Quote tattoo: she wasn't looking for a knight

Now. Everyone in Ashcombe thought Hester Vane had come up the valley road to find a husband. She had a purse of coin and a good wool cloak, and by the second week the knights had started arriving, one a day, clanking through the gate in tin like kettles on a cart. Sir Oswin brought a lute. Sir Peregrine brought a dog that couldn't walk straight.

Hester heard every one of them out on the bench under the medlar tree. Then she asked each the same question. Can you make me a blade? When they said they were no smiths, she thanked them kindly and sent them back down the hill. She wasn't looking for a knight, you see. She'd said so to the vicar, who wrote it down.

On the ninth morning the forge bell rang, and it was the smith's apprentice who came up to the garden with ash on his apron, saying there was a woman in the forge asking for the finest sword in the county. Hester had been bargaining with the smith since midsummer. She paid him in advance and sat on an upturned bucket each evening, learning the sound of steel going into water. When the blade came out grey and humming, she held it up to the window and laughed out loud, which no knight had ever managed.

She gave the smith her last coin, tied the knights' pennants to the medlar as a joke, and rode off down the valley with the sword across her back. Nobody ever saw Sir Oswin's lute again. The dog stayed, and it's still on the hill, if you go and look for it.