Upon Temple's death, Astrid, grown to adulthood, becomes blacksmith of Guell. Able to shape-shift at will, she uses her ability to hide her scars and, when she's at the forge, to provide the necessary muscles for ironworking. She is also DiStephan's secret lover. And she has another secret: She has driven DiStephan away with her frightened reaction to his killing of a young dragon. Now Guell is helpless to defend itself from the dragons that infest the territory.

Destruction comes to Guell, but not by dragon. Brigands kill most of the villagers and abduct the rest. Astrid is sold to an organization of blacksmiths. She teaches them the secret of creating a dragonslayer's sword in exchange for the chance to seek an abducted friend. But this quest returns Astrid to the brigands' power—and their leader is her long-lost brother, Drageen, who once left her to a dragon's attack, the source of her horrible scars. He arranges that she face the same dragon again, a sacrifice for the good of their people. But matters do not go as either sibling anticipates, and Astrid finds herself borne away by dragons. Somehow she must overcome her fear of killing to become a dragonslayer herself.

A wealth of sword-making knowledge

A Clarion graduate, Resa Nelson is a short-story author and moviemaker. She also belongs to the Higgins Armory Sword Guild and has experience in fencing and blacksmithing. These skills and experiences inform her first novel, The Dragonslayer's Sword, which, like Eleanor Arnason's novel The Sword Smith (1978), does something rare: It puts the mythically potent character of the smith at center stage.

Astrid, Nelson's physically and psychologically damaged smith-protagonist, is a sympathetic and interesting character. Her fear of revealing her scars to others, and the varied reactions of those who do glimpse them, ring true. The characters' shapechanging abilities are a good symbol for both the changes of physical and emotional growth and the power of other people's expectations. And Astrid's actions as a swordmaker are nicely detailed; readers can almost feel the heat of her forge.

Details elsewhere in The Dragonslayer's Sword are not so plentiful. While admirably clear, the prose is too lean. Metaphors and similes are few and far between, while events are more summarized than dramatized. This underdevelopment is especially apparent in the action sequences. Action typically comprises the most fully developed scenes in a work of popular fiction. But the action scenes in The Dragonslayer's Sword are so stripped down that entire series of character actions are reduced to one-sentence paragraphs. Overall, the thin prose makes the novel feel a rewrite short of the final draft. This is unfortunate, because Resa Nelson is a talented and imaginative writer and The Dragonslayer's Sword is an unconventional fantasy.