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Cahey would have found her both irresistible and unbearable.
    She moved like Astrid, who’d died in a useless accident for which Cathoair had never forgiven himself.
    Aethelred took a breath, crunching his shoulders down to look as small and inoffensive as he knew how. “I’m called Aethelred,” he said. “And I wonder if your name might be Aithne?”
    She frowned slowly, as if she had to think about each individual minute muscular contraction that made up the expression and choose consciously to allow it. Her hand dropped to the pistol again. She looked as if she could use it.
    She gave him a chilly, motivated grin. “You’d better have a good excuse to know that name.”
    “A young man told it to me. Dark skin, black hair. Striking eyes and a ponytail. Bad scar here—” Aethelred touched his cheek. “Missing some teeth from it. Name of Cahey. Sounded like he thought fondly of you.”
    Her face relaxed a step, but her shooting hand didn’t shift. “Where’d you see him?”
    “Last near Eiledon.” Aethelred rearranged his face in his best “you can tell me; I’m a bartender” smile.
    She lifted an eyebrow. “You’re that Aethelred.” She nodded. “Come inside, then. He’s not coming back, is he?”
    “Not right away,” Aethelred said, following her to the sagging gray farmhouse.
    She gave him an odd sort of look over her shoulder as she held the scarred, salvaged storm door for him to catch. She produced a key, opened the inside door, and stepped up over the threshold into the shade of a clean, weary-looking kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from him. I imagined he’d be pretty busy with his son for a while.”
    “I imagine he will,” Aethelred said. The storm door shut behind him with a click. He stepped out of the way so she could shut the interior door as well. She locked it, which seemed only good sense. “We’re old friends, though. I knew him when he was half your age, or a little older. So I thought I’d check up on you, as a friend of a friend.”
    “Ah.” She might have let him into her house, but she wasn’t unstrapping the sidearm. “He didn’t exactly ask you to stop by, did he?”
    Aethelred smiled with the corner of his mouth. “No, not exactly. But he did speak highly of you. And we are very old friends.”
    “Mm.” A noncommittal noise, the way she made it. Her weight shifted to her heels, but she didn’t fold her arms. “So what the hell do you want from me, Aethelred who meddles uninvited in the affairs of friends? Everybody has a motive.”
    “I came to help,” he said. “That’s all. Assuming you need any.”
    The question must have cost her something, because she gave him her shoulder while she thought about it. Not the blind side—that would have been too much trust. But the turn of her profile was enough to hide her expression as she crossed to the sink. She dipped water from a pot beside the stove and primed the green cast-iron pump, then began to work the handle. Aethelred watched her biceps and triceps knot as she gave it three hard pulls, metal rattling against metal, before the water gushed forth.
    He wondered where the blacksmith lived. Ailee, or closer? The pump and the stove hadn’t been cast and forged here, not unless she had a foundry out back behind the chicken coop. They looked like post-Rekindling manufacture, so they must have been carted out from town. That implied positive things about the local economy.
    The smell of water—clean, a little metallic—filled the kitchen, following the sound of a flood ringing into metal. Aethelred hitched his elbows on the counter or what passed for it—a crudely knocked-together table painted yellow and blue—and leaned back to watch. Aithne dipped cold water into a kettle, hooked a stove lid aside with the other hand, and set the kettle on the hob to boil. When she turned back, her arms were folded over her chest.
    “How do I know I can trust you?”
    The crux of it. He knew why she’d let him