Page 111 of Hellbound

Their eyes locked, a knowing look passing between them.

“Give me that…” Danika grumbled, swinging her finger at Ksenia’s haphazard hairdo, tendrils falling into her face and over her shoulders.

Ksenia rolled her eyes but obliged, untangling the ribbon.

Her sister’s deft fingers pulled every coarse and wavy strand into a tidy braid down her back in record time. She knew better than to trust her little sister not to burn her hair.

Ksenia pulled on a pair of heavy, singed leather gloves while Danika threw the first bar into the heart of the fire.

Beside the forge, Ksenia pulled the bellows handle down and up in a steady, rhythmic motion, reading the metal and the colors dappling across its surface.

It smelled like woodsmoke, leather, and iron.

A faint smile crept to her face.

She shot a glance at her elder sister, who smiled wistfully into the fire before cutting a look back at Ksenia.

It had been a decade or more since they had worked side by side like this, and although things were grim, nothing felt more like home than working with her.

Sparks burst from the metal, purple and blue.

It was time.

“I’ll be primary, unless—” Danika offered, casting her a sidelong glance.

“No, absolutely, I’ll be secondary.” Ksenia nodded her head.

Danika snorted and retrieved her hammer.

All metal had a single resonance, and a bondsmith could capture it into the body of the blade and temper it before it had the chance to escape. With a regular steel bar, if the resonance was lost, it could still become a weapon, albeit ordinary.

Grastelian steel was different. Unstable. It had a structure that wanted to resonate at multiple frequencies at once that a single bondsmith wouldn’t be able to hold still long enough to quench.

You always needed at least two.

And whoever wielded the hammer was the primary, whose sole job was to find and capture the dominant resonance hiding within the steel, while their secondary dampened the other interfering resonance.

With Grastelian steel, if the resonance was lost, the result was catastrophic.

Ksenia’s mind momentarily drifted to memories of their first-ever attempt at a Grastelian steel dagger.

It had been a scrap that their father allowed the sisters to practice on. It had resulted in the metal completely warping and twisting like a corkscrew, inverting in a burst of sparks and incinerating everything around it. It would have killed the girls had their father not been watching carefully.

Grastelian steel was dangerous.

She shook her head and picked up her tongs.

Danika pulled out the glowing purple-and-blue steel bar and laid it upon the anvil.

Ksenia pinched the metal on one end, and Danika pulled on the other as she swung a hammer with heavy, even strikes.

Then, the metal began to sing.

Two warbling notes: one high and restless like a twisting gale, the other low and deep like rolling, distant thunder.

Ksenia clenched her eyes shut. As the secondary, she had to suppress everything for Danika to work in complete silence.

Her job was to control.