Chapter 13 Steel Remembers #2
Her mouth pressed thin. “Listen to me.” She stepped forward, blade lowered now, voice flat but edged with an urgency he didn’t like.
“You’re not the only one losing control.
Half the kingdom is misfiring, and the High Vexari has already held two services in the Cathedral.
She’s preaching that the land is warning us.
That the Veil is thinning. That Dravaryn must prepare. ”
Jakobav’s jaw locked. “The High Vexari enjoys the sound of her own prophecy.”
“She enjoys influence,” Maeren shot back. “And she’s using it. People are scared. They look to her because they haven’t heard a word from you or your father.”
That was a low blow and he had a feeling she knew it.
Her gaze flicked to the cracks, still visible beneath the settling frost. “You will need to meet with her soon.”
“I do not answer to the Cathedral.”
“No, you answer to the kingdom,” she said, tone like flint striking. “And they need to hear from you, not from a woman stirring panic with every sermon.”
A long exhale bled from him, white in the cold air.
Maeren lifted her sword again, not with challenge, but with resolve. “Now,” she said. “Again.”
He reined it in with effort, forcing the hum to collapse back into silence. Frost resettled across the ring, shards catching the light like coal dust at his feet. He rolled his shoulder as though the motion alone could erase what had just surged from him. “Again.”
Her mouth pressed thin, the humor gone from it. She stepped forward without a grin, blade lifted, her voice flat. “You need to get ahead of it.”
“I am ahead of it.”
“Then stop cracking the yard.”
“Press,” he growled, the word both command and warning, as much need as challenge.
Their blades blurred together, faster and harder, until for a fleeting instant it felt as it once had: clean, focused, every strike a note in the rhythm of battle that steadied his pulse. But then Ella’s face rose unbidden, and his grip faltered.
Maeren’s blade slid past his guard and lifted beneath his chin, the point steady. “Dead again,” she said, lower now, though her eyes did not soften with it.
He shoved her weapon aside and stalked toward the rope line, chest tight with the failure.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Maeren asked, her voice even, unreadable.
“No.”
She didn’t pry. That was Maeren’s gift: she knew when to cut and when to retreat. She reached into her coat and tossed him a bundle wrapped in cloth. “Scouts brought that back at dawn. The other thing you are avoiding talking about.”
He caught it. The cloth was warm against his palm despite the cold. Inside lay an obsidian shard no larger than his hand, edges smooth as water, a faint ash-scent curling from it. Its surface was not dead black. Instead, it rippled like ink over oil.
He set the shard back onto the cloth and closed it carefully, the fabric swallowing its shifting dark. “Where?”
“North copse,” Maeren said. Her tone was stripped of inflection, the way she spoke when the details disturbed even her.
“Burned trees still standing like bones, ash falling like snow, and shards arranged in symbols again, tighter this time. There was a smell I could not place.” She paused, her gaze locking on him, weighing the lines of his face the way she might judge a blade for flaws.
He wiped his palm against his sleeve, but the sensation clung like static, a faint hum that refused to leave his skin. “What else?”
“Tracks that began and ended in the same place, and there was ash that burned through the soles of a boot.” Her eyes flicked toward the cracked ground beneath his feet, unflinching. “Ash that burns, Jake. That is not natural. Neither was whatever you just did to the grass.”
“I have it handled.”
Her mouth curved in a smile that held no warmth, quick and biting. “Tell that to the groundskeepers who have to restore the courtyard’s manicured squares.”
He almost left it there, but something had been gnawing at him.
He wanted to keep denying how distracted he was, wanted to let the words lock behind his teeth where they belonged, but instead he heard himself say, voice low and raw, “I tasted her blood.”
The air thickened between them, silence settling heavy.
Maeren went utterly still, then snapped her blade higher, the point kissing the hollow of his throat so close that he felt the cold metal through his collar, and her eyes blazed fury.
Then, as quickly as it came, the violence smoothed into a scowl, her voice cutting.
“Tell me you’re not that reckless. Tell me you didn’t. ”
He held her stare until he could taste iron at the back of his tongue. “I did. And worse…it didn’t match any known line. Floral on the surface, but underneath, a fire that wanted to be something else. I couldn’t access her abilities. It locked me out.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, the words flat and cold.
“I assure you, it happened.” His tone left no room for doubt.
He pushed his unbound hair back from his brow, dark waves clinging, damp with sweat, beading on his skin from both sparring and from his confession.
“You’ve seen me borrow many different powers over the years, stolen with a drop of blood: Windcrafters, Waterweavers, Metalbinders.
A taste of their blood and their gift is mine for minutes, sometimes hours.
But with Ella, I took nothing. And not that I was trying to, but it was like the pathway for access wasn’t even there. ”
The point of her blade dipped until it hovered over the dirt between them. “Then she’s not Dravaryn. And whatever she is…her blood breaks rules it should not break.”
The floral note in her blood had been a lie painted pretty. With most people, even a whiff of their blood opened doors, but Ella had locked each one and set the whole hall burning, and the longer she kept her truth buried, the more hunger and suspicion twisted tight beneath his ribs.
Maeren began to circle him, boots whispering over frost as her gaze stayed fixed on his face. When she spoke again, her command was hard and controlled. “Jake, do not taste her again.”
He didn’t respond.
He knew better than to lie to Maeren, although he’d already lied by omission.
Still, she would hold him to any word he gave her, and this was not a promise he could keep.
Her blood still haunted his tongue, intoxicating and deceptively sweet. He wanted to soak up the way her body had betrayed her under his sheets, even as her voice spewed venom and denial.
Fuck, she had a traitorous body, the way her scent had thickened, leaving no question of how wet she’d been for him.
It had pulled at him like a lure, something primal and unforgiving.
He could have fed on it—fucking drowned in it.
The contrast to her usual defiance only left him wanting to uncover every contradiction she carried, to have every lie and every revelation carved into him.
She held countless secrets, and she revealed hardly any truths.
Thank the gods for the furs that night. If she’d seen what she did to him, the way his cock had hardened at the sight of her in his shirt and her arousal flooding the air, she would’ve known exactly how far she’d unraveled him.
But she was a trespasser in his head, just as she had trespassed in his castle, and he knew a threat when he saw one. He could harden for her and still slit her throat if she threatened his kingdom. The two truths did not erase one another.
“Jake,” Maeren snapped, “are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, of course,” he heard himself say.
Shit, he was not.
Maeren’s face tightened. Something like apology flickered through her features before she smothered it, her voice steadying into cold iron.
“I’m not saying you can’t control yourself,” she said, no trace of mockery left.
“But if the court hears, they’ll use her.
And you may be hiding her now, but I can already see it—you won’t be able to stifle what you’d unleash if harm found her. ”
His teeth ground together. “I won’t let that happen. I’m focused on two things only: Dravaryn and my Claiming Rite.”
The words tasted like ash. Since when did he lie to Maeren?
Maeren shook her head like she didn’t believe him and sheathed her sword, eyes locking on him. “My brother thought he could outrun the Claiming. He hid his fear and his questions. It killed him. I push you because I will not bury another fool I love.”
For once he had no retort ready.
He held her eyes, her loyalty grating against his secrets. “I hear you. I’m sorry, Maeren.”
She nodded once.
Maeren was right. He should’ve been preparing for the Rite, yet he was distracted. He knew his reputation; people usually screamed and ran from him, though he rarely let it get that far. Ella didn’t run from him—not really. She bit back at him.
Fuck. The best kind of distraction.
“Jake, listen to me. You will regain your focus,” Maeren said.
He sheathed his blade. “I have it.”
“You do not,” she said, not unkindly. “But you will, or this kingdom will fall.”
He walked to the bundle Maeren had tossed to him earlier and lifted it. The shard’s hum rose at his touch.
“Anything else from the north copse?” he asked.
She shook her head.
Jakobav tied the cloth shut. “Keep the perimeter tight. I want Thane and Soren on the north watch again. Rotate the younger pairs through the inner gates. No one rides alone.”
Maeren nodded. “And the girl.”
He looked at the wall instead of her face. “I will handle Ella.”
Maeren’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Try handling yourself first.” She lifted her blade again. “And Jake, if she has you this rattled, she must be something fierce. I would like to meet her. Why should Bryn get to have all the fun?”
Feeling guilty for lying to her, he agreed to let her meet Ella soon, dismissing her from training.
Maeren returned to the Guards’ quarters, and he stayed alone in the training ring, staring down at the broken ice.
His reflection gathered itself in the shattered pieces, the face of a man the court would soon either worship or fear.
And if he failed the Claiming, they would abandon him just as quickly.
That was if he made it to his ceremony. The Veil had been twitching faster, and more breaches were opening by the day, and Ella’s arrival had landed too neatly in the center of it all to be a harmless coincidence.
If she’d come to his kingdom as ruin, he would see it first and make the choice the realm required. Better to bleed her secrets until nothing remained than let her carve weakness into him or his people.
Ella carried secrets like hidden knives. If she aimed them at his throat, she would learn that lust and desire cut as clean as any blade, and with her, he would be oh so fucking willing to wield his sword.