Mat’s face shone with excitement. ‘I did it!’ she squealed, waving the hilt above her head.
Gruff forced a grin. ‘Well done!’ he called. He should be happy – he was happy. But he was annoyed that it hadn’t been him. Why could she pull the sword out when he just ended up with a fistful of water?
Mat had obviously asked herself the same question. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a fish-person?’ she suggested as he walked over to her.
‘Yeah,’ Gruff said, trying to sound enthusiastic but knowing he probably just sounded jealous. Mat was special, so she was the one who could hold the sword, and she would be the one to save the island. He was not special. He was useless. He couldn’t do anything to save the island, or his family. He couldn’t do anything to save the farm.
Maybe the island didn’t want him.
Gruff pulled his phone out of his pocket without really meaning to and checked the messages. Nothing.
Mat laughed. ‘I can’t believe you’re checking your phone. Look, real life, right in front of you!’
Gruff shoved his phone back in his pocket and scowled at her. ‘You don’t know what my real life is.’
Mat’s face fell. Suddenly she was as shy and unsure as she had been when she first stepped off the boat. The silence stretched.
‘So, we’ve got it,’ she said eventually, in a small voice. ‘What now?’
‘We need to finish it,’ Gruff replied. He was already regretting snapping but he didn’t know how to go back and make it better. He put a careful hand out and felt in the air just below the hilt that Mat held in front of her. His hand passed through without resistance, but when he brought his fingers away they were wet.
‘Woah.’ Mat’s eyes were wide. She put her own hand out to copy him, but Gruff batted her fingers away, getting a brief pulse of waves from the touch.
‘Careful!’
‘What?’ Mat hunched her shoulders protectively.
‘If I can’t hold the hilt, maybe I can’t feel the blade properly. If you can hold it, then maybe the blade could cut you. Just be careful.’
‘Oh.’ Her shoulders relaxed. ‘Fair. Thanks.’ She put her hand out more slowly, and brought her index finger down onto the space just below the hilt, what would be the flat of the blade if there was one.
There was. Her finger stopped in thin air, and she tapped experimentally. A soft, musical ringing accompanied the taps, a pale reflection of what Gruff had heard when the blacksmith had hammered the blade. Gruff grinned despite himself. This was pretty great, even if he couldn’t touch it himself. It was genuine, actual magic.
Mat, her mouth open with amazement, tapped slowly down the length of the invisible blade until the struck notes overlapped into a sound that was as solid and insubstantial as the sword itself. And then, just before she reached the length of her arm, Mat tapped and her finger met only air.
‘That’s where it happened,’ Gruff said. He remembered the sickening moment when the blacksmith’s hammer had met Dylan instead of the sword, turning the man-fish’s curious, laughing smile to agony and anger.
Mat retraced her steps back towards the hilt, moving her taps from side to side across the blade. ‘I think it’s nearly finished,’ she said. ‘The blade’s as wide as the length of my finger at the hilt, but it’s much narrower where it stops – so it must be nearly at the point. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes.’ Gruff put his hand out again and swept it through the wet air, his fingers dripping seawater. ‘It’s nearly done. We need to do the last bit. You need to. I can’t touch it.’
‘We,’ Mat said firmly. ‘Don’t we need a hammer as well as the sword, though?’
‘Oh. Good point.’ Gruff had been so focussed on finding the sword, he hadn’t thought about how to actually finish making it. His heart sank. ‘We’ve got hammers at home but I bet we need the blacksmith’s one. She didn’t give it to me.’
‘She didn’t give you the sword, either,’ Mat pointed out. ‘Maybe the ones she has are like ghost versions.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Gruff said, thinking this through. ‘And I’ve just remembered, she didn’t have the hammer on her belt until she started making the sword. It just appeared, when she couldn’t hear me or see me. Maybe she doesn’t have it any more.’
‘What about the museum?’
‘No. There’re definitely no hammers there.’ He thought for a moment. Iolo had only known one story with a blacksmith in it, but maybe Nain knew more, hidden in her deep store of memories. ‘Nain,’ he said. ‘Let’s go talk to Nain.’
They walked back to the farmhouse, Mat holding the sword hilt carefully at her side. ‘I wonder if I could cut myself on it,’ she said conversationally as they climbed the gate out of Evan’s field.
‘Don’t try.’
‘I won’t.’ Mat gently brought the hilt down towards the grass at her feet.
Gruff looked at her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just seeing if it’ll cut – oh.’
The hilt was almost touching the ground now, but no cut had appeared. Instead, a pool of water trickled and spread.
Gruff stared, fascinated. ‘Maybe it’s because it isn’t finished yet?’
Mat tapped the empty space below the hilt and the note rang out again. ‘I’m not sure this can get any weirder.’
Nain was sitting in the little patch of scrubby grass and wildflowers at the back of the farmhouse. It was a garden of sorts, the sheep kept out by tumbledown stone walls. Gruff knew Mam had battled with it when he was young, planting flowers that never seemed to do well in the salt-blown island air. It was one of the things he remembered her being frustrated with, a thing that made her sad. Now the garden grew as it wished to, hardy flowers and stony soil.
Nain had set herself up with her canvas chair and the rickety folding table covered in papers, cardboard folders and the laptop. The ferocious way she was scowling at it all could mean only one thing.
‘Oh dear,’ Gruff said. ‘She’s doing the accounts.’
‘Is now a bad time?’ Mat asked.
Gruff shrugged. ‘We might as well just go for it. But if she snaps, don’t take it personally, okay?’
He noticed a tremble in Mat’s sword arm. ‘Are you all right? Is it heavy?’
‘Not really. It’s hard to carry, though.’ Mat sucked her top lip, looking for words. ‘It feels like it’s … excited? Ready. Like a cat, all wound up before it jumps.’
Gruff reached out his hand, desperate to feel what she described, but he let his arm drop again. His fingers would just pass through. He swallowed his disappointment and led the way through the wooden gate.
Nain did not look up as they approached and Gruff guessed she’d seen them coming from afar. She squinted at the screen in front of her, tsking quietly. Gruff saw the columns of a spreadsheet. ‘Er … Nain?’ he tried.
‘No,’ Nain said. ‘Another time.’
Gruff folded his arms and stood his ground. Nain and Dad had put him off far too many times recently. They’d used up their share of conversation escapes. ‘Mat just pulled a magical sword out of the sea, and yesterday I saw the blacksmith on the Weeping Stone and it wept,’ he said calmly.
‘Hm,’ Nain said, though whether at the spreadsheet or at him, Gruff couldn’t tell.
‘All right,’ he said, and he led Mat to a driftwood log used as a garden bench and sat down. Mat let her hand rest on the log beside her but didn’t relinquish her hold on the hilt.
‘What now?’ Mat asked.
‘Give her a second,’ Gruff said. ‘She gets really focused in on stuff. We just have to wait for her to hear what I said.’
Sure enough, after half a minute of Gruff and Mat watching a honey bee feasting amongst the clover, Nain’s sharp voice cut the calm. ‘What?!’
She came stumbling across the grass, bringing her folding chair with her. She plonked herself down in it and regarded them both through narrowed eyes. ‘You do not joke about the Weeping Stone, Gruffydd,’ she said, in a quiet, dangerous voice.
‘I wasn’t joking.’
Fear swept across Nain’s face. For the first time in his life, Gruff really understood that his grandmother had once been a child.
‘When I was seven,’ Nain said softly, ‘I saw that stone weep. Within the week, a storm had taken most of the outbuildings and half of our flock. My da, he almost died trying to save them. He swallowed so much sea. His lungs were never the same.’ She paused, twisting her gnarled fingers together. ‘We nearly lost the farm.’
‘Iolo said that’s when you sold Blacksmith’s Cottage,’ Gruff said.
Nain looked at him sharply. ‘He told you that?’
‘Because I told him about the Weeping Stone.’
Nain was silent. ‘You didn’t feel able to tell me.’
Gruff squirmed. ‘I didn’t know if you’d believe me, and you and Dad are so…’ He searched for the word.
‘Preoccupied?’ Nain finished for him. ‘Evasive? I know we’ve not been answering your questions about the farm, bach. To protect you.’
‘I don’t need protecting,’ Gruff muttered.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ A shiver went across Nain’s shoulders. ‘If that stone has wept we will all need protection before the week is out.’