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Someone laughed – a familiar female voice I didn't manage to identify immediately through my own grating breath. Hallthor – yes, that really was Hallthor – dryly said, ‘I wasn't aware I was labouring undersuchdire circumstances.’

That laugh had been Ylfreda’s, I realised belatedly.

I forced myself to stand up straight, sniffling the tears from my eyes. We had arrived right in the middle of a cloud of smoke, it turned out; the rest of the room, while all but clear, at least offered enough oxygen to keep breathing. In the firelit dusk, Tared and Ylfreda sat lounging on a long wooden work table littered with scorch marks, the both of them grinning at me with an air of excitement I would almost describe as giddiness. Hallthor leaned against an anvil of impressive size, arms crossed and expression amused as he watched my laborious attempts not to suffocate on the spot.

Slowly, understanding rose. The smithy in the Underground. The place where Hallthor spent most of his working days before returning home with brand new soot marks on his leather apron and fragments of molten steel in his hair. Doubtless a place of importance to the family, and I didn't mind seeing it from the inside for once – but was a visit to Skeire’s smithy reallyimportant enough to justify hauling me off under threats of violence and abduction?

‘We’re about to go to war,’ I managed, clearing the last lingering wisps of smoke from my throat. ‘Did you really have to drag me away while I—’

‘We had to drag you awaybecauseof that looming war,’ Tared dryly interrupted, still smiling way too broadly for my nerves. ‘Had to get it done before the fighting starts, you see.’

It took all I had not to take a swing at him. ‘To getwhatdone?’

‘Good question.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I understand that Edored actually managed to keep a secret for longer than a minute this time?’

‘Hey!’ Edored protested, dropping himself next to Ylfreda on the edge of the table. ‘I am the pinnacle of secrecy, you smug—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Ylfreda interrupted. Even she was looking unusually cheerful, though there had to be plenty of people to be stitched up in times like these. ‘You did an excellent job. Shall we get to the point, then?’

At least there was one sensible person to be found in this room.

‘Please,’ I said, unable to keep the edge of despair from my voice entirely. ‘I would very much like to know—’

‘We have a gift for you,’ Tared said, as if that would explain everything.

I was getting closer and closer to the point of violence. ‘Yes, Edored said that much, but I don't suppose you went to the effort of collecting the whole family together just to give me a new pair of socks, did you?’

He chuckled. ‘No.’

‘So then what in hell …’

He turned to Hallthor with a sweeping gesture. ‘I'll leave the honour to you.’

The smith just smiled, taciturn as always, and pulled something wrapped in a woollen blanket from behind that boat-sized anvil. He handed me the package as if he was handing over his firstborn child, a sudden earnestness on his face that seemed directly opposed to the air of giddy lightness that had hung in the room a moment ago.

Even then, the pieces didn't click into place.

I peeled the wool off the object, slowly, all too aware of the four pairs of eyes following my every movement. A gleam of metal reflected back at me, almost golden in the light of the smouldering fires. The earthy smoothness of polished leather. Silvery mother-of-pearl. And …

The sharp edge of a blade.

I froze.

I blinked.

Someone chuckled, a few feet away.

No – no, this couldn’t be what I was stupidly thinking it was, could it? In a burst of confusion, I tore off the rest of the blanket, an attempt to put a stop to my fanciful imaginations rather than a matter of impatience … but it reallywasa sword, and a stunningly beautiful one at that. Pommel and cross-guards inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A razor-sharp alf steel edge. The hilt itself seemed to have been made for fae, common steel where it wasn't covered in leather: no risk that I would accidentally block my own magic while holding the blade.

While holding …

Myblade.

I stared at the weapon in my hand as the sound of those two words slowly sank in.

‘You … you're not joking, are you?’ They didn’t look like they were joking, the absolute opposite really – but good gods, asword? I knew perfectly well how they felt about their weapons.Lose it and I’ll kill you, Beyla had told me at the Golden Court,and I’d believed her – believed, at least, that she would have made a good attempt or two before anyone would have been able to talk her into settling for some broken bones and lifelong shunning.

And now they were putting one of those same swords inmylittle fae hands?