Elva forge was a malleable material, more so than any other material Rusk had ever worked with, and Mandy assured him it was the most durable wood in all of existence as well. She told him it was favored by faeries. They sat inside Mandy's little hut, so much smaller than Rusk's cottage home, and while Mandy spun yarn out of a spool with a needle deftly held between two fingers, Rusk was attempting to work the Elva forge into a weapon of his own.

The problem was, he didn't know what he wanted it to be.

"Why's this so hard?" asked Rusk, mainly to himself if he were being perfectly honest.

"You can't just ask it to be something out of nowhere. You have to have a plan in your head before you begin. Just like any project."

Rusk focused the way Mandy had taught him. He held the Elva forge in his hands and imagined it forming into a weapon, something strong and sharp and full of valor. He was picturing Iya Tarfell's sword, and in his palm the Elva forge morphed of its own accord, moving the way Rusk imagined it would, and formed a shallow interpretation of Iya Tarfell's blade before it collapsed back into itself and sat defiantly in his grip once more. It didn't want to be a blade.

"Arrows are easy for me to make with that," offered Mandy.

"You never did teach me how to shoot. And I don't own a bow either."

Mandy pulled something out of the air, something that wasn't yarn but was a magic all in itself, and added it to her needle. She knitted something with it before she began with the physical yarn, and between her needles Rusk could almost make out the framework of what the physical materials would become.

"Is that chainmail?" asked Rusk dubiously.

Mandy smiled and kept working.

"How do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"That, when you pull stuff out of thin air. You pulled this out of thin air too." He held out the Elva forge, in its original form again since it had rejected his attempts at, well, forging it.

"No air is truly thin," said Mandy. Her eyes glinted in the candlelight. Rusk had taken to staying in her hut on the weekends when his parents wouldn't nag him for coming home late. In fact, it seemed they didn't much want him around, so it worked in both their favor. But sometimes, like now, when Mandy's eyes turned that odd shade, more of the monster showing from beneath the surface, he wondered if his decision to stick close by her was a wise one. Mandy looped the physical yarn over the magic and did something that resembled a knot with both substances. Her voice was flat. "Only humans afraid of the larger world assume there's nothing but them around, assume there's no magic anywhere. Assume safety where there is none."

"Mandy."

"It's true, you know. What the monsters always say. What they threaten. It's not a threat, it's the truth. That nowhere is safe."

"Why do you have to talk like that?"

"Like what?"

"If there were no safe places then heroes wouldn't exist, and neither would Sanctuary."

Mandy stopped knitting. Her head tilted unnaturally. She looked at Rusk as an animal might, but he couldn't decipher if he were predator or prey to her. He thought he might be both, with that monster molding her expression in the same way he was trying to mold the Elva forge. "Sanctuary?"

"It's a place I've heard about, where heroes come from. Where it's safe. There's no monsters there, so the legends go."

"Legends?" Her teeth weren't hers. "And where have you heard these legends?"

"From a hero. She saved me when I was a kid. Chopped a monster's head right off."

Mandy flinched. She knitted. She knitted some more. The box she'd shown Rusk after her breakdown about her father and the recovery that followed, the one that she'd opened to find it contained nothing, sat behind her against the wall. It was an unassuming thing, black as a viper's scales, and glinting just as venomously. The monster receded. Her face turned sad.

"Not all monsters are like that," she said under her breath, but who she was trying to reassure Rusk couldn't say, so he said something else. He changed the subject.

"So when are you gonna teach me how to make a bow? Or to shoot, for that matter. I've never even strung one."

"Right now, if you want." She set aside her knitting. No matter how he looked at it it resembled chainmail, but what use could someone like Mandy have for chainmail? Surely she wasn't going to give him even more than she already had, which was a lot even when he didn't count her instruction, but the only person who might need chainmail Rusk could think of was, well, himself.

She was so generous. Sometimes it made him ache. She showed him how to string a bow. She always had one on hand. It rested unstrung in the corner within reach at all times. Rusk visited often but hadn't ever seen the bow used. But she pulled it from its corner and strung it fluidly, pulling it taut before Rusk could figure out how she'd wrangled it into submission.

When he tried, he couldn't figure out where to put his feet, and Mandy had to walk him through the process very slowly. Even then, he felt he could never string or unstring it as fast as she could. It seemed like magic the way she held it, the way she handled it with such respect but authority, and he almost asked if it in fact was. Maybe the Elva forge wasn't the only magic Mandy had access to.

"How'd you get so independent anyway?" Rusk made another clumsy attempt at stringing the bow. "Did your father really teach you all of this?"

"No. Some I had to learn myself. The knitting I learned from a book my mother left. The sewing too. My father may have taught me how to survive, but my mother taught me how to thrive."

"You never told me what happened to her."

"She's dead," said Mandy with a shrug.

Rusk immediately regretted asking, but Mandy's face remained casual. The wound was too old to affect the monster. Or maybe it wasn't a wound at all. When Mandy spoke, her voice was flat. No emotion, positive or negative.

"She died in childbirth. That's where my name comes from. Mandra, a shortening of the word mandrake. According to my father one screamed the moment I was born, took my mother with its shriek, and so he named me after the thing that killed her. Maybe that's why he hated me enough to abandon me."

Rusk's mouth hung open.

Behind him, where he'd left the Elva forge, the light from within the wood curled up and elongated, stretching and expanding without him noticing, and it solidified into the most beautiful bow Mandy had ever seen. It sat in wait on its cushion, a flat bow with an undefined handle.

"Oh look." She nodded toward the new, unstrung bow with a soft smile. "It went and formed a forge for you. Must've grown tired of your indecision."

When Rusk picked the Elva Bow gently off the cushion, the grip morphed to perfectly fit inside his fist, and a fire ran through his veins. He knew with absolute certainty every arrow he fired from this bow would hit its mark, and shuddered at the power that rushed up his arm from the handle. He had to master archery. A weapon as fine as this deserved nothing less than an adept.

"Teach me to shoot?" he asked Mandy.

"Oh I'll teach you more than that." Her tone was infectiously eager. "I'll teach you to make arrows out of anything."