Page 63 of Scorched
The question has been asked and answered but she is asking it again because the answer has not changed and she needs it to change and it won’t change. I killed her people. I claimed her. I knew. I did it anyway. Those are facts. They will be facts tomorrow and next year and in another six centuries.
"I would make a different choice now," I say. "Not about the claiming. About the truth. I should have told you before the heat. I should have given you the choice to walk away before I put my brands on your skin."
"But you wouldn't have changed the Sundering."
"No."
She nods. Once. The single, controlled nod of a woman who has received the answer she expected. She holds the ledger in her hands. She looks at me one more time—the full weight of those dark eyes, the assassin's gaze that reads everything, that misses nothing, that has just read the worst thing about me and found it to be exactly what she feared.
"I'm leaving," she says.
My fire magic flares before I can catch it. A sharp, hot spike that lights the fire-thread in the walls to blinding intensity for one second before I wrench it back under control. The obsidian floor cracks—a thin line running from my feet toward hers, the volcanic rock splitting under the pressure of fire magic that has just been told the worst thing it can be told.
She watches the crack form. She does not step back.
"The court."
"The court. The forge. The mountain. You." She tucks the ledger under her arm. "I'm going to my grandmother. I'm going to ask her why she sent me here knowing what you are. And then I'm going to decide what to do with the heritage you tried to destroy."
"The other courts?—"
"I know about the other courts. I know about the deadline. I know that three Fae lords came to your throne room and told you to deal with me." She steps closer. Close enough that the Bloodwork harmonic brushes against my fire magic, that hot, bright contact that lights up the brands on her skin. "You have dealt with me for nine hundred years, Ignatius. You have dealt with my people, my grandmother, my heritage. You have dealt with all of it. Now I’m going to deal with myself."
She walks past me. The god-killer at her hip. The ledger under her arm. The Bloodwork harmonic trailing behind her through the throne room like a wake in dark water.
I do not stop her.
She is right to go. She is right to seek the truth from the woman who raised her, right to put distance between herself and the male who destroyed her people, right to need time and space and the cold air outside this mountain to think clearly. I know this the way I know the caldera's rhythms, the way I know the fire-thread's moods, the way nine centuries of ruling and losing and surviving have taught me to recognise the moment when holding tighter will break the thing you are trying to hold.
I let her go.
The throne room doors close behind her. The fire-thread in the walls blazes once—a bright, hot flare that runs through every wall in the court, from the throne room to the forge to the corridors to the gates—and then dies to the lowest glow I have maintained in nine hundred years.
The mountain goes quiet. The caldera settles to a murmur. The fire-thread dims to embers.
The Ember Court feels, for the first time since I built it, cold.
27
SOPHIA
The road from the Ember Court to the human district takes three days on horseback.
I ride alone. The horse is a court mare—dark, fast, bred for the mountain passes—and the Ember Court guards at the gate didn't try to stop me when I rode through. They watched me go. The fire-thread in the gate pillars flickered as I passed, a last, uncertain pulse, the mountain's magic reaching for me one final time before the road dropped below the treeline and the court disappeared behind me.
The sigil over my heart burns the entire ride. Not pain—presence. His heartbeat, steady and distant, a thread of fire connecting my chest to a mountain three days behind me. I can't sever it. I can't ignore it. I can only endure it the way I endure rain and cold and the ache in my thighs from riding too long.
The human district is unchanged. The same narrow streets, the same coal-smoke haze, the same cobblestones slick with the morning's rain. The forge is at the end of the lane—a low stone building with a chimney that hasn't stopped smoking in thirty years and a door that my grandmother locks from the inside every night at eight.
It's half past nine. The door is locked.
I knock.
Silence. Then the scrape of a chair. The click of a bolt. The door opens and my grandmother looks at me and her face does something I've never seen it do in twenty-six years of knowing her.
She goes white.
Not pale. White. The blood draining from her skin so fast I can track its retreat—from her cheeks to her jaw to her neck, the color falling away like forge-heat leaving metal. She's looking at me but she's not seeing me. She's seeing the brands.
