"A bellows is hard when you've got no assistant, and Kai can't touch half the stuff in here." It's a reminder, what she is, that anything he works in iron is off-limits for her. That's driven him to experimenting with other metals, and that's not such a bad thing at all.

"That's why I ripped out the wall." He gestures to the open barn doors with a grin. "It's nice, this time of year, but in summer it's sweltering." Some masochistic part of him enjoys it anyway, because it's familiar.