The dream came again.
Samuel was at the forge, his back to her, hammer rising and falling in that rhythm she knew better than her own heartbeat. Sparks showered with every strike, a constellation of light in the dim room. She tried to call out to him, but her voice made no sound. She tried to walk forward, but her feet were rooted.
He turned.
His face was not a face. It was the inside of a forge fire, burning and shifting and full of light. And his voice, when it came, was the sound of metal on metal, hammer on anvil, the song of the smith.
"Again," he said. "Again."
She woke.
The room was gray with false dawn. Hannah lay still, her heart pounding, her nightgown damp with sweat. Samuel's side of the bed was empty. Still empty. Always empty.
She got up.
---
The forge was cold again. It was always cold in the morning. That was the nature of fires—they needed to be fed, tended, loved. Hannah went through the ritual: kindling, flint, breath. The flames caught. The light returned.
She stood looking at the fire longer than necessary.
"Again."
The word echoed from her dream. She didn't know what it meant. Again what? Again another day? Again another year? Again a lifetime of waking alone and working alone and sleeping alone?
She reached for the bellows.
---
The morning's work was a set of horseshoes for the livery stable. Simple work, the kind she could do in her sleep. Her hands moved while her mind wandered, shaping the iron, punching the nail holes, curling the ends. Six shoes, then another six. The stable had twelve horses, all of them due for new shoes before the spring planting.
By midmorning, she had finished the first set.
She was starting the second when she heard footsteps in the yard. Heavy footsteps. Male footsteps. Multiple sets.
Hannah set down her hammer and turned.
Three men stood in the doorway. She knew them: Cobb the miller, fat and red-faced; his son Bennet, a hulking boy of nineteen with his father's mean eyes; and a stranger, a thin man in a dark coat she didn't recognize.
"Hannah." Cobb nodded, as if they were friends.
"Cobb."
"We need to talk."
"I'm working."
"This won't take long." Cobb stepped into the forge without waiting for an invitation. His son followed. The stranger hung back, watching.
Hannah's hand drifted toward her hammer. She didn't pick it up, but she didn't move away from it either.
"Talk, then."
Cobb looked around the forge with obvious distaste. The dirt floor, the soot-blackened walls, the tools hanging on their hooks. "Place is still standing, I see."
"It's a forge. They tend to stand."
"Woman's work," Bennet muttered. His father shot him a look.
Hannah said nothing.
Cobb cleared his throat. "The council met again this morning. After your... outburst last night."
"Wasn't an outburst. Was a statement."
"Whatever it was." Cobb waved a hand. "We've discussed it. And we've come to a decision."
Hannah waited.
"The forge stays in your hands. For now."
The words hung in the air. Hannah felt something loosen in her chest, but she didn't let it show.
"For now," she repeated.
Cobb nodded. "We've agreed to a trial period. Six months. You'll continue to work the forge, handle the village's needs. At the end of six months, the council will review. If there have been complaints, if the work has suffered, if any customer is unsatisfied—"
"There won't be."
"—then we'll revisit the question of a new smith."
Hannah looked at him. Cobb's face was carefully blank, but his son was smirking. She understood.
"This isn't a decision," she said. "It's a delay. You're hoping I'll fail."
"I'm hoping you'll prove me wrong." Cobb's smile didn't reach his eyes. "We all are."
The stranger stepped forward. "If I may?"
Cobb stepped aside, suddenly deferential. "Of course, Master Aldwin. Forgive me."
The stranger was thin and pale, with long fingers and the soft hands of a man who had never worked a day in his life. His coat was good quality, dark wool with silver buttons. His eyes were pale gray and very cold.
"You are the widow Hannah?" he asked.
"I am."
"I am Master Aldwin, purveyor of fine goods to the nobility of the eastern marches." He said it as if she should be impressed. "I represent interests that require... specialized craftsmanship."
Hannah glanced at Cobb. The miller was practically vibrating with importance, as if bringing this man here was the greatest achievement of his life.
"I'm a village smith," Hannah said. "I do plowshares and horseshoes. If you need something fancy, you want the city."
Aldwin smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. "I've seen your work, widow. The plowshare for Old Garrick. The hinge for the miller's wife. The shoes you're making now." He gestured at her workbench. "Your technique is... unusual. Efficient. Almost elegant, in its way. Where did you learn?"
"My husband taught me."
"Your husband learned from someone. A master, perhaps? Someone with access to techniques not commonly found in village forges?"
Hannah thought of Samuel's father, dead before she met him. Of the old notebooks Samuel kept in a locked chest. Of the way he sometimes talked about his youth, about a city far to the south, about a master who had taught him secrets.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Aldwin studied her for a long moment. "Of course not." He reached into his coat and produced a small leather pouch. It clinked when he set it on the workbench. "Twenty silver marks. A commission."
Hannah stared at the pouch. Twenty silver was more than she made in a year.
"For what?"
"A knife." Aldwin produced a folded piece of paper and laid it beside the pouch. "The specifications are there. Dimensions, materials, finish. I want it exactly as described."
Hannah unfolded the paper. The drawing was precise, almost beautiful—a curved blade, a hilt of wrapped leather, a pommel shaped like a bird in flight. The specifications called for materials she didn't have: high-carbon steel from the northern mines, leather from a specific tannery in the capital, silver wire for inlay work.
"This is impossible," she said. "I don't have these materials. I don't have the tools for this kind of work."
Aldwin smiled again. "Then acquire them. The commission stands for six months. If you complete it to my satisfaction, there will be more work. Much more. If you fail..." He shrugged. "Then perhaps the council's concerns about your competence are valid."
Hannah looked at Cobb. The miller was beaming.
"You set this up," she said. "You brought him here. You want me to fail."
"I want what's best for the village," Cobb said. "If you can do this work, you're more than a village smith. If you can't..." He spread his hands. "Then maybe you're exactly what we thought you were."
Aldwin was already moving toward the door. "Six months, widow. I'll return at harvest time." He paused at the threshold. "Oh, and one more thing. The knife is for Duke Thorn's youngest son. His name-day gift. The duke has heard rumors of a lost technique, a way of forging that makes steel nearly unbreakable. If you happen to know anything about that..." He let the sentence hang.
Hannah said nothing.
Aldwin left. Cobb and his son followed, smirking.
The forge was quiet again.
Hannah stood staring at the paper, at the impossible knife, at the twenty silver marks that could feed her children for years but might also cost her everything.
From the house, she heard Tomas laugh at something. Lena's voice, scolding him gently. The sounds of ordinary life, of children being children, of a world that didn't know it was balanced on the edge of a knife.
She picked up the silver pouch. It was heavy. Real. Tempting.
She set it down again.
Then she walked to the back of the forge, to the corner where Samuel kept his locked chest. She hadn't opened it since he died. Hadn't dared.
The lock was old, the key hidden in a crack in the wall. Hannah found it, wiped off the dust, and fitted it into the lock.
It turned with a click.
Inside were notebooks. Dozens of them, filled with Samuel's cramped handwriting. Diagrams of blades she'd never seen. Notes on temperatures and quenching times. Sketches of tools she didn't recognize.
And at the bottom, a leather-bound book with no title, its pages yellow with age.
Hannah opened it.
The first page read: "The Techniques of Master Theron, Smith to the King. Passed to his apprentice, Samuel, in the twentieth year of his instruction. Let no unworthy hand touch these pages."
Below that, in Samuel's hand: "For my children, should they ever need it. For my wife, who deserves to know. Forgive me for the secrets, my love. I was young and sworn to silence. But you were always worthy."
Hannah's hand trembled.
She turned the page.
---
The afternoon passed in a blur of reading. Hannah couldn't stop. The notebooks were a revelation—techniques she'd never seen, methods that seemed almost magical. Differential hardening, where the spine of a blade was kept soft while the edge was made hard. Pattern welding, where different types of steel were folded together to create strength and beauty. Heat treatments that required exact temperatures, measured not by eye but by the color of the metal's glow.
And in the old book, Master Theron's secrets. The lost technique. A way of forging that used not just fire and hammer, but something else—something Theron called "the heart's heat," the smith's own will poured into the metal.
"The steel remembers," Theron had written. "It remembers the fire, the hammer, the hands that shaped it. But more than that, it remembers the heart. A blade forged in rage will be brittle. A blade forged in fear will break. But a blade forged in love—in pure, burning love for the work and for those who will wield it—such a blade cannot be broken."
Hannah read the words three times.
She thought of Samuel, patient and kind, always gentle with his students, always loving in his work. She thought of the blades he'd made, the tools that lasted generations, the reputation that had brought Master Aldwin to her door.
She thought of her children, playing in the house, trusting her to keep them safe.
And she thought of the knife. The impossible knife. The test that would prove her worthy or condemn her forever.
She closed the book.
---
That evening, after the children were asleep, Hannah sat at the kitchen table with a piece of charcoal and a scrap of parchment. She began to sketch.
Not the knife from Aldwin's drawing. Something else. Something she'd seen in Theron's book, a blade of ancient design, curved and deadly and beautiful. She sketched it from memory, then added notes. Materials she would need. Tools she would have to make. Techniques she would have to practice.
It would take months. It would take everything she had.
But for the first time since Samuel died, Hannah felt something other than grief.
She felt purpose.
---
The next morning, she woke before dawn. She lit the forge fire. She fed it until it roared.
Then she took Samuel's notebooks to the workbench and began to read in earnest.
She had six months.
She had a lifetime of catching up.
And she had a hammer in her hand.
"Again," Samuel whispered in her memory.
Again.
---
End of Chapter Two