Max
Nikolai and Caspian bickered the entire way.
“Could’ve sent a messenger,” Caspian said.
“A messenger wouldn’t have gotten things done,” Nikolai said.
“A messenger wouldn’t have interrupted a training session.”
“Your training session wasn’t going anywhere productive anyway.”
“That is not the fucking—”
“It’s precisely the fucking point.”
By the time Greymantle came into view, I had to stop myself from sprinting ahead of them both.
The building sat closest to the south gate, a deliberate positioning.
If a hit came, if the walls were breached, the Covenant’s senior command would be at the front, not sheltered at the back.
The academy sat in the rear, where cadets trained and civilians sheltered, and the top officers stood between them and whatever came through the gate.
The strong shouldered the burden first. The Spartans had run the same philosophy at the outpost.
Nikolai led us down a staircase into the underground war room.
The ambient noise of the compound died the moment you descended—cut clean, like a door closing.
Soundproofed walls and warded steel. The Stormglass sconces threw a cool blue-white light across the long oak table that ran the full length of the room, its cushioned chairs already occupied by the high-ranking officers.
At the far end, a three-dimensional tactical map of North America rose from the table’s surface, colored pins marking positions, borders, and points of interest across all four kingdoms. The space felt fortified even standing in it, the ceiling low and reinforced.
Every line of it was built to contain what mattered.
Aelindor held the head of the table. The Fae woman sat to his left—too close, her voice low at his ear, and he listened with his head inclined. The sight put a cold knot in my chest that I had no business feeling.
Was she his lover? An old flame rekindled now that she was back in the capital? Was that why he’d gone cold toward me after the clearing?
He turned his head, his winter-blue gaze crossing the room and finding mine.
I looked away first.
Frost materialized at my elbow and guided me to stand along the wall with the other lower-ranking officers and aides.
Unlike Greyhold, where every eye had tracked me the second I walked in, the generals and commanders here were deep in their own conversations.
I was just another body filing in behind the heirs.
I liked the anonymity more than I could say.
No coffee and no donuts. It wasn’t that kind of briefing.
Frost had walked me through the command structure on the ride back: four generals, one per army, each reporting to their heir. I’d filed the names and faces as he gave them, matching them to the uniforms I could now read on sight.
Aelindor raised a fist. The room settled instantly.
“Before we begin.” His voice was flat and even, the quiet of someone who never needed to raise it. “Cadet Max Morning’s presence here—her identity, her abilities, her value to the Covenant—doesn’t leave these walls. Not a word.”
He let them all hear it.
“Some of you read yesterday’s summary on the eastern train. An archdemon led the assault. Cadet Max went to the roof against orders, intercepted a Coldiron-tipped arrow mid-flight, and turned it on the target. She saved my life.”
The room absorbed it in silence.
“Cadet Max is an alchemist of a classification we haven’t encountered before. Her abilities are tied to a sentient metal called Coldiron. I could keep briefing you on what it does, but I’d rather show you.” He looked at me. “Cadet Max.”
The Fae woman angled toward me with the measured attention of someone taking stock of a variable they hadn’t yet categorized.
I peeled myself off the wall, crossed to the open space beside the tactical map, and stripped the armguard from my forearm, holding it flat on my palm.
As I pushed the intent, the armguard flowed, dividing and reshaping—not the arrow from Greyhold, not the sanjiegun from the training hall.
Two chakrams formed in my palm, each ten inches across, dark iron-black, humming with contained energy.
The moment they separated from my skin, the room changed.
The temperature dropped. Not from any ventilation shift—the Stormglass sconces flickered once, a circuit briefly contested.
Several officers straightened without knowing why, bodies registering a predatory presence before their minds caught up with it.
One general’s hand moved toward his sidearm and stopped.
A commander pressed her back into her chair.
The colored pins on the tactical map trembled faintly in their housings.
“I’d advise against touching the chakrams,” I said. “They’re fully saturated with Coldiron. When they’re not in contact with me, the metal is hostile, and it doesn’t distinguish between friend and target.”
I set them on the table and stepped back.
A colonel in an oxblood and navy uniform—Nikolai’s house—pressed her thumb flat to the surface of a chakram anyway.
Her scream was short and involuntary. She jerked her hand back, but it was already too late.
Some people just didn’t listen. Her hand that had touched the chakram withered before our eyes.
“Medical wing,” Nikolai said. “Now.”
Two aides had her out the door before the room could finish processing what it had just seen.
No one else reached for the chakrams. That was more like it.
I looked at Aelindor. He nodded his permission. I stretched out my hand, and the chakrams flew back, shifting mid-flight, and settled onto my forearm as a bracer. I saluted the room and dropped back to the wall beside Frost.
The skepticism that had greeted an unproven claim had walked out with the colonel. What replaced it was harder to name. Awe? Fear?
“An alchemist of high caliber is exceedingly rare.” The voice belonged to General Rhaek Solenne of Drakken’s House—charcoal uniform, gold Leo sigil bright over his left breast, smooth dark skin going gray at the temples. “I’ve met two in my career. Neither came close.”
“Finally.” Commander Lee leaned forward, dark eyes moving between me and the chakrams on my wrist. She’d traded her fatigues for the dress uniform. She was one of the Forged: human baseline rewritten by the Rupture’s flood of magic. “We have an exceptional alchemist in our ranks.”
Caspian tapped the table. “The Covenant has been sourcing Stormglass through the black markets for decades, because the Pallid Court controls the largest deposits on the continent.” He gave his briefing the way he did everything in a war room—fast, no wasted words.
“Crimson Ridge, old Utah. Roughly eighty percent of total production across all four kingdoms. We’ve raided it seven times and never breached it.
” He let everyone take it in. “What nobody knew, what we didn’t know, is that Max has been running a covert operation out of that mine for the past decade.
Half the Stormglass shipment out of Crimson Ridge has been seeded with dormant Coldiron, inert until commanded.
Half the continent’s Stormglass infrastructure, including a third of this fortress, is compromised.
” He looked around the table. “The Pallid Court’s output tripled ten years ago.
They credited better extraction methods.
” His eyes moved to me, pride brimming in them. “They never knew it was Max.”
“To put it plainly,” Nikolai chimed in, “we’re extremely fortunate we reached her first.” He didn’t elaborate. Didn’t need to. The room understood what the alternative looked like.
“Our enemies have no idea nearly half the Stormglass shipped from Crimson Ridge is already tainted,” Aelindor offered.
“One command from Max and we cripple the Pallid Court’s entire infrastructure—transport, communications, arcane weapons, every facility running on their Stormglass. All of it goes dark. Simultaneously.”
General Solenne’s fist came down on the table. “Then we move. We activate the asset and we take out the Pallid Court.”
The room broke open. Officers leaned forward, talking over each other, voices climbing—the particular fever of people who had been fighting a war for decades and had just been handed a way out.
I understood it. Everyone wanted the White Witch dead.
The energy in the room was raw and contagious, and for a moment I let myself feel it too.
Then the Fae woman’s voice cut through the noise without increasing in volume.
“It’s not that simple.”
The room quieted faster than it had for General Solenne’s fist. She had that quality, the authority of someone who had been one of the most dangerous people in every room she’d ever entered and had never needed to announce it.
“The White Witch’s top mages have begun to identify the metal,” she said. Her gaze moved briefly around the table before settling. “They’re analyzing it. I risked my cover to fly back and report this in person, because the window is narrowing.”
“Lady Vaelith,” Frost murmured in my ear.
I filed it away.
“The Witch’s coven calls it Foolsilver,” Lady Vaelith continued.
“The trickster metal. It mimics silver under inspection, which is why their alchemists dismissed it as worthless for years. That’s no longer the case.
Their senior mages have reported to the White Witch that Foolsilver may be the most strategically significant metal on the continent.
They’re working to unlock its magic now. ”
From the wall, I said, “Did you bring a sample?”
Every head turned. Apparently, cadets didn’t speak in this room unless addressed. I held my ground. I needed to know if Coldiron and Foolsilver were indeed the same.
Lady Vaelith looked at me directly. Whatever she was measuring, she took her time with it.
“Impossible,” she said. “Coldiron attaches to host metals and disguises itself completely. You cannot extract a sample any more than you can bottle a shadow.” I didn’t point out that she couldn’t—but I could.
“Only a sufficiently powerful alchemist can detect it at all. Until recently, the Pallid Court had no one capable of that. Now they’re looking. ”
She wore her glamour, but I could see through it.
Half-Fae, carrying the blood so cleanly it read as pure.
She sat well beside Aelindor, both of them at home in a room full of power the way you were only at home in places you’d occupied for centuries.
Something tight and unwelcome settled in my chest. I was twenty years old and had spent nearly all my life in a mine shaft.
I had no business being in their league, and the part of me that was most honest about things knew it.
I looked away from them both.
“The balance of power just broke,” Nikolai said, his rich, cultured voice cutting clean through the undercurrent of the room.
“Controlling a Stormglass vein used to mean controlling the power supply. Raiders hit caravans for it because Stormglass ran the world. That calculus is finished. Coldiron changes the equation entirely. Whoever commands this metal controls whether anyone else’s Stormglass works at all.
We have the only person on this continent who can do that.
” His crimson gaze found me across the room, warm and certain in a way that steadied something in me as well. “Max changes everything.”
At the opposite side of the table, a general in Virgo silver turned his gaze on me—General Theron Cassel, his pale silver eyes marking him as pureblooded Fae even before you registered the stillness in him.
“Cadet,” he said. “What’s your read?”
Every eye in the room followed.
I was the only cadet in a room full of generals, commanders, and heirs.
“Huh?” I stuttered. Then I straightened. “Well. I’m proud to report that my work is all over this continent.”
The room laughed—genuine and surprised, the tension breaking along a fault line nobody had seen coming.
I hadn’t been going for a laugh. I was never the funny one. But while I had the room’s full attention and trust, and while everyone was beginning to grasp what Coldiron meant for the power structure of the entire continent, I might as well make use of it.