Rods and limbs went flying as Cara flailed, hitting the dirt floor with a hard smack that knocked all the wind from her lungs. Her right hand flared with heat. 

With a gasp, she snatched it away from the forge’s hearth and a hearty, healthy fire. 

It roared in the enclosed space, flaring with each pump of the apprentice’s billows. Even her ungainly entrance didn’t halt his movements, though he stared in disbelief and shock at her sudden appearance.

“What in blazes…!” Aaron came from the other side of the fire, hammer clenched in one fist with a set of tongs in the other, to see what all the commotion was about. 

He leaned over, scowling. “It’s the tavern girl making a mess, then. What do you want, besides ruining my shop?”

Cara scrambled to her feet, dusting off her shirt and trousers as best she could. 

“I wouldn’t have ruined the shop if you hadn’t trapped your door!” she snapped, red flags flying on her cheeks. “I’ve half a mind to not take on the job, if that’s how you greet visitors!”

“What job? Are you offering to take his place?” Aaron jerked a thumb at his apprentice. The boy’s only response was to pump his billows all the harder, fire flaring.

“The job on the questing board, of course.” Cara gathered the folds of her cloak and lifted her head. “You have a problem with some cockatrices?”

Aaron’s beard twitched. “And you’re the one to do it for me, then, lass?” 

If she didn’t need the work so badly, she’d walk out the door. As it was, she lifted her chin even higher. “Yes.”

Aaron blinked, then barked a laugh. “But you’re just the barmaid!”

Cara grit her teeth. “Here.” 

She reached beneath her cloak, extracting a scuffed leather wallet. It had the same curving initial tooled in faded red ink on the front from her job token. 

Cara flipped back the front cover to show a battered brass disk inside. The badge had once bent nearly in half, but later had been carefully, clumsily hammered back into a semblance of its original convex shape. 

Though the blunt hammer strokes had almost completely erased the delicate etchings, enough remained to mark its bearer as an Apprentice Hero. The master’s mark, however, had not survived the repair work. 

The smith raised a woolly eyebrow. “How much did you pay a tinker to fix that? Too much, whatever it was.”

“I did it myself.” Cara offered the wallet to him, biting off any sort of sarcasm.

“Badly.”

Cara’s patience broke. “I’m an Apprentice Hero, not a metalworker,” she snapped. “Are you going to look at the badge or not?”

Aaron’s eyes narrowed, but he took the wallet. 

He spent a long time examining the badge, going so far as to slip the disk out of its straps to examine the back side.

“Where is your Master?” he finally asked, still peering at her Apprentice’s badge.

Cara’s arms prickled with gooseflesh. “You posted for an Apprentice, not a Hero.”

“But I want to talk to your Master, ask them whether you can handle cockatrice.”

Cara threw up her hands. “For the love of all the gods, it’s not like they’re dragons! You’ve got feral chickens with stingers! Your own apprentice could probably handle them, the way he pounds away over there. Brain ‘em dead with a hammer, if he knew where to strike.”

The fire guttered for a moment as the bellows stalled, then resumed.

“And how do I know that you know where to hit ‘em, then, if not by talking to your Master?”

Cara bristled, but her stomach sank. This was the very conversation she had hoped to avoid. “He’s… not here.”

“Oh, really?” Aaron folded his arms across his chest, still holding her Apprentice’s badge. “And when would he be back, then? Would he pay the health fee, as a guarantee?”

Gods above, he was going to drag this out of her. 

It was obvious she had no supervising Master to answer to, to sponsor her for these sorts of jobs, but he was going to grind that fact in. 

Fine. 

Cara would let him have his pound of flesh, and then she’d take it back—and more—once she’d haggled the fee.

“If he was coming back anytime soon, do you think I’d have taken work at the tavern?” she asked. “You’ll have to take me as I am.” 

“As you are, eh?” The blacksmith’s gaze swept down to the dirt-covered knees of her trousers. “And that’s a clumsy farce of an Apprentice Hero who mucked up my workroom, that’s what it is.” 

He tossed the leather wallet at her feet into the still-hot soot at the hearth’s edge. “Get back to the tavern, girl. I need a professional to do this job, and you’re not anything.”

Cara felt a pang in the place she kept her pride, but she refused to bend and pick up her badge just yet. “But I can do it! And it’s not like we have any other Heroes in town. I wouldn’t get hurt or ask for the health fees or anything, just let me do this!”

“Do you have references? Anyone at all willing to speak for you? Or should I ask George about your fighting skills? You dumped a beer on his lap not last week, and then snapped him in the arm with a towel trying to sponge him off.”

“That’s some skill, at least,” Cara tried to joke, but Aaron was already shaking his head.

“I’ll not have it and risk having to pay for your injuries, girl. I need someone who knows the sharp end of a blade, and the closest you’ve been to a dagger is an eating knife, I’ll bet.”

Cara shifted so the cloak’s fabric fell away from the hilt of her short sword. 

Aaron snorted. “That’s not a dagger, that’s a piglet-sticker. No, you’ll not do for this. Get back to the tavern where you belong. I’ll wait for a real Hero, thanks all the same. Now get.”

With that, he strode back to the other end of the forge, snagging a metal rod on his way. Cara’s badge lay at her feet, smudged and dull. 

Slowly, she stooped to pick it up, carefully rubbing the grime away with the palm of her glove. 

When she raised her head again, she saw the apprentice was staring at her with something like sympathy. I guess he must get this all day, she thought ruefully. At least I get to leave, even if the answer’s no.

“You’d not use a dagger to take care of cockatrice, anyway,” Cara said, almost too low to be heard over the fire and the bellows. But the bellows stopped for just a moment, as though the apprentice were listening. “Better to use a slingshot, to take them out at a distance. Or a hammer to stun them first, if you can sneak up behind them.” 

She clutched the folds of her cloak around her once more, feeling cold despite the warmth of the forge. “Just in case they return before a real Hero shows up,” she added. 

And then, Cara walked out before the apprentice could say anything at all.