“Take it—really—you’d be doing me a favor. I do need the space.” She held out the dress. Arbor reached toward it and gasped at the sight of her hands. She ran off and scrubbed them red before taking the dress in her quivering arms, cradling it as if it were a child.

“I promise to keep it safe for you. Come back and pick it up anytime, all right?”

“Of course,” Arista replied, smiling. “Oh, and one more thing.” Arista handed her the corset. “If you would be so kind, I never wish to see this thing again.”

Arbor carefully laid the dress down and put her arms around Arista, hugging her close as she whispered, “Thank you.”

When Arista stepped out of the bakery into the sleepy village, her head throbbed, jolted by the brilliant sunlight. She shaded her eyes and spotted Armigil working in front of her shop, stoking logs under her massive cooker.

“Morning, Erma,” Armigil called to her. “Yer looking a mite pale, lassie.”

“It’s your fault,” Arista growled.

Armigil chuckled. “I try my best. I do indeed.”

Arista shuffled over. “Can you direct me to the well?”

“Up the road four houses. You’ll find it in front of the smithy.”

“Thank you.”

Following the unmistakable clanging of a metal hammer, Arista found Royce and Hadrian under the sun canopy in the smithy’s yard, watching another man beating a bit of molten metal on an anvil. He was muscular and completely bald-headed, with a bushy brown mustache. If he had been in the bakery the previous night, Arista did not remember. Beside him was a barrel of water, and not far away was the well, a full bucket resting on its edge.

The bald man dropped the hot metal into his barrel, where it hissed. “Your father taught me that,” the man said. “He was a fine smith—the finest.”

Hadrian nodded and recited, “Choke the hammer after stroke, grip it high when drilling die.”

This brought laughter from the smith. “I learned that one too. Mr. Blackwater was always making up rhymes.”

“So this is where you were born?” Arista asked, dipping a community cup into the bucket of water and taking a seat on the bench beside the well.

“Not exactly,” Hadrian replied. “I lived and worked here. I was actually born across the street there at Gerty and Abe-lard’s home.” He pointed at a tiny wattle-and-daub hovel without even a chimney. “Gerty was the midwife back then. My father kept pestering her so much that she took Mum to her house and Da had to wait outside in the rain during a terrible thunderstorm, or so I was told.”

Hadrian motioned to the smith. “This is Grimbald. He apprenticed with my father after I left—does a good job too.”

“You inherited the smithy from Danbury?” Royce asked.