CHAPTER22
The sky is already turninga hazy amber; the sun will be up within the hour. I imagine that they’ll all sleep through the day after the festivities tonight, which means I have anywhere between eight and ten hours of uninterrupted solitude.
It’s time to get to work.
With Ruvan’s magic still burning within me I ignite the forge, turning it from red, to orange, to yellow in tandem with the sky. The power within me is as bright and hot as the flames that dance in my hearth. Taking the disk from my pocket, I place it in the center of one of the tables and simply stare at it. What books are to scholars, metal is to me. I scan and search it for whatever information it will yield from a glance alone.
When I’m done, I pick it up. I bite, taste, scratch at, drop, and scuff it. I tap it lightly with a hammer. I do everything I can to feel and inspect it without materially damaging the disk. As curious as I am about its secrets, it’s still more precious to me intact—at least until I can confidently recreate it. So, for now, I can’t risk smelting it or any other more intensive investigations.
My inspections reaffirm my existing suspicion that it’s certainly unlike any other silver I’ve come across thus far. Excitement tingles through me. A new metal to explore. To try and recreate.
I roll up my sleeves and don one of the heavy leather aprons that hang on one of the pegs in the smithy. I then begin to scrounge for supplies. Fortunately for me, this smithy was left well-stocked when it was abandoned. There are ingots of iron, copper, brass, steel, even some gold.
Pure silver is missing, however. Of course it would be. If they had pure silver then they wouldn’t need to steal the weapons from hunters during the Blood Moon.
An idea strikes me.
I speed back up the hall to the upper armory, grateful I don’t run into anyone along the way. There, I pick through the oldest of the weapons that have been collected from the hunters across the centuries. Given what Ruvan said, the Succumbed are the only ones to wander to our world regularly. Vampir like him have only come once every five hundred years. But if there’s a broadsword here, there must be—
My fingers land on a small, needlelike dagger. Silver. Pure silver. I can tell by sight, touch, and sound. There are four of them in total. I cradle the weapons in my hands. They were made by one of my ancestors, easily over two thousand years ago, when we didn’t know yet how to make silver steel.
“Thank you,” I whisper to whatever great-great-grandmother made this for me to find and return to the forge.
I place the four daggers inside the crucible. It’s going to take every try I have to get this right, if I’m able to at all, and it’s best not to waste more than I need to. Once I have the daggers melted down, I pour the majority of the metal into a channel. When the silver has almost cooled completely, I break it into pieces while it’s still malleable.
My resources secured, I go back to the crucible. What I’m about to do isn’t like any sort of forging I’ve ever done. I don’t know anything about magic, or blood lore…not really. But I’m learning. And what I do know is that blood—my blood—holds power. And that power might just be what I need.
I dig the point of one of the sickles I sharpened before we left into my forearm near the elbow. It’s a small cut, enough to drip five droplets into the crucible. The blood bubbles and hisses the second it meets the hot metal, turning it black. I let my body decide how much to start with. Using as much as I bled before my wound healed over.
Magic in my blood… It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the truth but I believe it at this point. However, it uncomfortably blurs the line between human and vampir. Vampir were always the ones with magic in the stories and they hunted us purely for the sake of food. Humans had no innate power.
It was a lie. Humans carry our own magic. Was the deceit among the people of Hunter’s Hamlet intentional? Or merely a forgotten part of our history? What will either case mean for our future?
I briefly wonder what my own innate ability of blood lore is. If it’s anything, it must be forging.
The metal has cooled to the point I was waiting for and I banish the worrying thoughts from my mind as I carefully lift the vessel with tongs and pour the liquid into a second, small, rectangular mold.
I work quickly and confidently up until when the metal has cooled into the shape of a new ingot. I hold the tiny bar in one hand, the disk in the other, and close my eyes. I test their weight, temperature, smoothness. As expected, it’s not right. Not even close. But there’s still more to try.
The door in the depths of the old castle was able to channel magic through it. That was how the lock was disengaged. The pure silver of the handle was made to ward off vampir—curious on its own, but a topic to muse over another time—but this metal was what the power within the blood moved through.
There has to be some special property to it. Something I’m not seeing. My knuckles turn white and my brow furrows as I stare at the two pieces of metal in my hand. They do nothing.
I either have no idea what I’m doing, or my theory is totally wrong. Either is possible. I purse my lips and think back to the door. A piece that large… I drop the ingot I just made. It rings out with the pitch of pure silver and dents just as easily. I didn’t change the properties of it at all with my blood.
The door had some other alloy in the metal to strengthen it. It must’ve. This time I put the bar back into the crucible along with iron, carbon, and limestone. More blood. And back on the heat.
As I’m waiting for the metal to rise to temp and meld together, I walk the perimeter of the smithy, repeating the thoughts of the woman from my dream.
“The smith has the right alloy now. We can test it with new daggers during the next full moon.”
Folding my arms, I lean against one of the walls in the back corner, tapping against my biceps.
“All right, Floriane, accept that your blood holds magic as much as theirs does.” I hammer the kinks of my doubt away with forceful words. “Good. Now, what do you know about magic in the blood?”
Two things—that all vampir can see the future using it, and that some vampir have unique abilities beyond that.
“But you are not a vampir,” I continue over the crackling of the hearth. Drew told me once about the record keepers in the fortress, using their quills to record and sort their thoughts. For me, the sound of my own voice is far better than any pen and parchment. “You cannot see the future…but you might still have some innate ability?” I’m not sure, but the logic seems sound since I am bloodsworn to Ruvan. That might have awoken some power within me.
