Tusk

Nobody comes through Harlow's Ford in a snowstorm. Not after dark. Not to the last forge on the last road before the mountains.

Rowan Ashdown keeps his doors open anyway. He is thirty-four, a broad, hairy-chested blacksmith with a warm forge tan on fair skin, short tousled chestnut hair, a full chestnut beard and soot streaked over his arms and chest, and he has more silver under his floor than this town will ever let him spend. What he doesn't have is company.

Then two orcs walk in out of the storm.

Grask is a wall of moss-green muscle and old scars, a head taller than Rowan, with long, wild black curls, a scruffy black beard and heavy tusks. Thorne is slate grey-green and hard-cut, shaved head, close-cropped dark beard, a gold hoop in one pointed ear and a grin that never quite leaves his mouth. They have been together for sixteen winters. They ride out at first light on a contract they swore to keep, and Grask's war-axe is split down to the eye.

Rowan can make it whole by dawn. He doesn't want their coin. He names a different price.

The bar comes down across the forge doors. The furnace roars. The sweat runs, and the two orcs who share everything start looking at the smith the way he has been trying not to look at them.

There is a word that stops everything. All three of them know it.

Nobody wants to say it.