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crushed to death!
    I twist to the side in time to pass through, fingers nearly caught in the stone wall as it slams back into place. Merlin did say there were traps about for curious fingers.
    There’s a familiar crack, one that sounds when you switch on a common gas lantern to catch flame. One by one, lanterns line the corridor. At the end, the light is bright.
    There’s nowhere to go but forward. But when I reach the end of the path, the burly shadow of the blacksmith steps in front of me, his lantern lifted high, revealing his unmasked face. His face fills with surprise. But he can’t be as surprised as I am.
    Because the blacksmith has Marcus’s violet eyes.

SIX
    Those violet eyes turn to fire. The blacksmith steps toward me, just as shocked as I am.
    “What are you doing here? Why did you follow me?” His voice is heavy and raw from so many years working with fire and soot in his trade, but also mixed with the French-sounding pronunciation Guinevere had.
    His surprise sets me back several steps. I reach for the surface of the walls for balance.
    “You’re—” I cannot say the words for fear I might be wrong.
    The blacksmith turns away. Marcus told me all he could find in the farmlands was his mother’s apron. There was never any mention of his father’s body in the fields that Morgan’s drones burned. I wonder if I didn’t just see in the blacksmith what I wanted to see, rather than the possibility that Morgan le Fay actually failed in killing both of Marcus’s parents.
    But then the blacksmith glances back at me, and there’s no denying it.
    “It’s been you all this time. Does he know you’re alive?” I step inside the dimly-lit room, where the walls are covered with iron workings, trinkets that would catch the wind and turn it into song, twisted black poles morphed into cold, decorative animals. Clocks with cuckoo birds whose delicate iron sculptures surpass Caldor in realism. Wrought-work stools with cold, black blossoms for feet. And a scene of miniature people in a festive, wintery village. All of it, the same decor I saw only once in a barn that no longer stands.
    The blacksmith’s face falls, as though he’s given up on his secret. “No, Marcus doesn’t know I’m alive.” His eyes grow heavy, and he looks away. His face is larger than Marcus’s. Wider. But his walk and height are identical. “By the time I’d returned from the infirmary, he was to be knighted. How could I show myself and encourage him to refuse such an honor, when it was to be but a few months before all was said and done? We were serfs. He had the chance to be something better.”
    I’m more furious at my own inability to see the truth when it was standing right in front of me than the blacksmith’s deception, and yet. “All this time, you never told me. He never told me. You watched me sneak in and out of Merlin’s clock tower for five years, and you said nothing. Did Marcus at least know you worked here?”
    I follow him further inside the workshop. In the dead center, he stops in front of an ironwork cross. One made with meticulous detail. With love. In the middle, the name Elly formed in long, thick, iron strips and sharpened to angled points. The blacksmith kneels. He glances at me with tears wet on his face. “Give a mourning husband a minute of peace.”
    A wave of shame washes over me as he goes quiet.
    There are a few moments of whispered prayers. Then he clears his throat and stands, shoulders curving into a hunch as he regards the cross’s craftsmanship. “Of course Marcus knew of my trade.”
    I remember the horse-drawn cart departing from Camelot with Marcus’s mother in it. I remember her bright blue eyes as she glanced at me, a stranger, a noblewoman, and how she looked elsewhere when she didn’t recognize me. Naturally, Marcus’s eyes would come from his father, who’d congenially slapped his boy on the shoulder before returning to his work. “Why are you still here? Why did you work in