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. The two 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.
"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 supply lines." 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.
I wait in the yard for a long time after he's gone, one hand braced on the cold stone of the wall, turning over everything he said and didn't say. The warning was real. The promise not to arrest me was real. Both of those things being true at once is more unsettling than either one alone.
What unsettles me most, though, is the realization sitting quiet and inconvenient in the far reaches of my mind—that I cared what he thought when he looked at me across that forge last night. That I still care now, standing in an empty yard with coal dust on my hands.
I care, and I shouldn’t.