Trugs

A blacksmith came to Loshev out of Draazstone about two months before the rapier came in, took over a smithy that had stood unused for years, and had the inside of it working before the outside was painted. Word of the shop ran ahead of the name, and so did a rumor that the weapons made there carried a hint of magic. The market told that rumor of Hinta as well, the other Draazstone smith setting up in the town at the same time, and which of them was meant was never settled.

Mikhail brought in his mother’s rapier and got the measure of the shop before he got the measure of its owner. On the open shelves was work of a quality nobody keeps in stock: metal set so evenly the light came off it without a flaw, the sort of thing a man with money commissions and then waits for. On hooks along the far wall hung a rack of far cheaper swords. The smith came out with arms corded like cable from years at an anvil, burn marks across shoulders, arms and face, and the rough of fur at the forearms scorched into bald patches combed over as best he could. No apron, and no fire lit.

The rapier was judged against the shelf and not against the hooks. This is absolute trash. In the name of Snaga, how would you insult the gods with something like this. The blade was warped past saving, and a rapier is forged as one piece rather than assembled, so keeping the guard that mattered to him meant cutting it free and hammering a new blade to sit in it. That is real labor, and Trugs priced it at a single gold, took it with a loud complaint about Peredhel coin, and set it down hard on the counter. Three weeks for the work. Then he demanded to be shown the man could use the thing at all: a sparring match with a rapier off the shelf, which Mikhail lost, and a verdict of rudimentary training that would do.

Trugs pitched a blade made properly from the start, forty gold, which meant measurements of Mikhail’s hand and a study of how he fought. The handguard Mikhail cared about he dismissed on the way past as graceful and useless. Told that his work was only good on a battlefield, he gave the sharpest answer of the afternoon: these weapons have been carried by people who wanted to show off their money, and quality is also a matter of commanding a room. He wanted twenty gold shown before he would watch anybody fight, and the coin stayed on the counter against Mikhail walking out.

Yullen Gemsmith fronted the forty on a sealed written promise, reckoning the smith had too much business in Loshev to skip town over it. The company’s name meant nothing there: Mikhail was taken for Aldo on the grounds that he looked like what people describe Aldo as being, which is human. He came back with the promise to find the smith outside painting the shop wall and in a considerably worse mood than he had left, though visibly glad of the excuse to put the brush down.

The reforging was done, and the blade Mikhail carried afterwards was his mother’s guard with new steel in it. Of the forty-gold sword nothing more was ever heard, and nothing more of the shop or its owner after that day.