The armorer gave me a brief smile. “The same as usual, then.” He shaped the iron with the same swift skill he showed with steel. It was a real concession on his part when he agreed to shape iron with the blacksmith. Blacksmithing was a step down from the work he’d usually been called upon to do.

“Stala said we might have a visit from the king soon,” said a quiet voice from the back.

I walked around to see the blacksmith pulling shoes off a horse. He was a little younger than the armorer, with long blond hair he pulled back to keep out of his eyes.

“We might,” I agreed. “But we’ll not be fighting if I can help it. For one thing, the gate in the curtain wall will come down at the first hit of a battering ram. He’ll be looking for the woman we brought in today, and the trick will be not to let him know she’s here.”

The blacksmith set the horse’s leg down and tossed the old shoe into a barrel. “I had heard you’d gotten another stray.” He grinned. Unlike the armorer, he liked to chat while he worked.

“Hardly a stray,” I said, then reconsidered. “Well, she needs help for a bit—but she’ll not be staying.”

“We’ve gotten most of the bars for the windows done,” he said, “and bolts and brackets for the doors inside the keep. Hinges, too, for that matter—but we haven’t started on the hinges for the keep door yet. So far we’re ahead on nails and fasteners of various kinds, but the carpenter sent his boy in to check today—so I imagine we’ll be doing nails again in the near future.”

The heat of the forge felt good in the cool air, so I stayed and talked a bit, helping with bellows and fetching water from the well.

Tisala’s state had left me melancholy, and work was good to dispel it. When I left the forge’s warmth, I wandered along the curtain wall and touched a rough-hewn granite block to remind myself of how much we’d accomplished since Hurog had fallen.

The inner curtain walls had been the first thing I’d had rebuilt after Hurog fell. And it was a good thing, too—between the death of my father and the invasion of the Vorsag, bandits from hundreds of miles around had come to see if Hurog was ripe for the plucking. The Blue Guard, under my aunt’s direction, fended them off—but had there not been the curtain wall to hide my people behind, the bandits would have laid waste to the farmers who worked the land.