Page 14 of Scorched
At ninety seconds he catches my eye across the table and raises his goblet to me. A small tilt. The firelight catches the goldof his eyes and the gold of the wine and for a moment everything is the same colour—hot and bright and utterly untroubled.
"The oleander base is inspired," he says later, falling into step beside me as the court moves from the dining hall to the drawing rooms. His voice is low enough that no one else hears. "Most assassins default to nightshade derivatives for ancient targets. Oleander is bolder. It tells me you've studied our physiology rather than relying on general formulas."
My fingers are still tingling from the compound. My chest is tight. Not from fear—from the specific, grinding frustration of a job done right that produced nothing.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I say.
"Of course you don't." He's looking at me the way he looked at the fire-rose yesterday—as if I am something he made and is pleased with. "The delivery was pristine. The timing showed patience. You're exceptionally good at this."
I want to put a blade through his eye. I want it so badly my right hand twitches toward the knife at my thigh and I have to lock my fingers around the fabric of my skirt to keep them still.
The wanting isn't the problem. The problem is the heat that floods my throat when he says exceptionally good, the way my pulse kicks like a hand just closed around my chest and squeezed. The problem is that I've been killing people since I was fourteen and no one has ever looked at my work and called it inspired and meant it the way he means it—not as flattery, not as fear, but as one craftsman recognising another.
I hate him for it. I hate him with my whole body, which is the only kind of hating I know how to do.
The druggedfood is more subtle. I prepare the compound overnight—a slow paralytic derived from deepwater fish venom, tasteless, designed to accumulate over multiple doses ratherthan striking at once. Three meals and his motor function should begin to deteriorate. Six meals and he won't be able to stand. By the eighth, his heart will be working so hard to pump blood through paralysed vessels that it will simply stop.
I bribe the kitchen servant. A small woman with quick eyes who takes my coin without asking what the powder is and adds it to the spice blend for his morning meal. I watch from across the breakfast hall as he eats.
He eats slowly and deliberately, tearing bread with his bare hands the way he tears metal—the same precise, unhurried strength—and I watch his fingers and think about the forge yesterday. The way the steel softened under his grip. The way the fire-rose sat in my palm afterward, warm and alive and humming against my skin.
The fire-rose is in the pocket of my dress. I haven't taken it out since he gave it to me. I haven't looked at it. But my hand keeps drifting to the shape of it through the fabric, pressing against the metal, feeling the warmth, and I pull my hand away each time like it's been burned and it keeps going back.
He finishes his meal and rises without slowing, without stumbling, without showing any sign that his body has absorbed a compound that should be—by now—beginning to thicken his blood.
At the afternoon political gathering, I learn why. His general—a scarred female with fire-thread woven through her armour—mentions in passing that Ignatius hasn't eaten food prepared by anyone other than himself in eight hundred years. He grows his own grain in the volcanic soil beneath the court, mills it himself, bakes his bread in the Royal Forge.
The meal I watched him eat was made by his own hands. The kitchen never touched it. My bribed servant drugged food that went to the general's table instead, which means?—
I find the servant an hour later and administer the antidote. She's shaking and grey-faced and I hold her wrist and feel her pulse steady and I tell her it was a mistake, the wrong spice jar, it won't happen again. She believes me because she needs to and because I'm very good at making people believe things they need to.
But my hands are shaking when I leave her room, and not from remorse.
The afternoon gatheringis the political session I've been waiting for. Representatives from six courts fill the great audience hall—Ember, Thorn, Frost, Mist, Stone, and Shadow. The Shadow Court's emissary is a tall, narrow-faced male who watches everything and says nothing. The Thorn Court's ambassador has brought a proposal about trade routes that will take three hours to discuss and during those three hours everyone in the room will be focused on the argument and not on the human delegate in the corner.
I have a blade. Not the one from yesterday—he's handled that blade now, knows its weight and balance and the poison on its edge. This one is new. I made it last night.
I don't know why I made it. I had the metal—a fire-iron from the hearth in my guest chamber, good steel, dense with fire magic the way everything in this court is dense with fire magic—and I couldn't sleep and my hands were restless and I took the fire-iron and I began to work.
Without a forge. Without proper tools. With a boot knife and patience and my fingers, bending the metal, shaping the edge, working by feel in the dark the way my grandmother taught me before she decided that making things was a distraction from killing things. The blade took three hours and came out six inches long, perfectly balanced, and when I hold it against thelight it catches fire the way his metal catches fire and I don't want to think about what that means.
I wait until the trade route argument reaches its peak—the Thorn ambassador and the Frost delegate shouting over each other, the room's attention locked on the spectacle—and I move.
I'm faster than any human he's encountered in his nine centuries and I know this because he told me so and I hate that I know it because he told me and I believe it because I've never missed. I cross the twelve feet between my position and the side of his throne in the time it takes the Thorn ambassador to draw a breath. My blade is aimed for the soft place beneath his jaw where the bone thins and even ancient Fae bleed.
He catches my wrist.
The same grip, the same precise, unhurried certainty—his fingers close around the bones of my wrist and my arm stops and the blade stops and the room does not notice because the argument is still raging and because he hasn't moved from his throne and because from any distance it looks like he's simply holding the hand of the human woman standing beside him.
"New blade," he says, glancing down at it. His thumb finds my pulse—hammering, and I can't make it stop. "You made this."
It isn't a question.
"I purchased it?—"
"You made this." His golden eyes lift to mine and the fire behind them isn't amusement. It's something hotter, something with teeth, something that looks at me the way I look at a finished blade—with hunger and recognition and the absolute certainty that this is good. "The grain follows a pattern I've never seen in commercial steel. The balance point is three millimetres forward of standard, which tells me you adjusted for a reverse grip. You don't buy your weapons, Sophia. You build them."
No one calls me Sophia. Lady Moreau. The human delegate. The girl, from the kitchen servants. No one has used my real name since I left my grandmother's forge and he shouldn't know it and I don't know how he knows it and the sound of it in his mouth—the way he shapes the syllables, low and sure, the consonants warmed by the heat behind his teeth?—
