After all the adrenaline rushed, blood spilled, tears shed, and monic particles flustered over it, the lockbox refused to open.

Hava had never been much of a charmer with locks. No matter how many push and pull spells were expended trying to crack the inner workings, no matter how many new hairpins Murmur broke in the lock’s aperture, its mysteries were hidden from them.

Maybe, just maybe, it could be another one of those omens – perhaps they were not supposed to find out what was inside. And it was only by Hulali’s firm hold on the locks and chains that they hadn’t. Or, the less Mugrobi and hungry for coin bit of him insisted, it wouldn’t open because he was rubbish at lockpicking.

Either answer worked.

There was a mechanist’s shop a few roads down from the abandoned house they’d settled into, one they passed most every morning on the way to fetch kippers at the pier (whenever Murmur decided morning was on any particular day). Bolt cutters, Hava had decided. No arcane spell nor any twisted bobbypin was going to open it – but snapping the metal clean it half would certainly do the trick.

The hideous steel lockbox in question was huddled underneath Havek’s arm as he scaled the rickety stairs leading up to the shop. Blessedly, the owner’s had installed a what looked like a driftwood overhang just outside their door, a welcome respite from the misty late Hamis rain.

Havek rapped his knuckles on the door, mincing and polite – “P’ea, I know you’re tired, but do not rub at your eyes like that, poa’na. You’ll get all sorts of salt and grime in them. You don’t want an infection, do you?” – and then rapped again, a few decibels louder.

Anaxi people never were ones to greet the dawn, he knew.

Tutting with her teeth, Murmur went on rubbing at her eye- trying to dislodge the last remnants of a golden crust of sleepy dust from her socket. There were a lot of things, according to Hava that caused infection said like it was some unwanted house spirit that haunted about the place, only staved off with strange superstitious rituals like washing your hands after you’d been to the toilet and before you handled food. She didn’t buy it much, still alive well enough after twenty years of poor personal hygiene and very rarely visited by that nasty little ghoul of infection.

Some other strange little Havek-isms were more contagious, more infectious than the actual thought of diseases themselves, odd little Mugrobi customs and superstitions, some of them akin to the little chants of ‘don’t step on th’ cracks or ye’ll fall and break yer back’ she used to sing with her sister, skipping over cracks in the paving, others sometimes frightening. That Lockbox, clutched under Havek’s arm, Murmur had decided was no good. Any inanimate object that she had to get shot in the shoulder for and then did not even have the courtesy to open up for them was no good.

As such, the thing had been personified greatly, an unknown enemy- that was possibly watching both of them, and it was evil and more often than not very judgmental. The sooner really they were rid of the damn thing the better, Murmur had considered chucking it over the pier at one point but decided that it probably would have annoyed Havek more than a little, not to mention would have been a whole waste of taking a bullet in the shoulder. Nasty thing, rubbing it in their noses, just sitting their mockingly when Murmur felt a twinge in her shoulder from time to time. She hoped it was bloody well worth something
.
“No no no,” said Murmur shaking her head at Havek’s feeble knocking, “Too polite, we ent ‘ere to see th' Queen. Gotta beat th' 'eck outta it.” Nudging him aside, she absolutely pounded with her good arm on the door, big grin on her face as there was no simpler pleasure in this life than being a noisy disturber of the peace, “OI. OI? YE OPEN? CUSTOMER’S ‘ERE,” pausing for the owners she looked up at the sky and tutted.

“Ridiculous hour not te be opened,” she sighed to Havek, “We got a lot of our business in the early hours, ye know? The people up wi’ th’ larks, when the fish is fresher.” Impatiently she pressed her face up against the door, trying to hear footsteps behind it and not satisfied sufficiently, she raised her fists to knock again.

Coking the forge was a duty that had to be done now and again and meant that Grigori Hosturn had to get up well before the sun. His forge, the monstrous, fat demanding bitch it was, had grown hungry for coal again. Layer after layer he heaped onto the thing, pumping the bellows as hard as he could, getting the inside of the of the pile so hot that everything burned away but the porous rock of the coke shelf. It was good work for him, kept him from feeling useless. Never mind the forge hadn't been used in weeks now and buying this coal was bringing his shop even closer to going into the red and the only thing that kept them living in the house had been his wife brokering that arms deal and-

Harder and harder he pumped at the bellows, burning all the air out of the forge and reducing the soft, bitumous coal into the proper shelf needed for forge welding. Harder and harder he pumped, pouring all his impotent, targetless rage into it. Then he heard the knock. He gritted his teeth and pumped harder, he'd put the sign on "closed" for until he was done coking. The knock again. His teeth began to grind and he began thinking of what he'd say to greet such impatient customers.

Then they started banging on his door, yelling for him. That was too much. He slammed the bellows handle down, and without even wiping his hands off he stormed to the other side of the shop space where the door was, threw the lock open and opened the door with a resounding crack.

"I CLOCKIN PUT THAT SIGN OUT FOR A REASON AND WHATEVER YOU IMPATIENT SOTS WANT CAN CLOCKIN WAIT UNTIL I'VE COKED MY GODS BE DAMNED FORGE!" His eyes flashed with rage. Yelling was fine, so long as it stopped there. Yelling was like a pressure valve, it kept important parts from rupturing. What did Soph say... it was cathartic. Whatever that word meant. One day when they were still young and he'd lost his temper and, instead of yelling and scaring his wife, he'd gone up to the sharp and had bent a piece of bronze rebar around until he'd bloodied his hands. When she saw what he'd done, she'd just laughed and said he could holler all he'd like, she'd rather have him loud than bloody. The way she could laugh when he was thundering and smile when he dug holes into the table with his fingernails in anger, it was calming. She wasn't scared of him, so he didn't have to be scary.

Still these two weren't his wife and their very presence was making him red. Impatient things, these two darkies. He stared out at the two, a taller Mug fellow with a box under his arm and a smaller girl, lighter but not as light as he and with a dusting of freckles under a light film of grime. He breathed in and out and cooled the fires within him. It was too early to yell at customers. "Now then," he growled. "If ye like, come inside and wait. Clocking. Wait. And I'll be with yer momentarily." He gazed at the taller of the two with eyes like a feral cat. "Welcome to the shop."

In spite of the strange penchant Murmur had stirred up in him for doing odd things, like talking and even occasionally smiling, all those semblances of normal human interaction seemed reserved for her alone. The moment any other creature was introduced, Havek flickered back into usual cold fish self. The shouting didn’t coax anything more from him than a crinkled brow and a slight hunching of his shoulders.

“I...I offer my apologies for her, sir,” he said flatly. His face didn’t look very apologetic – though really, it didn’t look like he was feeling much of anything at all. “It was not my intention to disturb you.” Boat our hands clasped across his chest, Havek dipped into a bow. It certainly looked quite penitent and polite, only his hanging ropes of hair dribbled a fair share of rain water on the mechanist’s boots and floorboards.

Somewhere amongst the Anaxi man's -- he was almost loathe to call him that -- gale of shouting, Havek was almost certain he’d said something about a sign. He cast a spurious glance to all the windows before he located it. Broken teeth scraped over his ring for a moment, eye narrowing thoughtfully.

“I also offer my apologies for neglecting to read your notice, sir. So many of your people struggle with their letters, such is an uncommon sight in places such as these. We will be well obliged to wait until you finish with your current business to broach our matter of concern.”

The soft-spoken soliloquy over, he cast Murmur a sidelong glance. “That was impossibly rude, you know,” he whispered. Somewhere in the passive planes of his face, she might have been able to catch the faintest, remotest traces of a smile. A very strong might.

Murmur didn’t want or need apologizing for, as far as she was concerned but she let Havek go about his strange business of bowing to people and saying sorry and calling them sir. Different planet to everybody else most of the time, she could swear, different bloody planet.

All of the shop man’s shouting put her in a bad mood too, defiant little pout falling over her face as she folded her arms and looked up at him distastefully. “Feelin’ really damn welcome yeh.” Murmur and her sisters used to smile at customers, back in the days when she had a full set of teeth- not all of them mind, just the ones she liked, it was Ellen who was the best at charming people. They used to sell things too, talk up the catch of the day. Didn’t do too badly on it neither, tidy little profits before her Ma got her hands on it, drinking it all away, putting it on dogs and the like. How well did a place like this do?

“It’s better’n waitin on a cold front step fer th’ place te open,” she whispered back to Havek with an unconcerned shrug. Not sure how long this raging shopkeeper was going to take, Murmur allowed her eyes to wander around the ugly metal store, all that cold, utterly lifeless and cruel machinery. No heart in it at all none. But the sooner they got that damn lockbox open, the better, and if this man did it personally Murmur would kiss him full on the mouth or something.

On a shelf, she reached up and let her hand run through a tray of nuts, bolts and ball bearings, probably more than a thousand of each, fingers feeling cold metal as she examined the shiny things. Twirling a nut between her fingers, she pressed it up to her eye so she could peer at Havek through the hole and decided that this was funny so she pressed another nut to match against her other eye, little owly face peering up at the Mug man.

“Dunno what ‘alf o’ this is,” she shrugged quietly. “An’ ow pricey ye reckon cuttin’ up that bastard box will be?” She leaned over the tray of bolts, searching for a price just as an indication for how much the store might charge. If the random scraps of metal, which all had holes in them anyway, were overpriced then they certainly had no hope for what they were looking for.

Unfortunately, Murmur got a bit zealous in her search for a price tag, leaning over the shelf as far as she could, on tip toes to see over the damn thing anyway, doing it all one handed since her other shoulder didn’t like it when her arm got raised above her head.

What happened next, had probably been foretold, some other Mugrobi omen- maybe a cat had blinked at her twice this morning or she’d walked thirteen paces into the shop but it still took Murmur by surprise, the tray tipping and a metallic tidal wave of nuts, bolts and ball bearings gushed forwards with a sound like the roaring of the ocean, bouncing on the floor, slipping and getting stuck in the spaces between the floor boards.

“Fffff,” she said for lack of anything else to say, those two nuts still on her eyes.

Grish took a long hard look at the Mugrobi man. He bared his teeth and stared, breathing hard in and out. Looked into that cold fish eye, the dispassionate way it was placed. That backhanded insult so soon after he all but scraped the ground with his dreads. Finally, he growled out, voice choked with anger, "Fish man, I hate apologies. I hate false humility too. And insincerity. I can't speak for the rest of my people, and I won't. It's no concern of mine. MY only concern is that YOU decided not to tilt your nose from out of the air to look around you. As it is, yer here now and the doors open so-"

KSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH. Ball bearings, nuts, bolts, washers. Those bins had been sorted four months ago, it had taken him hours upon hours, and now they lay on the floor, mixed together like a mess of metallic candy. The girl too, standing in the middle of it, two nuts in her eyes.

Grigori Hosturn felt the spirit of his ancestors, that blood loving beast, pulse into his body. His hands reached out towards the first person he saw, the Mugrobi man who still had that cold look in that single eye. He diverted them though, clutched onto the adjunct window sill. In and out, in and out, breathe damnit! His back shook as he tried to stuff the beast back in, keep it away from the customers.

"Don't kill customers," he murmured to himself, between his gritting teeth and so low no one else could hear it. He repeated it again and again until finally he was able to look at the man. His eye twitched and his teeth rode back and forth against either, chipping themselves away in an attempt to divert his attention to ANYTHING accept his desire to kill. His breathing was still labored, and his face was that of an oncoming monsoon, ready to capsize any ship in its way."Fish... man. Is... it custom for... your people... to let there kids tear down shops? If so... I'd rather... ya kept a leash on her." The red was starting to bleed back out, but the anger on his face remained. It was too clocking early for this, and his forge still needed coking.

Yelling was a common and highly encouraged occurrence in the Hosturn household. It was even more encouraged if the yelling was directed at people. Soph had found that if her husband was screaming death threats at people, it gave them a chance to run away than see the threats followed through. Unfortunately, the only downside to this was that Grisha had taken to yelling at people they didn’t want running for their lives. Those people were customers and customers gave them money and by giving them money, Grisha would feel as if he had fulfilled his husbandly duty and stop digging holes into their table.

Soph sighed and rose her head up from her book, waiting for the sound of the door slamming behind the “impatient sods”. But there was no such noise to be heard except for a deafening crash as what sounded like tonnes of loose metal hitting the floor. Her shoulders sunk as she contemplated the mess that was being made of the shop. She hoped to Alioe that whatever fight was occurring between her husband and the customer, as she imagined was happening; no blood was spilt onto the newly washed floor. She hated having to bleach the floors as the smell lingered for hours after.

“GRISHA! WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING, STOP IT RIGHT NOW”. Sophie threw her book down on the coffee table and rushed down from the living room upstairs to the store front in order to prevent any further damage being caused to the house. And perhaps to save whatever was left of the customer. It wouldn’t be very good marketing for the shop if their customers left it with their faces caved in or, worse, in a coffin. She was going to have to start putting disclaimers on the doors if this became regular.

Fortunately for her (as self-appointed head of Public Relations for the shop), nobody was injured or dead. However, the trays of nuts and bolts and other bits and pieces that she had seen her husband spending hours sorting were now spread across the shop floor. It would take longer to pick them all up than to sort them again. There was also a girl standing amongst it all apparently trying to look like an owl. It was sort of disconcerting. More so was the big Mug wick and the look Grisha was giving him. Very soon the Mug was going to loose enough of his body mass to fit tidily in a matchbox. Sophie gently took Grisha’s hand, pulling him away. “Now now sweetheart,” she told him gently," How abou’ you finish with the forge an’ I’ll look after these two in the mean while, hmm?"

Hava winced at the crash of nuts, bolts, menacing metal bits all over the floorboards. All the shouting and growling that sprang from every corner of the shop went ignored. He swept forward without a word and was on his knees among the all spilled metal bits in mere seconds. Nimble spindle fingers plucked up every nut and bolt in sight. That eye flashed up to Murmur, quick as a snap. A faint touch of annoyance lingered in that look. The whole owly bit with the bolts wasn’t nearly as endearing when viewed from the floor, from the middle of the mess she’d made.

“Please help, miss.”

He never was one to understand the need for shouting in any situation, especially not indoors. So when the mechanist started huffing and staggering about so, a look somewhere between bemusement and concern flickered across his face. Perhaps he had a heart problem of some sort. All these Anaxi kept insisting that he was the strange one here, that if their nation flustered him so he ought to just leave, but Hava couldn’t fathom that kind of behavior was decent and acceptable anywhere, even in the sooty heart of Old Rose. He’d stop holding them in such contempt if they just gave him reason not to. Really.

Hava spoke to the floor, quietly but firmly.

“She is not my daughter. It was an honest accident. I would prefer if you didn’t refer to her like an animal.”

Every syllable was terse, sanctimonious. He raised up a silent prayer that the man didn’t have any children, if the act of something getting spilt was enough to send him into a conniption. Fortunately, there seemed to be no trace of young people about the place. The tentative manner the man’s wife – had to be his wife, or best be – skittered and cooed called up the memory of some carnival wick tempting an uliam into a cage with a haunch of goat.

How unbelievably strange.

“Bolt cutters, madam,” he muttered when he glanced up to the woman, hands sweeping bolts into neat pile. “I trust you have them? A lock has been giving me a touch of trouble. If it would not trouble you any further.”

“It just fell,” said Murmur, admonished, slinking down besides Havek and gathering bolts up in her dress, “Weren’ on the shelves proper,” she insisted. Gods, it was worse than it was with her sisters; most of her time spent with Havek had somehow dissolved into a string of fuck ups on her part, it was a job to prove that no she did not faint twice a day, and that yes once or twice she had thieved things without it ending in utter disaster. It was that fucking box. She shot it a mutinous glare.

And then she turned it on Grisha, lip curling as she gave him a little sneer of indignation. “Kid? His kid?” affronted Murmur sat back on her knees, the motion of shoving bolts into her skirts stopped and she all but spat on the ground.

“Ye soft in th’ ‘ead? I’m past twenty, ye great galumphin’ eedjit. So I can’t be ‘is kid neither, ‘e looks older but I know ent no way e’s a day over firty which is young te get started even fer a wick, ehh…no offence, Trouble.” It was an easy mistake to make, but Murmur couldn’t see it, couldn’t see that there wasn’t much hardness in her face, lower softer Mugrobi cheek bones and she was rather short for her age even when you put all the clowning around with nuts and bolts aside. As far as she could see, Grisha was either blind or piss poor at arithmetic.

Shoving more bolts in to her skirts, Murmur muttered about shop keepers having no business being bad at numbers since, oddly enough, her grasp of mental arithmetic was something Murmur was incredibly proud of- it had to be, the old cash register in the shop was permanently temperamental.

“An’ don’t talk te ‘im like that neither,” she warned Grisha, “’E were only being polite so you can stick yer comment about ‘im stickin ‘is nose in th’ air right up yer erse.”

Ignoring the entrance of this woman, she busied herself with bolts again, letting Havek deal with the business, wishing she’d made Seth teach her how to pick locks when she’d had the chance.

Grish could barely hold it in. The way this Mugrobi man acted, the way he dismissed every single thing he said, as if Grish was just some little mosquito. In his shop too! He took one more breath, a deep one. His teeth had stopped grinding, his hand stopped shaking. "Break his neck and dump him in the forge. Let his flesh help coke the sides." It was whispering to him, the beast was entreating him to action. He started towards him, reached his hands out and-

And then, they were clasped by something soft. He looked and saw his wife, smiling slightly. A voice of logic entreated him to return to the forge. Her eyes were serious, but even still, they had some humor in them. Grish always had the feeling that Sophire was laughing at him and his outbursts, his yelling and breaking. But when he went to far, before he leapt off of the proverbial chasm and descended into that real madness, the kind that was painted by bits of other people, she was there with a soft touch, a gentle embrace, a show that yes, someone did care for him, bad blood and all.

He gripped her hand, closed his eyes, and let himself settle again. The world became cooler now, the madness stopped pressing at his skull. He breathed out. "Yeh... think yer right, Soph. Forge gotta get ready for the day, right?" He walked back to the great fire chalice in his shop, the inside still red hot.

Then he heard that girl call to him. What did she say about his shelves? Did... twenty? Really? Pitching this fit like a ten year old girl on his shop floor? That thing about the shelf stuck with him especially though. Grish inspected the shelves every single day before he opened. She couldn't have known, but still. Each inch of the shop was cleaned, each shelf was checked for soundness. This shop was like owned space on a ship, it was his and he'd make sure everything was always ready for work.

This didn't really raise anger though, Soph was still by him and he looked at her before he did anything. But still, this was an insult he wouldn't suffer. Not after he put so much sweat into keeping this place working at its peak and she had decided to wreck it and then blame him to boot.

He crossed over to where she knelt, a look like she had a bad tooth ache on that too young face. He reached into the pile of wreckage and brought out a ball bearing, no scratches on it, thank the- oh wait, there it was, a slight raised edge that stretched half way across the metal. He shook his head and placed it on the shelf, and there it stayed, completely and utterly still, not rolling one way or another. "Girl, do you know how much effort goes into machining one ball bearing? Just one? And how ONE CLOCKIN SCRATCH makes it useless? There was sixty eight ball bearings on that tray you tipped over. I can't sell any of em now."

He stomped back to the forge and began pumping the bellows again, muttering darkly under his breath about how she shouldn't act like a kitten if the mug didn't want him to look at her like an animal. This was certainly turning into a fine day, oh yes indeed.

Sophire clucked disapprovingly like an old mother hen keeping her chicks in line. The Mug wick and the seemingly young girl were going to end up being tossed back onto the street if they kept provoking Grisha as they were doing. She had got him away from them and the girl just had to go and talk about him and his shelving in such an insolent manner. It was never safe to insult his shelving or any other part of the shop for that matter. He was awfully finicky about keeping the shop, just as she supposed she was with the living room. It was their house, their sanctuary and they could keep it however they wanted to. It was even worse to go insulting Grisha.

“It’s probably best not ta go touchin’ other people’s shelves in the firs’ place,” Soph told the girl (although apparently she was twenty which was slightly hard to believe, considering). She smiled softly and nudged a few bolts her way with the toe of a shoe. “An’ it’s especially recommended you don’ go sayin’ such things to people who own bolt-cutters, ain’t it?”

She ignored Grisha’s yelling with a roll of her eyes and a small smirk, doing so that the young woman could see. Hopefully she wouldn’t take her husband’s antics too much to heart and keep her mouth shut as she had suggested. As she moved over to a wall of tools, taking care not to slip on the ball bearings (scratched or not), she brushed her hand over his shoulder’s. “I seem to remember a certain somebody I know turnin’ up on my doorstep with a wild child who trashed da house”, she laughed.

Grisha’s workspace was kept neat and tidy making it easy for Soph to locate the bolt-cutters. For the tools that couldn’t fit in the draws under his workbench, a wall had been made up where such things as bolt-cutters could be found hanging. She lifted them down and brought them over to the Mug, who (thankfully) was cleaning up the mess of washers and bolts and ruined ball bearings. “Now lookie here wick,” she told him, holding out the bolt-cutters,” You’re not ta go runnin’ off with these ‘cause frankly I don’ trust ya. Big boxes with locks like those are meant for keepin’ important things in an’ people out so you’re not goin’ to be so foolish to be losin’ the key, are ya?” Soph rose her eyebrows in the same manner a mother did when she knew exactly who took the last cookie but was going to give them the choice to fess up to it.

Havek raised his head from the bolts, gaze following the mechanist as he stomped back into the depths of his shop. The bitter muttering made him bite his lip, as if tamping down the impulse to say something. He turned his attentions back to the mess at hand.

“There is no key,” he told the handful of bolts, voice ineffectual. “It’s...not stolen,” he said carefully. “Sometimes, under very specific circumstances, things are bartered. The stakes were so high and traded so fast, I suppose they key was lost somewhere in the hand off.” He blinked up at the woman, cocking his head.

A trade made in pounds of flesh. His eye skipped over to Murmur, lingering briefly on the curve of her shoulder. He still wasn’t certain the trade off was worth it. The lockbox best be filled to the brim with rubies and concords, swimming in mor-pheen or whatever the opiate was called. Best be.

“Pe’a, please,” Havek dipped his head into a bow to the woman. “Please do not refer to me as...wick. It is mildly rude. I wouldn’t fathom referring to you as simply ‘human’, miss. No offense intended.” He bowed again, the picture of humility. “The inference that a wick would, by social misconception, have the proclivity to steal is somewhat callous. Apologies, miss.”

His gaze fluttered over to Murmur, then, flicking over the planes of her face.

“Twenty? Really?”

The words came out with more overt surprise than he’d have wanted. “I always thought...you look so....ah...” Spindly fingers traced the air in front of her face, as if the gesture could phrase it a bit more politely than his tongue. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen maybe. Each number still a woman in its own right, so close to what Akee and Ama would be by now, but they weren’t twenty. Girls got married at sixteen – Ekua had – but most had a baby, maybe more, by twenty. It didn’t suit her, that number.

Havek bowed to Murmur too. He was rife with supplication today. “Epa’ma,” he muttered. “That was rude of me.”

“Yes twenty,” huffed Murmur. He didn’t need to sound so shocked and Murmur tried to work out what that meant. That she was stupid was the most likely explanation, some stupid little girl who didn’t know anything about anything. Just because she had both her eyes, it didn’t mean she hadn’t lived.

So she didn’t act like a woman, whatever the fuck that was, so she had decided at fifteen that she didn’t want to marry Jude the tanner boy and have a dead baby ripped out of her like Muriel had done, and she liked playing with bolts over her eyes like an owl more than she liked swaying her hips and winking at men. That wasn’t out of naivety, it was quite the contrary. Murmur sure as shoot felt twenty.

“Is tha’ a problem? Like em younger do ye?” she snapped, deciding that she thoroughly wasn’t in the mood for this. Her shoulder hurt and the shelf had been loose no matter what anyone said. Of course vanishing into an almighty sulk would do nothing to prove that she really had made it all the way to her second decade. And he meant well, Murmur supposed, all of the mollycoddling and the infection talk was for her benefit at the end of the day. And, well, it was hard to be mad at someone who had very recently closed a gaping hole in your shoulder.

She sighed, rubbing her temple. “Sorry Trouble, didn’t mean nothin’ by that.”

Looking up at the female proprietor who she’d decided she already liked a lot more than her husband Murmur said blankly, “Nah, it is stolen…we wanna get it open and go on our way is all.”

This was Old Rose Harbour, sixty percent of what a family owned was stolen somewhere down the line and well, a shop like this would have been run a damn sight differently if it was run by the bad brothers...but that didnt mean she was going to elaborate on the matter anytime soon.

In and out, in and out, Grish pumped his blast furnace all the harder, burning the anger away with the coal's impurities. The callouses on his hands ground against the knurled steel of the bellow's handle. He could vaguely hear his wife talking to the customers. This was normally how things happened, he knew that things worked better when Sophire handled the front desk and he just did the work and kept the store tidy. It was just bad luck on everyone's part that he had been the first to answer the door.

His work had almost been done when he was called out. Four more layers of coal laid down later and the forge was coked up to the tops of the sides. Wiping his hands off he returned to where Sophire was offering the two dark customers bolt cutters, and heard the kneeling wick tell her not to call him such.

He rolled his eyes and stood by his wife with arms crossed. "You know, if you'd like someone to call you something other than what they see you are, you could just give them a name, eh? Don't even got to be yer real one, if you'd like."