Then she stops.
Her head comes up slowly. She turns toward the door gap, and her eyes find mine across the distance and the firelight.
Neither of us moves.
I watch the panic cross her face—quick, unguarded, gone almost immediately. What replaces it is worse, in some ways. She straightens. Sets the hammer down. Looks at me with an expression that suggests she just watched a door close behind her and heard the latch drop.
My eyes land on the blades on the table. I look back at her.
The blade from Caevar's table sits in my memory with perfect clarity.
I don't move. She doesn't move. The fire breathes between us, and the night outside is very quiet, and everything I thought I understood about what was happening in Oxwood rearranges itself into a shape I can no longer pretend is simple.
9
EDRIA
Iwrap the blades before he's fully gone from the window.
My hands don't shake, which surprises me. The rest of me is doing enough of it internally that my hands seem to have decided to compensate. I cover the finished work, bank the forge fire, and move through the dark house to my room with the careful quiet of someone who knows exactly which floorboards announce themselves.
Then I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall.
He saw the blades. He saw me, at the anvil, two hours past midnight, with six finished weapons laid out in a row. There's no version of that scene that looks like anything other than what it is. I can tell myself he doesn't know where they go, that a woman forging late at night could have a dozen explanations, that border lords don't arrest people over suspicion alone.
I tell myself all of it. None of it lands.
What I keep returning to is his face in the doorway—not angry, not shocked. Still. The way a man looks when something he already suspected becomes something he knows.
If he arrests me, Papa has no income and no one to run the forge. Finn loses his medicine supply before winter breaks. Thetwo of them sit in a house with a leaking roof and an empty larder while I rot in whatever passes for a magistrate's prison in this region.
I lie down without undressing and don't sleep until the sky starts to pale.
He arrives mid-morning,when the forge is busy and Papa is showing Finn how to retemper a bent chisel. I see Nyrius through the open door before he reaches the threshold—no guards, no members of his party, dressed plainly enough that the two farmers collecting their tools don't notice who he is until he's already inside.
Papa notices immediately. He straightens off his stool and pulls Finn back a step by the shoulder, instinct overriding everything else.
"My lord." His voice is steady, but his knuckles go white around Finn's collar.
"I'd like to speak with your daughter." Nyrius's eyes move to me, brief and unreadable. "Privately."
"Anything you have to say to me you can say in front of my father." I set my tongs down without looking away from him. "He runs this forge. Whatever this is, it concerns him."
"Edria." Papa's voice carries weight. He’s never been one to oppose authority.
"It concerns you," I say to him, "You should be here."
Nyrius waits. He doesn't argue, doesn't raise his voice, just stands with his arms hanging loosely. He looks like he’ll stand there all day if he has to.
That patience is more unnerving than anger would be.
"Please," he says, to me rather than Papa. One word, no performance behind it.
Papa puts his hand briefly on my arm. "Go."
I go.
The deep recesses of the forge opens onto a narrow yard—a stock wall, a water barrel, the coal pile under its oilcloth cover. Nyrius stops in the center of it and turns to face me. The morning light is flat and grey, and it does nothing to soften the directness of his expression.
