The Maahes who made the steel. Binta-Wangara was the daughter of a gold-field smith, and she took the mantle two years after Sanu-Dia fell on the sandbar, in an age that kept losing its Maahes to the river trade. She had one idea: that the Pride needed a better blade.
She spent five years with the smiths of Wangara, the men and women who worked the gold fields south of the desert, and with the grove-keepers who sent her prunings from the resin trees. The result was lion-steel: a blade folded with ash from resin-tree wood, so that the wounds it makes in the flesh of the Children of Apep do not close for weeks. It does not kill them. It makes them slow, and that is nearly the same thing.
Each blade took a full year. She forged fewer than fifty in her life, and every one was numbered and named. She held the mantle for 53 years, and when she died, the smiths of Wangara swore that they would never forge lion-steel for anyone but the Pride.
What she left behind: the lion-steel blades, and the oath of the smiths.
