"The blades," he says.
"I was working late."
"Six finished pieces, past midnight, hidden under cloth the moment I walked in." He watches my face. "Don't waste time on the easy deflections."
I fold my arms together. "You were spying on me."
"I was returning to the village and the forge was lit. I investigated."
"Through a partially closed door. Without announcing yourself."
"If I'd announced myself," he says, "what would I have found?"
I stare at him, mouth slightly parted. The yard is quiet except for the wind moving through the coal pile's oilcloth, and somewhere inside the forge, Finn drops something metal and swears under his breath.
"What do you want?" I ask.
"An explanation."
"For what? Working late?"
"Edria." My name is sharp on his lips. "I'm not interested in having this conversation twice. Tell me about the blades."
Something in the steadiness of it breaks through the defensive wall I've been building since last night. Not kindness—steadiness. He's not enjoying this, not making a performance of his authority. He's just waiting.
The coal pile draws my attention. "We can't pay the bills on plow repairs."
He says nothing.
"Papa's leg won't heal right. He can't do the heavy work anymore, and what I can do alone doesn't cover the taxes and the medicine and the food." I say it raw, honest. "A man named Velis came through two years ago looking for a skilled smith for private commissions. He pays well. I took the work."
"You knew what you were supplying."
"I knew it wasn't going to farmers." I snap. "I didn't let myself think past that for a long time."
"And now?"
I push a loose stone with my boot. "Now I think past it and I do it anyway, because Finn's medicine costs more in a month than regular work gives us and there's no other way to get it."
Nyrius is quiet. His face hasn't moved, his expression present in a way that means he's actually listening rather than waiting for me to finish.
"You want to talk about corruption?" I ask. "About where illegal weapons come from and why people make terrible choices?" I poke him in the chest. "Ask what a village looks like after twenty years of impossible taxes and labor quotas nobody can meet. Ask what options are left when every legal path runs out." My voices rises in anger. "You and every noble like you built the conditions that make men like Velis possible. The desperation is not an accident. It's a consequence."
He absorbs that. A muscle works briefly in his jaw, not anger—something more complicated than anger.
"I won’t arrest you," he says.
The words are not what I expect. Not relief, exactly. More like the sudden absence of a weight I'd been braced against all night.
"But someone else will," he continues, "if you keep taking these commissions. The weapons are being traced. People with real authority and no interest in context are following the supplylines." He motions in an arbitrary direction. "I'm telling you that as a fact, not a threat."
"And if I stop, my brother goes without medicine."
"I know." He says it quietly. "I'm not pretending the problem disappears because the risk increases."
I stare at him. He looks back, and there's something in his face I don't have a clean name for—not pity, nothing so dismissive as that. Closer to an expression that says he just looked directly at something they'd been keeping in their peripheral vision and found it worse than expected.
He turns and walks back around the forge without another word.
