The rage came before I could stop it.
What I wouldn’t give to carve it out of me.
But now that the demon had planted the image, it wouldn’t leave. Were they? Aelindor and Vaelith? Was that the real reason she’d come back to Elenmoor—to be with him, to stake her claim?
Lady Vaelith leaned close to him again, her voice too low to separate from the table’s noise. I strained toward it, ears sharp, and caught nothing.
Aelindor looked straight at me.
Shit.I’d been glaring at them both. Face burning, I dragged my gaze to the space above the tactical map and held it there.
“Xander will come,” Aelindor said. “He’ll cross into our territory to take what isn’t his.”
Me.
Xander would come for me.
Chapter 23
Max
After the briefing, I trained harder than I ever had. The heirs pulled me out of the regular drills and classes and buried me in lessons, and I barely saw Bryn anymore. Most nights I came back to the barracks to find every other cadet already asleep.
General Solenne from House of Leo pushed to have me moved out of the barracks entirely and kept under guard around the clock. To protect the asset, he said, and pointed to the assassination attempts in my past as proof. I bet he’d pulled every scrap of intel on me the moment the heirs revealed what I could do with Coldiron. He wasn’t the only one who’d taken an interest, either.
The lessons were endless: etiquette, courtly dance, the protocols of the four kingdoms and the Zodiac Houses that ran them. How to hold a knife at a noble’s table and have it read as manners instead of a threat. A different instructor for every subject, each one certain their corner of my education was the one that would keep me alive. The heirs were preparing me as thoroughly as they could, and when they got pulled away, Marco and Frost stepped in to train me in their place.
I’d freed Frost from most of his babysitting duty. By then I knew the compound’s routes and could get around easily enough with the skate shoes Caspian had given me. I’d worked two drops of Coldiron loose from my armguard and fed them into the wheels.
Soldiers on the service road had taken to stepping aside when they heard the particular sound the Coldiron-augmented blades made on packed earth.
Early on, people had stopped to watch. A cadet moving faster than a military vehicle tended to generate attention. By the second week, the same soldiers barely glanced up. Everyone in the sectors knew me now. It couldn’t be avoided, and I’d stopped trying.
I used a break between afternoon sessions to skate south toward the Emberhold—the forge.
Drakken’s squad held the perimeter, a Spartan at the entrance. The forge mattered, and the heirs took no chances with it even here, in the heart of their own fortress. There were always enemy agents tucked into plain sight.
I’d expected to explain myself, but the Spartan looked at me, looked at my armguard, and stepped aside.
The smarter move would have been asking Frost to come with me. But I’d wanted to test the boundary, to see how far I could move through this fortress on my own terms, without deploying the heirs’ names like a banner every time I needed a door to open. I also wanted to know whether the blacksmiths had heard of me. I was the new alchemist in town. It wasn’t the right word to define me, but no one had a better one, not knowing exactly what I was. Alchemist beat “witch” in any breath.
The Emberhold was one long throat of heat. A row of forge-fires ran down the center, each breathing under a hood of blackened iron, the air above them shimmering thick enoughto bend the far wall. Soot furred every surface: the rafters, the racked tongs, the quench barrels sweating in the corners. Half-finished blades hung from the walls in rows, catching the firelight like teeth. The heat reached me before I was three steps inside, a pressure against my skin, carrying coal smoke and scorched metal and the sharp tang of hot oil, and under all of it, the faint mineral bite of Stormglass.
Seven people worked the floor—four women, three men, sleeves shoved past the elbow, forearms shining with sweat and old burn scars.
I watched one of the men work. He drew a glowing billet from the fire, laid it across the anvil, and set to it with a hammer—steady, ringing blows that flattened and stretched the metal a fraction at a time. He folded it back on itself, fed it to the coals, drew it out, and hammered again. When the shape finally satisfied him, he plunged it hissing into the quench barrel, then carried it to the wheel to grind an edge.
Nothing I intended had anything in common with that. The idea had been turning over in me since the train, since the archdemon had nearly taken Aelindor off the board for good. The heirs would always be targets. I wouldn’t always be standing beside them. If it happened again and I wasn’t there, I could lose them, and I wasn’t willing to gamble on that.
I was about to introduce myself.
“You’re the alchemist,” a woman said.
My name had reached even this corner.
She set down her tongs and came toward me, wiping her hands on a smudged apron. A burn scar puckered one forearm from wrist to elbow. “I run this forge. Name’s Hessa.”
“Would you mind if I picked through the scrap piles?” I asked.