Steel Victory (Steel Empire Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

said, rearranging the vials on the counter again. She pulled her glasses back on, and gestured for Kane to grab his own pair hanging on the wall. “So what did I do that was so inordinately stupid?”
    “I was never clear on what you did in the first place.” After donning eye protection, he picked up one of the vials and watched the silver solution slide around inside. “Just that you converted part of the metal in your sword to silver.”
    Toria plucked the vial out of his hand and returned it to its original place. “Yeah, when we were young idiots, and I thought I knew what I was doing. Before I knew as much about chemistry and metallurgy as I do now. I analyzed one of the shards, and frankly, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.”
    “How so?”
    She pointed to a spot on the floor, and Kane moved his stool and then parked himself as instructed. “Because I had the damn proportions completely wrong.” She clenched her fist at her side. It would be a long time before she stopped berating herself for this. “I thought I could willy-nilly mess with the steel and that my magic would retain the strength of the blade. I was so stupid.”
    “No, you weren’t,” Kane said. “Just young. You said it yourself, you didn’t know as much as you do now. And I assume now you’re trying to fix the problem?”
    “Yeah.” She unstopped the vial at the end of the row to pour the silver solution into the clean beaker. “Grandpa took the hilt when he left. He said he’d take it to a smith he trusts and get a new blade forged for me.”
    “Then Asaron’ll bring it back good as new. And we’ll redo the spell we did in high school, but you’ll get the proportions right this time, and it’ll be your old sword again. No problem.”
    She could feel another tension headache coming on, despite her partner’s soothing presence. Toria scuffed both hands through her short hair. “You’re right. I should have gone with them to pick him up. What if the boat was late, and they got stranded during the day?”
    “Then it’s a good thing Mikelos is perfectly okay in the sun,” Kane said. “It’ll be okay, love.”
    She swirled the silver in the beaker. Damn his logic. “Yeah, I guess.”
    “They’ll bring him home. And your sword. Now show me what we’re going to do to make it even better than it was.”
    After being wrapped up in each other’s souls for ten years, he knew how to manipulate her. Not that it was difficult to make her talk about her true passion: mixing the two volatile sciences of chemistry and magic. “Well,” she held up the new beaker, “this is a formula I’m still attempting to perfect.” She gestured to the remaining vials. “Those are the latest variations I mixed up this morning.”
    “Do I want to know what’s in them?”
    Toria had banned him from helping her play with chemicals due to his incurable inability to measure with any precision. He was a terrible cook, too. “The new idea is that instead of weakening the steel of a blade by converting a percentage of it to silver, I should coat the blade with a microscopic layer of silver instead. Bond it to the steel so well it can’t even be scraped away.”
    “So what are we doing here, exactly?” Kane said.
    Toria picked up another small blade from the counter—a broken throwing knife, this time. “I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to bond the silver alloy to the steel of a blade.”
    “Magic?”
    “Of course.” Toria held the beaker out to Kane. “And I’ve gotten used to working with the extra magical properties the silver gives me. It takes too much concentration to pour the alloy on the blade and get it to cover evenly at the same time. So you pour, and I’ll spread.”
    Uncertainty clouded his face. “If you think so.”
    Her fascination with mixing chemistry and magic always left him a bit puzzled, similar to the way his own passion for literature made no sense to her. “You’ll be fine, hon,” she