"And yet the box is still empty."
He gives me a long look. Not angry—tired. There's a difference there too, one I learned young.
"Three days of grain is enough time to get paid for these jobs," he says. "Focus."
I focus. Finn eventually wanders off to help with the afternoon feed at the Pelley farm, and Papa settles back onto his stool. The morning moves in hammer strikes and quiet, in the smell of hot iron and ash, in the careful arithmetic I run in my mind every hour. What we're owed. What we owe. What the gap between those two numbers costs us every week.
It never adds up right.
The village goesquiet well past midnight.
I wait until Papa's breathing deepens and Finn stops shifting in his sleep before I light the small forge lamp and get back to work. The blades I'm making now aren't for anyone in Oxwood. They're better than anything I'd waste on a cracked plow repair—clean edges, balanced weight, the kind of work I could do in my sleep because I've done it a hundred times in the dark.
Velis pays well. That's the beginning and the end of my justification.
I hate that it's enough.
By the time I wrap the finished blades in oilcloth and slip out through the back, the sky is a deep, lightless black overhead. The forest edge is a ten-minute walk from the village. I've done it enough times that my feet know the path without the lamp.
He's already waiting, a broad shape in the dark, two of his men standing a few paces back.
"You're late," Velis says.
"You're lucky I came at all." I hold out the wrapped bundle. "Count them."
He does, unwrapping each blade with the slow deliberateness of a man who trusts no one. He should. I don't trust him either. His scarred arms catch what little moonlight filters through the canopy as he runs a thumb along one edge, careful and satisfied.
"Good." He passes the bundle to one of his men and produces a small purse. It's heavier than last time.
I don't let myself react to that.
"Patrols have been thick," he says, not handing it over yet. "Closer to the border. Dark elf territory's been restless."
"That's not my problem."
"It will be, if they start stopping people on the roads." He sets the purse in my palm. "Keep a blade for yourself. Just in case."
I pocket the coin. "I'll keep it in mind."
His expression says he doesn't believe me. He's right not to.
The walk back takes longer in the cold, or maybe exhaustion just stretches it. My hands ache from the night's work and the morning's before it, and the sky is beginning to pale at the edges by the time Oxwood's rooftops come back into view.
I think about the purse. About three days of grain stretched into ten. About Papa's leg and Finn's medicine and the wheel fitting still sitting unfinished on the worktable.
Then I stop thinking, because thinking too hard about why I do this is its own kind of weight, and I'm already carrying enough.
Morning comes fast.
I'm back at the forge before most of the village is awake, the ache in my shoulders something I've learned to ignore. The farmers start arriving for their repaired tools not long after sunrise, and with them comes the noise that always accompanies a crowd in Oxwood—gossip traded like currency, but more abundant, passed hand to hand at every doorway.
I'm fitting the last of Aldric's plow back together when two of the Henley women stop just outside to talk to old Perrin, their voices carrying easily through the open forge door.
"...hunting party, they're saying. Big one."
"Coming through here?"
"Stopped at the crossroads already, according to the miller's boy. Dark elf lord, by the look of the banners."
