I unintentionally snorted, then instantly coughed, hoping I could cover it up.
“Well, that’s not the reaction I wanted to get from that statement,” he said, though he sounded amused and his eyes were doing a twinkling thing that made my stomach feel funny.
“You’re notnothandsome,” I admitted.
“High praise.”
“You’re an elf, and you’re a blacksmith. It’s a given that you’d have some…appealing attributes.”
“Is that so?” He inched closer, and I stumbled a step away but my backside pressed into the edge of the anvil, halting my retreat. “And these appealing attributes would be…?”
I smiled. “You misheard me. I saidappalling, not appealing.”
He leaned in close and braced his hands on the anvil, one on either side of my hips. “You can try and backtrack all you like, but I heard you. What was it you said the first night? I should keep my hands to myself?”
I swallowed. “Yes, that’s what I said.”
“Hmm.” His eyes swept across my face and lingered just a moment too long on my mouth. Suddenly, my lips felt impossibly dry, and it took all my self-control not to sweep my tongue across them. The moment stretched into another, the room silent but for the crackling flames from the forge. Was he going to kiss me? What a wild, ridiculous idea. Still, the tension between us felt palpable, so tangible it rose between us in a haze of steam.
And then suddenly, he shoved away from the anvil and stepped back. I nearly sagged forward—from relief or disappointment, I wasn’t certain. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both. Fates be damned, I didn’twanthim to kiss me. I just…I shook my head to free myself from those kinds of thoughts.
“Something wrong?” he asked in a voice just a little lower than usual.
“No.” I moved away from him and looked for something to busy myself with. A pair of metal tongs sat on the lip of the forge. We needed to clean things up before we went inside the house. As I reached for them, Rivelin let out a strangled yell.
Frowning, I lifted the tongs and glanced back at him. “What?”
He stared at me, his eyes wide. “That’s been sitting by the fire. It’s too hot to handle without gloves. Put it down, Daella.”
“Oh.” I set down the tongs and looked at my hand. The skin on my palm was perfectly fine. “Look, no burn. The tongs are hot, but they must have cooled off enough to touch.”
Rivelin shook his head and moved to my side before poking at the tongs. “No, they’re still burning.” Gently, he lifted my fingers before his eyes and examined the skin, but I didn’t know how well he could see with all the steam billowing everywhere. The air seemed to crackle, or maybe that was just my stomach. After a long moment of inspection, he let go of me. My hand tumbled heavily to my side.
“You’re fine,” he murmured. “Are orcs immune to fire?”
“No,” I said quietly, my heart twanging. The moment suddenly dissipated like the steam. “My mother died in a fire, remember? From the Draugr.”
“That’s right.” His face softened. “Perhaps just immune to heat, then.”
“Perhaps.”
Where a moment ago, an intoxicating tension had hung between us, now I just felt awkward. I shouldn’t have touched anything. It only reminded us both of where I came from and what I’d come here to do. And the future that awaited me.
Quietly, we tidied away his things. I left him to handle the hot tongs with his gloves. We didn’t have much to say for the rest of the night, even when we sat down for dinner in the kitchen, hand feeding Skoll our scraps. In the morning, we’d start working on the item we’d enter for the competition. Not a sword, he said, but something just as magnificent. I went to bed with images of fire and sun-kissed eyes in my mind, and I was so exhausted from blacksmithing I slept like the dead.
* * *
At 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.
