Page 58 of Scorched
Twenty-seven. Their count is accurate. Their intelligence is better than I'd prefer.
"The weapons are contained."
"The weapon is not contained." Karax's voice does not rise. It does not need to. "Three days ago a single blade degraded a ward-shield in your own court from forty feet away without being touched. Our monitors registered the signature from four hundred miles. That blade is an existential threat to the court system."
The floor is heating. The three of them will feel it through their boots.
"I'm aware of the blade's capabilities."
"Then you understand our position."
"I understand that three court rulers have entered my territory without invitation to question how I manage my own mate and my own forge." I lean forward on the throne. The volcanic rock is hot beneath my palms—my fire leaching into thestone, running at a temperature that would blister human skin. "I understand that is, at best, a diplomatic overstep and at worst a provocation."
I let the fire-thread rise. The walls glow. The heat in the room climbs until the air shimmers the way it shimmers above the Ashfields in high summer. Karax doesn't move. Karax has never moved in the presence of anything. Kaelen's jaw tightens—not with heat, with the awareness of the choice point he's standing on. And Aratus endures it with the practiced stillness of a male who's spent his life in ice, who knows how to hold cold inside heat.
"I also understand that none of you have offered a solution. You have brought me a problem. I already have the problem. What I do not have is your counsel—which you have not offered, because offering counsel would require admitting that the Bloodwork question is more complex than the answer chosen last time."
The word lands in the room like a blade on stone. Chosen. Not 'the Sundering.' Not the formal name for it. Chosen—the word that names what it was. They were all part of it. Kaelen's court supplied the intelligence that identified the last strongholds. Aratus's predecessor endorsed it. Karax's predecessor sealed the northern passes so no one could run.
None of them say it. Not yet. But the scent of it sits under the political composure—the cold, held-still scent of Fae who've already decided and are waiting for the procedural moment to say so out loud.
"We will be in contact," Aratus says. He stands. The other two follow. The Frost Court lord meets my eyes and I see it—not threat display, not anger. Arithmetic. He's running numbers I can't read, calculating variables I haven't disclosed, and the pale stillness of his face tells me nothing about what sum he's reached.
"You have until the next full moon," he says from the doorway. "After that, the matter moves to the Combined Court Assembly."
They leave. Three sets of footsteps across the obsidian, three courts walking out through my doors without being dismissed.
The doors close.
I sit on the throne. The obsidian floor cracks—a thin, sharp fracture running from the base of the throne to the door, the volcanic rock splitting under the heat I'm pouring into it.
Three weeks. The full moon is in three weeks.
Three weeks to resolve a situation that began with a genocide I ordered and has arrived at a woman in my forge whose blood carries everything I tried to extinguish. I could tell Sophia everything. Show her the vault records, the kill orders, the names. Hand her the full weight of what I did and let her make her own decision.
Or I could handle this the way I've handled every crisis for a near-millennium—alone, from this throne, with fire and strategy and the absolute certainty that I know what is best for this court.
The crack in the floor cools to a dark line, a scar in the obsidian.
I stand. I leave the throne room. I walk through the corridors of a court that's been mine since before Aratus was born—past the guard posts and the servants' quarters and the armory where her twenty-seven blades are stacked against the wall. Past the forge, dark now, the anvil cold.
I end up in my chambers. The bed is still unmade from the last night of the heat—sheets tangled, scorched at the edges where my fire flared during the knotting. The room smells like her. Omega-sweet, iron-sharp, the specific scent of her skin after four days of forge work and claiming.
The scent is fading. In another day it'll be gone.
I stand in the doorway. I don't enter.
Three weeks. The woman I need to protect is the same woman who won't speak to me. The courts are moving. The deadline is set. And I'm standing in a doorway unable to cross the threshold because the scent of a human assassin is fading from the fabric and nine centuries of kingship haven't prepared me for how much that matters.
The sigil over my heart pulses. Her heartbeat, steady, distant. She is in the forge. She's been in the forge since dawn, making blades that sing. She's not speaking to me but she hasn't left.
Not yet.
The court holds its breath.
25
SOPHIA
