Mark Anthony - Kindred Spirits

“Oh,” Flint said, “I suppose she wouldn’t seem pretty to your tall, slender elven friends, but we fourteen frawls and harms think she’s just fine. Sure, she carries some extra weight…”

“Try bearing fourteen children and see what it does to your figure,” Ailea interjected.

“… but she has a sweet face, and she cooks like one of the gods. Nice big portions, too.” Flint patted his protruding gut, then blushed, straightened, and attempted to pull in his belly. Ailea’s smile grew wider.

“What’s your father like?” Tanis asked.

“Ah, lad, my father died when I was just a youth. Bad heart. Runs in the Fireforge line, among the men, at least.”

“Your poor mother,” Ailea said softly.

Flint nodded. “She held the family together in those years after Papa died. Set my elder brother Aylmar to work at Papa’s forge-and occasionally took a turn herself, on lighter tasks.”

Ailea rose quietly and dropped the lunch dishes in the boiling water that had cooked the corn. When Tanis raised his eyebrows, she smiled and said, “No point wasting water. This will clean those plates just fine.” Then she resumed her seat and motioned for Flint to go on.

“I was the second-born,” the dwarf said dreamily. “After Papa was gone, Mama put me in charge of the barn. I remember one early spring morning in Hillhome. I came out of the barn, trying to get away from the damnable smell of cheesemaking, and I gazed around me at the hills and the conifers.” He sighed. “Qualinost is beautiful, lad, but so is Hillhome. Still, it was a small, small village and ultimately I had to leave it to see the world.”

“I’d like to see it someday,” Tanis said, then prompted, “Your mother…?”

Flint frowned, thinking. “Oh. I was standing there in the open barn door, enjoying the sun and the weather and the trees and the green hills, and Mama came out on the porch and hollered”-and he switched into the falsetto again-” ‘Flint Fireforge, don’t you close the barn door after the early bird catches the worm!’ ” He jiggled with silent laughter. “I figured that meant she wanted me to go back to work.”

He stood and stretched, then stepped over to the boiling water to fish out the plates with his forge tongs. “Once,” he said, turning back toward his guests, “when my younger sister Fidelia was complaining about how poor we were, and how much the mayor’s children had, my mother looked at us all and said, ‘Oh, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.’ ”

Eld Ailea and Tanis waited for the punch line, but Flint shook his tongs and said, “We were stunned. For a moment, we didn’t say a word. She’d gotten it right!”

He paused, still holding the tongs. “Then, I recall, the fourteen of us started to laugh, and we couldn’t stop. I still remember Aylmar, sprawled on his back on the stone floor, holding his sides and giggling until he couldn’t breathe. Even my brother Ruberik, who normally has the sense of humor of an anvil, found himself gasping for air, he was laughing so hard. When we came to ourselves, we realized that Mama was out in the kitchen, muttering and banging the kettles together in a rage.

“She didn’t speak to any of us for days. And, what’s worse, she refused to cook!” He looked aghast.

“What did you do?” Ailea asked.

“Aylmar and I went to work at the forge. We fashioned a sign for her, bending slender bars of iron into words and fastening them to a piece of barn wood. We put it up over the fireplace for her. It said…” He suddenly erupted in a chortle. “It said…” Flint coughed, and wiped his streaming eyes.

“It said…?” Tanis prodded.

“ ‘Waste makes haste!’ ”

“But that’s not right.” Tanis caught himself. “Oh, of course.”

“She loved it,” Flint said. “Oh my, she just loved it.”

The three decided that, notwithstanding Flint’s impending deadline, it was too lovely a day to spend indoors. So they gathered up the most portable of Flint’s metalworking tools and headed toward the mountains just south of Qualinost. While the two rivers guarded the city on three sides, to the south was a forested slope rising to a ridge of mauve granite. On the opposite side, the top of the ridge formed a sheer cliff a thousand feet high. Tanis persuaded Flint to make the trek, which was not all that steep anyway, by pointing out that the ridge offered a marvelous view of the mountains of Thorbardin, the ancient homeland of Flint’s people.

“A little exercise never hurt a dwarf,” Flint replied then, and led the way. And thus he was the first to view, beyond an undulating sea of green forest, the sharp-toothed mountains of Thorbardin, looking almost like dark ships sailing on the southern horizon.

He found a comfortable spot at the foot of a tree and spent several hours inlaying the medallion, nearly completing the work, while Tanis and Eld Ailea walked, talked, and gathered herbs for the midwife’s potpourris and potions.

Hours later, dusk was beginning to creep through the city as Flint made his way alone to his shop in its grove of aspen and fruit trees; Tanis was off escorting the midwife home. Flint’s dwelling, of course, was dark; he’d not fired the forge for several days because of the summer heat and because this portion of the medallion-crafting process involved working only cold medal.

The blooms of the morning glories that were entwined about the door were twisted tightly shut against the descending twilight, but one of the new rosebushes Flint had planted next to the stoop was just beginning to bloom. Flint plucked one of the pale yellow blossoms and inhaled its perfume. He sighed. It didn’t do to forget life’s small pleasures. Notwithstanding the dispute with Lord Tyresian, the day had been a good one.

Perhaps a mug of ale-Flint’s favorite of those small pleasures-would be in order this evening, he mused as he opened the door of his shop and started to step through, twirling the rose in his fingers.

“Ow!” Flint said suddenly, dropping the rose. He had pricked himself on a thorn, and he stuck his finger in his mouth, sucking on it to ease the sting. “So much for simple pleasures,” he grumbled around his wounded finger, and then bent down to retrieve the rose, mindful of its thorns this time.

Just as he was about to stand back up and step into the shop, something caught Flint’s eye. It was a thin black thread, lying before the doorway, about a pace into the room. Usually a keeper of a clean-if cluttered-shop, Flint reached for the thread, intending to pick it up and throw it away.

The thread seemed strangely stuck to something.

“Confound it!” he groused, and he tugged harder.

Suddenly there was a faint snick, and, acting on some survival instinct, Flint threw himself face down on the floor. Just as he collided with the stones, he caught a glint of light flashing from across the room. Something whooshed over his head and landed with a thunk in the wood of the door above and behind him.

Swallowing hard, he forced himself to roll over and, still on the floor, examine the door rising above him. Sunk deep into the hard oak, directly at chest level to a standing dwarf, was a leather-hilted dagger.

“Reorx!” Flint whispered. He moved cautiously to his feet, alert for any sudden noise that might signal another attack. He felt his knees trembling despite his firm orders for them not do to so. Slowly, he gripped the dagger and pulled it out of the door. Its tip glinted wickedly in the waning light of day. Had he stepped into the shop and snagged the thread with his boot, that dagger wouldn’t have sunk into the door, but into Flint’s heart.

Why would someone want to kill him?

Flint began to turn around, to step over the thread and into the shop, but just then there was a faint clunk, reminding the dwarf of the sound a stuck mechanism might make when it suddenly falls into place.