"I don't know about that."
He glances at me sideways. "You've seen what my governance produced for thirty years."
"I've seen what you did when you actually paid attention." I go back to the hoe blade. "Two months in Oxwood and you caught what thirty years of distance missed. That's not nothing."
He doesn't answer, but he doesn't look away either.
"My mother died when I was nine," I say. I've told him this before, in the back yard during our first real argument. But that version was an accusation. This is different. "Papa never said she was the one holding us together, but after she was gone, I understood it pretty fast. He kept working. He kept the forge running. But something went quiet in him that never came back."
"You started filling the space."
"I started trying to." I fit the blade on the handle to check the angle. "I've spent a lot of years expecting powerful men to disappoint me. My father because he had nothing left to give. The magistrates and overseers because they never pretended to care in the first place." I set the handle aside. "You kept not doing that. It took me longer than it should have to notice."
From across the low fire, his eyes meet mine. The forge light catches the silver in his hair and the tiredness behind his eyes, and he looks older than he usually lets himself look.
"You're not easy to disappoint," he says. "Your expectations are low enough that just showing up counts for something."
"That's a depressing thing to say."
"It's accurate."
"Maybe. But it gives my station in a life a poor outlook." I pick up the next order, window hinges. "You should aim higher."
"I'll keep that in mind."
We work through another hour like that — talking in pieces, comfortable in the gaps between. He tells me about the eastern range in winter, the cold so sharp it frosted the inside of tents. I tell him about the summer I was twelve and learned to temper steel by ruining forty consecutive pieces before somethingclicked into place. He laughs at that, a real one, low and quiet, and it does something to the inside of my chest I choose not to examine too carefully.
He leaves near the fourth hour, when the forge has burned down to coals and I've run out of excuses to keep working.
At the door, he pauses with one hand on the frame. It's become a habit — the slight delay before he goes, neither of us making it obvious. I step close enough that I have to look up at him.
He leans down and kisses me, soft and unhurried, one hand coming up to my jaw. I lean into it before I decide to, my fingers curling briefly into the front of his coat.
When he pulls back, the night air comes back in with the distance.
"Go to sleep," he says quietly.
"I'll try."
He goes.
I stay in doorway for a moment longer than I should, watching the lane, and then I close the door and turn around.
Finn is sitting on the bottom step of the interior stair with his elbows on his knees, watching me with wide eyes and a careful expression, like he saw something he shouldn’t and is worried he’ll get scolded.
My stomach drops.
"Finn—"
"How long?" he asks.
"It's not—" I stop. Start again. "It's complicated."
"How long, Edria?"
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. "A few weeks. Loosely."
He doesn’t say anything right away, turning it over. "I knew he kept coming by. I didn't know it was—" He gestures vaguely at the door. "That."
