Forged in Fire
Page 1
This book is dedicated to those adventurers who question societal norms, explore the dangerous and forbidden, push the limits, risk greatness, and dare to dream. Never give up, never lose hope.
Acknowledgments
Forged in Fire is the latest installment in the Sarah Beauhall series. It’s definitely been a steep learning curve, this professional writing gig. There are a lot of folks who have helped me along the way.
First I’d like to acknowledge my family for all their support and the occasional boot in the rear that it took to make this the novel that it is. You make all of this worthwhile.
My support network stretches out to a huge array of friends. You are all wonderful people who help me get through my days. From the occasional gaming session, movies, e-mail, lunches, and even phone calls—each of you makes my life richer.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the writing family I have been lucky enough to join. You friends who are on the same journey as I are all a wealth of love and support. Thank you for the midnight sanity checks, the convention decompression, and the moments of exhausted camaraderie.
My editors, Claire Eddy and Kristin Sevick, are wonderful people who deserve accolades beyond this silly little acknowledgment. I love working with you. You make the publishing aspect of this journey a joy.
To my most excellent agent, Cameron McClure, who has a keen eye for story, good solid advice, and a sharp wit, thanks for all the help.
To Dan Dos Santos, thanks for another astounding cover, and for making folks stop and look at my book. You create magic.
And finally, thank you to the fans, bloggers, critics, and book reviewers who help spread the word of Sarah and her adventures. Thanks for boosting the signal.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Chapter Sixty-three
Chapter Sixty-four
Chapter Sixty-five
Chapter Sixty-six
Chapter Sixty-seven
Chapter Sixty-eight
Chapter Sixty-nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-one
Chapter Seventy-two
Chapter Seventy-three
Chapter Seventy-four
Chapter Seventy-five
Chapter Seventy-six
Chapter Seventy-seven
Chapter Seventy-eight
Chapter Seventy-nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-one
Chapter Eighty-two
Chapter Eighty-three
Chapter Eighty-four
Chapter Eighty-five
Chapter Eighty-six
Chapter Eighty-seven
Chapter Eighty-eight
Tor Books by J. A. Pitts
About the Author
Copyright
One
I kept Katie back and to the right of me as we followed the she-troll into the clearing. Here the snow was deep enough to see the paths the troll had made and to see where she was heading. Even with the sheep slung over her shoulder and one of Katie’s crossbow bolts in her right thigh, the she-troll had stayed ahead of us, weaving in and out of the trees, climbing for the last mile or more. Not for the first time this winter, I swore over the loss of my Doc Martens. The trainers sucked in this rough terrain.
“Be careful, Sarah,” Katie called to me in a hoarse whisper.
I glanced back at her, letting a grin grow on my face. We so had this.
Halfway across the clearing, the troll spun around, launching the sheep at us. I barely got my head turned around fast enough to dive to the right. Katie wasn’t as quick. She dropped her crossbow while trying to avoid the ovine missile, but went down under two hundred pounds of meat and wool.
“You okay?” I called, rolling to my feet, keeping between Katie and the troll.
The she-troll roared, overwhelming Katie’s reply. I drew my sword Gram and squared to face the beast, expecting her to fall on me, but she stepped back, ripped the bolt from her leg, and screamed once again. Blood ran down her rough britches and stained the snow beneath her huge feet.
“I know you, berserker,” the troll growled. “I will not let you destroy what is mine.”
“You’re one of Jean-Paul’s beasties, then?” I called. Her only answer was to scoop a fallen tree limb from the ground and lumber at me.
I caught the downward stroke of her cudgel against Gram. She was strong. I nearly fell beneath the sheer power of the blow. I slid backward on the ice, barely keeping my feet.
“Not anymore,” she grunted, swinging at me again.
I parried, spinning around. It was a beautiful move, at least in my mind. It should have caught her in the neck, smashing through the arteries. Instead, my shoes slipped on the ice and I stumbled, missing her by half a foot. She lunged forward, punched me in the chest with the cudgel, and slashed my right leg with her claws.
Lucky for me, the universe is random and capricious. The wound in her leg kept her from putting her full strength and balance in the blows, so I didn’t lose my leg. As it was, she punched through my chain mail and sliced into my upper thigh.
I screamed with the pain and fell backward. Luckily, rocks and ice broke my fall. I clamped my right hand over my thigh and kept Gram up between me and the killing machine. She loomed over me and roared. Spittle flew over me, and for a moment she looked like King Kong raging on Skull Island.
“Oh, shit,” I said, trying to scramble backward with one good leg. She had me dead to rights, only we’d both forgotten about Katie.
Katie smashed the crossbow into the side of the troll’s head, causing her ugliness to lumber to the side. I rolled up onto my good knee and shoved Gram upward, sending six inches of black steel into
the troll’s neck.
The troll jerked backward, flailing with both arms. She caught Katie a glancing blow. She staggered backward to fall against one of the old oaks.
I forced myself to my feet as the troll fell to her knees, clutching her throat. She looked at me, really looked into me, pleading. I could see the pain and fear in her huge green eyes. She opened her mouth, gasping something through the foaming blood. I couldn’t make out the words. Tears rolled down her pocked face as she tried over and over to say something. I think it was “mercy,” but I couldn’t be sure. After a minute her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fell backward. The forest shook with her falling.
“Damn it,” I shouted, looking around to Katie, who was limping toward me.
“Hang on,” Katie called, pulling her pack and guitar from the underbrush. She fell to her knees at my side and pushed me onto my back. “Let me stop the bleeding,” she ordered.
I leaned back on one elbow and watched as she peeled the chain and cloth from the wound. I grunted as she pulled several links out of the rent flesh. “Fuck, that hurts,” I growled.
She looked around, picked up a small stick from the ground, and thrust it at me. “Bite down on this,” she said and pushed me onto my back.
I bit down onto the stick and tried not to make too much noise as she dressed the wound.
“Not too deep,” she assured me, pulling her first aid kit from her pack. She’d been training with our doctor friend Melanie for weeks—basic wound care and treatment. She used an irrigation syringe to clean the wound with distilled water. Then she had me hold it partially closed while she applied four wound closure strips.
“Gotta keep it open some,” she said, grimacing. “Can’t risk infection.”
She slathered the wound with antibiotic ointment and applied a sterile bandage over it. I held that down tight, applying pressure to help it stop bleeding while she tore off several lengths of muslin and duct tape to finish off the dressing.
“At least you didn’t wreck the runes,” she said, cupping my calf.
I had runes running down my left calf—Thurisaz, Dagaz, Kenaz, Gebo, Tiwaz—the same runes that ran down the length of the fuller on my sword, Gram. I inherited them when I became tuned in with the blade. Just popped up on my calf one day, pretty as you please. Damn funny thing about magic swords. They mark you in some ways. I just never figured it would be so literal.
She did a quick and efficient job of binding the wound. Within a few minutes, I was standing. I wouldn’t be running any marathons, but I could get around.
I cleaned Gram and sheathed her before examining the troll.
She was dead, for sure.
“What was that at the end?” Katie asked, looking around for a branch long enough for me to use as a cane.
“I think she said ’mercy,’” I said. “She was already dying, knew it by the look in her eyes. Why would she ask for mercy then and not when we had her cornered?”
“No idea,” Katie said. “But she was definitely making a stand here. We should look around.”
We hadn’t gone very far across the clearing when we heard crying. I looked at Katie, who shrugged and pushed forward, her short sword out. I pulled Gram from her sheath and hobbled forward, leaning on the staff.
Beyond the clearing, where the rocky slope pushed upward, we found the troll’s lair. The opening was fairly low, but firelight shown from inside. Katie went in ahead of me. The opening jagged to the left and expanded into a huge, dry cave.
The place was amazing. Most of the floor was covered in sheepskins, and several pieces of crude furniture were placed around a central fire pit. The cave went back about thirty feet. The smoke from the fire wound its way upward, being pulled out through a natural chimney of some sort.
A spit was erected over the fire and several cook pots sat off to one side. Katie and I looked at each other in astonishment. It was dry, warm, and homey.
“Christ!” I breathed. “How long has she been here?”
That’s when we heard the cry again. I’d forgotten it in the shock of seeing the way the cave had been made into a home.
“Oh, no,” Katie said, walking to the back of the cave.
I hobbled after her, expecting the worst. What I saw, however, was beyond even my worst nightmares.
In the back, buried in shadow, was a handmade crib. By the time I made it around the fire, Katie had lifted a troll baby out of the crib and was holding it to her chest, trying to quiet it.
“Sarah,” she started, her voice thick with tears. “There’s a second one here.”
I stumped over to her and looked down into the crib. A second troll baby lay sleeping. I looked at Katie, stunned. “What the hell do we do now?”
“I think he’s hungry,” she said.
I took two more steps and collapsed into a rough-hewn chair. It gave a little, and I realized it was a rocker. This was where she nursed them.
“What have we done?”
Katie handed me the child. “Hold him. I need to find what she used for diapers.”
I held the kid out from me, eyeing the drooping cloth diaper. “Great,” I said, rocking forward and holding him over the floor. I did NOT want any of that leaking on me.
He looked a lot like a human baby, only longer, like he’d been stretched. He had the normal eyes, ears, and mouth you’d expect on any humanoid.
The thought stopped me. How utterly bizarre my life had become. Humanoid, indeed. Just a year ago, I’d had a normal life as a blacksmith in Seattle, one of the coolest cities on the planet. I was shoeing horses and making swords for the local ren faires. I had taxes and lattes, too much traffic and not enough income. Then I reforged a magic sword and the dragons took notice of my sorry ass. Now I’m plagued with troll babies and dragons, giants, dwarves, magic swords, and ancient Norse gods. How had the whole damn world managed to miss all this hiding in plain sight? Why wasn’t this front-page news all over the globe? Instead, I sat with an orphaned troll and was wishing for nothing more than a hot shower and a thin crust pepperoni pizza.
The child’s fingers were long and thin with no talons. I guess they grew in later. Made me wonder if you could trim those back like fingernails. Really, he pretty much looked like a normal kid. His skin was a bit knobbly, thicker than mine, I’m sure.
“Any luck?” I called back to Katie. When I looked back, he had the greatest little smile. Probably gas. That’s what my ma would’ve said.
Katie found a stack of cloths we assumed were diapers and changed the little monster. His nappy was heavy with urine. Katie rolled it up and took it to the back of the cave. “This clears things up,” she said, carrying a shield back into the light. “This is one of ours.”
It bore the emblem of Black Briar. Nidhogg had been right, damn her icy heart.
“So she was a survivor of the battle back in May,” I said, looking down at the mewling troll baby in my lap. “She probably killed some of our friends.”
“Good odds,” Katie said, taking the child from me and sitting on the edge of a pallet of sheepskin that looked like a bed. “But she only took sheep and such since then. And didn’t try to head back north or harass us further.”
“True enough. But the farmers who lost those sheep weren’t too happy.” And Nidhogg, the dragon who claimed these parts, was none too pleased to have a beastie raiding her territory.
The second baby woke then, and we repeated the diaper routine. I ended up on the makeshift bed with the first troll baby beside me while Katie carried the second on her hip. “I don’t see any bottles or anything,” she said. “I guess she could’ve been nursing them still.” She held the second one and looked into its mouth, worming her finger around past the tight, rubbery lips.
“Plenty of teeth,” she said, pulling her finger back quickly and wiping it on her shirt. “And sharp.”
“Maybe they’re already eating meat,” I offered. “They’re not like human babies.”
So Katie returned to the cleari
ng and dragged in the sheep the mother had been bringing to feed her children.
“If they weren’t hurting anyone, why’d Nidhogg want you to look into this?” she asked me as she began cutting small chunks from the sheep carcass.
Both troll babies were sitting on the bed with me and actually giggled and clapped as we fed them cubes of raw sheep.
“Oh, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say she was testing me, testing my loyalty. She has high expectations for her servants. That and I’d wager a punishment for causing Qindra to be locked in that house out in Chumstick.”
“Not your fault the witch got trapped with all those ghosties,” Katie said.
“Fault doesn’t come into it. It’s spite and obligation.”
She didn’t reply to that, just worked in silence. We’d had that conversation too many times—what with Julie’s staying at my apartment since the dragon attack in May and my volunteering to help cover Qindra’s duties for the last few weeks. The only plus to it all in Katie’s mind was that I was sleeping at her place pretty regularly now.
I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t have to be this hard. I loved her; she knew it. There are just times when you have to stand up and do the right thing, even if it isn’t easy. Yes, Nidhogg was a dragon. But she had a kingdom to run, and the witch Qindra had been her face to the world. With her incapacitated, I had to step up. It was quid pro quo.
Qindra had helped our people—had come to our aid during and after the battle with the dragon Jean-Paul. Hell, she’d agreed to try and cleanse Anezka’s property in Chumstick as a favor to me. It wasn’t her fault that my substitute blacksmith mentor, Anezka, was bat-shit crazy. Nor was it her responsibility that Anezka’s home and smithy had been built on the vortex of a major ley line that ran down from the wilds of the Cascade Mountains. No one knew the whole place was a haunted house waiting to explode. Well, maybe the evil necromancer dude Anezka had dated and dumped. I’m sure he’d had a clue, bastard.
It felt right, standing in for Qindra. She was locked inside that magic dome she’d thrown over the property, protecting everyone from the demented and nasty spirits that were being drawn to Anezka’s place. My running a few errands for Nidhogg paled in comparison. Of course, I’m sure the troll I’d just killed would’ve rather I stayed out of things.