Page 4 of Ties of Legacy

The young man didn’t even seem to notice Avery, his focus on the forge beyond her. But Avery stood for a moment, struck by something she couldn’t articulate. He was good-looking, with wavy brown hair and eyes so blue she could see their color from across the street, but she had seen good-looking men before.

Was it his single-minded focus that was out of place in the setting? Or was it the haggard cast of his features? He looked as if he had only just recovered from an extensive illness and was upright only due to the assistance of the shoulder he had propped against the wall. And yet his focus didn’t waver.

If he had been waiting outside a healing clinic, it might have made sense. But while the Henton smith made remarkable objects, he didn’t work with anything that had healing qualities. Avery was there to save lives, but her situation was unique.

She stilled. Was it concern for someone else and not his own health that had affected the man’s countenance so dramatically? Could he have come from Bolivere? Had the situation there worsened in Avery’s absence?

Without thinking, Avery stepped toward the man, drawn irresistibly in his direction. She would ask him if?—

Her approach finally pulled the man’s attention away from the smith, and for a moment, he seemed as struck by her appearance as she had been by his. But a second later, his face was wiped clean of expression, and he pushed himself off the building. Walking with more strength than she had expected from someone who looked so weak, he hurried back between the building that had been supporting him and the one beside it, quickly disappearing from sight.

Avery took several hurried steps after him before stopping. What was she doing? If the man had been from Bolivere, he would know about her mission and would have recognized her, not run away.

He had struck a discordant note in his surroundings, and it had made her curious, but she couldn’t lose her focus. Her father had always warned her that curiosity could get her in trouble. She would never see the young man again, so she had to shake thoughts of him off, just as she had with Olivia and Laurie.

Avery turned back to the smithy and strode inside without looking back. A burly man with heavily muscled arms looked up from beside the fire and slowly raised his brows.

“I’m Avery,” she said. “I’m here for the enchanted lamp I ordered.”

Chapter 2

Elliot

Elliot leaned against the wall, appreciating the extra support after so many hours on his feet keeping watch on the smithy. His strength had mostly returned, but he could still feel the effects of his recent weakness. He needed to get closer to the smith’s stash before he could regain his full strength.

And if the smith didn’t leave his forge soon, it was possible it would never happen. Elliot shuddered at the thought. The last two weeks had been sufficiently bad that he refused to even consider the possibility of his current state continuing indefinitely. He would recover his candelabra—and consequently his health—no matter what it took.

Villagers came and went down the main street, but Elliot’s eyes remained on the smith. The man was enormous—too enormous for Elliot to consider raiding his smithy while he was still there. And the man didn’t even leave his forge at night, sleeping laid out at the front of the smithy.

Elliot had attempted approaching him as a customer, of course. But the only thing the man would grunt at him was that there was a waiting list. Apparently, you couldn’t just walk in off the street and purchase from this particular smith. And if youwere from out of town, he was taking bookings for six months away. Six months!

Elliot couldn’t possibly wait six months, which was why he was reduced to considering petty theft. Not that it would be true theft. The candelabra was his and had been stolen from him in the first place. It wasn’t as if he was stealing one of the smith’s own works. And he would even leave a fair price behind. The candelabra might have been his by right, but the smith hadn’t been the one to steal it.

Not for the first time, he cursed the original, unknown thieves. By the time he had woken up and realized it was gone from his makeshift camp, he had been too weak to have any hope of catching them. As it was, it had taken him two weeks of trial and error to track the candelabra to Henton. And by then he was too weak to care about justice for the original theft. He just wanted to retrieve his property.

It wasn’t as if the thieves had known what they were doing. Who would ever have suspected that Elliot needed an ordinary brass candlestick in order to put one foot in front of the other? Some days he still couldn’t believe it himself, and he’d been carting the thing everywhere he went for twenty-one years.

Elliot’s focus on the smith had grown so intense that he barely noticed the periodic movement of others around him. Even when a cart approached the smithy, he didn’t break his stare. But when the owner of the cart started across the main road toward him, he blinked and finally took in her appearance.

She was young—a little younger than him, he would guess—but she carried herself with confidence beyond her years. And she definitely didn’t come from Henton. That much would have been obvious even if he hadn’t grown to recognize all the town’s inhabitants. She was the kind of woman it was hard to look away from—the kind who must command the attention of kings as easily as smiths.

But what was she doing approaching him? Elliot shook himself. In a normal situation, he would have welcomed the opportunity to talk to her. But what if she was connected with the smith in some way and was coming to ask the purpose of his suspicious lurking? He didn’t have a reasonable answer, so it was better to avoid the conversation altogether.

He slunk back between the buildings, disappearing from view as quickly as possible. When he paused to check behind him, he breathed a sigh of relief. She had abandoned the pursuit.

Circling the building, he approached the main street from the other side, moving more cautiously this time. Her cart and horse were still tethered outside the smithy, but it took him a moment to find the girl herself.

She was just inside, talking animatedly with the smith. But the smith was giving her little in return, just as Elliot remembered in his own attempts at conversation with the man.

The girl seemed disappointed by whatever he did say, but she accepted his words much more quickly than Elliot had. Consequently, she walked out on her own feet, avoiding being forcibly ejected and forbidden to ever return.

From the look of their interaction, his earlier fears had been misplaced. She definitely appeared to be a customer rather than an associate. But in that case, why had she attempted to approach Elliot? The question was of far more interest to him than it should have been. He couldn’t afford to indulge curiosity when he was in such dire circumstances.

He watched her untie her horse and cast a final, longing look at the forge before moving off toward Henton’s one small inn. Elliot wished he could follow. And not just because he wanted to talk to the girl. He envied the fact that she would get a meal in the inn’s dining room and a night sleeping in one of its two guest chambers. His own night would be much less comfortable.

His meal consisted of simple rations from his pack, and he slept as usual in the shadow between the general store and the bakery, directly across from the smithy. And as before, he slept only fitfully, waking periodically through the night to check if the smith had left. He never had.

The first light of morning had barely begun to rouse Elliot when the sound of hooves brought him to full alertness. He scrambled to his feet and identified the cart and its owner, shaking his head when he did so. He knew from experience that the smith’s mind wouldn’t be changed by a good night’s sleep. The girl would have no more luck in the light of morning than she’d had at the end of the previous day.

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