Page 64 of Scorched
The brand at my throat. The sigil over my heart, visible where the collar of my shirt has pulled open during the ride. She can't see the wings on my shoulders but she knows they're there. She knows because she sent me to the court knowing exactly what would happen and now she's looking at the proof of it standing on her doorstep with a ledger under my arm and a god-killer at my hip.
"Ilara Vey-Sorath," I say.
She flinches. The first time I've ever seen my grandmother flinch.
"Come inside," she says.
The forge is the same.The back room is still locked.
She makes tea. Her hands are steady—the hands of a woman who's been lying for sixty years, who has raised a weapon and called it a granddaughter, whose steady hands forged the blades that trained mine. She pours. She sits across from me at the small wooden table in the kitchen above the forge.
I set the ledger between us.
"I know," I say. "I know what Bloodwork is. I know what I am. I know what you are. I found your name in his records—in the kill orders he wrote himself, in the ledger where he documented the extermination of every forge, every master, every family. You are listed as a survivor. Threat assessment: low."
She looks at the ledger. She doesn't touch it.
"When did you find this?"
"Yesterday. In a vault beneath his forge. A vault full of everything the Bloodwork Fae ever made, preserved by the male who destroyed them." My voice is level. The assassin's discipline holds—the same discipline she taught me. "You knew, Grandmother. You sent me to the Ember Court knowing the heritage would wake. You sent me to kill the male who murdered our people knowing I would fail."
"I sent you to survive."
"You sent me to be claimed."
She's quiet for a long time. The forge below us hums—a different hum from the Ember Court's caldera, smaller, older, the coal-fire's murmur instead of the mountain's roar. The kitchen smells like iron and tea and the lavender she hangs from the ceiling beams. I grew up in this kitchen. I learned to hold a knife in this kitchen. I learned to kill in the forge below.
"The heritage was dying in you," she says at last. "Dormant. You're the last—the last carrier, the last blood, the last hands that could remember what our people's hands knew. I trained you. I gave you every technique I could translate into human metalwork. But the heritage needs Fae fire to wake. It always has. The Bloodwork Fae weren't just smiths—they were a bridge between metal and magic, and without the magic the metal stays silent."
"So you sent me to a Fae court."
"I sent you to the only Fae court with fire magic strong enough to wake the heritage fully. The Ember Court. His court." She wraps her hands around her teacup. The steam risesbetween us. "I could have sent you to any court with a forge. The heritage would have stirred. But to wake it completely—to bring back the full Bloodwork craft, the god-killers, the war-curves, the singing blades—you needed Ember fire. His fire."
"You knew he would claim me."
"I suspected. I hoped." She meets my eyes. Hers are dark, like mine. The same eyes. The same hands. The same blood. "A claiming binds you to his court. Under Ember law, a claimed mate can't be touched by the other courts. It's the only legal protection strong enough to keep you alive once the heritage surfaced."
The tea is cooling in my cup. I haven't touched it. My hands are flat on the table, the brands on my skin glowing faintly in the dim kitchen light. The sigil over my heart is pulsing with his distant heartbeat. Three days of riding and I can still feel him.
"You raised me to kill him," I say. "You trained me as an assassin. You gave me poisons. You gave me a cover story. And underneath all of that, the real mission was to get me into his court and let his fire wake the heritage."
"Yes."
"The assassination was the cover."
"The assassination was the reason the court would admit you. An omega assassin sent to kill the Ember King—it's a story he would believe because it flatters his paranoia. He would bring you inside. He would put you in his forge because that's where he keeps the things he finds interesting. And the forge would do the rest."
I push my chair back from the table. The scrape of wood on stone is loud in the quiet kitchen. I stand. I need to stand. I need the distance between my body and that table and the woman sitting at it who orchestrated my entire life.
"You could have told me."
"If I had told you, would you have gone?"
The question sits in the kitchen between us. The honest answer is no. If my grandmother had told me the truth—that I was the last heir of a murdered people, that the heritage in my blood needed Fae fire to wake, that the mission was not assassination but transformation—I would not have gone. I would have stayed in this forge, making blades that hummed with a frequency I couldn't explain, living a half-life of dormant heritage and human limitation. Safe. Silent. Diminished.
"No," I say.
"No." She nods. "So I lied. I've lied the way I've lied for sixty years—to keep you alive, to keep the heritage alive, to keep the possibility of the Bloodwork Fae alive in one woman's hands." Her voice cracks. Not theatrically—a thin, sharp fracture in the careful composure of a woman who has been afraid for longer than I have been alive. "I was terrified, Sophia. Every day since I sent you to that court I've been terrified. Not that you would fail the mission—that you would succeed and kill him and the claiming would never happen and you would walk back through that door with dormant hands and a dead heritage and I would have to look at you and know that I had the chance to save our people and I chose your safety instead."
