This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/sjanevardsson on 2025-12-20 23:20:01+00:00.

I sat in the cafe, looking out at the hustle and bustle of the city. The round-ears were always in such a hurry. Always one task or another to get to. How many of those tasks were evil schemes I will leave up to the reader to decide. This, however, is the story of just one of those nefarious plots; the worst one ever. This is the story of how a round-ear blacksmith became regent and ended the elven Kingdom of Elian.

When Queen Sylthia died in the nine-hundredth year of King Rikkan's reign without providing an heir, the king married the young Princess Arina, barely three hundred years old to his two thousand. Within a decade, she bore him an heir, Crown Prince Sylber - this humble narrator. Much to my detriment, the princess died in childbirth.

The king was of failing health and rushed my education. Seers, mages, and priests were employed as my tutors. Even as a child, I sat in on meetings of the king's council and learned the art of statesmanship.

I was barely two centuries old when the king died of a sudden fit. Knowing what I know now, it was likely a massive stroke. I was thrust on the throne while border skirmishes with the newly united dwarves of the northern mountains were threatening to turn to all-out war.

It was a delicate balancing act. I had to make concessions enough to the new dwarven Grand Chief to placate him and the tribes. At the same time, I had to ensure that those concessions were minor enough that the king's council and the people wouldn't oust me and place some easily controlled distant cousin of mine on the throne.

It worked for a while, until the round-ears blacksmith showed up. He came from the dwarf lands in the north and was allowed across the border by showing his handiwork. He knew the secret to forging mithral. The proof was in the shoes with which his horse was shod. A dwarf smith would never stoop to making horseshoes from the most noble metal.

He showed up in the capital with an ingot of mithral and requested an audience with me. Of course, I wanted to see this strange round-ears with mithral shoes on his horse.

My first surprise was that he was a she. I'd heard of dwarf women blacksmiths, I hadn't heard of such a thing among the round-ears. The second surprise was that the shoes on her horse were war shoes. The toe of the shoe extended partway up the hoof with a ledge at the front that allowed the horse to rip through shields. There was no mistaking the blue sparks of mithral when the massive draft horse, freed from the wagon that carried her forge and tools and coal, ran down the cobble road faster than most riding horses.

The final surprise came when she handed me an ingot of fine patterned steel, then an ingot twice its size of mithral. Even at double the size, it weighed less than half what the steel did.

We already knew what mithral weapons could do against steel, but the dwarves controlled the supply and hoarded the secret to working it. Until Brenna the Smith, at least.

The ingot she let me hold was worth at least a hundred-thousand crowns. I asked her if she could make me a mithral sword. She said she could but would never make a mithral weapon to help a dwarf kill an elf or an elf kill a dwarf. Horses, she said, were a different matter, since they weren't the ones with the mental faculties to declare a truce.

I allowed her to set up a stall in the outer market where she plied her trade for months. Every time I saw that horse of hers, however, a twinge of jealousy bit at me. Finally, I asked if she could make mithral war shoes for my best destrier.

"That," she said, "I can do."

I was ready to pay her as much as half a million crowns for the shoes, so long as they were properly fitted, included the striking plate, and had my sigil embossed on the raised toe. I told her what I wanted, and she stopped me before I made an offer.

"Bring the horse," she said. "If it is of amenable temperament to be shod, I shall make the shoes and nails and charge only for the nails. They are harder to make than the shoes, after all, and must be made of mithral as well."

Brenna the Smith enclosed her stall with cloth walls and began to work sixteen hours a day. She wouldn't let anyone see how the mithral was worked. After several days, she had the shoes and nails ready.

After I examined the shoes and gave her my blessing to continue, she said she would need one more day in secret to perfectly fit the shoes.

She spent the next day with the horse closed in with her as she trimmed the horse's hooves and made the final adjustments on the shoes. The next morning, I went with the exchequer to watch the shoeing.

"This is your last chance to change your mind," she said. "I will charge only one crown for the first nail, two for the second, four for the third, and so on."

The exchequer was looking for something to write with, while I thought only a little about it. I'd guessed I would end up paying maybe twice the value of the final nail, but none of the cost for the much more substantial shoes.

"You don't know what you have, then," I said. "I'll take that deal."

"And how do I know you're good for it?" she asked.

"I am the king!" I said. "My word is backed by the entire Kingdom of Elian."

With that, she nicked her hand and mine and shook. Some strange round-ears custom, I guessed.

The destrier was larger than most, nearly sixteen hands, and the shoes each had ten nails. I'd lost track of the price of each nail, but the exchequer hadn't. His face blanched as reached a realization that I hadn't.

After the last nail was driven and trimmed with mithral nippers that bore her own maker's mark, she pulled a piece of parchment out of her apron with a bill of sale. Forty lines, one for each nail, with the price doubling every time.

The exchequer fainted. I balked, and tried to make her take the shoes back, but I was unable to. It wasn't some strange round-ears custom, it was the law of the land, sealed by magic commissioned by my father a century earlier. A blood-oath in the marketplace sealed a deal that neither party could back out of.

While the original purpose of the law and seal was to enforce the decisions of the court, it was written in such a way that it was binding even when the court didn't set the terms. Brenna the Smith knew more about the laws of my own kingdom than I did.

I found myself unable to mount my horse, or return to the throne, or do anything in regards to the palace other than gather my toiletries and trinkets with no monetary value and walk away. When the king's council asked what was happening, all I could answer was, "Ask Queen Brenna the Smith."

Within the year, the king's council was dissolved, a temporary parliament installed, and an election held for a permanent parliament and prime minister. Brenna continued as queen for another twelve years, brokering peace through trade deals with the dwarves, humans, and even the beastkin far to the east.

In the twelfth year of her reign, after convincing parliament to draft and ratify a new constitution without a monarchy, she declared herself no longer needed and retired to a small village to smith. The Kingdom of Elian was no more, replaced by the Elian Republic.

I met with Queen Brenna a few years after she abdicated. She had a smithy by the river, where the historical plaque is now. The Smithy Pub was built more than a hundred years later, and was never a smithy, and certainly not Queen Brenna's. Hers was a crude, wooden building.

I asked her first, how she learned the secret of smithing mithral, and she just said, "Trial and error."

Then I asked her why. Why did she take Elian and then essentially give it away. She said, "You elves were pouring all your resources into gearing up for a war you didn't want. The dwarves were doing the same, their engineering and manufacturing geared solely towards weapons and armor. At the same time, the humans and beastkin were dealing with drought and crop shortages that could've been mitigated with elven resources and dwarven ingenuity. I thought of an outrageous plan and hoped it would work. It did."

I do have to admit admiration, though. The new constitution Brenna championed gave everyone in Elian equal rights, regardless of caste. That, plus universal education and healthcare, and consistent trade with all the neighboring countries has made it one of the most prosperous nations, bursting with cities like this one, even if it is full of round-ears.

So, dear reader, are the round-ears all evil cunning … or just Brenna the Smith? Or perhaps I've seen it wrong all along. After all these centuries, I've come to grips with losing my birthright, my throne … and I've realized that it was the people of Elian that were promised to me as if they were mere chattel. From where I see it now, I wasn't on the side of good, no matter how I wished it so.

As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Brenna the Smith was right, and I was wrong to think I owned the kingdom. Maybe it wasn't evil cunning at all, but just part of her human nature.

prompt: Write a story from the perspective/POV of a non-human or fairy tale character sharing their side of the story.

originally posted at Reedsy