Masterwork blocking rapier

Hinta made this for Koa at Loshev, and she made it after telling him what she thought of his last one: poorly crafted, and he was lucky it had not broken on him.

The blade is thick at the base for the first few inches and drops away faster than a rapier usually does, so the edge finishes about where the hand expects while the root of it will take a blow. The cross-guard is built out to cover the fingers. None of that is style. She would not design the thing until she had watched him fight, and had Aldo hire men to brawl with him so that she could. What she saw was a man who falls back and defends more often than he attacks, and this is a sword for a man who does that. It will keep you safe, she told him. You’ll see.

The craft is flawless, no imperfection anywhere in it, every angle true, the whole thing fluid, and it sits in his hand as though it were cut to the hand. Her mark is on it. So is a run of etching along the thick of the blade, echoing the design on Koa’s cloak, with electrum melted into the lines; it looks like silver and is not.