Chapter 2 Svenn #3
I move to the bellows, pumping air into the furnace until the coals glow white hot. The physical labor feels good and grounding. When I finish, I turn to face him directly.
“Teach me your craft,” I say.
The eclipse is coming. I will need something strong enough to endure what I might become before the sky darkens.
Hrolf turns to face me fully, his dark eyes studying my face intensely. “You want to learn smithing?”
“Yes.” I hold his gaze. “I need to make armor for my wife.”
He considers this for several heartbeats while the forge flames dance behind him. Then he nods toward the smaller anvil positioned near the wall. “I will teach you armor work. Helms, breastplates, mail if you prove capable.” He pauses, meeting my gaze. “But I will not show you weapon forging.”
“Why not?”
“I will never make a weapon for the elves,” he says, his voice hardening.
He runs his fingers along a curved breastplate on his bench. “Besides, weapons make widows and orphans. I have made enough of both for one lifetime.”
I respect the boundaries he sets. Given his hatred for elvenkind, his terms are more than fair. “Armor is all I need.”
“Start with something simple,” Hrolf instructs, returning to his own work. “A horseshoe. Basic shape and technique. If you can make one that will hold a Noctral’s weight without cracking, we continue.”
I move to my station, feeling the familiar weight of the hammer in my hand. Hrolf pulls a bar of iron from the coals and sets it on my anvil. The metal glows orange in the dim light.
“Heat it first. Watch the color. When it reaches cherry red, you strike.”
I adjust my grip and bring the hammer down. The impact sends vibrations up my arm. The metal barely moves.
“Again. Harder. You’re not petting a kitten.”
I strike again, finding a rhythm. Each blow brings me closer to understanding the craft. The metal slowly curves beneath my strikes.
“Focus,” Hrolf barks as I swing again. “Your mind wanders.”
He’s right.
Even past stone walls and the clamor of the forge, I can feel Rhianelle’s heartbeat.
Her pulse has spiked. Perhaps someone in the council has said something foolish.
She’s somewhere in the palace, drowning in council duties as she manages the aftermath of the prisoner exchange.
Part of me wants to be there, supporting her through the endless meetings.
But she needs good armor more than she needs my presence in those chambers.
I push away the awareness of her presence and strike again. The metal curves properly this time.
“Better,” Hrolf grunts. “Now the other side. Keep the curve even.”
I work the iron until it takes the rough shape of a horseshoe.
My technique is clumsy, the strikes uneven, but the basic form emerges.
I’ve seen the enemy now at Lysander’s Crossing.
The wyverns, the fae warriors. They bring death with them.
I need to make sure Rhianelle survives whatever comes next.
The forge heat wraps around me and I lose myself in the rhythm of creation. Strike, turn, strike again. Rhianelle’s heartbeat becomes a distant drum that guides my hammer home.
My horseshoe takes final shape under Hrolf’s critical eye. It bears the marks of amateur work, the curves slightly uneven, the thickness inconsistent. But it holds together under his testing.
“Passable,” he declares, which from him might as well be high praise. “Do it again. Until your hands remember the motion without your mind needing to guide them.”
I return the iron to the coals and begin anew.
The scent of heated metal clings to my clothes despite the time I spent washing the soot from my hands and face.
The back streets of the castle district are quiet at this hour.
Most servants have retired for the night, and the nobles prefer the well-lit main corridors.
I take this route because it’s faster and because I’ve had enough of people for one day.
I turn the corner toward the royal wing, eager to find Rhianelle and discover how she spent the day.
The morning’s events at Lysander’s Crossing continue to puzzle me.
Sanguisyl’s strange behavior, the deliberate way the elven elders sabotaged what should have been a simple negotiation.
Something about the entire affair feels wrong, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit together.
Despite my vampire endurance, I feel the subtle ache from hammering dwarven steel. It’s a feeling I miss from mortal days, the honest fatigue of hard work.
“Evening, vampire.”
The voice is flat and emotionless.
I don’t move or reach for my weapons. I recognize this particular brand of stupidity.
“Shade.”
The grimsbane materializes fully from the darkness between two support pillars.
His dull gray hair and the demonic half-mask covering his face make him look like something from a nightmare.
No one has ever seen what lies beneath that mask.
The exposed half of his face shows pale skin and grey eyes with an unusual violet tint that always makes me pause.
It annoys me that I notice these details.
“You’re getting sloppy,” he says to me. “I could have killed you.”
The bastard can try.
He stands directly in my path but maintains enough distance to react if I choose violence. His hands rest casually at his sides, though I know he can reach any of his concealed weapons faster than a blink.
“Grimsbane.” I don’t slow my pace. “You’re in my way.”
“I require a moment of your time,” he requests.
“I have somewhere to be,” I reply, stepping forward.
“This concerns your queen’s wellbeing.”
The words stop me cold. Every instinct sharpens as I reassess the situation, searching for signs of immediate threat. Shade has all the emotional range of a brick wall, but he’s never used Rhianelle’s name lightly.
“Explain.”
“I want something from you in exchange for this,” he says, a hard edge in his voice.
I could summon Coinneach to rise behind him, snap his neck before he draws another breath. But Rhianelle would notice this fucker’s absence. She considers him a friend. That annoys me again.
“I have information,” Shade continues. “About who hurt the queen in Tavan.”
Every thought narrows to those words.
Rhianelle never speaks of what happened in Tavan. The night she crawled back to my tent with broken ribs, her face pale with pain. Someone did that to her.
Someone put their hands on what is mine.
This emotionally constipated assassin knows who.
“Tell me.” My voice drops to something inhuman, something that’s made brave men soil themselves.
“No.”
Shadows writhe along the walls, eager and hungry. “I could torture it out of you. I will peel your thoughts from your skull.”
“You could try,” he echoes my earlier words back at me with infuriating calm. “But the guild has trained us to resist torture. My mind would break before it opened. You’d get nothing but screams and madness.”
He’s not bluffing. The Grimsbanes undergo conditioning that makes them nearly impossible to crack. It’s part of what makes them such effective killers.
“Torture requires time and privacy.” He tilts his head slightly. “By the time you break me, if you break me, the threat to your queen may have already acted.”
Damn him.
“You know who they are,” I say.
“I know everything that threatens the Wiolant family.” His pale eyes study my face for reaction. “I’m their hired guard after all.”
“Then tell me.”
“After you agree to my terms.”
I cross my arms and lean against the stone wall, signaling willingness to listen. “What do you want?”
Something flickers across the visible half of his face. Not quite embarrassment, but close.
“I want...” He pauses, and the hesitation is so unlike him that I actually lean forward. “I want you to teach me.”
“Teach you what?”
“To read.”
The corridor falls silent except for the distant sound of night birds calling to each other through the darkness. I stare at the assassin, certain I’ve misheard.
“You want me to teach you to read?”
“Yes.”
“You are an assassin.” I study his face, searching for signs of a joke. “You cannot read?”
“No.”
I study him more carefully now. There’s something almost desperate in those strange grey eyes.
He wants to read?
“There are tutors in the city,” I point out. “Scholars who would teach you for far less than the information you offer.”
“Knowledge of my limitations would become a weapon in the wrong hands,” he says evenly. “I cannot afford that.”
I begin to understand the true nature of his request. An illiterate assassin faces disadvantages that could prove fatal. Unable to read contracts, correspondence, or written intelligence that might reveal traps.
“Why me?”
“You already know my secrets.” His eyes cut away briefly before looking at me again. “And you will not use this knowledge against me because it serves your interests to keep me effective and guard the Wiolants.”
I watch Shade carefully, noting every subtle shift in his posture.
He’s fucking serious about it. Decades in the most lethal profession in Tiamat. Can’t read a word. I almost respect it. The fact that he’s still breathing is either a miracle or a testament to how dangerous he truly is.
But why now after all these years.
“Why do you need to read?” I ask again.
“That’s not part of the deal.”
“There is no deal yet.”
He considers this for several heartbeats. “I want to send a letter to my mother.”
Of all the answers he could have given me. I wasn’t prepared for that one. Something in my chest twists uncomfortably. I think it might be sympathy.
“How have you survived this long?”
“Luck and good friends.” The brief vulnerability from earlier vanishes from his grey eyes. “No one knows this except you, wolf, and kitty.”
Who the fuck are wolf and kitty? His pets?
“Besides,” Shade continues, “I know you won’t tell anyone.”
I have no interest in losing one of Rhianelle’s protectors, no matter how much he annoys me. Shade is useful.
“And in exchange, you’ll tell me who hurt her?”
“Everything I know,” he promises.
I want that information. The hunger for it rivals my thirst for blood. Someone hurt Rhianelle, left her broken and bleeding. When I find them, I’m going to tear them apart so slowly they’ll beg for death.
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “But we do this my way. You show up when I say, where I say. And if you’re too stupid to learn, I’m not wasting my time trying to pound letters into your thick skull.”
“Acceptable.”
I push off from the wall. “Bring your own parchment and ink.”
He nods and begins to melt back into the shadows as silently as he appeared, then pauses. “Vampire?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
The words are so unexpected that I’m still standing there when he vanishes completely.
I run a hand through my hair. Teaching an assassin to read. What could possibly go wrong?
But he knows who hurt Rhianelle. For that information, I’d teach a thousand Grimsbanes to read and write. Hell, I’d open a damn school for them.
I have a growing certainty that I have just agreed to something I will deeply regret. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, I have my wife’s warmth to bask in.
I continue down the street leading to the castle and straight toward the royal wing.
The guards outside our chambers nod as I pass. They’ve learned not to question my comings and goings at odd hours. I push open the heavy door quietly.
The room is dark except for the dying embers in the fireplace. We used to have separate rooms in Wesley’s keep but here in the capital, Rhianelle insisted we share chambers. She said she slept better knowing I was close.
I haven’t argued.
Rhianelle sits slumped at her desk, silver hair spilled across another letter she was writing. Her breathing is slow and even, her face peaceful in sleep. The quill has fallen from her fingers, leaving a small ink stain on the parchment.
I cross the room silently and slip one arm beneath her knees, the other supporting her back. She weighs nothing in my arms. I carry her to our bed, settling her gently against the pillows.
“Sweetheart,” I murmur, brushing a kiss against her forehead. “I’m home.”
She stirs slightly, her eyes fluttering open for just a moment. “Svenn?”
“Sleep, little fawn.”
She murmurs something in her sleep. Focusing on her face was a mistake. I forget what the sight of those pouting lips does to my cock.
Her eyes close again, and within seconds her breathing evens out once more.
The bond whispers in the back of my mind, dark and insistent. Make her ours. She’s right here, warm and willing and—
I shut it down hard.
I settle into the chair by the window, content to watch her sleep.
The bond is only going to get more unbearable the closer we are to the eclipse. He shows me what he wants in flashes—
Rhianelle on an altar with my head between her thighs. Her legs are squirming around me, her back arched and her breasts bounce with every deep breath.
Another onslaught of images of her body seizing and buckling as I’m buried deep in her sweet heat.
I rip the thought away before it can root.
The fucking bond knows the eclipse is coming. He’s counting down alongside me. I don’t let myself think about what he will ask of me when the time runs out.
I enter my dormancy as the steady rhythm of her heartbeat chases away the darker whispers in my head.