Free Hammer & Air by Amy Lane

blacksmith.”
    I stared at him, the fog and fatigue of relief and emotion muddling me. Still, I managed to say something, this once, to give him something that he needed.
    “I couldn’t like you more if you were golden,” I murmured. “There is not a soul in all the kingdoms that I would rather have by my side than my Hammer. Not even a prince.”
    “I wish I could give you a prince,” Hammer murmured, both of us so drowsy in that snug, enchanted little cottage. “I wish I could give you a prince, so you could know the difference, so you could have a choice.”
    “Prince or parson, Hammer, I’d still choose you.”
    We fell asleep then, side by side, fanning each other’s cheek with every breath. We were young and fond and foolish, and we did not realize then, the risk you take when you speak of wishes and princes in the hearth of an enchanted home.

Part V Gold Light on Sable
     
    It took Hammer some days to recover, but he let me nurse him, so I didn’t mind. I’d leave him inside sometimes, to go out and collect herbs, to collect edible roots, to make up our stores so we didn’t have to tax the house too greatly when winter finally arrived and the snows set in, but it didn’t matter. All Hammer had to do were mention a food or a taste, a smell or something we’d eaten in times long past, and I’d wish, and it would appear in the cabinet.
    I didn’t tell him about it, but he figured out soon enough when his favorite foods kept appearing at his bedside. And, of course, there were the book.
    We awoke from our nap that first evening, and as Hammer used the bathroom and sponged the sweat from his trembling limbs (a thing he begged me to let him do himself) I went to the kitchen for the rest of the bread and jam.
    I found—along with a baked chicken and a skin of goat’s milk—a hefty tome of fairy stories with a leather binding which was tinted a fantastic color of cobalt blue.
    I pulled out the book first and fondled the gilt-edged hide pages with reverent hands. There were finely plated illustrations, with what looked to be hand-colored details, and the beauty alone of such a book made my eyes burn. But perhaps that were just the day for it, right?
    “Thank you. Oh… gods of motion, gods of magic, thank you. I could not have chosen better for Hammer myself.”
    He’d insisted on coming to eat at the table, and I’d insisted that I bring him a tray for the bed. We settled on him eating from a small table at the hearth, and as I watched him cozy into a big, stuffed leather chair with a throw over his lap, something inside me clicked rightly to place. The cottage might have been enchanted, but maybe part of that were Hammer.
    We sat and ate (silently, because that were how we were raised at the orphanage) and then, when I’d cleared the plates, I showed him the book. His eyes glowed and a child’s eagerness crossed his usually grim mouth.
    “Would you like me to read it?” I asked gently, just to watch him nod with that wonderful innocent happiness. The things I hadn’t known about him—the learning of them were as glorious as the fucking, if truth be told.
    The story I chose that night were about a lass named Snowdrop who fled into a forest and met up with seven little men who gave her safety.
    Hammer listened avidly, but when I were done, he snorted.
    “They must have been poofty as we are,” he said, and I grinned at him.
    “Why would you say that?”
    “Because otherwise, they would have buggered the poor lass senseless. I think she only pretended to be dead to get away from them!”
    I laughed then. “Well, not all of them were pooft; some of them must have been like you, liking both, otherwise, they wouldn’t have had to put her in the glass box when she didn’t look dead.”
    He laughed back and then rolled his eyes. “Aye, and I don’t think much of her prince. What? He sees her lying there like a statue and thinks that’s a woman he must have? For all he knows, she’s dumb as a