A t the crack of dawn, I found Rivelin in the middle of the road staring at the shattered hinges of his shop’s doors. They hung half-open, revealing carnage within. Splintered remains of wooden crates and barrels littered every inch of the once-polished floor. The racks that had held his hammers and tongs were now empty. Even the decorative horseshoes were missing. His metal sign rattled in the wind, creaking ominously.
Someone had completely ransacked the place.
Rivelin jammed his fingers into his silver locks and sank to his knees. The anguish on his face cracked some of the defenses that guarded my heart, especially the new ones I’d erected last night after our…moment in the forge. Slowly, I approached and knelt beside him on the dirt street.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
A muscle in his jaw worked as his hard gaze never left the forge. “What does it look like?”
I ignored the snap in his tone. I would have snapped, too.
I stood and held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go inside and see what can be salvaged.”
He looked up at me, his eyes dark and hollow. After a moment, he accepted my hand and let me tug him toward the broken doors. The interior was just as damaged as it had looked from outside. Most of his tools were missing, and it would take hours, if not days, to clean the place up. I kept those thoughts to myself, though. No need to make him feel any worse than he already did.
Rivelin picked his way through the debris to the closet door in the back. I noticed a heavy-duty lock now hung from the latch, and whoever had ransacked the shop hadn’t managed to break it. There were a few dents in the wood surrounding it, though.
“If it wasn’t for the lock, he would have taken the swords, too,” he said wearily. “Just don’t say ‘I told you so.’”
I ran my hand along the top of the anvil. It was coated in a thick layer of sawdust, but it only needed a good clean to be as good as new. Same for the forge itself. The thief had only taken small things they could haul out of here easily, like the horseshoes. Anything else, they’d smashed to bits or left alone.
“I’m surprised you didn’t hear anything,” I said after a moment. “The sofa where you sleep is just on the other side of that door.”
“I wasn’t on the fucking sofa.”
I glanced at him, surprised. “Where were you, then?”
I suddenly got the unwanted image of Rivelin sneaking into Odel’s house and spending the night in her bed. He’d mentioned she found him handsome. What if they’d been an item all this time? What if they’d chosen to hide it so that I would accept Rivelin’s offer to stay in his house, so he could keep an eye on the ‘murk’？ And now that he knew more about me, they’d gotten a little more relaxed about seeing each other.
He said he never brought women over to his forge. Was it because he was already taken?
And why was I even thinking about this right now?
“Patrolling the beach,” he said.
“Patrolling? What for?”
“For any unwanted visitors.”
“Ah.” Relieved, I leaned against the anvil. “Is that how you found me when I washed up on the beach? You patrol there all the time?”
“The Elding rages just offshore all through Midsummer. Ships get caught up in it. Sometimes, folk manage to survive and end up on our beach. I like to be there when it happens.”
“Most ships know better than to sail through the Elding. I doubt anyone will want to risk it for a while, especially after what happened to the craft I was on.”
He gave me a long, hard stare. “You’re valuable to the emperor, and you’ve been missing for a good while.”
“Surely you don’t think he would send a ship after me.”
“You don’t?”
“He sent me to the Isles of Fable knowing there was a good chance I’d die at sea. By now, he’ll have heard the Elding smashed the ship to pieces. There’s no reason for him to think I’ve survived. Why risk another ship?”
“What about the shard, then?” he asked.
The shard angrily throbbed in answer, and my hip ached.
“Oh, he’ll use it if I don’t show up in time, just in case I’m still alive somewhere. He’s not the type to renege on his threats.”
“Hmm.” He glanced around the shop. “Well, you can be relieved about one thing. I’m not winning the Games, not now. The tools I need are gone.”
“I’m not relieved about that. I want you to protect Wyndale,” I found myself saying. The moment the words left my mouth, I frowned, and then realized I’d meant it. Somewhere between one week and the next, I’d come to understand these people weren’t harboring the deep, dark secret I’d first believed. Yes, there were dragons around, but right now, they were harmless. And if Isveig invaded this place, he would destroy the peaceful tranquility everyone had worked so hard to create.
If Rivelin won, I did not know what that would mean for me, but I knew what it would mean for them. I would just have to find some other way to survive.
“Do you truly mean that?” he asked quietly.
“I do.” I gazed around the destroyed shop. “And we can fix this. You can still win.”
He held his hands out to his sides. “I’m all ears.”
“The saboteur, Gregor. It’s obvious he did this.”
“Of course it was him. This is payback for saving Kari’s life and turning the entire village against him. He likely thinks the only way he’ll win now is by taking us out of the competition.”
“Exactly. And what do you think he did with all your tools? He’s not smart enough to get rid of them. I bet he even thinks he might use them to craft his own item from fire.” I gestured at the missing rack of tools. “He’ll be hiding them. In his house, I bet. I say we take them back.”
Rivelin shook his head. “We can’t just storm into his house in the middle of the day. He’ll expect it.”
“Exactly. That’s why we go tonight.”
21
DAELLA
A fter breakfast, we hauled the doors off the hinges and collected the debris from the shop floor, placing the wooden shards in piles out front. A few neighbors popped by to help. Milka, a dwarf from down the road, wandered over with some freshly baked bread that was much appreciated. Mabel brought us some mushroom pasties, and Tilda finally introduced herself.
She was a human of about thirty with deep brown skin and sleek black hair, and like Rivelin had said, she was about my height. I thanked her for the steady supply of clothes, but she just waved me away and carried off some of the broken crates to mend. Even Odel and Haldor joined in once the news travelled. They didn’t say a word about who’d done it, but I could tell by the looks on their faces they had their suspicions, too.
In the late afternoon, Lilia swung by with jugfuls of a sweet, lemony concoction that tasted like sunshine itself. As she watched me sweeping the floor, she folded her arms with a deeply troubled look on her face.
“Gregor did this, didn’t he?” she asked.
I paused my sweeping and nodded. “We don’t have any proof, though.”
Lilia shook her head and gazed at the villagers sorting through the rubble we’d pushed out into the road. “I should leave Wyndale for the rest of Midsummer. This all started because of me, and I don’t want Rivelin to lose the competition because Gregor is still angry I don’t want anything to do with him.”