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burning well, Sand thrust the steel bar into the heart of the white-burning coals, and pumped the bellows again. When he pulled the bar out with his tongs, the end glowed a lovely light orange. He set to work with his hammer, shaping the end with a few well-placed strokes, smoothing out the jaggedness to something a little more pointed and purposeful. But not too sharp. It wasn’t meant to be a fish hook.
    He put the metal back into the heat, this time pushing it farther so as to heat the center of the bar, and pumped the bellows. He glanced at Perrotte. Still, she said nothing—just stood there, with her arms crossed, watching him, as silent and as still as the stone for which she was named.
    He began to feel a little bit guilty for his ire, for ignoring her. She had just risen from death, or something like it. She was more than twenty-five years removed from everything and everyone she had known. So what if she was a little prickly? Wouldn’t he be a little prickly in her place?
    And he couldn’t ignore the truth of their situation. She was the first person he’d spoken with or touched in so many days they might have been weeks, and she might be the only person he spoke with or touched for the rest of his life.
    Her mere existence changed his world.
    He was about to say something to her, but he didn’t know what . So he angled his heated metal over the edge of the anvil and started bending it, then set it to heat again. Since he was making a mere hook, and it didn’t have to hold up to heavy usage, and also because Sand was in a hurry to retrieve the bucket, he chose not to weld the hook’s eye.
    He got a little lost in the process of working the hook. He came back to the world during the quench. The bubble and hiss of water meeting hot metal was as satisfying as ever.
    He looked over at Perrotte, half-expecting her to have finally left. But she still stood there, watching.
    â€œSand,” she said, and now her voice was polite, not prickly. “I would like to learn how to do that.”
    â€œQuench something?” he asked, not surprised. Everyone wanted to quench something, at least once.
    â€œNo. That .” She gestured at the hook. He stared down at where it dangled from his tongs. Surely she didn’t mean that she wanted to learn how to make hooks. Hooks were boring. “I want to smith something.” Her voice was smaller and less imperious as she added, “I want to mend something.”
    â€œOh,” he said, words failing him. He’d never been allowed to call himself even an apprentice blacksmith, but he was well aware of the importance of keeping his grandfather’s craft secrets. But Perrotte didn’t have to learn anything particularly secret just to mend something.
    He remembered then the story of when his father became his grandfather’s apprentice. After his father left Castle Boisblanc and shoemaking behind, he had shown up at Grandpère’s house. His father had begged to be taken on as Grandpère’s apprentice. Grandpère had asked his father the one question, the most important question.
    No one needed to ask Sand the question, of course; raised by a smith and with Grandpère’s blood in his veins, everyone had known Sand’s answer since he was a toddler. And in the end, they hadn’t asked him the question because his father had no intention of letting him become a smith. It still rankled him that he’d never been asked. That he never would be asked.
    Even so, Sand asked Perrotte the one important question of blacksmithing: “Do you have an imagination?”

10
    Bed
    P ERROTTE BLINKED LIKE A SLEEPY CAT.
    â€œOf course I have an imagination,” she said, sounding prickly again.
    â€œWell, great,” Sand said. “I’ve never heard of a good smith who had no imagination.”
    Perrotte glanced around the dim smithy and ran her finger through the fine layer of dust and soot on the