Page 21 of Claimed By the Wolf Prince
"Hold this," he says, and nods toward the stock on the anvil.
I take the tongs. The weight of them is familiar in a way that bypasses every defense I’ve constructed since the capture, settling into my grip with the rightness of a tool my hands learned before my mind learned to use them as weapons. The handles are warm from the forge heat and worn smooth from years of the same wolf's grip, and my fingers find the natural position without searching.
I hold the stock while Dag works it. The rhythm of the hammer is different from this close, felt in the bones of my wrists and the soles of my feet through the stone floor, a vibration that enters through the body and settles somewhere behind the sternum. He draws the metal out, folds it, draws it again, and the bar transforms under his hands with the patient inevitability of something that was always going to become what it is becoming. He doesn’t narrate. He doesn’t instruct. He works, I hold, and the holding is enough.
The holding is more than enough. My hands are serving a purpose that is not survival, not strategy, not the management of a captivity that grows more complicated with every morning I take a smaller pill in the alcove and every evening the thing I have been calling anger settles in my belly and reaches for a man through mountain stone.
The grief arrives without warning.
It doesn’t announce itself the way grief is supposed to announce itself, with tears or trembling or the dramatic collapse that the war poems describe. It arrives as an opening. The tongs stay steady in my grip, the stock stays true on the anvil, and my hands do not shake. But something inside my chest gives, a door I welded shut the day my mother's body was carried from the workshop where she died mixing a compound that was supposed to keep me hidden for one more season.
The door gives and the air that comes through it smells like coal and iron and heated stone and the specific heat of a forge where a woman once pressed her green-stained fingers to the hollow of her daughter's throat and said'This is where they mark you,'with a voice so steady that the steadiness itself was a kind of fear.
I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since the day I burned her body in the forge she built, and I will not cry in the workshop of the wolfwho made the blades that ended the war she was trying to help me survive.
But the door stays open, and the air keeps coming through.
Dag works the metal in silence. Either he sees it or he does not, and either way, his response is the same: he works. The hammer falls. The metal bends. The world inside the forge operates on a set of rules that have nothing to do with pack politics or captivity or the complicated knot that living next to Torben is tying in my chest.
The bar Dag finished sits on the cooling rack, radiating heat that I can feel from an arm's length away. I learn again with my hands what my mother taught me and what I forgot in the years of strategy and war: that metal holds heat long after the fire dies. The heat lives in the grain, persistent and patient, outlasting the flame that created it.
Dag sets the hammer down and stretches his back with the grunt of a wolf whose body has been doing this work for longer than I have been alive. He looks at me for the first time since he handed me the tongs, and his gaze is the assessment of a craftsman evaluating an unfamiliar tool: not interested in origin or politics, only in whether the thing in front of him can do what it was shaped to do.
"You've held tongs before," he says. It is not a question.
"My mother was a metalworker. A healer-smith." I offer the second word before I can weigh the cost of it, and the offering surprises me. A healer-smith is a metalworker who specializes in the medicinal application of forged compounds, a craft that sits at the intersection of metallurgy and herbalism and requires fluency in both. It isn’t information a prisoner should volunteer. The forge has cracked my grip on the inventory of what I give away and what I keep.
"Hm." The sound carries the weight of a full assessment delivered in a single syllable. He picks up the tongs I’ve beenholding and hangs them back on their hook, returned to the exact position they occupied before he offered them. "Come back tomorrow if you want. I'll be making nails. Could use the help."
The offer is so stripped of agenda that it takes me a moment to process it as genuine. There’s no leverage in this invitation, no information being solicited, no dynamic being tested. He needs help making nails and he’s decided that my hands are adequate to the task.
Then the air in the doorway changes, and the simplicity vanishes.
I don’t hear him arrive. I feel the temperature drop where the corridor's cold displaces the forge heat, and underneath the cold, his scent reaches me before I turn: pine resin and leather and the darker note that my compound intercepts but no longer fully blocks. My body registers him before my eyes confirm what my body already knows.
The relief of the forge air vanishes with a single breath. Every inhale is his again, and my body's response is immediate. The heat that pooled pleasantly in my muscles from the fire concentrates low and sharp, my pulse thickens, and the opening the grief produced turns into a different kind of vulnerability that I like considerably less.
I’ve spent days building a framework for managing proximity. The forge dismantled the framework, and now he’s standing in the doorway and I’m undefended in ways I wasn’t this morning when the guard left the door unlocked.
Torben fills the doorframe with one shoulder against the stone, arms folded. The posture is designed to look casual, and on a man with less bulk it might succeed. On him, it communicates the breadth of his shoulders and the weight he carries with the unconscious ease of someone who has never needed to prove that he can do damage. His sleeves are pushedback, and the corded muscle of his forearms catch the forge light in a way I’ve no business noticing and cannot stop noticing.
His expression carries the controlled assessment I’ve seen him wear in debriefings, but the assessment has a different quality here. He’s reading the room: the tongs on the wall, the cooling rack, the soot on my fingers, the ease in my shoulders that was not there before. He’s measuring what the forge did.
I wait for the confrontation. The order to return to my quarters. The observation that prisoners don’t wander the fortress unsupervised, that the unlocked door was a test and I’ve failed it by venturing too far.
The confrontation doesn’t come.
He looks at Dag. Dag looks at him. Something passes between them in the silence, an exchange so compressed that it registers as a single glance, and whatever information the glance contains is sufficient for both of them. Dag picks up his hammer. Torben pushes off the doorframe, and the last thing I see before he disappears into the corridor is the set of his jaw, the muscle at the hinge locked tight, and the brief drop of his gaze to my mouth before he controls it.
He looked at my mouth. In the forge, with the firelight on my face and the soot on my hands and the grief still sitting open in my chest, the Wolf Prince looked at my mouth and then walked away, and the walking away cost him something I could see in the lock of his jaw.
The absence of punishment is more disorienting than any consequence would have been.
Consequence is a language I speak. I’ve been speaking it since Korren's war councils, where every action carried a price and every inaction carried a worse one. I know how to navigate punishment, how to calculate the cost of defiance against the value of resistance and arrive at a number.
But the quiet permission to continue does not fit inside the framework I’ve built for this captivity. The leash loosened without discussion, the space granted without acknowledgment, the mouth-glance that turned the granting into something that isn’t professional and isn’t strategic. He’s adjusting the cage, and the adjustment is harder to fight than the cage itself, because the cage is starting to include rooms I want to be in and a man whose jaw locks when he looks at my mouth.
I stay in the forge until the fire burns low and Dag banks the coals for the night. We don’t speak beyond the requirements of the work. He finishes the hinge pins, moves on to bracket stock, and I hold and turn and operate the bellows without being asked. The silence between us is the only silence I’ve occupied since my capture that doesn’t carry the weight of calculation.
