Sidra walked the streets of Sloane, a basket of healing supplies hanging from her arm. Each door she passed held an offering on its threshold for the spirits. Appeasements and manifest prayers in the shape of carved figurines and small stacks of peat, so the fire could dance and burn, and chimes made of fishing line and glass beads, so the wind could hear its own breath when it passed by. There were small bannocks and cups of milk for the spirits of the earth, and salted herring and jewelry strung with shells for the water.

Desperation hung like fog, and Sidra let her thoughts roam to dark places.

She thought of the two lasses, Eliza and Annabel. Two girls now unaccounted for, and Sidra imagined them being claimed by the folk. She wondered if a girl could become a tree, no longer aging in mortal ways but by seasons. Could a girl become a wildflower patch, resurrected every spring and summer only to wilt and fade come the sting of frost? Could she become the foam of the sea that rolled over the coast for an eternity, or a flame that danced in a hearth? A winged being of the wind, sighing over the hills? Could she be returned to her human family after such a life, and if so, would she even remember her parents, her human memories, her mortal name?

Grief welled within Sidra as she returned her attention to the city thoroughfare. She came to Sloane twice a week, to make a round of visits to her patients there. Her first appointment was with Una Carlow, and Sidra followed the song of a hammer striking an anvil.

She arrived at Una’s forge and stood in the sun for a moment, watching the blacksmith work in her shop. The air was thick with the tang of hot metal, the sparks flying as Una hammered a long blade of steel. Sidra could feel every strike in her teeth until Una finally quenched the blade in a tub of water, the steam rising with a hiss.

Una withdrew the sword and handed it off to her apprentice, who was red faced and perspiring from pumping the bellows. Sidra thought of how the fire always burned at the forge, how its embers never fell cold and docile. If anyone was intimate with Cadence fire, knowing its temperament and power and secrets, it was Una.

As such, Una was one of the only blacksmiths in the east who wasn’t afraid to hammer enchantments into her steel. She could take a secret and an ingot, melt them together over a blistering fire, and shape them as one on her anvil. Once an enchanted blade was complete, she always fell ill with a fever and was sometimes unable to leave her bed for days.

“Sidra,” the blacksmith said in greeting, removing her thick leather gloves. “How are you and Maisie?”