Page 62 of Scorched
"Don't." She holds up her hand. The god-killer hums at her hip. "Don't give me the political justification for murderingchildren. I've read the orders. I've read your handwriting.Confirmed.That's the word you used."
"Yes."
"Did you write it yourself?"
"Every entry. I would not delegate the documentation of what I had ordered."
She is quiet for a long time. The throne room holds the silence the way stone holds heat—absorbing it, radiating it back in slow waves. The fire-thread in the walls is barely lit. The caldera murmurs beneath us.
"You knew what I was before you claimed me," she says.
"I suspected before the heat. I was certain during it. Your blood carries the Bloodwork harmonic—I could feel it through the fire magic during the first knotting. The frequency was unmistakable."
"And you claimed me anyway."
"Yes."
"Knowing that you had destroyed my people. Knowing that my grandmother—Ilara Vey-Sorath, whose real name I learned today fromyourrecords—was a survivor of the genocide you ordered. Knowing all of that, you knotted me on the floor of your forge and burned your brands into my skin."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question sits in the throne room between us. I have been carrying the answer for weeks—longer, since before the claiming, since the first time I smelled the Bloodwork harmonic in her blood and understood what she was.
"Because claiming you bound you to the Ember Court. Under Ember law, a claimed mate is untouchable—no court can move against you without moving against me. The other courts were already detecting Bloodwork signatures. If I had not claimed youbefore they acted, they would have sent assassins. The claiming was the fastest way to extend my protection."
"So it was strategy."
"Part of it was strategy. The fastest and most certain part. The part I can explain to court lords and military advisors and the part that makes sense on a map."
"What was the rest?"
I’m quiet. The caldera shifts beneath us—the mountain's bones grinding, the deep geological patience of a volcano that has been breathing for longer than the Fae courts have existed. The obsidian floor is cold under my feet. I can feel the fire-thread fighting to rise, pressing against the control I have clamped over it, wanting to blaze the way it blazes when she is near me in the forge.
The fire-thread flickers. A single, bright pulse that escapes my control—the mountain's fire responding to something in my chest, something that beats alongside the fire magic and the old guilt and sits where a king's certainty used to be.
"The rest is not something I’m prepared to discuss while you are holding a weapon that could kill me."
She looks at the god-killer at her hip. She does not move to set it down. She does not move her hand away from it. She looks at me and the Bloodwork harmonic hums between us and the question hangs in the space where the fire-thread flickered.
"Then I will ask you again," she says. "When I'm ready to hear the answer."
She looks at me. Her face is still. Her eyes are dry. She has not cried once since she found the vault—not when she read the children's names, not when she found her grandmother's identity, not now. She is an assassin who was trained to feel nothing and she is holding herself together with the same discipline she uses to hold a blade.
"You killed my family," she says.
"Yes."
"And then you claimed me."
"Yes."
"Did you know what I was before you claimed me?"
"I suspected before the heat. I knew during it."
"And you did it anyway."
