“Well,” Curran said.

“Good to hear. He had a bit of a temper, that one.” Ivar looked out at the river’s shore where Roderick and Ruckus chased each other. “Trisha is my second wife. My first one, Lisa, well, she was…The best I can figure, she was elfin. No way to know for sure, of course. She showed up on my doorstep one day and stayed. She was beautiful. We had a daughter, but the valley life wasn’t for Lisa, so one morning I woke up and she was gone. Left the baby with me. I did my best to raise her. She had hair like gold, my Aurellia. But I must have done a lousy job raising her. There was never any warmth in her, no empathy. I don’t know why. She was fully grown when a young man came down to the valley. He said he wanted to apprentice himself to me. To learn about smithing. I don’t take apprentices, but the boy had talent, so he and I made a bargain. He would stay with me for a decade.”

“Ten years is a long time,” I said.

“It’s enough to learn how not to do harm,” Doolittle said.

Ivar threw him a grateful look. “You understand. You can’t teach the craft in ten years. I’m past eighty and I still learn new things every day. But I thought a decade would be long enough to teach him what you should make and what you shouldn’t and when. Can’t just hand that kind of power to a man and let him loose in the world without guidance. So Colin and I made a bargain. He would wear the collar and stay here in the valley to learn all I could teach him. If he left the boundary of the valley before the time was up, the collar would kill him. He understood that there was no turning back. Once he put on the collar, he had to stay here for ten years.”

“Aurellia decided to leave?” Curran asked.