The Better Sword

The old sword had been failing for weeks.

He had been aware of it for most of that time and had not done anything about it, partly because he had not known that doing something about it was an option, and partly because the failing had been gradual enough to keep looking like a bad day.

It had failed him all the way up to Level 5, which arrived in a cellar full of rats and so quietly that he only found it that evening, reading his card on the stairs.

[LEVEL 5] The level before it had taken a fortnight. This one had taken three weeks. He noticed the widening and filed it beside the woodpile.

It did not hold an edge. That was the main thing. He would put an edge on it in the evening, badly, with a stone Maren had lent him and had eventually given him outright rather than watch him continue, and by the middle of the following afternoon the edge would be a suggestion.

It also turned in his hand on a bad angle. Twice.

The second time cost him about four seconds in a fight that had not had four seconds spare, and Maren had said nothing at all about it, which was worse than if she had.

* * * *

He had been apologising for it to people who did not care.

That was the part he noticed afterward and found faintly humiliating.

He had said something to Itta about it on the road, unprompted. He had said something to Poppy twice. He had, on one occasion, explained to a man in the hall who had not asked and who had been waiting for a completely different conversation.

Nobody had cared. Nobody had thought less of him. It was a low-tier blade and everybody started with a low-tier blade and the entire subject was so uninteresting to the population of Grennet that his explanations had been landing in a room where nobody had asked a question.

He had been apologising because the sword was the only thing he had brought with him.

He did not work that out until much later.

* * * *

The smith was at the north end of the crossing and had a queue, as always.

Alaric had passed it a hundred times. He had never gone in, and had not been able to say why, and had assumed it was because he had nothing to bring.

He had something to bring now.

He stood in the queue for forty minutes and watched the transactions ahead of him, because watching the transaction before you attempt it had become his method and had not failed yet.

Everybody did roughly the same thing. They put a thing on the counter. A pane came up. There was a short discussion of numbers. Coin changed hands and they went away with a thing that was the same shape as the one they had come in with.

He put the sword on the counter.

* * * *

The panel walked him through it.

It came up over the counter, angled toward him, and it was the most helpful thing he had encountered since the quest description at Ashfield.

[UPGRADE AVAILABLE]

It listed the materials. It listed the cost, which was most of a month. It listed what he had and what he lacked, and the lack was small and purchasable from a bin at the smith's elbow.

And then it did the thing that stopped him.

It showed him the result.

A preview, rendered above the counter, of a blade he did not own yet. Longer in the tang, better balanced at the guard, with a set of numbers beside it and every one of the numbers higher than the numbers beside his.

The numbers were not close.

* * * *

He read them twice, and then read the small text underneath, which was where the actual information was, because he had learned that much.

The old sword would be consumed.

That was the word the panel used. Consumed. Its material would go into the new one, along with the purchased material from the bin, and what came out the other side would be a single blade.

He stood at a counter with a queue behind him and looked at that word for slightly too long.

"You want it or not?" said the smith, not unkindly.

"Yes," said Alaric.

* * * *

The smith gave him both, which was not what he had expected.

That was the mechanics of it: the new blade first, made and finished and set on the counter, and the old one beside it, waiting to go into the bin with the rest of the material for the next job.

"Take it up," said the smith. "Get the feel. If the balance is wrong I can shim the pommel, but it will not be wrong."

Alaric picked up the new sword.

It was not wrong. It was better in every way his hands could report, and his hands were the part of him that knew about swords. The weight sat forward in exactly the place the old one had never quite managed. The grip was longer and his last two fingers had somewhere to be.

It was, unarguably, a better sword.

He put it down and picked up the old one to give it to the smith.

* * * *

He could not hand it over.

That was the whole of the event and it took place entirely inside a couple of seconds.

His arm came up. The smith put a hand out. And the transfer did not occur.

He was not gripping it hard. There was no drama in it. His hand simply did not open, in the way a hand does not open when it has not been told to, and he stood at the counter with a lump of failing steel in it and his arm halfway out.

He looked at his own hand.

He had by now a small collection of instances in which his body had acted without consulting him, and he had catalogued all of them, and every single one had been an action. The arm going for the sword on the forest track. The feet going to the left flank. The fingers going to VITALITY.

This was the first one that was a refusal.

* * * *

He stood there long enough that the smith asked whether he was well.

"Yes," said Alaric.

"You've gone a colour."

"I am well."

The smith looked at him, and looked at the sword, and did the arithmetic that people in trade do, and arrived somewhere entirely wrong.

"It's a poor blade, friend. If somebody gave it you, they'd not thank you for keeping it in that state."

"Nobody gave it me."

"Then where'd you get it?"

Alaric opened his mouth.

He had an answer. It was: it was lying in the grass under a tree on the morning I began, and I do not know how it got there, and it has never had a name, and it fitted my hand before my hand had ever held anything.

He said, "I have had it a while."

The smith accepted that, because it was the kind of answer people gave, and went to deal with the next person in the queue.

* * * *

He paid for the new blade and kept the old one.

It cost more that way. He had to buy the material from the bin outright rather than offsetting it, and the difference was a dozen bits, and a dozen bits was not nothing to a man who had been paid in three stacks on a table a month ago.

He paid it.

He did the arithmetic afterward, on the way back, and established that a dozen bits was two days of low-tier contracts, and that he had spent two days of his life on the privilege of carrying a failing sword he was never going to use again.

He could not make that come out sensible.

He kept walking.

* * * *

He wrapped it in sacking at the stable and put it in his pack.

He did it carefully, which he noticed while doing it, and which annoyed him. He wrapped the blade properly, along the edge, the way you wrap a thing you intend to keep, and he tied it at both ends, and then he moved two other items to make a space for it rather than putting it on top.

Then he sat back on his heels and looked at his own pack.

He could not produce one sentence explaining why.

He tried. He was sitting alone in a stable at the end of an afternoon and he had a great deal of time and nobody watching, and he tried honestly and at length.

It was not sentiment, because sentiment required a memory and he had none attached to it.

It was not value, because it had none and he had just established that in a queue.

It was not caution. He turned that one over carefully because it was the only respectable option, the idea that a spare blade was a sensible thing to carry, and he discarded it, because a blade that would not hold an edge was not a spare and he knew it.

He got as far as: it was there on the first morning.

And found that this was true and did not explain anything.

* * * *

Poppy called him sentimental at supper.

She had watched him pack and had waited a full hour before starting, which for her was restraint on a heroic scale.

"You kept it."

"Yes."

"It doesn't do anything. It didn't do anything when it worked."

"Yes."

"Alaric." She put her spoon down. "It is a lump of scrap. It is a lump of scrap that failed you twice and nearly took your hand off, and you have paid a dozen bits to carry it around in a bag."

He agreed with every part of that.

She then mimed weeping over the pack, at some length, with sound effects, until Itta made a small noise at the other end of the table that was almost certainly a laugh.

He bore it. He had discovered that being laughed at by Poppy cost him nothing at all, which was itself a fairly large discovery and one he had not expected.

* * * *

Maren did not join in.

He noticed that at the time and thought nothing of it, because she rarely joined in.

She looked at the pack.

Then she looked at the wrapped shape inside it, and it was a wrapped shape and there was nothing to see, and she looked at it for about two seconds longer than there was anything to look at.

Then she looked at him.

He met it. He had learned by then that meeting Maren's look was better than avoiding it, and that avoiding it produced a note in a ledger somewhere that he would not enjoy.

She did not ask.

He was expecting the question. He had it half prepared, in the sense that he had nothing to say and had accepted that he had nothing to say and had decided to say so plainly.

She did not ask it.

She said something about the following morning's contract and the state of the road, and the table went with her, and Poppy said something about the road, and the whole thing turned over and was gone.

He would think about that afterward.

She had not let him off. That was not what it had been. She had looked at a man carrying a thing he could not explain, and had decided that today was not the day, and had put it somewhere.

She never mentioned it again.

* * * *

He carried both from then on.

The new sword on his back, in the position his shoulders chose, which took about a day to re-settle and then never moved again.

And the old one in the pack, wrapped, at the bottom, under two other things.

It was heavier than it should have been. He established that early and could not explain it either, and eventually decided it was probably the sacking, and did not believe himself.

He took it out sometimes. Not often. Twice in the first month, alone, at the end of a day, for no purpose he could name. He would unwrap it and look at the tarnish and the marks along the flat where the light caught them differently at different angles, and then wrap it again and put it back.

He never once considered leaving it anywhere.

That was the part he would have found most interesting, if he had ever looked at it directly. Not that he kept it. That the alternative never came up. In four months of carrying a useless object across half a province, through inns and dungeons and a flooded quarry and a road north, the thought I could leave this behind did not arrive one single time.

It was not a decision he kept making.

It had been made somewhere he could not get to, and the getting to it was not on offer.