Set in the Age of Waiting on Tessalindria, this story is about a blacksmith whose blade making talents are legendary in the small country of Immerland on the northern reaches of the small planet of Tessalindria.

He is the best blacksmith in the kingdom, and his blades are sought after by everyone for their quality and usefulness, but he has a strict policy of never making a blade whose purpose is the injury of another person. He makes the best scythers, kitchen knives, axes, hatchets, and other such blades, but will not make daggers, swords, or battle axes.

As the story opens, the smith runs afoul of the king when the king asks him to make a sword for his 15th birthday. His refusal lands him in the king's prison until he complies with the king's request. The smith, however seems content to uphold his principles in spite of the king's wrath, so the smith's son and the king's daughter take it upon themselves to try to resolve the impasse between their fathers by the smith's son making of the sword in spite of the smith's request that he not do this.

Neither of the smith's son nor the princess fully understands the complex history of the king, the smith, and the warring clans from the mountains that threaten the kingdom's southern mountain border of Immerland.

Through all this, the smith seems to be the center of every thread of intrigue and action, and the story chronicles the ins and outs of tangled emotions and history surrounding his knowledge of what is happening.

The story crescendos to a dramatic confrontation between the king of immerland and the prince of the mountain clans that draws large portions of Tessalindria's distant history into focus, catylized by the making of the sword for the Immerland king.