CHAPTER TWO
The east wing of the Ember Hall was, Briar had to admit, nicer than anywhere she'd slept in her entire life.
The room they'd given her had a window that looked out over the whole caldera, black stone walls softened with woven copper-thread tapestries, and a bed big enough for four people that she was fairly sure cost more than her entire pack's den-hall put together.
There was a bath sunk into the floor, fed by some kind of natural hot spring that ran warm without anyone tending a fire, and clean clothes had been left folded on a chest — soft, dark green, nothing like the stiff court silks Sable had been wearing, like whoever had picked them out had actually thought about what a wolf might want to wear.
She suspected that had been Kade. She didn't examine why that thought made something warm settle in her chest.
Three days had passed since she'd arrived, and in that time Briar had learned exactly two things about life in Pyrhollow: the food was better than anything Duskmere had ever produced, and nearly everyone who wasn't Kade looked at her like she might combust the furniture.
She was currently proving them right.
"Again," said the woman across from her — a broad-shouldered dragon named Ophira, built like she'd been carved rather than born, assigned by Lord Ashgrove himself to "assess the wolf's threat level" in the training yard behind the Ember Hall.
Briar suspected the real assignment was closer to humiliate the wolf in front of witnesses, but she wasn't about to give anyone the satisfaction of saying so out loud.
She squared her stance, planted her feet against the packed dirt, and reached for the small, familiar pull of earth-magic she'd spent her whole life keeping leashed.
It came easier here than it ever had in Duskmere — dangerously easier, like the ground itself was hungry for her attention — and she used it to root herself, deepen her stance, brace for the strike she knew was coming.
Ophira came at her fast, a blur of dragon-strength and controlled fury, and Briar barely got her arms up in time to block.
The impact rattled up through her bones.
She staggered back, boots skidding in the dirt, and felt the earth answer her before she'd consciously called it — a ripple under her feet, sharp and involuntary, throwing Ophira's next strike off just enough that Briar could scramble clear.
"Enough," Kade's voice cut across the yard, low and hard in a way Briar hadn't heard from him before.
He was standing at the edge of the training ground, arms crossed, watching with an expression that had gone carefully, dangerously blank — the same stillness she'd learned meant he was holding something down. Ophira straightened immediately, dropping into a shallow bow.
"My lord. She's stronger than we assumed. It seemed worth testing the limit."
"The limit isn't yours to test." Kade's eyes moved to Briar, and something in them tightened when he saw the state of her — dirt-streaked, breathing hard, a thin cut opened along her forearm where Ophira's claws had caught her. "You're bleeding."
"I've had worse from my own pack." It came out sharper than she meant it to, and she saw something flicker across his face at that — not quite pain, but close to it.
"That's not a comfort," he said quietly. "That's an accusation, and you know it."
He crossed the yard toward her, and Ophira melted backward, clearly reading something in Kade's expression that made continued proximity seem unwise.
Up close, Briar could feel the heat radiating off him, stronger than usual — that low, banked-coal warmth that always seemed to answer something in her blood, except now it felt closer to the surface, like his control had slipped its collar just slightly.
"You could have stopped it earlier," she said.
"I was watching to see if you needed help." His jaw was tight. "You didn't. That earth-pull — you did that on instinct, didn't you? Not on purpose."
Briar's stomach dropped. She hadn't meant for anyone to notice that. "It's nothing. It happens sometimes. It's not—"
"It's not nothing," Kade said, low enough that only she could hear it. "Wolves don't manipulate ground like that. Not even the strongest of your bloodlines. Whatever that was, Briar, it isn't ordinary, and pretending otherwise in front of my father's people is going to get you killed."
The use of her name — just her name, no title, no wariness — landed somewhere low in her chest, more intimate than she wanted to admit. She looked away first, watching the fire-globes flicker to life along the training yard's edge as the light began to shift toward evening.
"I don't know what it is," she admitted, quieter now.
"It started at the equinox gathering. Before that, I was just — ordinary.
Unremarkable. And then the ground cracked open under my pack's entire gathering circle, and suddenly I wasn't ordinary anymore.
I was a problem." Her jaw tightened. "Corrin didn't wait to find out what kind of problem. He just made sure I wasn't his."
Kade was quiet for a long moment, studying her with an intensity that made her want to look away and refuse to, both at once.
"Come with me," he said finally.
He took her to a part of the Ember Hall she hadn't seen yet — down, not up, through a set of stairs cut into the mountain itself, into a chamber lit by a single, massive fire-globe suspended from the ceiling, its light low and steady rather than bright.
The walls here were different from the rest of the hall: rougher, older, carved with symbols that made something in Briar's blood hum faintly in recognition, though she couldn't have said why.
"What is this place?"
"The old training chamber. Before the Ember Hall was built up around it, this was the first thing my ancestors carved into the mountain.
" Kade moved to the center of the room, where the floor had been worked into a wide, shallow basin, the stone scorched black in places from what must have been centuries of contained fire.
"It's warded. Old magic, older than the current clan lines.
Whatever happens in here, stays in here. "
"Why does that matter to me?"
"Because," Kade said, and something in his voice had gone rough, "I think you need somewhere safe to find out what that pull actually is.
And I think — " He stopped, jaw working, like the next part cost him something to admit.
"I think I might be the only one here who can help you do that without getting you executed for it first."
Briar's pulse picked up, and it had nothing to do with fear.
"Why would you help me with this? I'm not your problem, remember? Your father made that very clear."
"My father," Kade said flatly, "isn't standing in this room."
He crossed toward her, slow, deliberate, giving her every chance to step back if she wanted to — and she didn't, which she noted with some distant alarm was probably a mistake.
He stopped close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him in earnest now, that banked-fire warmth that had haunted the edges of every interaction since the forest.
"Let it out," he said quietly. "Whatever that pull is. Here, where it's warded, where no one but me will see it. I'll make sure it doesn't hurt you. I'll make sure it doesn't hurt anyone."
"You don't know that."
"No," he admitted. "But I know fire. I know what it feels like to hold something back so long it starts eating you alive from the inside. I'm not going to watch you do that to yourself just because everyone around you is too afraid to help."
Something in Briar's chest cracked open at that — not the magic, not yet, but something quieter and more dangerous, a wall she hadn't realized she'd built until she felt it start to give.
She closed her eyes and let go.
The pull came up through her instantly, faster and stronger than it ever had in Duskmere, like it had been waiting for permission.
The stone floor beneath her feet answered in a slow ripple, cracks of pale green light spreading outward from where she stood, and she felt roots she couldn't see pushing up through solid rock, felt the ancient wards in the walls groan under the sudden pressure of her power meeting theirs.
It was too much. It was always too much, that was the whole problem, and she felt herself starting to panic, felt the power starting to spiral past anything she could hold—
And then Kade's hand closed around hers.
Heat poured into her instantly, banked and controlled in a way her own power had never learned to be, and it was like watching a wildfire meet a riverbank — not extinguished, not fought, just met, channeled, given somewhere to go that wasn't straight through her.
The green light steadied. The cracks in the floor stopped spreading.
She could feel her own magic settling against his like it had finally found the shape it was supposed to take.
"There," Kade said, low, close, his voice rough with something that wasn't just concentration. "That's it. You're not losing control. You just never had anything to hold the other end."
Briar opened her eyes and found him closer than she'd realized — close enough that she could see the fire-flecks in his coal-dark eyes, close enough to feel his breath, close enough that the space between them had gone thick with something that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the way his hand was still wrapped around hers, warm and steady, like he had no intention of letting go.
"Kade." His name came out barely above a whisper.
"I know." His voice had dropped low, rough at the edges, and his gaze dropped briefly to her mouth before dragging back up, like he was fighting something with everything he had.
"I know exactly what this looks like. I know exactly what my father would say.
I know I'm supposed to be marrying someone else in a matter of months. "
"Then let go of my hand," Briar said, and didn't mean it, and he knew she didn't mean it.