Free Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful by Paula Guran Page B

house and began twining the legs of the stool, miaowing.
    “Question ’tisn’t what tha can or can’t do,” he said sourly. “ ’Tis what tha will or won’t.”
    The witch lifted the pail and splashed milk on the stones for the cat to lap. And then she stood, bearing the pail in her hands, and shrugged. “You could pay me a Name. I collect those.”
    “If’n I had one.”
    “There’s your own,” she countered, and balanced the pail on her hip as she sauntered toward the house. He followed. “But people are always more disinclined to part with what belongs to them than what doesn’t, don’t you find?”
    He grunted. She held the door for him, with her heel, and kicked it shut when he had passed. The cottage was dim and cool inside, with only a few embers banked on the hearth. He sat when she gestured him onto the bench, and not before. “No names,” he said.
    “Will you barter your body, then?”
    She said it over her shoulder, like a commonplace. He twisted a boot on the rushes covering a rammed-earth floor and laughed. “And what’d a bonny lass like thaself want with a gammy-legged, fusty, coal-black smith?”
    “To say I’ve had one?” She plunged her hands into the washbasin and scrubbed them to the elbow, then turned and leaned against the stand. When she caught sight of his expression, she laughed as well. “You’re sure it’s not your heart that’s broken, Smith?”
    “Not this sennight.” He scowled around the rim of his cup, and was still scowling as she set bread and cheese before him. Others might find her intimidating, but Weyland Smith wore the promise-ring of Olrun the Valkyrie. No witch could mortify him. Not even one who kept Heidrún—who had dined on the leaves of the World Ash—as a milch-goat.
    The witch broke his gaze on the excuse of tucking an escaped strand of his long gray ponytail behind his ear, and relented. “Make me a cauldron,” she said. “An iron cauldron. And I’ll tell you the secret, Weyland Smith.”
    “Done,” he said, and drew his dagger to slice the bread.
    She sat down across the trestle. “Don’t you want your answer?”
    He stopped with his blade in the loaf, looking up. “I’ve not paid.”
    “You’ll take my answer,” she said. She took his cup, and dipped more ale from the pot warming over those few banked coals. “I know your contract is good.”
    He shook his head at the smile that curved her lips, and snorted. “Someone’ll find out tha geas one day, enchantress. And may tha never rest easy again. So tell me then. How might I mend a lass’s broken heart?”
    “You can’t,” the witch said, easily. “You can replace it with another, or you can forge it anew. But it cannot be mended. Not like that. ”
    “Gerrawa with tha,” Weyland said. “I tried reforging it. ’Tis glass.”
    “And glass will cut you,” the witch said, and snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
    He made the cauldron while he was thinking, since it needed the blast furnace and a casting pour but not finesse. If glass will cut and shatter, perhaps a heart should be made of tougher stuff, he decided as he broke the mold.
    Secondly, he began by heating the bar stock. While it rested in the coals, between pumping at the bellows, he slid the shards into a leathern bag, slicing his palms—though not deep enough to bleed through heavy callus. He wiggled Olrun’s ring off his right hand and strung it on its chain, then broke the heart to powder with his smallest hammer. It didn’t take much work. The heart was fragile enough that Weyland wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with the glass.
    When it had done, he shook the powder from the pouch and ground it finer in the pestle he used to macerate carbon, until it was reduced to a pale-pink silica dust. He thought he’d better use all of it, to be sure, so he mixed it in with the carbon and hammered it into the heated bar stock for seven nights and seven days, folding and folding again as he would for a