Chapter 136: Mithril Vein Discovered

Isolde had come out to the gate in her chair, with Tatia pushing. She called Ashe over and handed him a flat leather case, the kind used for carrying maps.

"For luck," she said. "There’s nothing in it yet. It’s for whatever you find."

Ashe took it with both hands. "I’ll fill it, my lady."

"With boring things."

"Yes, my lady." He grinned. "Very boring."

She laughed. The sound followed them up the road.

Emeric watched until the dust settled, then turned to go. Isolde caught his sleeve.

"You’re worried."

"A little."

"They’ll be fine."

"I know." He looked back once more. "I just don’t like sending people where I can’t see."

The first courier came back on the second day, as promised.

The Thunderhoof trotted into the courtyard just after noon, calm and unhurried, with a small leather tube tied to its saddle. Pip untied it and handed it up the stairs. Emeric broke the seal in the hall.

Timber excellent. Oak and ash, old and straight. River clean. Game plentiful. Nothing extra to report. — Ashe

He read it once. Then again.

The relief hit him first, so strong his knees felt loose. He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

Then, a moment later, the other feeling arrived.

It was too easy. It was a dense forest with a mountain behind it and a rumor about a dragon in every conversation for a week. No one had walked it in two centuries. And the first report was nothing to report.

He folded the note and put it in his pocket.

"Something wrong, my lord?" Graves asked.

"No." He paused. "I’m just waiting for the other shoe."

Graves tilted his head. "Which shoe is that?"

"I don’t know yet."

He went back to the study. The map was still spread across the desk, and now a thin line of ink ran across the western edge, Pell’s first marks, a few careful lines where there had been white paper. It looked like progress. It looked, for the first time, like a map of a place that actually existed.

He stared at it for a long time anyway.

By the third day, Ashe had stopped expecting trouble.

The Marrowood was bigger than the hunters had said, but it was an easy kind of big.

The oaks stood far apart, the ground between them was soft with leaf mold, and the Greywater ran beside them clear enough to see the stones on its bed. They walked upstream in a loose line. Pell sketched as he went, tongue between his teeth. Doss named every bird. Tomas had picked out three good timber stands before noon and was already arguing with himself about where to cut the first road.

"You’re enjoying this," Ashe said.

"It’s trees," Tomas said. "You can’t be stabbed by a tree."

"Don’t say that out loud."

"It’s fine. It’s trees."

Lirael, walking ahead, didn’t turn her head. "Be quiet, both of you.

Ashe frowned, then continued to walk.

They were quiet. That was how most of the day went.

They reached the cut bank in the afternoon.

The river had bent hard to the left there and sliced into the hillside, leaving a raw wall of rock and clay twenty feet high.

Pell wanted to sketch the profile.

Brokk, who had been humming under his breath for an hour, walked toward it without a word and stopped a few feet short.

The humming stopped.

"Brokk?" Ashe said.

The dwarf didn’t answer. He crouched, ran his thumb along a pale seam in the rock, and pulled out his belt knife. The blade scraped, and a curl of silver came away, bright as a coin.

"That is not silver," Brokk said.

"What is it?"

"Quiet." His voice had gone odd.

He laid the shaving across his palm and held it up to the light, and it shone with a faint white-blue glow that had nothing to do with the sun. "Lirael. Come here."

The elf crossed to him. She picked up the sliver, weighed it on her fingertips, and frowned. Then she dropped it into the river. It floated for a moment before the current took it, and she watched it go with an expression Ashe had never seen on her.

"Too light," she said. "And it did not dull."

"No."

"Mithril."

Brokk nodded. Tears were running into his beard. He didn’t seem to notice.

"I’ve worked metal for sixty years," he said. "I’ve held two pieces of this in my life. Both of them belonged to kings."

Ashe walked over. The seam ran the full width of the wall, then disappeared into the hill. He could see where it thickened. It was wider than Brokk’s arm span.

"How much is there?"

"I’d have to dig to know." Brokk wiped his face with the back of a glove. "But look at the angle. It’s not a pocket. It’s a vein. It could run a mile."

Nobody spoke. The river kept moving. Somewhere behind them, a bird started singing and stopped.

Ashe understood it all at once, in a single breath.

Greyfell’s debts. The Guild’s hold on it. The Crown’s contempt. The baron’s long list of problems. A mine like this would not solve all of them. It would let the barony stop begging.

"Tomas," he said. "Get the courier ready."

He changed his mind before Tomas finished unbuckling the saddle.

The courier’s note could be read by anyone who caught the Thunderhoof. A message that said mithril could not be put in a tube and trusted to a road. And Ashe didn’t know how big the vein was. If he sent word now, Emeric would ride out blind. He would wait two days for a report that couldn’t say more than there is something.

"Hold on," he said. "We’ll map it first. Another day. Find out how far it runs."

Tomas stopped. "My lord wants a report every two days."

"He’ll get one. Tomorrow evening. With the full picture." Ashe heard how it sounded. He thought it over and decided it was still correct. "If we send a half-answer, we’ll have the baron riding out here with half the garrison. I’d rather bring him a good one."