In Prince Wigia’s tenth year, on his name-day, King Nithad brought the prince to the smithy himself. Weyland set his hand to carving out the mold for a brooch, carefully digging the curved prongs of the settings from the clay that would shape the molten metals when they were poured.
“This sword is yours, my son,” Nithad said to Wigia, and Weyland’s gouge slipped a very little in the clay, the simmering rage glowing in his gut. “It was made in the month you were born by the finest smith in all the land, a man who is also a fine warrior, a slayer of dragons and men.”
The prince looked shyly at Weyland, and the rage abated a very little. In that moment, the smith knew despair, for he saw in himself the waves of violence surrounding his soul. The violent maelstrom wrapping, swirling closer and closer to his heart of hearts. He knew that when even the boy could not bring him peace he would lose the very essence of himself. The shackle answered his despair with a fierce jab of agony, delighting in his misery and magnifying it. Weyland’s expression did not betray the pain, though sweat broke out on his entire body.
“I will continue to train, my lord king, and prove myself worthy of the sword.” Wigia touched the blade lightly, and it only bit him a little, a thin line of blood beading his fingers as the sword tasted him. Weyland felt the weapon begin to sing, recognizing in the blood of the boy the blood of its maker, and the smith nodded once, satisfied.
King Nithad took the boy away again. Later, the princess Beadhid brought him a rich meal of venison and roasted vegetables, bread and a skin of fine wine. “The king is pleased with your work, and the prince is delighted with the sword,” she said. She sat on the bench next to him as he ate, just out of reach. Her long sleeve slipped up over her arm, and he saw a bruise around her wrist.
Silent, he touched his own wrist, looking up at the woman. She tugged the sleeve down again. “I have a suitor, a king from another land.”
“Did he hurt you,” Weyland asked, the first words he’d spoken to her in several years.
She shrugged. “No, that was the twins, playing a game. As for my suitor, he is a king. I would not be his first wife, or second, or maybe even the third.”
“Does this king have so many wives at once?” Weyland was puzzled. The rage simmered and swirled, but did not rise.
“He is widowed. His third wife gave him a daughter last summer, but died after. He wants more than anything to have a son. I do not want to marry him, to leave my place here, even if my brothers are cruel and my father hard-spirited. I think your cat would miss me.” The beast in question came and curled up in the princess’s lap, hissing once at Weyland as he ate his fine meal.
“If you do not want to marry this king, then do not marry him,” Weyland advised, wiping his mouth on his ragged sleeve.
“I wish it were so simple,” she replied, and took away his tray. The guard watched her leave, sympathy in his eyes.
Thinking of the animals the brothers had left for him, broken and bleeding on his floor, thinking of the cat’s whiskers burned away and the bruise on the wrist of the princess, he laid out his materials and began to work.
He slept little that night, not unusual for his days in that workshop. Sleep was rare, and always tormented him with dreams of times before his imprisonment, moments when he remembered a kind witch who traveled with him for a while, or his cousin with her black eyes and blacker hair, or another girl with haunting gray eyes and hair full of shadows. When he woke from those dreams, the shackle on his ankle would torment him with lingering fiery pain crawling up his leg, a slow burning fire that left no mark on his flesh and an indelible scar on his soul.
In his sleeplessness that day, he forged a different sort of weapon. The blade was no longer than his hand and half the width of his finger, thin and graceful. He carved a slim sheath for the thing from a fragrant wood, and carefully crafted an ornamental head, a flower in mother-of-pearl, petals closed tightly around a yellow gem at its center.
When Beadhid brought him his morning meal, he ignored her as usual, continuing his work. He set copper and silver and gold to melt in the bloomery and curled up on his cot to rest for a bit, falling into an unusually deep and dreamless sleep. He woke only when the princess brought him his evening meal.
Standing stiffly, he called to her as she began to leave, never facing him. “Princess, wait. I have made something for you alone.” She paused, turning as he went to the bench and lifted the slender thing he’d created. He raised it between them but did not yet hand it to her. “For your hair,” he drew his finger down its length, satin smooth, the flowered head glowing in the firelight. “And for your heart,” he pulled lightly on the head and a gleaming dagger emerged, strong and slim and razor sharp, the point so sharp as to be almost invisible.
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She accepted the bodkin and its sheath. “This is beautiful,” she said quietly.
“Wear it in your hair, create a new fashion at court, where ladies hold up their braided hair with slender jeweled hairpins. For you, if a man tries to harm you, tries to force himself upon you, this will reach his heart, or his vitals, or even pierce into his skull through eye or ear.” He carefully demonstrated the strikes. “Give him no length of wimple or hanging braid to control your head, and twist your wrist thus,” he put her small hand around his large wrist and demonstrated. “Guard, if you would assist us.” The guard, wary of the mad smith and respectful of the princess, came away from the door and stood very still as Weyland showed the woman the strikes once again, and then made her do them herself.
“You must push harder than you think, if you come to need the blade,” the guard added quietly, and Weyland nodded his agreement.
“Take off the wimple, princess, and pin up your hair now, before you leave.” Weyland instructed, and turned again to the bench, rummaging among the finished pieces until he found a silver comb to help support her long pale braids.
“I don’t think I could do that, stab a man thus,” she said, her voice shaking a bit.
“Then poison the bodkin. You should not have to endure these things.” Weyland gently grasped her hand again, his fingers brushing the ring he’d wrought so many years before, and pushed up her sleeve to reveal the bruises there. “Make them regret harming you.”
She nodded, not looking either of them in the eye, and left the smithy with her pale hair piled up, secured with silver combs and a slender hairpin, the delicate flower nestled into the braids.
The guard looked speculatively at Weyland. “You are not as mad as they say you are,” he said warily.
Weyland touched the pool of rage and pain and despair, felt the urge to rend and tear and kill, and shook his head. “No. I am much worse than they say.”
The twin bastard princes came late that night, bringing with them a fox they’d trapped and maimed for sport. It was still alive when they tossed it onto Weyland’s cot. He sat up, and the creature bit his scarred hand, crazed with pain and terror. The princes stood back, grinning at their sport, waiting to see what Weyland would do. The night guard looked on, his hand on the hilt of his sword.
Gently, so very gently, staring Raiden and then Regin in the eye with a deadly calm, Weyland snapped the neck of the fox. When its struggling jaws ceased gasping for breath, for even that was not a quick death, he set it down on the floor and stood. He was not as tall as the twin princes, but years at the forge made him broad, his limbs powerful, even the maimed left arm and leg. He grasped his hammer, which was always near to hand after they had hidden it from him as boys, and raised it casually, not thinking at all about what might come, for in the thinking of things would come the wave of agony.
Something in his eyes, in the way he held the hammer and the readiness of his feet, made the twins straighten and step back. Faster than thought, Weyland struck out, not with his hammer but his fist. The blow caught Raiden on the jaw, rocking his head back and knocking him to the floor. Regin stepped forward to defend his brother, and Weyland casually tapped him on the shoulder with the hammer, shattering the prince’s collarbone.
Regin screamed in pain, and the guardsman stepped forward, sword drawn, and stepped between Weyland and the princes he had laid low. If the man stood with Weyland to his left, and the princes to his right, facing neither, it could not be remarked as strange, but he looked first to Weyland and then the young men as they gathered themselves, Raiden roughly helping his brother stand.
Raiden mumbled something incoherent through a broken jaw, and the bastard princes hurried out of the smithy.
The guard looked to Weyland. “Are you injured?”
“I did not kill them. That is injury enough to my soul. I should have killed them.” His leg buckled with the wave of agony from the shackle.
“I wasn’t even here,” the guard said smoothly, moving back to his post. “I’d gone to do my business, and you were sleeping both before I left and after I got back.”
Weyland gently put the body of the fox in the furnace, pumping the bellows to raise the fires and cremate the small thing. He did not keep even its teeth or tail. The thought of teeth, though, settled into a vision, an inspiration, and he curled up with his hammer in his hand, thinking of uses for teeth.
It wasn’t but a week later when Beadhid did not bring Weyland’s breakfast. Instead, an extra guard came when the watch changed, placing his tray on the work table where he usually ate. He ignored the tray, instead pouring a gold and silver alloy into the brooch mold he’d been carving for a week.
Raiden came that afternoon with three guardsmen Weyland had never seen before. He ordered the watchman away, and grabbed a glowing hot hook from the forge. He motioned to his guardsmen, and they wrestled Weyland to the ground, forcing his face into the flagstones of the floor with bruising force. The pain from the shackle was so great that struggle was impossible, and when his shirt was ripped away Raiden beat him bloody with his own tools. Eventually, he lost consciousness, wishing only that the darkness would carry him away.
Beadhil’s soft voice woke him. She was giving instructions about being careful, and something else that made no sense at all until other hands moved him from the floor. He blacked out again, welcoming the void.