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  He smiled, a gold man on a white horse, inclined his head gently, then took his bride’s hand.

  “Mari, may I present to you my good friends? They are the ones who will live on your father’s land. I wanted you to see that they’re good sorts and more than deserved the kindness.”

  Hammer and I blushed and bowed, our hands clammy on the fabric of our best trousers. When we looked up, the pale-haired woman on the dark horse next to Behrens were smiling gently.

  “It’s so good to meet you,” she said warmly, and her voice were… it were lovely. Her smile were lovely. If I liked women, even a little bit at all, I should have fallen every bit in love with this tiny woman with the pale hair and the small nose and the hint of freckles peeking through the powder at her cheeks.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you,” I said, after Hammer poked me surreptitiously. Of course—if one of us were going to speak to her, it would be me. “Behrens mentions you fondly.”

  I remembered the smile on his face when he’d called her his friend—his best friend. She were very much beloved by him, it were clear. I wondered then, that our time in the cottage must have made it clear, what were love and what were infatuation, and what were coarse and what were fine. This woman were not a great beauty, but she were so much a beauty in his heart. Perhaps, by the time he’d ridden his horse into his kingdom, and the magic had melted with the spring, the prince had seen in his bride what I’d seen in my Hammer: that delicacy and sweetness were no measure of a true and brilliant heart.

  Queen Marianne’s smile were brighter than the sun on snow—and a good sight warmer. “He mentions you, as well,” she said softly, and I blushed, because I could almost imagine he’d mentioned everything about us, and our time together. Although we’d see each other many times and my reverence of her would do naught but grow, it were never a thing I’d ask her, and I blessed her for not ever telling me if it were so.

  We would see them often in the years.

  We worked on the cottage steadily as we lived our lives. It were our dream, and the next summer, it were real.

  We had left our plans there on the table of the enchanted place, and unlike our beloved book, they didn’t just reappear as we ran—but the same is not true of our roses. They had appeared in the bottom of our knapsack, complete cuttings with roots, wrapped in moist linen and oilcloth.

  I’d kept them alive, I’d kept them watered, I’d planted them in the earth of our small plot of land practically before we dropped our knapsacks after we first wandered into the clearing. And oh, how that little space between forest and meadow seemed made just for us. As the last board were sanded and the last latch drilled into place, the roses, one white and one red, were replanted on either side of the cottage proper. As the years passed they grew and twined, up over the porch and over the awning. I had to keep them trimmed and loved in order to keep them from attacking visitors—not that we had many, but we had some.

  One evening, we had a prince, and his lovely bride. Another evening, near to a year later, we had a prince and his tiny son, carrying an old, ragged stuffed bear.

  Hammer held the baby, besotted, and I poked the bear and looked at the bear prince, who shrugged. “I got to my apartment and there it was,” he told me, bemused, and I laughed. Childhood indeed.

  The son grew, and his sister joined him, and then a brother.

  Their tiny sister died in the birthing bed, along with her lovely, lovely mother, and for a time, a small time, Hammer and I juggled all three of them while their father ventured into the woods again, to see what solace the gods of hearth and forest could give him.

  He returned, and his children went home, but the visits continued. One year, the oldest took a turn in the smithy. One year the youngest took a turn with the platen press I’d bought and ran when it came clear I would never own one of the bigger presses, and maybe didn’t want to.

  For a few summers, Hammer and I, and three children in rough clothes, would venture to the stream in our backyard and pick blackberries. For a few years, a king’s daughter would help me put them up to give Hammer a taste of summer.

  The king himself would stop by some evenings, when our bones were settling from a long day, and bring a bottle of wine. Hammer and I had no head for wine, but we would sip quietly, while the king drank deeply, and told us stories of people we would never know.

  We came to love the sea, since it were so nearby. Some days, Hammer would leave the smithy to apprentices, and I would leave the press to its small room in the back of the house, and we would go walking, wandering, until we came to where the ocean and land met, and think of our friend, the mighty king, who seemed to have found his only peace in the cottage of two peasants.

  Ocean and land indeed.

  One evening, more than forty years after we’d first wandered into the kingdom by the western sea with a bag of gifted gold and a modest dream, our ocean failed to wander to his land. For months, the kingdom mourned.

  Hammer and I mourned, too, in the manner you would mourn your oldest and dearest friend.

  A year after, the golden haired boy who had balanced on Hammer’s knee and played at his forge, who had helped us build on our cottage and chased his sister with sticky, purple hands, came riding up to our cottage with a sheaf of aged parchment in his hands.

  He took Hammer’s hands in his and kissed his cheek, and thrust the parchment at him.

  “My father told me to take good care of that place when I had a chance to see it. The morning before I left, the cupboard opened, and this came out. I think it misses you, will you go?”

  But we didn’t need to go.

  We had built a cupboard of our own, of course, in shape and size much like the one we had known, but without the carving of the animals, because that weren’t our strength. We filled that cupboard ourselves, with the things we loved the most for each other. I filled it with berries and butter for Hammer. He filled it with books and paper for me. As time had gone by, the wood had taken on a curious sort of shape, and then an obvious sort of shaping, and while our beloved friend’s son had been away, having adventures of his own, it had carved itself, with love and care, into a deer, a cougar, and a far away bear.

  The heart of the little cottage had been taken with us, and we had built a place for it. As time and love—oh, gods, love—had pushed the heart’s blood of our home through the air that we breathed, the heart of our home came to beat in time.

  The sheaves of paper had changed in the years. We’d labeled our drawn cottage—Hammer’s tools, Eirn’s garden—and, of course, years of use had moved them. Our original plans had been but a dream to the place we’d built with our own two hands—but the drawings, faded on the yellowing parchment—showed what we’d built in the now.

  We didn’t need to go to our beloved little cottage. It were quite clear that it had come to us.

  And it has loved us still, these last fifteen years. Our skin is no longer taut and golden, and our muscles are shrunken with age. Our bones creak and ache and settle, and Hammer’s hair is mostly gone. (For many years, it were simply a white fringe, like a lady’s tulle skirt, and the children’s children had teased him gently about his bald pate. He had laughed then—he’s never had no vanity, my Hammer.)

  My own hair has become a grizzled mess atop my head, and I have my own share of teasing to enjoy with a smile.

  My press has long since ceased to clunk in my favorite music, and Hammer has since sold his smithy to a successor for more gold than either of us shall ever want or use.

  But still, we will sit and read books in the evenings—Hammer must read, because my eyes have become rheumy and useless. I still work my garden, although much of it is by feel. And still, I prune the roses that have shaded our porch for so very long.

  They have twined together, of course, and they have shaded together as well. The ones on the bottom of the vine are still red on one side and white on the other, but the ones that have met in the middle? Oh, they have become every shade of rose,
from softest pink, to most golden yellow, from red-tinted mauve to a violent, mesmerizing sunset. Perhaps regular roses do not do this, but these are magic roses, mine and Hammer’s roses.

  We started out seeing each other in only reds or only blues. Hammer were the violent one and I were the weak one, Hammer were the coarse smith and I were the smart printer, and those were the flowers as we thought they’d always be. But we’d seen each other through a lens of gold, through the tint of a king’s love and a king’s scorn, and our vision changed, and our colors grew richer. I had killed to protect my Hammer, and fought to defend his tender heart. He had learned he had the heart of a child, of an artist, one who loved stories and pretty futures painted by colorful words. Our hearts have grown tightly twined, tinted by every color we could ever imagine, and some, I know for a certain, we never would have guessed were real.

  Hammer does not think he will make it through this next winter.

  His breath comes short in his chest, and it takes much effort for him to get up and dressed. My body is still creaky and sound, but with every labor of his breath, I think that my heart will not endure.

  Enduring were Hammer’s gift, not mine, and I will not endure a life in which he does not laugh by my side and touch my hand, wish for the best things for me, and rejoice when I have them. My sturdy, blessed, stoic Hammer—how can life be, without him?

  So we lie together at night and scent the encroaching winter through the open window above our bed, and dream. I dream of three young men, younger than their prime, showing love and lust, friendship and obsession, through heaving bodies and sweating skin. I dream of sweet looks from Hammer’s blue eyes, and the rough feeling of his hand in mine.

  I dream of a proud boy, standing in a stream, a string of fish on the end of the line, joyful in his soul because his lover has rejected a prince to come back to his arms.

  I know these are only dreams. I know these days are long past. I wake to a dream in which Hammer’s breath has stopped, and mine with it, and hearts have gone to a quiet sunny meadow with the sweetest little cottage in the middle, with a millwheel and a stream.

  Our bodies will lie tangled until they become earth, like roses twining so closely there is no beginning and no end, and only the shades of beauty that were their growing.

  Every dream I ever had as a child has come true, simply because Hammer loved me. Perhaps this one will too.

  About the Author

  AMY LANE is a mother of four and a compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head. She adores cats, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckle-headed macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever or sometimes for no reason at all. She writes in the shower, while commuting, while taxiing children to soccer/dance/ karate/oh my! and has learned from necessity to type like the wind. She lives in a spider-infested, crumbling house in a shoddy suburb and counts on her beloved Mate, Mack, to keep her tethered to reality—which he does while keeping her cell phone charged as a bonus. She’s been married for twenty-plus years and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.

  Visit Amy’s web site at http://www.greenshill.com. You can e-mail her at [email protected].

  Fairy Tales from DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Also by AMY LANE

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Novel-length Romance

  by AMY LANE

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Hammer & Air ©Copyright Amy Lane, 2010

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  4760 Preston Road

  Suite 244-149

  Frisco, TX 75034

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Art by Dan Skinner/Cerberus Inc. [email protected]

  Cover Design by Mara McKennen

  This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press at: 4760 Preston Road, Suite 244-149, Frisco, TX 75034 http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  Released in the United States of America

  November 2010

  eBook Edition

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61581-690-3