The Broken Sword Read Online Free PDF Page A

hardest, most perilous part of his training was in magic. Imric had him wholly in hand for this, once he was ready to go beyond the simple spells that a child could safely use. While he was not able to learn as deeply as his foster father, because of his humanity and short lifespan, he came to be as adept as most elf chieftains. He learned first how to shun and sidestep the iron no elf, troll, or goblin could endure; even when told, and when a gingerly touch on a nail in a yeoman’s house had shown, that he would not be harmed by it, he left it alone out of habit. Next he learned the runes for healing wounds and illness, warding off bad luck, or wishing evil on a foe. He learned the songs which could raise or lay storms, bring good or bad harvests, call forth either anger or peace in a mortal breast. He learned how to coax from their ores those metals, unknown to humans, which were alloyed in Faerie to take the place of steel. He learned the use of the cloak of darkness, and of the skins he could don to take the form of a beast. Near the end of his training he learned the mighty runes and songs and charms which could raise the dead, read the future, and compel the gods; but save in time of direst need no one cared to be shaken to his inmost being by these and risk the destruction they could wreak on him.
    Skafloc was often down by the sea, he could sit hour upon hour looking out over its restlessness to the hazy line where water met sky, he never wearied of its deep voice or its tang of salty depths and windy reaches or its thousand moods. He came of a seafaring breed, and the tides were in .his blood. He spoke to the seals in their grunting, barking tongue, and the gulls wheeled overhead to bring him news from the earth’s ends. Sometimes when he was in company with other warriors, the sea maidens would rise from the foam, wringing out their long green hair as they came up on to the strand, and then there would be merriment. They were cool and wet to the touch and they smelled of kelp; afterward Skafloc would have a faint fishy taste on his lips; but he liked them well.
    At fifteen years of age he stood nearly as tall as Imric, broad of shoulder and taut of sinew, with long hair flaxen against brown skin. He had a straight, blunt, strong-boned face, a wide mouth quick to smile, large deep-blue eyes set well apart. A mortal without his schooling would have said that a mystery hung over him, veiling itself behind those eyes, which bad looked on more than common mankind saw, revealing itself in that leopard gait.
    Imric said to him: “Now you are big enough to be given your own weapons rather than old ones of mine, and also I have been summoned by the Elfking. We will fare overseas.”
    At this Skafloc whooped, cartwheeled out into the fields, and galloped his horse madly through the lands of men, making magic out of sheer need to do something. He caused pots to dance on the hearth and bells to ring in the steeples and axes to cut wood of their own accord, he sang cows up onto the crofter’s roof and a wind into being which scattered his hay over the shire and a rain of gold out of the sky into his yard. With the Tarnkappe about his shoulders, he kissed the girls working at twilight in the fields and rumpled their hair and tossed their men into a ditch. For days thereafter, masses were sung to halt the spate of witchcraft; but by that time Skafloc was at sea.
    Imric’s black longship sped with her sail taut to a wind he had raised. His crew was of picked elf warriors, for the chance of meeting trolls or kraken was not to be ignored. Skafloc stood by the dragon prow peering eagerly forward; he had been given witch-sight early in his life and could see by night as well as by day. He spied porpoises, silver-grey under the moon, and hailed an old bull seal he knew. Once a whale broached, water roaring off its flanks. Things which mortal sailors only glimpsed or dreamed were plain to the cloudy slant elf-eyes and to Skafloc: the