“Thought you said you were good with fire, boy…”

“S’different when there’s a forge around the wood…” muttered Beidon. He flung a frustrated gesture at his surroundings, a mere wagon-wheel-sized flatrock table for a hearth and only the trees edging its surrounding clearing for a windbreak. He inhaled for a louder response, but embarrassment at his failure to strike a sustained flame muted further protest.

He kept at it, trying different arrangements of the kindling, different striking motions with camp knife and flint, but nothing seemed to make a difference. The dry tinder shavings out of his forge kit caught readily enough, and the kindling complied grudgingly, but the foraged fuel was still damp from the prior nightlong drizzle and burned only in short, smoky fits before guttering out. He spent further futile minutes futilely cupping a series of hissing, dying embers and halfheartedly beseeching the First Forgers for aid.

When those worthies unsurprisingly declined to bless his insufficient effort, the boy finally choked down his pride and resolved to ask the experienced outdoorswoman for aid. But glancing up from his pathetic fire-in-the-making toward Laurn, he frowned in confusion – what was she doing now?

The huntress was bent over nearly double and walking a slow backwards circuit of the camp site. In her wake she laid down a thin line of dark powder which she was delicately tapping out of one of the canisters from her bandolier. She was quite careful, he noted, not to disturb the partially completed powder-ring taking shape behind her. Curious, he left the fire and crept to a completed section. He pinched up a finger-full of powder, raised it to his face, and was instantly suspicious. He rolled the grains between his fingers, sniffed them, touched them with his tongue, and was certain: “Hey… this is iron!”

Laurn looked up sharply from her work. “Dolt, don’t smudge the circle!”

Beidon gazed at the filings on his fingertips, then at the thick trail that Laurn was laying down. “But… the iron! That has to be a quarter-pound of ore you’re just dumping out onto the ground! It’s valuable!”

Laurn stood, placed her hands on her hips. “You’ll see just how valuable if you break that circle, and we’re ambushed by our own quarry! Stop crying over it before you rust it! What are you anyway, boy, some kind of ferro-fanatic?”

Beidon drew his hammer and lifted it laid across both palms. “No. I’m a blacksmith. Unlike some, we know the true value of iron!”

Laurn grimaced. “A ‘smith, eh? Swell. You’ll surely start pulling your weight on this journey the instant my next horse needs re-shoeing.”

At the mention of a horse the forge-boy looked around, confused. “But you don’t-”

The huntress rolled her eyes, lifted a leg, smacked her boot heel bitterly. “Look who’s a slagging scrutineer now! Listen, Rusty, and I’ll tell you what I do value: my skin. And I’ll tell you what I hate: I hate faekind. And faekind, as it turns out, hate iron.

“Doth comprehension dawneth, boy? We’re too few to stand a nightlong watch. So unless you fancy being set upon in your sleep by some unearthly horror that your lunkwit metal-headed mind likely can’t even conceive of, you’ll get back to botching your chore and let me get back to mine!” She bent back to her powder-ring. And Beidon, red-faced, caught her muttering as she resumed, “…Dana, but you’d think a bloody blacksmith would be better at starting a simple bloody fire….”

Stung by the quip, Beidon retorted with, “And what is it you said you do, again?”

“Told you, boy: fae hunter. Professional hunter of faeries.”

So me vestigial bit of skepticism, rebelling against the day’s numerous oddities, drove him to protest, “But… but… there are no such things as faeries!”

The self-proclaimed huntress smirked. “So say the edicts and ordinances of your high-and-wise elders and masters, boy?”

The belittled forge-boy defied growing unsurety, stubbornly maintaining his insistence: “So say my own eyes - I’ve never seen one!”

Her crooked smirk widened, mocking and gloating. “You’re welcome.”

Later, after Laurn had taken the fire-starting chore in hand (while giving special sidewise attention to making an already shamed Beidon feel even more the fool) the two rested uneasily across the sputtering flames from each other. The ruddy afterglow of the set sun sent long spears of weird dim light stabbing between the Clearwood trunks, strinking bloody glints off of the many lingering droplets from the afternoon’s rain showers. The oncoming night promised to be chilly, cloudy, and uncomfortable in more ways than one.

Peering through the fire at the woman, the boy glowered at her blitheness – despite the damp-matted pine needles underfoot and the dripping boughs overhead, Laurn had simply settled with her back to a pine trunk, pulled her hood down, stetched out her long legs, and effected perfect disregard for it all. Beidon, less well attired against the elements and less inured against outdoors adversity in general, had a difficult time demonstrating the same nonchalance. He folded his arms tightly to mask his shivers, the stern posture as well as his discomfort emboldening his first question for the enigmatic huntress.

“Listen… I TOLD you back there, today… I swear I saw Emlie entering, receeding-” he rubbed his bruised head, self-doubting, then with sudden ridiculous-or-no-I’ll-say-it-anyway vehemence declared “-I saw her disappearing into a blink-and-miss-it hole in the riverbank!”

The woman raised a sharp-peaked eyebrow at him, all but out-loud asking and your point is?

The boy held up placating hands. “Yes, you listened. You poked around with that… that contraption of yours… but then you rushed us out of there so quickly, hauled us clear out of town down the Southern Cropway… you worked so fast, could you really have made sure, absolutely sure, that I was addled and wrong and that she didn’t go in there?”

Her reply was offhand insouciance: “On the contrary Rusty, we sped out of there once I’d made the rapid determination that she did go in there.”

Hands still upraised, Beidon stared at the woman for a beat. Then he lunged around the fire at her. He was brought up short by the double-SNAKT of two metal forks springing up from the bracer wrapping her suddenly outstretched right wrist. “Uh uh UH. Down, boy. Civility is a cornerstone of successful road-fellowship.”

Beidon glowered, stared, flexed his fingers in frustrated anger.

Then, slowly, he returned to his spot.

He settled only uneasily, though, and began to grumble: “You know, this is ridiculous – I’m letting you threaten me with an underdeveloped cheese fork. You don’t even have a sword. That’s just leather and some junk mechanism, I don’t-”

Laurn shifted her arm a minute amount and flicked her wrist.

A BLAST erupted over Beidon’s head, the concussion driving his knees down into the duff. A shower of sparks rained down, forcing Beidon to throw up a heavy-sleeved upper arm to shield himself. Gobbets of molten wax and smoldering splinters peppered his exposed elbow, eliciting a pained yelp.

“Swords are overrated.” Laurn deadpanned.

She gestured at the wrist-device. “Greatwright bracer-sling, Gumrubber Estates band, Infernal Heights brimstone shot. Modest bark, outsized bite.” She leaned forward. “Listen, smith-boy: there’s a lot that I could tell you about the whys and the wherefores of certain things that we have done and will do. But some of it would invite your provincial disbelief and some of it would tax your capacities and much of it would just go completely over your head, so what say we just skip that whole ugly exercise and stick with the ‘I say, you do’ model of partnership? It’s worked pretty well for us thus far…”

But Beidon folded his arms obstinately. “Explain why we abandoned her trail, or learn to sleep with that thing pointed at me.”

Laurn easily matched his intensity. “What makes you think I haven’t already got that –and you– covered?”

Nevertheless, after a moment she shrugged, lowered the weapon, crushed out a lingering ember, and began: “You didn’t just see your girlfriend vanish into some cave opening, boy – you saw her cross the Veil. Into Feyside.”

As if that word had exhausted all her air, Laurn took a breath. She looked away from her interrogator, clearly not relishing the thought of having to explain to the uninitiated. But the boy was there regardless… staring, demanding… and after a moment she relented in the face of his stubborn expectancy. She settled back in preparation for discoursing at length, though for the moment her eyes their surroundings.

Dusk’s afterglow was lighting the rising night-mist, lending an air of eldritch mystery to the humble young Clearwood. Appropriate ambiance for a faery-story, perhaps, but Laurn regarded it with a pained sneer, as if it had further tasked and burdened her. Inspired to contempt, she warned the boy by way of preamble, “Listen... a lot of fodderbrained faetors will tend to couch talk of this sort -of faeries, their realm, their dealings- in airy, romantic terms dripping with ominous mystery. A sugar-coated toadstool ring wrapped up in gossamer rstarshine and served with a helping heaping of wonderous awe…

“Slag that, say I.” She flipped an unrepeatable gesture at the woods.

“No doubt you already know that romance is something to save for impressing mortal maids who know no better, eh? And for a tracker, mystery is just another word for ignorance.” She smacked a holstered truncheon handle. “No, there’s only one valid way for any but a halfwit to approach such matters... And that’s tactically, matter-of-factly. That said…”

She finally turned back to the boy with her hands upheld, fingers spread.

“Feyside is simply the faery realm. It isn’t a land or a kingdom in the way you’re used to thinking of such – it’s a world apart, another reality. Disjoint from our own, this world they call Sunside (or ‘Mudside’, when they’re looking down their pointy little noses at us.) Disjoint, yet connected. Overlaid, you could say, but hidden. Veiled. You see boy, Feyside’s everywhere. Your town, the bower by the stream, the path of today’s travel, even here… all the time. You’re an eternal hair’s breath away from it without ever knowing it.

“The Veil is what separates here from there. It’s most times and places a wall-” at which she held up one hand in front of the other, the fore screening the rear behind its bunched, upraised fingers “-but sometimes a window, or even occasionally a door. Ordinarily we and the Folk on the other side of the Veil are blessedly mutually oblivious … but it happens that we can discern, and even interfere with, each other under certain rare conditions…” And now she parted the fingers into a vee, revealing the formerly hidden hand and the lewd gesture she was making with two of its fingers. She then thrust those fingers forward through the gap. “Specifically, in the presence of one of those holes in the Veil, those ‘windows’, particularly one that’s been opened.”

Next she pressed her face against the opening as if peeking through- “With me so far?”

Rapt and dubious in equal measure, Beidon nodded.

The huntress next gestured back in the direction from which they’d come. “Faeries call the damn things Thinnings. They’re particular past masters at sniffing them out, and at using ‘em to transit between here… and there. Those Feyside bastards natively have the means of throwing them wide almost at will. But if you’re a mere mortal looking to gatecrash, those holes in the Veil are accessible only extraordinarily. Via, you know,” Laurn frowning in distaste, “magick.”

She shrugged defensively. “And sorry, but my bag of tricks doesn’t extend that far. I left my wand and pointy hat at home, so cracking that Thinning and charging through after your girl wasn’t an option.” She held up a hand to forestall his objection. “But fear not Rusty, for options we’ve still got. Starting with marking off that Thinning back there for a good paving-over, toss that much right back into the fey batards’ teeth!” She spit into the fire.

“’Paving’? Lady, are you a mystic or a municipal worker?”

“What makes you think I’m not both, boy? Now pay attention.” Laurn cast around the campsite for… inspiration, perhaps? She nodded in satisfaction upon spotting a little rainwater pool caught in a depression of their firepit-stone. She trailed a finger through it, raising little ripple-wakes.

“See, the landscape of Feyside shadows our own world’s, sure… but only in a tangential and complicated sort of way. You can think of it like ocean covering a seabed, level surface over craggy, rugged bottom. From a bird’s-eye-view, every spot on the surface lines up with a spot on the ‘bed; yet for all that, the path of a Freeport windjammer setting sail on that surface will very quickly part ways from that of, say, a crab scurrying across the bottom directly underneath, even if they keep precise pace and both beeline for the same destination. It’s only when they reach that destination, when the ground and the surf smash back together at the shoreline, that the boat and the crab will again encounter each other. And just so, the true line of pursuit when tracking something cross-Veil, from the perspective of those in the thick of it, may appear to skew and swerve from the straight an’ level.”

Laurn leaned forward, emphasizing, justifying: “That’s the case with regards your little friend and the thing that’s leading her down the primrose path – we may not be appear to be following the same track as the two of them, but we do this right and we’ll damn sure wind up at the same damn island.”

At that, Laurn paused. Her look was sharp, formidable, yet tinged with a vulnerability perhaps reflecting the making of extraordinary statements for which the listener might demand extraordinary proof. Her look challenged the boy to scoff, to question, to deride, even to maintain his prior combative incomprehension.

Instead she found him staring back at her intently, and after a moment motioning her to continue on.

“Not even a snicker? Forgers, boy, do you have an exceptionally open mind or an exceptionally empty one?”

Beidon couldn’t help but smile ruefully. “Neither, I surely hope, just… had a very demanding teacher teach me a hard lesson on that front only a small while ago. Trying to do better now. Go on.”

Laurn appeared glad for the reception even if she didn’t fully understand its motivation. “Clearly…” Holding the boy’s gaze, she moved to summarize:

“Well I suppose the point is… the lands of Feyside are every bit as vast as those of Sunside and ten times as confusing. Taking the right path rather than the obvious one isn’t just the best way to track, it’s the only one. That kind of track requires an… unconventional expertise…” and laying a hand upon her chest, “…something I have in droves.”

The hand now moved to a holstered truncheon’s handle, while the eyes blazed with fervid intensity: “I promise you this, boy: you follow my directions to the letter, nonsensical though they might sound to the uninitiated, and the next time that faery bastard pokes his head out through a Thinning, he’ll find the two of us there waiting to brain it!” The clenched hand spasmed as if the huntress was imagining making good on her threat. Then the huntress paused, waiting for a response.

Beidon considered all that he’d been told. He reflected on the day’s events, its myriad impossibilities. He weighed his options, not least the choice of whether or not to believe the half-mad-seeming revelations of the roughneck woman staring back at him. He remembered the last time he’d been presented with fanciful, flighty dreams… and what his choice then had cost him.

Beidon relaxed his still-tense shoulders, his decision made.

“I’m… I’m sorry I quenched without tempering.”

Laurn snorted. “If that little flash of colorful trade argot means you apologize for acting in untutored ignorance, then apology accepted.”

Beidon rolled his eyes, but let the dig pass unaddressed. Laurn clapped him on the shoulder, as if some important milestone had been attained. Beidon took it as permission to question, and he started with the fervor he’d just glimpsed: “Her captor… you said you were following him…”

Scowling, Laurn spat into the fire. “The one you saw her with. Yeah. The foddering worst of the worst, that one… which, for a faery, says a lot. He was my bounty-” then with a self-censoring shrug, “-or rather my quarry…”

Beidon picked up on this odd evasiveness. “There’s a difference? Which one?”

Laurn, looking offended at the question, slashed a dismissive gesture before the boy’s face. “Business or pleasure, boy. ‘Which one’ is no matter. …what matters is, I’d succeded. I’d already outfoxed him. I’d already caught the vermin!”

“So what happened?”

Laurn responded by tugging her leather headband up from over her left temple. Underneath, a nasty bruise stood out angrily on her skin. “This. En route out of the Glasslands and back to civilization, I ran afoul of this troupe of itinerant tinkers… trinket-forgers and bush-glaziers, sure you know the type. We’d traded before, and we got on well enough.

“Anyway, familiarity breeds contempt, they seemed harmless and I was eager for company, and consequently not as on my guard as I should have been…” the huntress glowered, scrutinized her finger tips. Staring past the boy at the last licks of sunset, she intoned a softly voiced singsong: “My mother said / that I never should / play with the gypsies in the wood…”

Shaking herself, she mutteringly resumed, “…so I got a little too friendly with the buggers, a mite too free maybe in partaking of their passed wineskin… and I wound up getting skinned.”

Beidon was taken aback. “They waylaid you?”

“Don’t get precious. They robbed me boy, yes, and right under the walls of your beloved Clear Crucible too. They took my coin, food, horse… but worst of all they took my witchball, the soulglass prison I’d bound my captive up into. Now, could be they were just grabbing a bauble to fence, pass off as their own craftwork, but somehow… I don’t think so. ‘Fact that the ‘ball was broken and the bastard on the loose again almost in less time than it’s taking to tell it seems like pretty strong argument against…” She yanked the headband back into place, wincing as she did so. “Anyway, there was my folly. I bumped into you as I was trying to run him down, re-collect him before he could cause any trouble in consequence.”

Hearing the obvious self-rebuke, Beidon felt a sudden kinship for the woman. “So you… you’re a foul-up too! You’re as desperate to redeem yourself as I-”

But that had been the wrong thing to say. Laurn’s expression fell dark like storm shutters slamming shut over a window, and her interrupting voice was thick with ire: “What I am boy, uniquely so, is the only one on this little expedition who has the slightest clue what she’s doing, on any front. Or to stretch our little analogy further, I’m the ship captain and the eyeing bird here. Remember that.”

She tugged her cloak tighter about herself before resuming in a tone that was either placatory… or merely sleepy: “And right know my unique expertise tells me that it’s time for all fellow travelers to shut up and get some rest.” She laid her head back against the pine and buried her glower deep inside her cowl.

The cowl soon began to issue rhythmic, rumbling snores.

The next morning lost the pine copses of the Clearwood and found Beidon following Laurn across the cultivated feed-lands further south. Both were edgy and grumpy, owing to a too-short sleep (insisted upon by Laurn) and a bone-deep chill (owing something, Beidon grudgingly allowed, to his difficulty keeping the fire burning consistently through the night…) Laurn had reverted to taciturn type after the uneasy night’s rest; Beidon likewise to his by turns-clueless-and-surly recent norm. Their conversation of the night before, the forge-boy ruefully reflected, might never have happened for any lasting good it did their relationship dynamic or how he felt about it: he was still readily cowed by her stern and scornful demeanor, he was still offended by her irreverent attitude toward just about everything… and now that she’d doffed her cloak he was, to his mortification ansd in spite of all of that, still somehow …intrigued. Captivated, really, (surely entirely against his conscious will) by her raw physicality.

He caught himself stealing glances at the bounty huntress as she stalked up the cart-road ahead of him, admiring the tension and stretch of sleekly fit legs, the ripple of trim abdominals, muscles all-too-visible under their tight leather claddings. Every time this happened, Beidon flinched away out of a combination of fear of discovery and shame at his own fecklessness… and yet there was always a next time…

It was ludicrous, insane. After all, she was perfectly awful. Completely the opposite of, completely different from his fair and formal Emlie. Fascinatingly different, a voice somewhere inside his head offered. Shut up, Beidon shot back.

Sure, both women were in a sense alike in their heedless defiance of the norms of their gender, but there all similarity ended. He looked down at his hands, at their heavy callouses and their creases still stained coal-dark - so very different, those hands, from the long and dainty hands of the Lord Mayor’s daughter. Insurmountably different, perhaps. The huntress’ hands, by contrast, were as dirty and work-worn as the forge-boy’s own…

No, the boy admonished himself; he’d make no unfair comparisons of that sort, seek no shame where in truth there was only magnificence. Emlie for all of her quirks and fancies was a lady. The same could hardly be said of this …this harridan: brash, brazen, brusque; coarse, cruel, uncouth, she was utterly singular in her unfemininity. But there’s nothing unfeminine about the shape of that b­- Beidon smacked himself hard across the side of the head.

Laurn turned at the sound, raised an eyebrow. Ooo-kay…Whatever, kid, the peaked brow teased. The huntress turned away again, shrugging, and resumed her confident stride.

The huntress set a bitter pace, one far more comfortably maintained by her long legs than by the stocky forge-boy’s. She was guarded around the few other travelers they encountered on the road, verging in Beidon’s opinion on paranoid… she decisively crushed Beidon’s hesitant suggestion that they beg a lift on one of the eastward-bound goods-wagons that periodically overtook them.

And she was miserly with their rests. When Beidon found the courage to mildly protest that they might move faster overall if they allowed their legs more frequent breaks, the huntress was again characteristically aggressive in her denial:

“Had enough already, boy? Ready to call it quits?”

“Not hardly. I’m simply suggesting that we might travel smart and-”

“‘Smart’? Let me impart some smart, Rusty: we are pursuing a Veil-translated arch faery across open country. You have no idea how fast these bastards can cover ground. Even making do here in Sunside, the damned serendipity of their magicks make them veritable speed demons. On their own side of the Veil, unencumbered, they cannot be surpassed. So don’t you advise me to take any unnecessary smart rests.” She spat. “Our only chance at catching them is the hope that your little friend will slow our quarry sufficiently with her own need for rest to allow us to overtake ‘em.

“So tell me, smith-boy: is your dainty-footed towne-girl apt to serve us passably as a faery-millstone?”

Beidon considered. He flashed back upon their innumerable excursions as a duo through, around, beneath Clear Crucible, the irrepressible golden-tressed girl impetuously dragging along in her wake the reserved, stone-footed smithy boy. He winced in dismay, and reluctantly shook his head. “Actually... She might occasionally have been the more... venturesome of the two of us...” Laurn rolled her eyes elaborately and muttered curses against her perennial luck, prompting Beidon to seize her wrist and add, “...but not THIS time! We’ll catch up and we’ll liberate her, I swear it!”

Laurn turned on Beidon with a sneer and a closed fist, and it seemed inevitable that she would violently dislodge and/or verbally eviscerate him. Something in his determined glare or the earnest set of his jaw must have spoken to her, however, as she instead settled for inserting her fingertips between her wrist and his clutching hands and batting them away with a deft flick. “Sure, Rusty, sure.” Stifling her smirk, she strode on ahead.

Their rapid clip pushed them through the crop-rows and onto a shallow rock-strewn downslope. The fields’ end demarcated the outermost extent of Clear Crucible authority - the slope beyond was an unproductive no-man’s-land between the tableland of the Glasslands and the adjacent lowland district, the unprofitable terrain claimed by neither’s bordertowns and therefore left to exploitation solely by the occasional small wildcat-croft. Fired by the recent exchange, Beidon fought against the urge to simply lean into the slope and run all the way down into the Timberstrand district.

He restrained himself, and soon enough the ground grew completely level again, and the lowland beyond ever-increasingly cultivated. The duo knew themselves to be decisively into the Timberstrand when the small farms of the slope gave way to a resumption of the regular tenant-yards of Industrial Agriculture, in this case textile fields claimed by the neighboring builders’ town of of Framers’ Square. Laurn resumed her furtive ways, forbidding Beidon from any contact with Timberstrand passers-by, and picked up their pace yet again.

Around noon the duo reached the South Cropway Crossroads and, turning west onto the Timberway, soon passed out of of Framers’ Square’s claim and into the next marge. This was at first a tree-specked band of semi-wild fallow-land. Within the hour, however, they passed their first stumps. These were at first scattered and unordered enough to be taken for hastily executed field-clearings, preparing the way for crops. But over the afternoon’s course, they grew more frequent and more arranged, eventually falling away in serried ranks to either side of the road, and it became obvious that in fact they were the crop (or at least the leavings of its harvest.) In any case, Laurn was a sojourner many times over through the region, and curtly informed the untraveled Beidon that they had entered the outlands of Once-Were-Trees.

“It’s a Loglands logging town… a logging camp, really. Biggest in the West Reach.”

“I know, I know. I do live a day’s travel from here!” Beidon stooped to pick up a pebble and sidearm-flung it against a roadside stump

“A day’s awesome, daunting travel, clearly, since you’ve never made it this far from home, eh Rusty?”Laurn flipped another pebble upwards with her boot, snatched it mid-air with a flourish, and began loading her bracer-slingshot. “Amazing. Your knowledge of what lies beyond your doors is prodigious. Tell me, does your mental map of the world just end at the edge of the Clearwood? Perhaps with a fanciful drop-off into blank white paper adorned with an illustrated notation reading ‘here there be dragons?’”

“I’ve been out past the ‘wood! I’ve made Master Brimmel’s coal run to Oreton for him any number of times!”

“A half-day’s jaunt through cropland to another cushy trade-town. If Oreton were any closer to ‘Crucible, they’d share the same sanitation department! Your girlfriend’s father would doubtless have jurisdiction! Tell me, did you drive the wain, or just shove it down ‘Crucible’s West Hill?” The pebble, launched with a snapping twang, embedded itself dead-center into the stump Beidon had pelted.

Beidon reddened. “That’s not fair… anyway, I know plenty about Once-Were-Trees – most of Clear Crucible’s construction lumber comes from here. It’s a mechanized production camp, and it fills most of the West Reach’s hardwood needs.”

"My, what a prodigious amount of book-learnin’you can regurgitate. Don’t let the Logmasters know how loaded with it you are, Rusty-boy - they’ll pressgang you into bookwrighting the investor prospectus! But you’re my dead wood, not theirs, and I intend to squeeze some actual use out of you. If you know so much, why don’t you put your vast knowledge to use in interrogating the camp foreman?”

“Pardon? ‘Interrogating?’”

“You’ve got it, yes. That’s bounty hunter argot for ‘ask salient questions and obtain answers.’”

“Why? How? About what?”

“About log yields, per-capita outhouse use, and his feelings on the next inter-tradetown Harpastum tournament. Failing that, oh I don’t know, perhaps you could ask about the arch-faery and faetor girl-in-train making their way across his logging claim.” Laurn threw her hands up in frustration.

“You said that they’re across this Veil thing from us, though… why would he know anything about it?”

“He runs this place, he’s in tune with it. And the Veil is quite thin here… not quite a Thinning, but nowhere near as watertight as most other places. Doubtless why our quarry is passing this way, thin spots like this draw them. Why do you think the trees are so infamously tall hereabouts anyway? Magick is like dung - it may be foul, but it makes excellent fertilizer!

“As for the foreman, he knows his little realm, he’ll be on top of any odd occurrences that might presage or signpost the faery’s passage. It’ll be your job to drag it out of him while I see what I can see.”

“But... I’ve never interrogated ANYBODY, least of all a Master! I’m an apprentice! I’m quiet, respectful, and obedient!”

“I see. So your Master directed you to head out into the wide world, borrowing your full smithing kit and in company of a strange woman, in pursuit of faeries?”

Beidon thought back on yesterday’s departure, on defiance of Grywald and glass shards raining from his hammer’s head. Laurn’s words were a truth to he had no reply.

Laurn grinned, her expression idiosyncratically sympathetic. “Thought so. Perk up Rusty, this’ll hardly be the first heedless, headstrong, unprecedented thing you’ve done today!” She smugly strode off.

Beidon thought on it, shrugged, smiled himself, and followed her towards the plumes of chimney smoke rising from crest of a distant hill-line.

Next Chapter: 10. Emlie Cold Shouldered