Page 72 of Scorched
The silence changes. Kaelen's face goes from pale to gray. Karax doesn't move. Aratus—the Frost Court lord who plays both sides—has the grace to look at the table.
"One of the three exceeded his orders," Kaelen says before I can continue. His voice is flat. The specific cold of a Fae lord who has already cleaned something up and resents accounting for it in public. "The Thorn Court operative who attempted to kill the omega rather than retrieve intelligence was executed. Publicly. His body is at the Thornwood border." His jaw tightens. Not guilt—the controlled fury of a lord whose clean operation was made ugly by a subordinate who thought old laws still applied.
I look at him across the table. He isn't lying. He's also not telling the whole truth—there's a distance between he was executed and I never intended it that I'll examine at a time of my choosing.
"The other two," I say, "were less easily managed. Sophia Moreau defeated both using Bloodwork abilities and human combat training. She did this while carrying my child."
The words land in the hall like the god-killer landing on stone.
I haven't confirmed this. I don't know it for certain—the shadow guard's report was ambiguous, the signs are early, theevidence is a hand pressed to a belly and a heartbeat running faster than it should. But I'm a king who has survived nine centuries by knowing when to play a certainty and when to play a possibility, and this—in this room, in this moment, with these lords—is the moment to play it as fact.
My child. An Ember King's child. A child who will carry both Ember fire and Bloodwork heritage. A child who will be, if the heritage runs true, the most powerful Fae smith born in six hundred years.
They hear it. I can see the recalculation happening across the table—the slow, heavy shifting of political weight as seven court lords absorb the implication. Eliminating a lone Bloodwork descendant is one thing. Eliminating a pregnant, claimed mate of the Ember King—a mate carrying an heir to the Ember Court—is something else entirely. That isn't the Sundering Compact. That's an act of war against a full court sovereign, and the last court that went to war with the Ember Court is the Bloodwork Fae, and they're extinct.
"This session is concluded," I say.
I walk out. I don't wait for their response. I don't look back. The fire in the walls follows me to the door and dies the moment I cross the threshold, the neutral hall's wards reasserting themselves in my absence, the stone going cold and dark behind me.
The rideback to the Ember Court takes a day at speed.
I ride hard. The mountain appears on the horizon at dusk—the volcanic peak rising above the cloud layer, the caldera's smoke trailing east in the wind. Home. The court I built, the mountain I claimed, the fire-thread that's been mine for nine centuries and that learned to respond to a human woman's blood in six weeks.
I push through the gates. The fire-thread in the gate pillars blazes as I pass—the mountain recognizing its king, the court coming alive around me. The heat rising through the stone. The corridors warming. The forge chimney smoking.
I go to the forge first.
The weapons are where she left them. Twenty-seven blades stacked against the wall, singing the Bloodwork harmonic into the dark room. The god-killer is gone. She took it with her. The forge is cold.
I stand among her blades. I bring fire to my palm. The forge light catches the metal and the blades sing louder—the Bloodwork harmonic answering Ember fire the way it has always answered, the ancient argument between two frequencies that can't exist peacefully in the same room and can't seem to stop trying.
She will come back.
Not because I'll bring her back. Not because the brands compel her, or the bond demands it, or the court requires it. She will come back because three courts sent assassins to kill her and the only power in the Fae world strong enough to protect her is the fire that runs through this mountain. She will come back because her heritage wakes in this forge and nowhere else can feed it. She will come back because the child in her belly—if there is a child, if the thing I played as certainty is true—will need both Ember fire and Bloodwork steel to survive in a world that has tried to eliminate both. She will come back because I'm standing in a forge full of singing blades and I didn't do the arithmetic.
The fire-thread in the walls lights. Slow. Steady. Brighter than it's been since she left. The sigil over my heart flares—her heartbeat, distant, faster than it should be. The child's heartbeat, maybe. Something new. Something that makes my fire magic burn at a frequency I haven't felt in nine centuries of ruling alone.
The blades sing. The caldera hums. The mountain breathes.
For the first time in six hundred years, I've chosen something other than what is politically correct.
I've chosen what is mine.
31
SOPHIA
Iride back to the Ember Court on a stolen horse with three sets of Fae assassin blood on my shirt and a god-killer at my hip and the truth sitting in my belly alongside the child.
The road to the Ember Court runs through volcanic lowlands that smell of sulfur and wet stone. Scrub-pine forests thin to black rock as the elevation climbs. Steam vents hiss along the path—plumes of white curling through the pre-dawn dark, the mountain breathing, the heat rising through the earth in pulses I can feel through the horse's hooves.
My horse doesn't like this road. She shies at every vent, every crack in the rock where the orange glow shows through. I keep my hands steady on the reins and my ribs press against each other with every stride and I ride.
The mountain appears at dawn. The volcanic peak breaking through the cloud layer, the caldera's smoke trailing east, the dark stone slopes catching the first light and turning it to copper.
I've been riding through the night. My cracked rib aches with every stride. The cut on my throat has scabbed over—a thin, dark line across the brand at the base of my neck, the assassin's mark overlaying the king's. My fingers are numb from the reins. Theassassin blood on my shirt has dried stiff and dark—Thorn Court smells like copper and sap, Stone Court like chalk, Frost Court like nothing at all.
The gates open before I reach them. The guards don't speak. The fire-thread in the gate pillars blazes the moment I pass—a surge of orange light racing through the stone, the mountain's magic recognizing me, reaching for me, the court lighting up wall by wall as I ride through the lower courtyard and up the switchback path to the main keep.
