Page 84 of Scorched
I'm watching my hands as they work and they're steady and they're mine.
Not my grandmother's hands, though her training is in them. Not the guild's hands, though their kills are in them. Not his hands, though his fire runs through the brands on my palms and his magic is in the metal I work. My hands. The hands of the Forge Queen—the last Bloodwork smith, the Ember King's mate, the woman who makes things that sing.
The hammer falls. The metal bends. The Bloodwork harmonic rises to meet the iron and the iron rises to meet it and the forge fills with the sound of making—not a weapon, not a tool, not yet. Just the sound of a woman at her anvil, shaping metal in the pre-dawn dark, the fire-thread blazing in every wall and the phoenix wings warm against her back and her hands sure on the hammer.
I work until dawn breaks through the forge's high windows. The light catches the metal under my hammer and it gleams—dark iron shot through with the first threads of the blood-and-fire pattern, the double helix forming as I fold and hammer and fold again. The blade will be small. A knife, perhaps. Something for the hand that carries it, something personal, something that sings its smith's name.
The sun climbs. The forge fills with the pale gold of early morning—light falling through the high windows in shafts thatcatch the iron dust in the air and turn it to floating copper. The fire-thread settles to its steady glow. Outside the forge I can hear the court waking—the distant clang of the guard change, the murmur of servants in the lower corridors, a bird somewhere in the volcanic gardens singing something bright and careless.
I pause. Set the hammer down. Press my palm flat to the anvil's surface and feel the metal's vibration—the Bloodwork harmonic running through the iron and the stone and the mountain's roots, a sound that was silent for six hundred years and isn't silent anymore.
A letter sits on the workbench, arrived while I was gone. Claire's handwriting—precise, tilted, the penmanship of a woman who was trained in the same cold school I was. I haven't read it yet. I will. Claire Whitmore of the Mist Court, my only friend in the world who doesn't share my blood or my bed. She'll want to know about the wings. She'll want to know about the baby. She'll write back something dry and careful that hides the fact that she's happy for me, because we were both raised by women who taught us that happiness is a liability.
I pick up the hammer again.
Footsteps behind me. His.
He doesn't speak. He crosses to the workbench. He picks up a tool. He begins to work beside me—his fire magic rising to meet my harmonic, the two frequencies finding each other the way they found each other for three days of forging, the loop closing, the partnership resuming.
We work in silence. The forge is lit. The anvil rings. The mountain breathes fire beneath our feet and the blades on the walls hum in chorus and the Bloodwork harmonic and the Ember fire run through the metal between us, through the brands on our skin, through the child growing in my belly, through the wings on my back, through the bond that Oberonconfirmed and the courts cannot break and the prophecy holds in its sixth seal.
My hands are steady. My hands are mine.
I bring the hammer down.
EPILOGUE: SOPHIA
Seven months and the forge hasn't gone dark once.
I stand at the anvil with my belly pressing against the workbench edge—I've had to raise the workbench twice this month, the baby pushing me further from the metal, my body reshaping itself around the fire growing inside it.
My phoenix wings are folded tight against my back. My hands are shaping the last blade in the Ember Court's contribution to the prophecy arsenal. The metal hums under my hammer. The Bloodwork harmonic fills the forge the way it fills every room I enter now—constant, low, the frequency woven into my breathing and my heartbeat and the kick of the child pressing against my ribs.
The child kicks again. Hard. Fire magic pulses through my belly where the tiny foot connects—his fire, carried in the blood I share with the baby, reaching for the Bloodwork harmonic the way it's been reaching since the first weeks. The baby's magic is both. Fire and Bloodwork. Ember and forge. I feel it when I work—a third note in the harmonic, smaller, less certain, learning the frequencies it has been born to carry.
I press my hand to the spot where the foot struck. The baby settles.
"You'll wait," I say. The same voice I use on metal that's not ready to be shaped. Patient. Certain. "I'm finishing something."
Ignatius is at the secondary workbench. He has been there since dawn—bare-chested, fire brands glowing, working a piece of Ember iron into a guard for the last blade. We don't speak while we work. We haven't needed to speak while working since the third day of the forging. His fire magic adjusts to my harmonic and my harmonic adjusts to his fire magic and the loop closes and the metal between us becomes what it is meant to become.
He looks up. His golden eyes find the place where my hand rests on my belly. His fire magic reaches across the forge—not physically, through the bond, through the brands, through the fire-thread in the walls. A pulse of heat that settles against my skin where the baby kicked. Reading. Checking.
"She's fine," I say.
"He."
"We've discussed this."
"And I've told you that the fire magic's frequency indicates?—"
"You're an ancient Fae king, not a midwife. Finish the guard."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The Ember King doesn't smile. The ghost of something that lives in the same place his guilt lives, in the same place the unnamed thing lives, in the deep structure of a male who has been learning, over seven months, that he is allowed to want this.
He finishes the guard. Crosses the forge—passing the rack where the first Bloodwork blades hang, the ones I made during the heat, raw and rough and screaming with uncontrolled harmonic. I haven't remade them. They are the record of what I was before I knew what I was. They will stay.
He sets it on the workbench beside the blade I have been shaping. The metal hums—the Bloodwork harmonic welcoming his fire-wrought piece the way it welcomes every piece he makes for me. I fit the guard to the blade. The join is seamless. Fire and blood, fused in the metal's grain.
