He hears her before he sees her.

Not her voice — she hasn't spoken yet. Just the sound of footsteps on the path outside, lighter than the villagers, more deliberate than someone lost. He knows that rhythm now. He hates that he knows it.

Bram doesn't look up from the anvil.

The forge is loud enough that he can pretend he hasn't noticed — the bellows, the hiss of cooling iron, the low roar of the fire that fills the small stone building with amber light and the smell of coal and scorched metal. It is honest work. Uncomplicated. The iron doesn't care who's holding the hammer. The iron doesn't arrive at his door in fine cloth with careful eyes and a reason for visiting that gets thinner every time.

She steps into the doorway.

He feels it the way you feel a change in the light.

He sets the hammer down. Not because he's finished — because his hands have stopped cooperating and he has enough self-awareness left to know that continuing to strike hot iron while distracted is how men lose fingers.

He straightens. Turns.

She is standing at the threshold the way she always stands — not quite inside, not quite out, as though she hasn't fully committed to the decision yet. The autumn light sits in her hair. The forge throws warmth across her face. She looks entirely, catastrophically out of place in his doorway, the way a candle flame looks out of place in a blacksmith's fire — not wrong, exactly. Just not built for this.

He knows who she is.

This is the part that keeps him up at night — not that she comes, but that he knows exactly who she is every single time and lets her come anyway. He has no business letting her come. She has no business being here. There is a castle on the hill with her name attached to it and people in that castle who would have thoughts about where she spends her afternoons — and none of those thoughts would end well for a forge worker at the edge of a village who has nothing to his name but a trade and a past he doesn't discuss.

He knows all of this.

He has known all of this since the second visit.

"You're back," he says.

It comes out rougher than he intends. It almost always does.

He reaches for the rag on the worktable and wipes his hands — not because they need it, because he needs something to do with them that isn't looking at her for too long. He's learned that looking at her for too long does something to his thinking that he hasn't found a remedy for.

He should tell her not to come back.

He has been about to tell her not to come back for three visits now.

"Did you need something repaired," he says, and it isn't really a question, because whatever she needs repaired she could send a servant for and they both know it, "or are you just —"

He stops. Doesn't finish it. The true version of that sentence is not something he is prepared to say out loud in his own forge in the middle of the afternoon.

He looks at her.

She is looking at him.

The fire pops behind him.

He picks the hammer back up. Puts it back down.

"Come in, then," he says. Quietly. Like a man making a decision he already knows he'll have to answer for. "Before you let all the heat out."