happened, she was certain that it wasn’t just that she had picked up a different book by mistake: The book that she had taken off the shelf was unwieldy. The one that she set in front of Wolf to look over was little more than a pamphlet.
Intrigued, she returned to the shelf where she’d gotten the book and found the massive tome she thought she’d taken sitting where she’d found it. She tapped it thoughtfully, then smiled to herself—wizards’ libraries, it seemed, had a few idiosyncrasies. It certainly wasn’t her luck spell—that had dissipated a few minutes after she cast it.
Wolf had taken no notice of her odd actions but set the thin, harmless book on her side of the table and returned to what he termed “the unreadable scribbles of a mediocre and half-mad warlock who passed away into much-deserved obscurity several centuries before: safe from the curses of an untrained magician, however powerful.”
Aralorn, returning to the table, listened to his half-voiced mutterings with interest. The mercenaries of Sianim were possessed of a wide variety of curses, mostly vulgar, but Wolf definitely had a creative touch.
Still smiling, Aralorn opened the little book and began reading. Like most of the books she chose, this one was a collection of tales. It was written in an old Rethian dialect that wasn’t too difficult to read. The first story was a version of the tale of the Smith’s Weapons that she hadn’t read before. Guiltily, because she knew that it wasn’t going to be of any help defeating the ae’Magi, she took quick notes of the differences before continuing to another story.
The writer wasn’t half-bad, and Aralorn quit skimming the stories and read them instead, noting down a particularly interesting turn of phrase here and a detail there. She was a third of the way through the last story in the book before she realized just what she was reading. She stopped and went back to the beginning, reading it for information rather than entertainment.
Apparently, the ae’Magi (the one ruling at the time that the book was written, whenever that was) had, as an apprentice, designed a new spell. He presented it to his master to that worthy’s misfortune. The spell was one that nullified magic, an effect that the apprentice’s two-hundred-year-old master would have appreciated more had he been out of the area of the spell’s effect.
Aralorn hunted futilely for the name of the apprentice-turned-ae’Magi or even any indication when the book was written. Unfortunately, during most of Rethian history, it had not been the custom to note the date a book was written or even who wrote it. With a collection of stories, most of which were folktales, it was virtually impossible to date the book reliably within two hundred years, especially one that was probably a copy of another book.
With a sigh, Aralorn set the book down and started to ask Wolf if he had any suggestions. Luckily she glanced at him before a sound left her mouth. He was in the midst of unraveling a spell worked into a lock on a mildewed book as thick as her hand. She’d grown so used to the magic feel of the lighting, she hadn’t noticed when the amount of magic had increased.
He didn’t seem to be having an easy time with it, although it was difficult to judge from his masked face. She frowned at his mask resentfully.