eyes when they went glassy and still, and thanked the animal as he'd been taught. Finally, he drew a thick line in its blood down his forehead.
Retrieving his spear, he tied the feet together with the twine, and hoisted it across his shoulders. It was heavy, but he was strong. The pup found him when he was half way back to the tower. He had tied her to a post inside the building in an attempt to keep her out of mischeif, but the tactic clearly failed.
"What are you doing, little girl," he chided, continuing his trek with the heavy animal. She barked, joyous at finding him, and led the way back to the tower.
"You should tell me your name, you know. If you'd gotten lost, how would I have called out to you, to find you?" The pup wagged her tail with mad enthusiasm. She was becoming gangly, though her legs seemed a bit short in proportion to her body.
When they got back to the tower, he carefully lowered his kill next to the tanning frame. He took a long drink of water at the well, and began skinning it. The left hooves and the massive curling left horn he removed and set aside for the woman Loch. He found a nub of horn, no longer than a fingertip, under the hide of the forehead, the missing straight left horn that had never grown. He cut it out anyway, setting it aside with the right side horns.
His knife grew dull as he butchered the sheep, and he paused, looking for a stone to sharpen it with. It took a few moments of searching near the base of the tower, but he found a long flat stone, slightly rough to the touch. He licked his finger and touched the plane of the stone, feeling no imperfections at all.
Wetting the stone with water from Myrddin’s well, he sharpened the knife in the red light of sunset. The edge glowed slightly in the sun’s dying light, and when he tested the edge on his thumb, the blade parted the skin with the lightest touch.
The newly sharpened knife made short work of the rest of the butchering, and he set the meat to roast on long spits he found in a corner near the hearth. The heart, horn and hooves for Loch he placed in a wooden bowl and set on the bench in the smithy.
Myrddin was gone already when Weyland woke. Supervised only by an eagle soaring high above the tower, Weyland went about finding wood for a proper handle for the axe. A long limb of a wood he’d never seen before seemed right, and he pulled it out of the pile of materials at the back of the lean-to. The wood was hard, with a fine grain to it, but the newly sharpened knife cut through the bark easily, making swift work of rough-shaping a handle a bit longer than his arm and half the width of his wrist. A second handle, the length of his forearm was shaped out of the remnant, and he set it aside.
At mid-morning, when the sun was fully up and marching towards noon, Loch appeared at the entrance of the lean-to, surveying the basket, rough handles, and the whetstone. Weyland looked up from where he was coring out the soft center of the horn bud with the sharp point of his knife.
“Good. I will be back in the morning, and you will learn to make metal from the earth. Clear the forge and replace the leather on the bellows. Fill the sand-table, we will need to make your hammer first.”
The eagle circling high above screamed and circled away.
Myrddin came to him just after noon. "You are learning things," he said, turning the right curved ram's horn in his hands. "Learn the creation of things, I will show you the transformation of them." The skald picked up the cudgel, looking at the runes stamped in the leather of the handle.
"Skald," Weyland began, and when Myrddin simply looked at him, he continued. "I came as a messenger, with a gift from Bruni the Farmer for Myrddin the Skald. Will you let me finish that task?"
There was cunning in the green-gold gaze. "Your task, boy, is to bind things together. You've taken some things apart, and created things from those pieces. You will not be prepared to deliver any gifts from Bruni One-eye until you know in your own bones how to create things anew, and then to transform them."
Weyland looked away from that gaze, taking in the horns and hide, the handles for two tools laying rough on the bench, the cold forge, and beyond the lean-to the hide of the ram stretched on a frame, the wool drifting a bit in the breeze. As he turned back to Myrddin he saw for the first time a white feather pinned through the weave of the man's tunic. It glowed bright in the noontide sun for a moment, and then was a simple feather once again.
"Ah, yes. You have flown before. Did Bruni send you into the skies?"
"No. I was with my cousin, Hervor, daughter of Frig."
Myrddin threw his head back and laughed, clutching his ribs with the force of his mirth. "Oh, that's rich. It's no wonder Bruni sent you to me. Keep at your tasks, boy, make me those common things. If they're good enough, you probably won't die."
By late afternoon Weyland held up the horn-bud thimble, examining it critically. With the point of the knife - which had not required sharpening again, no matter what work he set it to - he carved a rune for protection. When it was done, holding it in his left hand, the knife in his right, he blew on it, clearing the tiny bits of bone from the edges and the inner curve of the thimble. As his breath swirled around the thimble it grew hot in his hand. He cursed and tossed it to his right hand, and the thing turned ice cold, the rune glowing bright in the shade of the smithy. He put it down on the bench before him, considering it.
"A thimble is not useful on its own," he said softly, thinking of his mother's embroidered tapestries, the figures telling the story of their family, probably burned when the longhouse burned, erased from the world except for the images in the minds of the survivors.
Looking over the bench, he found a finger-sized piece of bone, flat and rectangular. Decisively, he cut it lengthwise into three long pieces, whittling them to a sharp point on one end, and boreing a hole at the other. The three needles were perhaps too thick for working fine cloth, but they would pierce leather and cloth alike in the hands of one who knew that craft.
"Mother," he whispered, emotion stirring deep as he thought of his vision of her, crowned in bright-winged light as she lit her husband's funeral pyre. He thought of her hands embroidering a new panel on a new tapestry, one that showed the longhouse afire and an enormous monster striking down the king, a messenger sent quickly to the lord of Hart Hall. "Bless these needles, that they never break or dull, and that their thread does not fray, but whatever they pierce always speaks the truth. Lady Sigrun, witness this thimble, which shall protect the hands that use it with these needles."
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
There was no flare of light, no strange sensation as he arranged the needles and thimble before him. He reached to his right, for a piece of leather he'd set aside earlier, and his fingers found instead a length of fine woven cloth, a wool in dark brown and black. In his mind's eye, the memory of Sigrund turned her face up to him as he flew as a hawk overhead, and she smiled slightly.
He wrapped the needles and thimble tightly in the piece of wool and set them on a low shelf above the bench. Looking around, he discovered that the lean-to was larger than he originally thought, perhaps larger than it was originally, for it held more than just the bench and the forge and a rough cabinet for tools. As he looked up, the long slanted wall straightened, and a sloped thatch roof settled over the top of the room. He slowly stepped outside the smithy, and found that it had indeed grown up from a rough lean-to into a room added to the side of the tower. The outer wall of the smithy was made of the same stone of the tower.
"How very strange," he mused, touching the stone of that wall. It was warm, perhaps from the sunlight, but he also felt a sense of satisfaction in the way the stones fit together so closely.
He cleared away the shavings and scraps from his day's work, setting the whetstone on the shelf with the thimble and needles, hanging the right-curved horn and the straight horn. "I should boil the hooves and scraps down to glue," he mused. "Perhaps tomorrow."
Suddenly weary, he left the smithy and went to his bedroll, spread in a corner of the main tower room near the fireplace. The stones were hard under his bones, but the weariness of the day's work seeped into him. He saw a tiny creature in the fire, a slender thing that was less a shape than a flickering wink of a blue-hot eye. It disappeared in the blink of his eye, and he saw instead a darkling creature next to the fireplace, a thing of earth and clay and stone, basking in the warmth of the fire. Instead of alarming him, its presence reassured him, and he was instantly asleep.
Before dawn the next morning, Weyland washed his hands and face in water from the well, wishing that he had time and a proper tub to bathe. He took a burning brand from the tower fireplace and lit the fire in the forge. Soon it glowed orange, heat shimmering off of it. Loch appeared from the vanishing darkness as the sun rose above the tops of the eastern trees.
"The tower likes you, boy," she remarked, examining the newly expanded smithy. "Now, what are we going on about today? You need a hatchet to chop wood, but you also need a hammer." She set a heavy sack on the bench. It clicked and ground like there were rocks in the bag. "But first you need metal." He opened the bag, and saw irregular lumps of reddish stone.
The creation of metal from the reddish stone was easier than he expected. She would not tell him where she found the lumpy iron ingots, ignoring his question as they melted it down in the bloomery just outside the outer wall of the smithy. The clay structure had not been there the night before, but Weyland had stopped questioning these things when the smithy rearranged itself from a lean-to into a proper shop in the course of the day before.
They melted the iron, and she talked about the crushing, and refining, and the coal that she added in equal measure to the iron ore. She used a stone headed hammer to work the initial pieces, and as the sun set, they poured the first metal into the sand casting mold she had shown him how to create.
Weyland brought her water from the well in a bucket, for the bloomery and forge, and a pitcher, for them to drink. As he poured her a cup, she looked at him strangely.
"You've been drinking from Myrddin's well?" She asked, taking a deep drink herself. “Those waters could kill you, if your soul has no fire.”
He was tired and irritable, and the constant barrage of questions that peppered her instruction had pushed him to a limit he had never seen in himself. "That's what wells are for," he answered.
Loch laughed, a sound that bubbled up from her chest and throat in an entirely distracting way. She saw his look, and his blush when he noticed her glance. "Weyland, have you never been with a woman?"
"How does that even relate to the making of hammers and hatchets?" He fled to the smithy, and rearranged his tools on the already organized bench. He forced his mind to the things they had done that day, thinking of the processes, and the smith that lived in his father's village. Reluctantly, he re-emerged from the smithy. She was still standing between the bloomery and the pouring table, waiting for the molten stuff within to do something else in its process so they could cast the head of the hatchet the next day.
"Loch," he began, and tried valiantly to ignore her arch look and his body's reaction. "The smith at my village took three days with the iron in the bloomery til it was ready. I remember him saying that when he was making tools and nails, three days to bloom, two to cast and cool, and one to forge. We've only been working the iron for part of the day, and we're casting it already?"
She looked away, glancing at the sky. The eagle had been circling for most of the day, but was gone at present. Weyland wondered for a moment about that eagle, but she interrupted his thought by taking the top of the frame on the sand table and gently working it free. “I do things differently than your Magnus the Smith. I imagine there are a lot of things I do differently than him.”
“And will I be able to do these things your way, or will I have to relearn them later?” Weyland reflected that he hadn’t told Loch the name of the smith, any more than he’d shared his own given name after she’d starkly corrected him about that. But he didn’t ask - he was learning how to ask questions, and when the answer would not be pertinent to the task at hand.
“Hmmm,” she teased the hot chunk of metal out of its place in the mold. It was solid except for the slot for the handle. “Have you ever flown again, after that moment with your cousin?”
Another thing he had not told her. “Should I be able to?” he asked in return.
“If you can fly again, then you will do these things whatever way you like, my way, Magnus’ way, or your own way. Pick what you want, and keep it in mind for later - that sort of choice is one that stays with you.” The eagle screamed high above them, and Loch gathered the few things she’d brought with her, and left without another word.
“Be careful with that one, lad,” Myrddin said, coming around the curve of the tower from the opposite direction. Weyland jumped, startled, because he had, in fact, been watching her retreating form more than he was thinking about her words.
“Is she dangerous?” Weyland was thinking about her questions about Myrddin’s well.
“As dangerous as any woman I’ve ever met,” the skald replied. “Which is very, and most of them.”
“Another skald comes,” Myrddin said in a completely different tone of voice. His words were dark and the tone sonorous, and his eyes were half closed. “Because of things that will happen, and things that must not happen, you are not here when the skald arrives.” Weyland looked around the smithy and the work area outside with dismay.
“But I’m not finished with the things you’ve given me to do. I can’t leave until I’ve given you -”
Myrddin put his hands over his ears and screamed, a bellow that surely was heard as far away as Bruni’s farm. “You do not talk of your leaving, no, no, no! Nor of tasks, or things that have been finished, or not.” Weyland took a breath to reply, and Myrddin pointed a finger at him. “No, enough of your talking. No more talking, brat, not from you, not from a cat.” He snapped his fingers and drew overlapping circles in the air between them with his palms, ending the gesture with a sharp clap that resonated in Weyland’s head and ears and knocked him over entirely.
That was the moment when Weyland became a wildcat.