Max
After the briefing, I trained harder than I ever had. The heirs pulled me out of the regular drills and classes and buried me in lessons, and I barely saw Bryn anymore. Most nights I came back to the barracks to find every other cadet already asleep.
General Solenne from House of Leo pushed to have me moved out of the barracks entirely and kept under guard around the clock.
To protect the asset, he said, and pointed to the assassination attempts in my past as proof.
I bet he’d pulled every scrap of intel on me the moment the heirs revealed what I could do with Coldiron.
He wasn’t the only one who’d taken an interest, either.
The lessons were endless: etiquette, courtly dance, the protocols of the four kingdoms and the Zodiac Houses that ran them.
How to hold a knife at a noble’s table and have it read as manners instead of a threat.
A different instructor for every subject, each one certain their corner of my education was the one that would keep me alive.
The heirs were preparing me as thoroughly as they could, and when they got pulled away, Marco and Frost stepped in to train me in their place.
I’d freed Frost from most of his babysitting duty. By then I knew the compound’s routes and could get around easily enough with the skate shoes Caspian had given me. I’d worked two drops of Coldiron loose from my armguard and fed them into the wheels.
Soldiers on the service road had taken to stepping aside when they heard the particular sound the Coldiron-augmented blades made on packed earth.
Early on, people had stopped to watch. A cadet moving faster than a military vehicle tended to generate attention. By the second week, the same soldiers barely glanced up. Everyone in the sectors knew me now. It couldn’t be avoided, and I’d stopped trying.
I used a break between afternoon sessions to skate south toward the Emberhold—the forge.
Drakken’s squad held the perimeter, a Spartan at the entrance. The forge mattered, and the heirs took no chances with it even here, in the heart of their own fortress. There were always enemy agents tucked into plain sight.
I’d expected to explain myself, but the Spartan looked at me, looked at my armguard, and stepped aside.
The smarter move would have been asking Frost to come with me.
But I’d wanted to test the boundary, to see how far I could move through this fortress on my own terms, without deploying the heirs’ names like a banner every time I needed a door to open.
I also wanted to know whether the blacksmiths had heard of me.
I was the new alchemist in town. It wasn’t the right word to define me, but no one had a better one, not knowing exactly what I was. Alchemist beat “witch” in any breath.
The Emberhold was one long throat of heat.
A row of forge-fires ran down the center, each breathing under a hood of blackened iron, the air above them shimmering thick enough to bend the far wall.
Soot furred every surface: the rafters, the racked tongs, the quench barrels sweating in the corners.
Half-finished blades hung from the walls in rows, catching the firelight like teeth.
The heat reached me before I was three steps inside, a pressure against my skin, carrying coal smoke and scorched metal and the sharp tang of hot oil, and under all of it, the faint mineral bite of Stormglass.
Seven people worked the floor—four women, three men, sleeves shoved past the elbow, forearms shining with sweat and old burn scars.
I watched one of the men work. He drew a glowing billet from the fire, laid it across the anvil, and set to it with a hammer—steady, ringing blows that flattened and stretched the metal a fraction at a time.
He folded it back on itself, fed it to the coals, drew it out, and hammered again.
When the shape finally satisfied him, he plunged it hissing into the quench barrel, then carried it to the wheel to grind an edge.
Nothing I intended had anything in common with that.
The idea had been turning over in me since the train, since the archdemon had nearly taken Aelindor off the board for good.
The heirs would always be targets. I wouldn’t always be standing beside them.
If it happened again and I wasn’t there, I could lose them, and I wasn’t willing to gamble on that.
I was about to introduce myself.
“You’re the alchemist,” a woman said.
My name had reached even this corner.
She set down her tongs and came toward me, wiping her hands on a smudged apron. A burn scar puckered one forearm from wrist to elbow. “I run this forge. Name’s Hessa.”
“Would you mind if I picked through the scrap piles?” I asked.
Her eyes moved over me the way the others sized up a length of raw stock, weighing what it might become.
“What for?” she wanted to know.
I pushed up my sleeve and showed her the Coldiron armguard.
“I want to make six more like it. Four for the heirs.”
Coldiron chirped at the exposure, delighted, and its power rolled out into the room. Hessa sucked in a breath. So did everyone else within reach of it.
“What’s the metal riding on the iron?” she asked.
I hesitated. It was still classified.
“You can sense it?” I asked instead.
She shook her head. “Not the whole of it. A feeling. I’m no alchemist, but I read metal closer than most metalsmiths do, and yours sits wrong with me—unlike anything I’ve handled.” She wiped her palms again, slower this time. “Lady Vaelith briefed me on the Foolsilver just yesterday.”
Okay, then. Foolsilver it was.
I nodded.
We are not Foolsilver! Coldiron protested, indignant. We are not fool!
But you could have a nickname, I coaxed. When Coldiron was offended, bad things happened. Like master of disguise.
Like when you dressed as a boy!
Exactly. Best lie there is. Deception. Clever, I offered.
Clever. Very clever. Coldiron turned the words over, mollified, and went warm against my wrist.
Down in my gut, it felt safer to give the world Foolsilver than Coldiron—the name my inner demon had handed me.
Hessa led me to a pile of unforged stock against the back wall: dented ingots, snapped blades, a tangle of scrap that had failed some test or other and been set aside for the melt. Bins of ore squatted beside it, raw and dull, awaiting their turn at the fire.
“Iron and steel mixed in there,” she said. “Some bronze. Take what you need.”
I crouched and picked out a fist-sized lump of scrap iron, nothing special about it. Then I worked a single drop of Coldiron loose from my armguard and pressed it to the iron.
The drop sank in, woke, and hummed up through my bones.
I pushed my intent into it. Reshape. The iron answered, softening, going pliant as wet clay under my fingers, and I was the potter, drawing it long, thinning it, curving it to the bones of a forearm.
The cold of it never touched me. In a handful of breaths, the scrap was gone, and a Coldiron armguard lay across my palm, dark and singing faintly.
“That’s an eye-opener,” Hessa breathed.
She was staring. So were the others. They’d drifted close without my noticing, their soot-streaked faces ringed around me.
“None of the alchemists can do what you just did,” a man from the far bench said.
Hessa looked at the floor and then at her people. “What you saw here doesn’t leave this room. Understood?”
They nodded.
I didn’t tell them why none of the alchemists could do it. The truth was that I wasn’t exactly one of them. No one could command Coldiron but me.
No—not no one. There was another. Coldiron called the being the False Heir.
An alchemist, maybe, or something else, like me.
Whatever it was, it kept close ties to the demons and bent them to its will.
I suspected the passenger riding in my own skull knew exactly who the False Heir was.
And I had a low, ugly feeling that whatever let me command Coldiron traced back to a bloodline that had nothing to do with the parents I’d known.
If I pulled that thread—if I kept pulling—the whole foundation of who I was would come apart in my hands, and I wouldn’t like what was left.
If you think too hard, the demon had told me once, it’ll break you.
It hadn’t been lying. I let it go. I had enough on my plate without digging up the rest. Some truths were worth chasing. Some were better left buried, like mine.
I chose another piece of scrap and started again.
Drop by drop, I worked through them all, until six armguards lay in a row across the bench, humming their low, identical song.
The door at the south end of the forge opened and Aelindor stepped through.