When last we left our heroes... At the maiden Panathfei's forge, in the roofless halls of the old Stone-King forge, the company took stock of themselves. Five days' walking through the living wood had knitted only a little of what the last fight had torn from Inayin; his eyes wept red still, a slow blood-weeping that no rest would mend, and the dark blade at his side was eager. Through Thargash, Inayin asked the maiden whether the thing that fouled her waters was the primordial Serpent itself or one of its brood. She answered that a serpent-thing lay bound in the deep beneath the forge, unable to leave the waters and yet tainting them with its malice, so that whenever she began the rite to wake the spring she could not finish it, and the lost craft of the water-forging stayed shut to her. The ancient wards created to keep it from tainting the forge's upper waters had been damaged, and would have to be repaired in order to cleanse them.
Inayin swore the creature would not see another dawn, for this was not the first such evil the company had come across, nor, he owned, was it like to be his last. Ineia, meanwhile, begged of Thargash a little teaching in the tongue of the Star-folk — Old Treian, which he told her was, after all, her own mother-tongue, for the speech of all the Ambori is but its far-descended child — and he began to teach her a few basic phrases as she tended the living blooms she had lifted from the wood, keeping their cloth damp and setting a pinch of moon-dust to them against their withering.
At last, the party decided to help Panathfei try to re-seal the wards against the lower waters. There was a warding stone of the Stone Kings, broken, that had once sealed the cold waters below; and the company decided they would attempt to repair it. Ineia, Inayin, and Talari went down into the Underspring and found an ancient blue waterstone covered in runes, writings of the Stone Kings themselves, and the very attempt of reading and studying them induced visions in the three companions. Inayin saw a flash of a woman, one-eyed and heavily armed, making her way through a long chamber full of treasures, at the far end of which a dead giant sat enthroned, his long beard overflowing his chest and filling the whole chamber; and after her a man chained and racked with torment in a lightless cell; and last of all ancient misty ruins standing up out of a grey and withered wood. Ineia saw a young man, tall and lordly, in a similar chamber, weeping before bodies he had just interred there. Both Ineia and Inayin managed to snap out of their reverie, but Talari became lost to it, waking in the same chamber now convinced that it was her true life, and that her whole career as an adventurer before it had been but a dream.
After a botched attempt to reassemble the warding-stone completely broke it in half, Ineia and Inayin brought it--and the unconscious Talari--back to the surface. Panathfei was alarmed, and through Thargash she told the party that she could now hear the serpent's voice. It was only a matter of time before something really bad happened. They would have to try to reassemble the ward. That work wanted silver, which takes such a charge better than iron — and so the whole company emptied their purses into the crucible, nearly every coin they carried between them, and Inayin melted their fortune down to mend the ward.
Then Panathfei, via Thargash, told them one more thing would be required: the stone would hold only to a true vow. One of them must bind himself, and all his line after him, to the keeping of the ward — to hold back the folk of the Serpent from the forge-waters forever — and should that vigil ever fail, some dire thing would follow. It was Herek who took the oath upon himself.
As Herek swore, Panathfei began to sing. Not one of them could construe the words — save their "smiling friend" — and yet the song was so made that in the hearing each of them beheld the making of the world: the first waters of all leaping up upon the holy hill of Orusena, running down to fill every river and stream and sea, and the earth behind them greening, and beasts and men coming forth into the new light. So the vision passed through them in a breath. And while it held them, Thargash and Inayin poured the molten silver into the broken places of the warding stone and joined it whole again; and at the maiden's sudden, urgent word Ineia and Inayin bore the stone back down into the underspring and set it once more in its place, sealing off the cold waters of the deep.
Talari, in the meantime, lost to another time and another place, had wandered to a sepulchre within the larger tomb, where three figures lay — two whose incorrupt bodies still wept blood from unhealed wounds, and a third long withered to dust — about a long sword set upright in the stone. After speaking with the other person in the chamber -- a tall, heavily scarred woman with one eye and a great Red Fang Longsword slung over her back -- she laid her hand to the hilt and it slid free as though it had waited for her; the blood of the dead shone out with a golden light; and she woke again beside the forge with the wavy-bladed weapon in her hands and a vision fading behind her eyes — a young man, half-starved and half-mad and clad in rags, staggering through the river of shining blood grasping a much more glorious blade in his hand: the Hurorupeim itself. Talari had known none of the faces there, but the sword in her hands was Hurpalb — that ice-pale, half-clear metal of legend, out of which the Blade of Kings itself was forged.
When at last they climbed up again into the night air, the dark voices under the water had fallen silent, and the forge was clean. Panathfei, glad beyond her few words, asked what boon she might grant them for the service done her. And Herek, who had bound his blood to her stone, asked only for some help to keep the charge he had taken up. So the maiden took his sword, and cut from her own dark hair a single lock, and bound it about the hilt, and said that as long as he bore it her blessing would go with him.
For Inayin's part, he sought to have her loose the silver lock already knotted to his belt, but something was evidently lost in translation and Panathfei, who had not yet tied it and would not for long ages remember tying it, only frowned in bafflement and did not understand. He then asked Thargash to tell the whole story of his father and grandfather, the dark sword, the other water-forge, and his first meeting with Panathfei. Thargash translated perhaps a little too honestly, and Panathfei, realizing that Inayin and his family had consorted with the ancient serpents, politely asked him to leave.
By this point, it was nearly midnight. The forge was saved and the spring run sweet again, and eastward on the road a star-priest waited at Amirukarr who might yet heal Inayin's eyes. Thence the party resolved to go.
