Legend

Eldana Saryn’s Coal Scepter was made of neither gold nor bone. On its carved shaft, among black feathers, sat an ordinary lump of coal – rough, dull, and quick to blacken the fingers.

With the first frost, the village elder came to her cottage. He wore a fur down to his ankles and had two servants to carry his staff.

“Nobody listens to me,” he complained. “They laugh behind my back. I need a scepter of gold, so they know who rules here.”

Eldana looked him over from head to toe, then looked at her own scepter. She broke off a piece of coal the size of a walnut and laid it in his palm.

“Light it.”

“That’s all?” the elder asked, astonished. “A lump of coal?”

“Gold shines for the one who wears it,” Eldana replied. “Coal warms whoever sits beside it.”

That evening he lit the piece in his cold house. It glowed till morning, steady and smokeless. At dawn the neighbours were sitting outside his door, come to get warm – and at last they talked to him as one of their own.

The elder sent the goldsmith away empty-handed and had a common fire lit in the square every evening. Eldana’s Coal Scepter was one piece shorter ever after.