Some days let you have your farm implements, but others require tools of war. Either of those needs fire and anvil, sweat and time. Some people march to the front for battle. Others march out back to the forge.

She’s got her hammer free, and she’s beating fear from hot steel on the flat of a February morning. Try as you might, you can’t hone an edge on worry. You just set yourself to the work.

A flare of light from the cooling metal: recalescence. She smiles in the glow of her swords and plowshares, and marshalls summer against the dark.

She takes them out of the handkerchief one at a time, careful not to touch the edges: three shattered seconds, like puzzles that cut. Her left eye says they’re missing a few shards but fixable. Her right, through the loupe, says they’re ugly bad dark times: betrayal and sick fear, things that were broken for a reason.

The Summersmith looks across the counter at her patron, thirteen, too young to deserve these in his life. “Do you want them fixed,” she says, “or fixed?”

“Truth is beauty,” he says sadly, and the loupe shows her the galloping pulse in his neck.