A Soul Like Glass (Kingdom of Betrayal #4)

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

T he fear in Thaden’s eyes hits me hard.

So hard that the horrified cry that was rising to my lips vanishes instantly.

His chest rises and falls rapidly, and his voice is strained. “Do you remember the question I asked you in the wasteland before you came here?”

“What darkness would I not embrace,” I say, trying to breathe out my own fear and my confusion and my dread.

He nods urgently, and the terrible vulnerability in his expression only gets worse. “Her heart wasn’t working. When she was born. You can’t imagine, Asha. You can’t possibly know… To hold your baby daughter in your arms. To listen to her mother weeping. To have all this power at my fingertips and not be able to do anything—not a damn thing—to save her.”

He swipes at the tear trickling down his cheek, words tumbling from his mouth. “I made a choice. A split-second decision.”

He swallows hard, his throat visibly constricting. “Every other time I helped someone, I had time to plan, to design and then to construct what they needed, but even then, metal doesn’t grow, Asha. That boy out there with the metal foot—he’ll need a new, bigger one soon. Which will be easy enough. Feet and hands and joints must function, but a heart?” The tension in his face only increases. “A heart must live.”

My question is a bare whisper, barely an exhaled breath. “What did you do?”

How did he turn his daughter into a wolf?

“Milena had given me my father’s first prototype,” he says. “The one she stole from him when she fled with me.”

I know about that device. Erik told me about it. Malak had confessed to him the details of his sister’s disappearance. Malak had discovered that his prototype device had been missing—the one he eventually perfected and used on Erik. When he’d gone looking for his sister, believing she had taken it, he’d discovered that she’d fled the city.

Malak never knew that she’d taken his son, too.

In his rage and to save face, he’d destroyed a section of the city and invented the story about a human rebellion in which his sister had supposedly been killed.

“Milena gave me the prototype as a reminder of what I must not become,” Thaden says. “But within that device was already the soul of a wolf. A living creature whose life force would ensure that the metal could grow.”

I quickly recall what Erik told me about his own change. Malak had embedded the device in Erik’s heart, but Erik’s heart had been fully functional and intact, and Thaden is telling me that his daughter’s wasn’t .

He seems to anticipate my question. “I used a piece of one of my medallions,” he says. “I commanded it to take the shape of the tiniest heart I could fashion, and then I fused the prototype to the base of it and?—”

“But the pain, Thaden.” I’m horrified. “How did you expect her to survive the implantation?”

“I didn’t.” His voice is bleak. “By the time I did all that, she was already dead.” His eyes meet mine. “So you see, I had nothing to lose.”

He finally steps away from me. “The prototype took hold immediately. The metal heart attached to her damaged heart so fast, it was fucking frightening. The power in that device was—” He closes his eyes for a second. “But she healed up, and within seconds, she was alive.”

I consider the little girl in the cage. “But not the same.”

He shakes his head. “She’s growing at the speed of a wolf cub. She’s only two months old, but her body is beyond that of a baby already, and her mind can’t keep up. She acts on instinct, not reason. She looks old enough to speak, but she can’t. She’s…”

“A predator,” I whisper, steeling myself. “May I move closer to her?”

“Yes, but be careful. Her claws?—”

“Can cut through anything.” I take a cautious step toward the cage before I lower myself into a kneeling position.

“Caught a mouse and let it go, huh?” I murmur, recalling what I heard the woman say when we first arrived.

I’m still not clear who that woman is—she certainly appears too old to be the child’s mother—but she isn’t my greatest concern right now.

The little girl watches every move I make.

Her nostrils flare when I settle into position.

No doubt she’s inhaling my scent.

With a brief narrowing of her eyes, she darts forward, pressing her nose between the bars, drawing an even deeper breath.

Her eyes brighten, and she makes another growling sound, this one questioning.

“You can smell the wolf on me, can’t you?” I ask her softly.

Erik’s scent will be all over me. I don’t know what wolf Malak may have used for the soul of that prototype, but it’s possible it was from the same original pack as Erik’s wolf, Skirra.

“If only I knew how to speak to you like Erik could.”

As the little girl continues to peer at me, I look up at Thaden again. “What happened to Lysander Rex, Thaden?”

I still don’t know how Thaden killed him or why. When I challenged Graviter Rex to a fight, staring him down, I convinced myself that if Thaden could kill a dragon, then I could, too. Somehow .

I was so confident at that moment that I think even Erik believed I could do it.

Thaden lowers himself down onto the floor beside me, crossing his legs and hunching. “He saw her, and he thought I’d turned to the dark. He thought I was conducting experiments like my father had. And on a child, no less.”

I consider what I know of fire dragons and their rage. The way they don’t see anything else around them once their fury takes hold.

I also remember the mind-destroying heat I felt the first time I touched Thaden’s scaled arm while I was in contact with my power. That was the first time I sensed Lysander’s soul. He was majestic, but his fury had no limits.

“He truly believed you’d betrayed him,” I say.

Thaden inclines his head. “All my life, Milena and the dragons have watched me, waiting for signs that I would turn. They treated me as if it hadn’t been so much a question of if , but when . Lysander was my dragon, but I knew he’d been assigned to me because of his strength. His fire was more destructive even than his father’s. He was powerful enough to end me.”

“What happened, Thaden? How did he die?”

Thaden is quiet for so long, focused on his daughter for such an extended moment, that I suspect the answer even before he speaks it.

“She happened,” he finally says in a bare whisper. “I took her out into the sunlight for the first time. We were walking down the path toward the village. At that time, only a handful of people knew that I had a child, but even fewer knew what I’d done to keep her alive. Milena certainly didn’t know. Neither did the dragons.

“But then Lysander arrived. I wasn’t expecting him. He must have seen her from the sky because he was already in a rage when he landed and blocked the path. The heat from his mouth was burning us. He was shouting at me, but his fire was hurting her. She was terrified, screaming, and then?—”

“Then?”

He takes a deep breath before the corners of his mouth turn down. “Then she was covered in dragon blood.” His expression is haunted, his eyes shadowed. “Fuck me, she was barely as big as his paw, but she went straight for his throat and?—”

He glances back at the woman in the corner, who has turned pale.

“I was there,” the woman whispers. “Precious thing, but that dragon was dead within seconds.”

“Trust me, Asha,” Thaden says, turning back to me. “You don’t want me to describe it.”

I lift my hand. I really don’t need to know.

“And then?” I ask, knowing that what happened next matters, even though I can already see it playing out. I can already guess why Thaden asked me how far I would go to protect the ones I love.

“A dragon was dead,” he says, his expression now blank. “I knew they’d come for me. So I made another decision.”

“You took his soul.” But my forehead crinkles. “But you aren’t left-handed. How did you do that?”

He is grim. “My father never took souls with his Blacksmith magic. He used his Blacksmith magic to create the devices and transplant them into living flesh. But the taking of the soul was dark magic.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Dark magic drains life. It exists in every murder. All I had to do was take another medallion, fashion it into the shape of a dragon, and let go of the good in my heart. I accepted the dark. Then Lysander’s soul was mine.”

I shake my head, speaking with certainty when I say, “It wasn’t that easy.”

I remember again the pain Erik described to me of his transformation, of having his heart opened, and how he would have embraced death because it was better than the agony he was experiencing.

“You’re right.” Thaden’s gaze is steely as he looks me in the eye. “It wasn’t that easy. But it made me strong enough to protect my daughter. And that’s all that fucking matters.”

I lean back on my heels. I don’t need him to tell me the rest. He went to Milena. They fought. Then he came to me.

I have only a few questions left now. “How did you create the devices that you used to entrap Milena on the clifftop—the one for the snow bear and the other for the tree?”

“The tree was easy,” he says with a suddenly dark grin. “I killed a giant spider. Actually, the bear was easy, too, since I have a dragon’s strength. For both, I used a medallion and the death force of the dying creature.”

“But Blacksmiths only have three medallions.”

I’ve already counted to four.

“I had seven,” he says. “ Now I have three.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as though he grew up within the same system of rules that I did. It sounds as if he was making weapons well before the usual age of sixteen.

I fold my hands in my lap. “You said you needed my help.”

“ She needs your help.” His gaze hasn’t wavered. Where before his eyes were full of fear, now they’re full of hope. “I can’t do what you can do. I can’t help her mind or make her whole. Even before you healed the Vandawolf, I believed that you alone could heal her, but once I watched you pull that device from his heart, I was certain. Asha, she needs you.”

I try to breathe through my emotions: fear, anxiety, uncertainty. So many times since I stepped into this cave, I’ve caught my breath and tried to calm my heart.

“My hammer isn’t like any other,” I say. “When I helped Erik become whole, I had a medallion. He believes I can do anything with my hammer, but… I can’t exactly clobber her with it.”

I shake my head, frustration rising within me as I continue before Thaden can argue with me. “To help her, I need a medallion. But you’ve both warned me against using my power here. You, yourself, have stopped forging, and I can only guess that even changing the shape of your medallions was a considerable risk. Am I right?”

He nods. “There was a real danger that I’d draw the blight here. But?—”

“A medallion takes days to forge,” I plow on, “and that’s once I have the right metal. Days of risk. I’d also need crimson coal, which you don’t seem to have.”

I try to rein in my frustration, try to slow my speech, but all I’m left with is a horrible sense of hopelessness. “How can I possibly help her?”

“Because you’re not going to do it here,” he says quietly.

I blink at him for a moment. “What?”

He shuffles closer to me, and I’m startled when he reaches for my hands. “I’m asking you, Asha Silverspun, to take my daughter away from here. Away from me. And do whatever you need to do to heal her.”

“Thaden, that’s…” My voice fails me. He can’t possibly mean what he’s saying. Not after he did so much to keep her safe.

“The dragons think that I killed Lysander,” he says. “Only the people in this village know I have a daughter, and only the people in this room know what she is—or that she killed the dragon and not me. If you take her with you?—”

His voice suddenly breaks. He takes a shaky breath and then snarls against the tears gathering in his eyes. “If I give her up, you can keep her safe.”

I’m struggling to speak, to comprehend the complexity of his request, let alone to foresee its consequences. “There are no guarantees I’ll even be able to help her.”

“All I ask is that you try. You’re the only one with a chance. Worst case, she’ll have someone in her life who understands her wolfish nature and can communicate with her.”

“The Vandawolf,” I whisper.

Because suddenly, he isn’t alone.

And neither is this little girl.

Thaden nods. “If you agree to do this, she must never know that I’m her father. Do you understand? You can’t tell her who I am or what she did. As far as anyone knows, I killed the dragon, not her.”

I’m alarmed by his suggestion. “Thaden, healing her will be hard enough. She has a right to know who she is.”

“She has a right to live with love and trust in her life,” he says. “She will never have that if she’s living in the shadow of her grandfather’s legacy. I’m begging you, Asha. She needs to be free of it.”

How can I possibly make this decision, let alone do what he asks?

The danger and responsibility involved are immense.

I find myself recalling one of the first things Thaden said to me when he was chained up in the Vandawolf’s prison, and I’d asked him: Why are you here, Thaden Kane?

He had turned the question back on me, asking me why I was there. Why was I doing the bidding of a wolf when I could raze the city to the ground?

Now, I ask him, “When you were in the prison, back at the city, you were testing me, weren’t you?”

“I needed to know if you were the person I hoped you were,” he says. “All I had was Milena’s account of you. Even when she cut off her hand, I couldn’t be certain of the real reason why she refused to make you a hammer.”

“It was because she couldn’t,” I say. “There was too much darkness in her heart.”

“And none in yours,” he says.

“Oh, but there has been,” I whisper, remembering the pull of Malak’s tools and the malice within them. “Too much darkness.”

“Which is why you will understand my daughter,” he says. “The Vandawolf will understand her wolfish soul, and you will understand the battles of her heart.”

I contemplate the little girl, who has pressed her cheek forlornly against the bars. She looks up at me for a moment before her gaze drops as if she thinks I’m going to reject her.

But of course, she will hear the pounding of my heart and probably even smell my turmoil.

It’s startling to me that, despite hearing how she cut down a dragon, it’s only now dawning on me that she could have easily cut through the bars if she wanted to.

There must be a part of her that chooses not to.

I wonder if her world feels safer within the confines of this space. After all, on her first outing into the sun, a fire-breathing dragon tried to burn her to death.

I turn back to Thaden. “You said that only we know about her, but you haven’t spoken of?—”

I was about to say her mother , but at that moment, Thaden’s daughter turns away from the bars, and I have my first full view of her back.

Fuck me.

“Dear saints,” I whisper. “She asked me to protect you.”

General Glass told me very clearly that her people had little room for compassion and none for weakness.

Now I see the stumps protruding from the little girl’s shoulder blades and the beginnings of a single, deformed, silver feather.

No wonder she could plow through a dragon.

Her mother is a Valkyrie.

“What is her name?” I ask him.

He replies in a hush, as if speaking the child’s name aloud can only threaten his hope. “Galeia,” he says. “It means new life .”

I come to a decision, even though it could be the most dangerous vow I’ve ever made. “I will help her.”