Page 2 of Scorched
Weapons don't feel, and I am her greatest weapon. That means I feel nothing.
I’ve spent my life trying to become what she needs me to be.
"I'll need a blade," I say. "Something that appears to be decorative. A lady's knife, the kind a minor landowner might carry for protection on the road. It needs to be strong, sharp steel, so the edge can be slicked with the poison without rusting.”
"I have one."
"I'll make my own."
She looks at me. An expression crosses her face that I can’t read, though I’ve never been able to read her, not in twenty-six years of reading faces for a living. My grandmother is the onlyperson who has ever been opaque to me. I don’t know if that’s because she trained me or because she trained herself first.
"Fine," she says.
I stand. I go to the forge. I light it myself—a match and tinder, the human way. The forge takes a few minutes to come up to working heat. I wait. Patience is the thing I’m best at. Patience and killing and the feeling of metal warming under my hands.
When the forge is hot I pull a bar of high-carbon steel from the rack and I start to work.
This is the part my grandmother does not understand. This is the part no one has ever understood, because I’ve never allowed anyone close enough to see it. When I am at the forge, with iron singing under the hammer and the heat pressing into my face and my hands moving in a rhythm that I didn’t learn but have always known—I am not a weapon. I am something else. Something that makes things instead of ending them.
The blade takes shape under my hands. I fold the steel three times, working the carbon through, feeling the shape of the metal shift and align with each fold. A poisoner's blade—thin, precise, the edge ground to a bevel that will hold the compound in its pores without dulling. I shape the handle for my own grip, because a blade that doesn't fit the hand that holds it is a blade that will slip at the worst moment, and I can’t have that.
I’m halfway through the final shaping when my hand touches the anvil again and I feel it.
A pull. Low and warm, somewhere behind my sternum, like a note I can almost hear. The iron under my hand is singing to me, or I’m singing to it, I can’t tell the difference.
I have felt it before—every time I forge, every time I work metal, this pull in my chest that has no name and no explanation, something that doesn’t make sense. Weapons don't feel. But the metal feels me. I'm sure of it.
I pull my hand back. I finish the blade without touching the anvil again.
By the time I'm done the sky is starting to lighten through the shutters. The blade is perfect. Seven inches, double-edged, with a handle wrapped in dark leather and a weight that sits in my palm like it grew there. It’s better than the one my grandmother commissioned from the finest weapons dealer in the city. It’s better than anything in this workshop. My grandmother won’t say so. She never does.
I dip the edge in the green vial and let the compound wick into the steel.
Then I go upstairs to pack.
My room is small and cold and contains precisely what an assassin needs: a bed, a trunk, a washstand, a mirror I rarely use. I use it now.
The face looking back at me is the one I was born with: brown skin, dark eyes, the kind of bone structure that reads as pretty without being memorable. My grandmother chose my features the way she chose everything else about my training—for utility. A forgettable face is an asset in my profession. I’ve walked into twelve rooms and walked out of twelve rooms and not a single person has been able to describe me afterward.
I pack light. Three changes of clothing appropriate for a minor landowner at court. Two additional sets of poisons, both disguised as perfume. The blade in a hidden sheath at my thigh, where the weight of it feels like an answer to a question I haven't asked. Enough poison for two weeks, although the mission should take seven days. I’m precise, I’m fast, but I always prepare multiple options. Just in case.
At the bottom of the trunk I hesitate. Then I pack the small leather roll that holds my forging tools: the hand hammer, the tongs that fit my grip, the file I use for finish work. A lady traveling to court wouldn’t carry forging tools.
It’s a risk to pack these tools. But the thought of nine days without metal under my hands makes something behind my ribs tighten in a way I can’t explain.
Assassins don't feel.
I close the trunk.
Downstairs, my grandmother is waiting by the door. The forge is out. The workshop looks like it always does—a working forge that belongs to a woman who repairs household ironwork for the neighborhood. Nothing in it suggests that anyone here has ever killed a person. That’s the point.
"Sophia."
I stop and turn to her, meeting her penetrating gaze.
"He is nine centuries old," she says. Her voice is the same as always—flat, controlled, certain. But her hands are clenched at her sides and the scar tissue on them catches the light. For a moment I see something in her face that I think might be fear. Not for herself. For me. "He has survived everything that has ever tried to kill him. Every assassin. Every war. Every century. He has survived all of it."
"I know."
