“Those grains… they run differently, and yet they hold together.”
The old judges carried both swords straight to the testing stand. In the bending test, Doria’s broad blade bore the weight and came back straight, while Kang Mujin’s blade flexed deeper, its hard edge and tough spine dividing the load between them.
In the edge test the difference was plain. Doria’s sword smashed through leather and straw bundles as though they were armor, and Kang Mujin’s sword parted six layers of leather in a single line with no large motion. Neither showed a flaw.
Doria pointed at a thick iron bar that was not among the official items.
“Cut that as well.”
Kang Mujin laid a hand on the first bar, then lowered his sword.
“There is a defect in it. Please replace it with a new one.”
When a chisel was driven in, a hidden black line revealed itself. Doria brought a new bar he had drawn from his own forge three days before.
“If this one is defective too, I’ll break my own forge first.”
“It is good iron.”
Kang Mujin’s sword bit halfway through the bar on the first strike. The edge did not chip, and the shock ran along the boundary line and out through the spine. When he struck the same place again, the bar parted.
Doria examined the broken bar and Kang Mujin’s edge himself. His own sword was heavier and better at breaking armor, but he did not deny that Kang Mujin’s sword, which had divided and rejoined the natures of edge and spine within the same materials and the same span of time, had endured a wider limit.
The old judge declared:
“The winner of this contest is Kang Mujin.”
The yard went quiet, and neither cheers nor jeers came at once. A master smith of House Stonebeam had lost to a human outsider, and so the dwarves looked first to Doria, as if waiting to learn from whose mouth they were to accept the fact.
Doria gazed at Kang Mujin’s sword for a long while, and beneath his beard his jaw set hard, and his right hand went to his belt and stopped. He looked like a man who was angry, and he also looked like a man retracing the hammer marks he had missed, and Kang Mujin did not press him. Defeat was a lump of iron no one else could take up in your place, and laying a hand on it while it was hot left nothing but burns.
At last Doria spoke.
“They said my sword has no flaws.”
“That is so.”
“Your sword has flaws. The grip isn’t finished, and one side of the edge needs grinding again.”
“That is so.”
“And still I lost.”
Kang Mujin thought for a moment.
“Their uses were different.”
“Don’t slip away behind those words.”
Doria’s voice thickened, and he walked to the anvil and took up his own sword, then lifted Kang Mujin’s as well and laid the two side by side.
“I made the finest sword I know how to make. You made another sword that iron is able to become.”
Doria struck his chest with his fist.
“Doria of House Stonebeam admits it before witnesses. This tempering, I lost.”
The declaration came only once, yet the stone walls ringing the yard seemed to throw the words back. Stonebeam’s apprentices set down their hammers first, and then even the craftsmen at the other forges lifted their hands from their benches. The eyes that had been picking at the human outsider’s sword a moment before now moved between the severed iron bar and the unmarked blade.
The old judge exchanged the positions of the two swords. He moved the victor’s tablet from before Doria’s sword to before Kang Mujin’s, and struck one deep hammer mark into the record plate. At the sound of the stone plate ringing, a young apprentice at the edge of the yard straightened up without meaning to.
It was the moment Doria made his defeat final on his own name and his house. Only then did the dwarves’ murmuring break loose, and short gasps spread between surprise and discontent. Even those who had watched Kang Mujin as a spectacle could no longer point at his sword as though it were a sideshow.
The dwarves let out their breath all at once, but Doria did not end it there, and he stepped in front of Kang Mujin. He stood no higher than Kang Mujin’s chest, yet shoulders packed hard before the forge were broad as rock.
“I want to learn how you read iron.”
“The reading is hard to teach.”
“I know. I know you read it with your hands, not your eyes.”
Doria pointed at Kang Mujin’s right hand.
“Even so, there must be an order to the hammering. There’s a moment you draw it from the fire, and a way of keeping the carbon, and there’ll be a reason for where you laid the clay.”
“There is.”
“Teach me.”
The dwarves around them murmured, and for a craftsman of House Stonebeam to ask teaching from another smith seemed to be no light thing.
Kang Mujin looked at Doria. Charcoal dust was clotted in his beard, his apron was burned in places, and old burn scars lay over the calluses on the backs of his hands. The defeat could not have been painless, yet Doria had not turned his eyes from the sword, and he was a good craftsman.
“In return, I have a condition.”
Doria’s eyes went wide.
“A condition?”
“I will learn as well.”
“Learn what?”
“The iron bars you made have almost no hammer marks left on them. Your way of folding and welding differs from what I knew. The airway of your furnace was good, too.”
Doria’s mouth opened a little.
Kang Mujin went on.
“We teach each other.”
A silence held for a moment, and then Doria suddenly threw his head back.
“Gwahahaha!”
The laughter struck the mountain wall and rang, and Doria slapped Kang Mujin’s arm hard with a thick hand.
“You know the taste of iron! Good. Take everything from my forge that can be taken. And I’ll dig out every last handful of your clay.”
Kang Mujin shook out his numbed arm once.
“I will not get in your way at the forge.”
Doria’s laughter cut off.
“That goes without saying. Pick up the wrong tongs at my forge and there’s no master and no anything else.”
“The same for me.”
The two faced each other a moment, and when Doria put out his hand, Kang Mujin took it. The feel of calluses meeting calluses was surer than words.
From that day the two shared a single forge. Doria showed him his folding method, pointing out the direction by which the impurities would leave and the place where the hammer lands last, and Kang Mujin taught him the clay mixture and the order of the differential quench, telling him then and there of the flaws within that he sensed through his blessing. The test pieces split, warped, and lost their grain, again and again. Doria cut a groove into each failed piece with his own hand to record its cause.
“Keep them. Failed iron has more to say.”
After several days a test piece came out in which Kang Mujin’s differential quench was joined to steel whose impurities Doria’s folding had driven off. The boundary was fainter than on the earlier sword, but the shock spread more evenly. Doria stamped the crest of Stonebeam on one side of it and held out the chisel.
“Mark yours too.”
Beside the crest, Kang Mujin carved a bent line resembling a hammer and an anvil.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The two marks remained side by side on one piece of iron. Doria neither sold the test piece nor hid it, but set it on a storeroom shelf.
Kang Mujin gave his attention to drawing the eighth test piece from the furnace. The color was bright orange, the flame on its surface did not stretch long, and the heat within had risen evenly.
“Now.”
Doria’s hammer fell.
Kang.
In the instant the sparks scattered between the two of them, Kang Mujin felt the faint presence of metal outside the smithy.
It was below on the mountain path, and three light pieces of iron were swaying at the same interval. Unlike a horse’s shoes, they moved in time with a person’s steps. One was a set of thin, long arrowheads, another a short sword at the waist. The last was a silver ornament shaped like a leaf.
Doria stopped his hammer as well.
“What is it?”
While Kang Mujin looked past the open door, a dwarf who had been guarding the mountain path came running up.
“Visitors!”
“Who is it, that you shout in the middle of work?”
“Elves. And they wear the crest of the Council of Elders.”
Doria stroked his beard down.
“What brings the long-eared folk all the way out here?”
Kang Mujin turned the test piece with his tongs, and the iron had not yet cooled.
Just then a long, quiet shadow fell across the smithy entrance. An elf in a deep green cloak stood beyond the threshold, a bow slung at her back, a silver leaf-shaped badge at her breast. Her gaze passed over Doria first and came to rest on the test piece bearing Kang Mujin’s mark.
“I have come to meet the human called Kang Mujin.”
It was a slow, clear voice.
Kang Mujin set the glowing iron on the anvil.
“That is me.”
The elf’s eyes turned to him, and in them there seemed to be more questions awaiting confirmation than goodwill.
“Silvana Eilen, envoy of the Forest Elf Council of Elders.”
She said,
“I have been ordered to observe you.”
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