32. Max
Max
Ilay in the dark. Every time I closed my eyes I was standing in the yard again, watching them light Corporal Dane on the pyre at sundown.
Josette was still breathing. Two days on, and the healers had stopped saying if and started saying slow. Every time Missy visited, her hand came up off the blanket to find my sister’s hair.
I’d thought I could bottle the grief. Tonight it came faster than I could cap it.
There’d been no burial for Desta. No pyre either, since pyres were for the Covenant’s dead. Drakken had burned her corpse where it lay with one breath and we’d left the ash on the road behind us. That was the whole funeral my oldest friend got.
I kept waiting to feel more about that than I did.
That afternoon, before the drums started, we’d sat in Greymantle and fought about what came next.
Major General Adrian had the floor and a report he hated.
“We know how she beat the screening.” Stormglass light slid across his wire-rimmed glasses as he looked up.
“The shapeshifting power was implanted and then kept fully dormant. Folded down so deep that every test read her as what she’d always been.
A woman with no magic at all.” He set the page down.
“A blade doesn’t ring until it’s drawn. We tested her twice, and both times we were listening to a sheath. ”
“And the vehicle?” Aelindor asked.
“Waiting for her at the fourth lane, fueled, papers in the glovebox. Someone parked it.” Adrian took his glasses off and didn’t clean them. “Which means the handler is still inside our walls.”
The room’s temperature dropped.
Drakken got up to pour himself coffee. Aelindor already had a cup made for me.
“Then we seal the base and put everyone through the Sorting,” Drakken said. “Every soldier, every servant, every clerk, every civilian behind these walls, through my fire. Dormant or drawn, disloyalty burns. And if we have a traitor at this table, they become ash at sundown.”
For a moment, nobody objected. A good number of them liked it.
“No,” Aelindor said.
“Xander’s agent put a knife in Marco. She put one in a cleaning room and one behind the fuel drums, and she did it inside our walls on a feast night,” Drakken grated.
“We can’t fucking let it happen again. There are more of them inside these walls.
The next one they stab could be any of us, or one of ours.
We’ll light another pyre, and I’ll stand there knowing I had a way and you told me not to use it. ”
“No!” I called.
Every head at that table turned.
“It’s a barbaric practice,” I said. “I can still feel your dragon fire on my skin like it was yesterday.” Drakken flinched.
“You’ll pump fear into everyone, including the loyal soldiers.
And there are six hundred-odd children in this fortress.
” I stared straight down the table at him.
“Are you going to make them pass through your fire too? Are you going to put my sister in that fire?”
Somebody down the table drew a breath.
“I’d exempt the children,” Drakken said. His voice didn’t soften.
“We are not the White Witch and her Pallid Court, Drakken,” Aelindor said. “We do not adopt their practices because we’re frightened. One time was enough.”
“Hands,” Nikolai said. “Who stands with General Drakken?”
Five went up, slowly. Drakken’s gaze stayed on me.
“So be it,” he said. “I’ll find another way to weed out the traitors.”
The mole stayed hidden, and I stayed awake.
At some point past two, I gave up on the ceiling, dressed, and slid out of Elenmoor by way of the servants’ stairs.
I laced on my Coldiron skate shoes in the courtyard and ran the sleeping fortress to the Emberhold.
Two guards held the forge door at that hour, with a squad walking the perimeter. Nobody stopped me. They saluted, and one of them opened it for me.
Inside, the Emberhold was one long throat of heat even at rest. The row of forge-fires down the center lay banked under hoods of blackened iron, breathing a dull orange, and soot furred every surface.
The rafters. The racked tongs. The quench barrels sweating in their corners.
Half-finished blades hung along the walls.
The smell reached me three steps in. Coal smoke and scorched metal and hot oil, and under all of it the faint mineral bite of Stormglass.
Close to all that metal, I was never entirely alone.
A door scraped, and Hessa came out of the inner chamber wiping her hands on her leather apron.
“Couldn’t sleep, Spartan Max?” The forge-master didn’t look surprised. “I had a feeling. Your metal’s been restless since sundown. Singing at the stock like it’s waiting on somebody.”
“It’s time.” I pulled off my skate shoes and put on my boots. “I need to forge Coldiron shields, as many as we can manage, for what’s coming.”
“Then you’ll want the good stock.” She jerked her chin at the inner chamber. “I’ve been saving it.”
She led me in, and there it was. A great pile of iron already seated in the forge bed, burning, the heart of it gone the deep orange of a miner’s lantern.
I could seed cold scrap if I had to. I’d made the first armguards in this room out of the reject pile.
But live iron was the better start, and Coldiron loved bonding to molten metal.
It gives us kicks! my metal chimed from the armguard, wriggling. Burn and murder! Yes! Yes!
Two blacksmiths came through from the back and took up tongs without being asked.
I drew the first drop of Coldiron down my finger, set it into the burning iron, and it claimed the raw metal.
We fell into a rhythm, the smiths pulling each piece from the fire and me seeding it, and we were a dozen armguards in when the rhythm broke.
The heirs walked in. All four of them.
The blacksmiths froze, then bowed low.
“Anyone else in here?” Aelindor asked.
“Just us, Your Highness.”
“Clear the room,” Nikolai said.
The forge emptied at speed, and Spartan guards took the posts outside. I gave my princes a look and a sigh that all four of them ignored with the shamelessness of hunters who’d run their quarry to ground.
I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. I hadn’t needed to. Whatever the bond was that ran between the five of us now, it had a compass in it, and Aelindor’s end of it had been pointing at me since the night he claimed me as his mate.
Then, instead of lecturing me back to bed, they rolled up their sleeves.
We made an assembly line of it. Drakken pulled the burning iron out of the bed. Caspian hauled and racked. Nikolai worked the tongs. Aelindor set each cooling band straight.
Piece by piece, I drew Coldiron from my armguard and fed a living drop into every burning core, and before dawn, we had more than two dozen unbonded armguards on the racks.
Onto each one, last, I pressed a single drop of my own blood. The maker’s mark, so my metal would know its kin instead of rebelling.
“That will do for tonight,” Aelindor said, and I didn’t argue. My hands had started shaking somewhere around the twentieth drop.
“Whoever takes one has to give a drop of their own blood to seal the bond.” The racks ticked as they cooled. “Same as Drakken’s armguard shield. And warn them.” I flexed my aching fingers. “The Coldiron will feed on their pain: the greater, the better.”
“Every soldier has scars,” Drakken said.
“And they need to train with their Coldiron shields. Properly. Hard.” It came out sharper than I meant. “A shield you haven’t drilled with is decoration.”
Bryn had worn one of my Coldiron armguards onto that bridge, and it hadn’t saved her. I’d handed my friend a miracle and never once made her sweat with it. And she’d shielded the rescued and forgotten herself.
Whoever took up these two dozen would sweat. I’d see to that myself.
We didn’t go back to Elenmoor after that. We sat around the forge instead, the five of us on benches and anvil stumps, watching the banked fire breathe. For a while none of us spoke, and it was almost enough.
“Talk to us, sweetheart,” Caspian finally said. “Don’t shut us out.”
“I…” The words had been sitting in me for days, and they came out smaller than I wanted. “I need to leave.”
“Leave?” Nikolai stiffened. “Leave where?”
The last thing I wanted was to go. To leave Missy. That was why it had taken me this long to say it.
“I have to. This marriage contract made me a slave, and I vowed I’d never be one again. It chokes me. Smothers me in my sleep.”
I didn’t look at any of them when I said it. Every one of them flinched anyway.
“I can’t go on another day letting it own me.”
All four of them leaned in by an inch, hands twitching on their knees, wanting to pull me in and hold me while I shook. Not one of them moved further. They couldn’t. We’d all learned that lesson down to the burning nerve.
The torment on their faces nearly undid me.
“Now that my sister’s in your care, and safe, I can finally go. Thank you for everything.” I took a breath that shook. “Xander is confident that a blood contract doesn’t break. But there’s a loophole, and the Oracle told me what it was when I granted her the gift of true death. Her name was Sera.”
The forge fire dried the tears on my face as fast as they came, which felt like the metal doing me one more kindness.
“My father’s blood will override my mother’s signature. The people who raised me in the mine weren’t my blood. We’ve all learned that much together.” I looked up into the fire. “And one small mercy. My birth father never sold me.”
“Then we go with you to find him,” Caspian said. “Whatever it takes, sweetheart.”
“You’re not alone, Eirath,” Nikolai said. “We promised you’d never be alone again.”
“You can’t. First, because you have a kingdom to protect, and we’re at war.”
Aelindor had to rule. Nikolai ran the war’s intelligence.
Caspian coordinated every moving part between them, and he was our best tracker.
Each of them led his own house’s army, and Drakken, as general, commanded all of them in the field.
Pull one thread and the defense frayed. Pull four and the Covenant fell without the enemy lifting a hand.
“We won’t put anything above you, love,” Aelindor said. “Not even the kingdom.”
I looked at him through a fresh blur, and the old question came up with its hooks out.
What had I ever done to deserve this? A few months ago, I’d been a slave.
A number on a quota sheet, worth measured in cart-loads of ore.
Four crowns sat in a forge and told me, calmly, that I outweighed a kingdom.
Some part of me still didn’t know where to put a love that size.
I was learning. I put it where I put the grief, close to my heart.
“Second,” I continued. “The entrance to Hell is inside the DarkVeil. I have to go through the Veil itself. Alone.”
That set off the storm.
“Then I go through it bleeding,” Caspian said. “I’ve been struck by lightning twice, sweetheart. I healed. Whatever that lightning curtain does to me, it does it to a wolf who grows the skin right back.”
“It isn’t lightning, Caspian. It’s every fucking grain of Coldiron in that Veil deciding you’re not me.” I held up my armguard. “This one loves me, and it still drinks my pain like wine. Multiply that by a mountain.”
“I’ve walked into worse than angry metal,” Nikolai said coolly, but his eyes had gone flat crimson. “I went into a Pallid Court breeding hall alone as a boy, and I came out again. Name me the tolerance in hours and I will beat it.”
“Nikolai—”
“Just say the number, Eirath.”
“There isn’t a number.” My voice cracked. “It isn’t a wall you push through. It’s a sentient thing, and it’s gotten a taste for murder.”
“Then we don’t push.” Aelindor leaned forward, and the calm on him was the dangerous kind. “There are ward-forms in House Virgo older than the Shimmer. Give me three days with the archive and I’ll build us a shell that reads as you all the way through. We’re in this together.”
“And if it fails halfway in?” I asked him. “Do I carry you back out, or do I leave you?”
“Max.” A mild reproach.
“I can shield exactly one thing at a time,” I said. “Me. Last time I had to shield all of you, and we nearly didn’t make it out alive. I thought I was going to lose you, all of you. I can’t go through it again. I just can’t.”
“You don’t need to,” Drakken said. “Not if you ride a dragon into the DarkVeil and the Coldiron lightning.”
The forge went quiet.
“My dragon will take you. All the way to the end.” He looked around the fire at his brothers. “And when he’s your ride, you won’t even need to shield us. The Coldiron won’t attack.”
“You don’t know that,” Caspian said.
“I know what her metal did the last time it was in the air with me.” Drakken’s gray eyes came to mine and stayed. “It chirped.”
Dragon! Take the dragon. My Coldiron got excited inside my armguard.
“You stay behind and guard the kingdom, brothers,” Drakken said, his eyes turning molten gold. “The beast goes with her. We’ll break the fucking blood contract.”
Aelindor nodded. “I’ll take the field command until you’re back.”