Page 1 of Scorched
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SOPHIA
The anvil is cold at three in the morning.
That's the first thing I notice when I come downstairs—not my grandmother sitting in the dark with the forge unlit, not the dossier open on the worktable, not the smell of the poison she's been distilling since before I went to bed. The anvil.
I put my hand flat on it the way I've done since I was a girl, and just like always, the iron answers my palm as if it knows me. It always does. I’ve never told my grandmother what I feel when I touch the anvil; I’m sure she’d think me foolish if I did.
"Sit down," she says.
I sit. The workshop is cold. No doubt she hasn't lit the forge because she doesn't want the neighbors seeing light through the shutters at this hour. My grandmother thinks of everything.
She raised me to think of everything too. I count the exits out of habit—the front door I came through, the cellar hatch behind the coal bin, the window she bricked over six years ago when the Ember Court patrols started running tighter routes through the district. Two viable exits. Three if I go remove the bricks, which I could do if I had no other options.
Often, in my line of work, there are no other options.
She slides the dossier across the worktable towards me.
“Your next target is Ignatius Pyrion," she says. "King of the Ember Court. Eight hundred and ninety-two years old. Fire Fae. Ancient and powerful.” She pauses, then holds out her hands. The lamplight catches the scar tissue on her hands—the burns she's carried as long as I've known her, the ones she won't explain. "He is the reason for these scars. And the reason I have to keep you safe from knowing more about what we are and where we come from.”
I open the dossier. The intelligence contained inside is thin. A physical description that is almost any Ember Court fire fae male: tall, dark red skin, black hair, horns, fire magic, and of course, the pointed ears of all fae. There are schedules, but they’re months out of date. A list of his public appearances at court functions going back three years, each one marked with entry points and guard rotations that someone else has already compiled.
Whoever assembled this had good access and mediocre instincts. The schedules are useless. The entry points are better, though I’ll have to scout them to make sure they’re still there.
"His Harvest Festival is in nine days," my grandmother says. "You will attend as Lady Sophie Moreau, a minor landowner seeking the court's protection from a border dispute in the eastern territories. Your cover documents are finished. Your introduction has been arranged through a contact in the Ember Court's trade office. You will have seven days inside the court before the festival concludes. That is enough time."
It is. I have made twelve kills, never been detected, and the longest any of them took was four days. I’m twenty-six years old and I have never failed a contract.
Not because I’m reckless or violent, eager to kill. Because I’m precise and patient, and I do not take contracts I cannotsee through to the end. That is how an assassin keeps a spotless record.
I turn the page. Toxicology options are listed, all proposed to kill a large and powerful fae. Three of them are mine—compounds I developed in this workshop during the years my grandmother was teaching me that poison was a woman's weapon and a blade was a man's.
I didn’t ever tell her that I preferred the blade. I didn’t tell her that the poisons I mixed were backup plans for the killing edge I preferred. My favorite way to kill was with a blade I forged with my own hands, folding the steel over and over again, sharpening until it could cut flesh from bone and even bone from bone.
"The compound in the green vial," she says. "Applied to a blade edge, it will bypass Fae healing for a minute, maybe two. That’s your window. One cut, correctly placed, and his magic won’t save him."
I pick up the green vial. Hold it to the lamplight. The poison inside is a deep amber, almost black, and it moves like something thicker than liquid. I mixed this one myself three years ago.
I remember the afternoon I made it: the constant heat of the burner, the way the compound resisted combining until I adjusted the temperature by two degrees and it came together all at once, perfect and lethal. I’m good at making things. Better than my grandmother wants to admit.
"There is one more thing," she says.
I wait.
"He is Fae. Ancient and powerful. His court will have effects on the body that you must be prepared to deal with, or they’ll steal your concentration. You’ll feel… heat in your body. Disorientation. A pull you won’t understand." She pauses. Her jaw tightens. "You’re disciplined, well trained. I have made sure of that. Do not let the court get inside your head."
She has trained me well in discipline. Taught me to control my breathing until my heartbeat was a metronome. Taught me to lock my body down so completely that nothing could reach me—not pain, not fear, not anything else, not even love or desire.
I’ve never been inside a Fae court. I’ve killed Fae males, but always in human territory, always at a distance, always before they were close enough to touch. My grandmother was very clear about that. Kill them from a distance. Never let one close. Never cross into their courts.
This time she’s sending me in.
"I’m disciplined," I say.
My grandmother nods. Her face in the lamplight is the face I’ve known my entire life—severe, certain, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for tenderness. She loved me the way she knew how—taught me to kill people efficiently and leave no evidence and feel nothing about it afterwards.
When I had fevers she held me. When I broke my wrist at thirteen she set the bone herself. Not once in twenty-six years has she told me I had done well unless I had done something that could end a life.
