Page 65 of Scorched
I stare at her. I've never heard her admit to fear. I've never heard her voice crack. I've been trained by this woman since I was six years old and I've never once seen the mask slip this far.
She's afraid.
I know fear. I've been trained to read it in targets, in marks, in the faces of people whose lives are about to end. This isn't performance. This is a woman who's spent sixty years carrying the weight of an extinct people and who's now sitting in her kitchen watching the last evidence of that extinction standing in front of her with brands on her skin and a god-killer at her hip.
"He recognized what you are before the claiming," she says. Quiet now. The cracked voice held together with will. "He couldhave handed you to the other courts. He could have killed you. He did neither."
"He used me."
"He chose you." She looks at me. Her dark eyes, steady now. The fear still present but controlled—the way I control my own fear, the way she taught me to control it. "Those aren't always the same thing."
I sit back down. Not because the anger has resolved—it hasn't, it's sitting in my chest like a coal that won't cool, banked low but burning. I sit because my legs are shaking and the ride was long and I haven't eaten since yesterday morning and there's a faint, persistent nausea rising in my throat that I've been attributing to anger but which is beginning to feel like something else.
"Are you ill?" she asks. Sharp. The grandmother's eyes—the same dark eyes I see in the mirror, the same Vey-Sorath eyes that've been reading people for generations. She scans me the way she scans metal for flaws. Quickly. Thoroughly.
"I'm tired."
"You're pale. And you haven't touched the tea."
She's right. The tea sits in my cup untouched, the steam no longer rising. The smell of it—bergamot and chamomile, the same blend she's made since I was a child—is turning my stomach. Bergamot has never turned my stomach before.
"I rode for three days."
She looks at me for a long moment. Her gaze drops to my belly. Holds there. Returns to my face. She says nothing. But her hands on the teacup tighten, and the steam rising between us catches the kitchen light, and I see the question she isn't asking because she's afraid of the answer.
I'm not ready to answer it.
"I need to sleep," I say. "And then I need you to open the back room."
"Sophia—"
"The room you've kept locked since I was six years old. The room you told me held surplus stock. The room that smells like old iron and the same frequency that sang in my bones when I held your hammer in his vault." I look at her. "Open it."
She nods. Once. The nod of a woman who's been carrying a secret for sixty years and has just been told to put it down.
"In the morning," she says. "Sleep first."
She reaches across the table. Her hand covers mine. Her fingers are rough—the smith's calluses, the same calluses I have, the same ones his hands carry. Three generations of forge-hands. The Bloodwork heritage, passed down through skin and bone and the particular way a palm curves around a hammer's shaft.
"I'm sorry," she says. "For the lying. Not for the choice. The choice kept you alive."
"The choice made me a weapon."
"The choice made you a smith. The weapon was my fear." Her hand tightens on mine. "I couldn't raise you soft, Sophia. Soft girls with Bloodwork heritage end up dead. I raised you hard because the world that killed our people is still the world, and I needed you to survive it."
I pull my hand back. Not roughly. The anger isn't gone but it's shifted—the coal in my chest still burns, but the flames have banked to something I can carry without it consuming me. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Something closer to understanding.
I go to my old room. The narrow bed, the small window, the wall where I carved practice marks with my first knife at age seven. I lie down. The mattress is too soft after weeks of stone floors. The sigil burns over my heart. His pulse, steady, distant. Three days away and he's still there.
The nausea rises. I press my hand to my belly. Flat. Unchanged. But the nausea is there, and the tenderness in mybreasts that I've been ignoring for a week, and the way my sense of smell has sharpened until the lavender on the ceiling beams is almost unbearable.
I close my eyes. I press my hand to my belly and I think: not yet. I'm not ready to think about this yet.
The Bloodwork harmonic hums in my bones. Even here, miles from the forge, from the court, from him. It hums.
I sleep with my hand on my stomach and the god-killer under my pillow and my grandmother's real name burning in my mind like a brand.
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