Page 4 of Scorched
I run hotter than any male in this court. Hotter than most Fae alive. The forge doesn't burn me. Nothing burns me.
I strike the metal. The hammer falls and the steel sings and for a few minutes I'm occupied by the work and the ache in my shoulders and the sweat on my back and the work is enough.
It's not enough. It hasn't been enough for decades.
I am eight hundred and ninety-two years old and I have been bored for the last forty of those years. Not restless boredom—I passed that centuries ago. The deep kind. The kind that sits in the marrow and makes you wonder if the fire that keeps your body running has forgotten what it was for. Six hundred Harvest Festivals. Ten thousand blades. Not one of them has surprised me.
The Bloodwork Fae surprised me. Their work was unique in a way I've spent six centuries trying to recreate and failed.
Not just skill—I have skill. Not just heat—I have heat. Something in the grain of their metal that felt alive in a way my own work does not, as though the maker had pressed something into the steel that went deeper than fire magic.
I destroyed them, yet I kept their blades, and every time I pick one up I can feel what I ended in my hands. What they did is better than anything I have made since, and that's part of the punishment I have chosen for myself.
The bar of steel under my hammer is taking shape. A blade. Always a blade. I don't know what else to make. The festival preparations are handled by people who don't need me hoveringover them. The courts are squabbling again—Mist pressing against Shadow's borders, Thorn's agricultural reforms making Vine nervous—and I can't bring myself to care. Nothing has been urgent in a long time.
Superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
I stop hammering. The fire licks at the blade and I hold it there, not directing it so much as letting the shape of it settle.
Someone trained her. Someone spent years turning a woman into a weapon and then aimed her at me, and she's carrying a blade that appears to have been forged by her own hands.
That's what I keep coming back to when I read the full report. Not the poison—I've survived poison. Not the cover story—I've unravelled a thousand of those. The tools in her bag, the ones that my people found, that suggest she uses a forge regularly.
My cock stirs, because to a male like me, interest and desire are almost never separate. Something about what I've learned of her—a woman who kills and a woman who makes, both in the same body—has reached through forty years of nothing and put its hand on my spine.
Cassius recommends denial of entry. Cassius always recommends denial of entry. He's almost always right. I'm going to overrule him. He'll say nothing—he's served me long enough to know what a final decision looks like.
It's not that I'm careless. It's that I'm hungry, and there is a difference. Carelessness gets males killed. Hungry gets males what they want, especially males like me.
I will be paying very close attention to whatever walks through my door tonight with a poisoned blade and hands that know how to forge.
I pull the steel from the fire. Hold it up to the light. The blade I'm making is adequate. Functional. Dead in the way all my work has been dead for six centuries.
I set it down.
Then I go back to the vault and I open the ledger and I turn to the page I already know by heart. The last page. The youngest names. Children who were not in the settlements when my fire came. Children whose parents had sent them away, or hidden them, or begged a human family to take them in. Most of them were found within the decade. Their names have lines through them. But eleven of them—the youngest, the smallest, the ones who disappeared most completely—have a single word beside them.
Unaccounted.
I run my finger down the list. Eleven children. The oldest was fifteen. The youngest was six. They vanished into the human population and I never found them, and their children's children would be alive now, and their blood would carry the Bloodwork gift whether they knew it or not, and if one of them had learned to forge?—
Superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
I close the ledger. The amber light sits around me and I feel something I haven't felt in so long it takes me a moment to find the word for it.
Not guilt. The guilt never left. This is something under it—something that moves like heat through cold stone.
Interest.
I'm going to let her in.
I go upstairsto dress for the festival. The court is already in motion—servants carrying crystal, fire dancers rehearsing in the great hall, the diplomatic staff arguing about seating. I walk through all of it without stopping. My skin is still hot from the forge. The servants flinch when I pass, stepping aside withoutbeing told. My horns catch the firelight of the corridor sconces. No one meets my eyes.
In my chambers I strip and wash the forge-soot from my hands and chest. The water steams where it hits my skin. I dress in the formal black the Harvest Festival demands—fabric woven with fire-thread, the gold filaments reading mood the way a fire reads air. Tonight they sit steady. Neutral. I look at myself in the mirror. Golden eyes, dark horns curving back from a face that hasn't changed in eight centuries. The body underneath the formal black is the body of something built to burn, and I haven't used it for anything worth burning for in longer than I want to count.
I straighten my collar. My cock is still half-hard. I haven't bothered to address it. It can wait.
She can't be far now.
