Chapter 2
IGNUS
The Bloodwork vault smells the way it has smelled for six hundred years: cold iron, dead fire, and ash. It's empty, as it has been for longer than any human civilization has been around. That emptiness has lived here so long it almost has a name.
I come down here before every Harvest Festival. The tradition began at some point in the first century after I destroyed them. I stopped asking why a long time ago.
The vault sits beneath the Royal Forge, cut into the stone that predates the court itself. I'm the only one who enters. The lock responds to my fire alone—not a key but a temperature, held for exactly as long as it takes the metal to remember who made it.
Everything in the Ember Court remembers who made it. That's the problem with fire Fae craftsmanship. It holds memory the way stone holds weight.
I light the sconces with a thought and the room fills with the amber glow that firelight has when it touches old iron.
The artifacts line the walls on shelves I built myself: blades, mostly.
Forty-seven of them. Each one made by a Bloodwork Fae in the centuries before I ordered the purge, and each one more beautiful than anything my court has produced since.
I pick up the nearest blade. A short-sword, the edge still sharp after six centuries because Bloodwork steel does not dull the way ordinary steel does.
The metal is alive in my hand. I can feel the maker's signature in it—a complex heat pattern worked into the grain during forging, like a fingerprint pressed into the fire itself.
This one was made by a female named Aelith.
She was ninety-three when my soldiers came for her family.
I know this because I wrote it down, the way I wrote down every name whose blood bought a peace these courts have spent six centuries pretending was free.
The ledger sits on the bottom shelf, bound in leather I cured myself. Every name. Every age. Every last known location.
I was thorough about the killing because that was the only way to end it, and if I hadn't done it, the other courts would have been entirely too thorough. The decision was the only one that could be made at the time.
The Bloodwork Fae had grown too powerful, their ability to shape metal and fire threatening the balance between the courts.
Three of the other seven rulers came to me with evidence of weapons being forged that could kill even immortals.
I saw the evidence, heard the murder in their voices, and made the call: the Bloodwork Fae would die by my hands so they didn't die by any other.
I burned them out in a single night. Every forge. Every workshop. Every home that held a Bloodwork Fae or their families. My fire found them and ended them.
Afterwards I stood in the ashes of the last settlement and counted what was left: forty-seven blades, a handful of unfinished pieces, and a list of names with the word unaccounted beside the youngest.
Six hundred years. The blades have not dulled. The guilt hasn't either. I've stopped expecting it to.
I set the short-sword down and turn my attention to the report my intelligence master left on the worktable this morning. Cassius is efficient and humorless. He's served me for centuries and been thorough in every last one of them. The report is two pages.
Potential threat flagged for Harvest Festival attendance.
Lady Sophie Moreau, landowner, eastern territories.
Cover identity assessed is deep but constructed.
True identity: unknown. Weapons detected during preliminary screening—concealed blade, at least two chemical compounds consistent with unique toxicology.
Assessment: professional. Note: superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
Origin of blade unclear. Recommend denial of entry.
I read the report twice. Not because the assessment is unusual—I receive assassin warnings three or four times a year, and the last one who made it past my outer guard died of his own nerves before he reached my chambers. I read it twice because of five words.
Superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
I sit with that for a moment. Then I fold the report and set it aside and go to the forge.
The Royal Forge is the oldest room in the Ember Court.
It was here before the throne room, before the volcanic rock halls, before the diplomatic quarters where tonight's guests will eat, served by people frightened of me.
I built this forge with my own hands nine centuries ago and have maintained it alone ever since. No apprentice. No assistant.
I am the last Fire Fae who forges, and I forge alone. Once, that made me feel lonely—long ago, when I was young and thought of myself as a male who might one day take a mate, have a family. Now it seems right. Some weights are better carried alone.
I take a bar of Ember steel from the rack and heat it. The fire answers me the way it always does: immediately, totally, climbing at my will until the metal glows orange-white and the heat of it presses back against my bare forearms like a living thing.
I run hotter than any male in this court. Hotter than most Fae alive. The forge doesn't burn me. Nothing burns me.
I strike the metal. The hammer falls and the steel sings and for a few minutes I'm occupied by the work and the ache in my shoulders and the sweat on my back and the work is enough.
It's not enough. It hasn't been enough for decades.
I am eight hundred and ninety-two years old and I have been bored for the last forty of those years.
Not restless boredom—I passed that centuries ago.
The deep kind. The kind that sits in the marrow and makes you wonder if the fire that keeps your body running has forgotten what it was for.
Six hundred Harvest Festivals. Ten thousand blades. Not one of them has surprised me.
The Bloodwork Fae surprised me. Their work was unique in a way I've spent six centuries trying to recreate and failed.
Not just skill—I have skill. Not just heat—I have heat. Something in the grain of their metal that felt alive in a way my own work does not, as though the maker had pressed something into the steel that went deeper than fire magic.
I destroyed them, yet I kept their blades, and every time I pick one up I can feel what I ended in my hands. What they did is better than anything I have made since, and that's part of the punishment I have chosen for myself.
The bar of steel under my hammer is taking shape.
A blade. Always a blade. I don't know what else to make.
The festival preparations are handled by people who don't need me hovering over them.
The courts are squabbling again—Mist pressing against Shadow's borders, Thorn's agricultural reforms making Vine nervous—and I can't bring myself to care. Nothing has been urgent in a long time.
Superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
I stop hammering. The fire licks at the blade and I hold it there, not directing it so much as letting the shape of it settle.
Someone trained her. Someone spent years turning a woman into a weapon and then aimed her at me, and she's carrying a blade that appears to have been forged by her own hands.
That's what I keep coming back to when I read the full report. Not the poison—I've survived poison. Not the cover story—I've unravelled a thousand of those. The tools in her bag, the ones that my people found, that suggest she uses a forge regularly.
My cock stirs, because to a male like me, interest and desire are almost never separate. Something about what I've learned of her—a woman who kills and a woman who makes, both in the same body—has reached through forty years of nothing and put its hand on my spine.
Cassius recommends denial of entry. Cassius always recommends denial of entry. He's almost always right. I'm going to overrule him. He'll say nothing—he's served me long enough to know what a final decision looks like.
It's not that I'm careless. It's that I'm hungry, and there is a difference. Carelessness gets males killed. Hungry gets males what they want, especially males like me.
I will be paying very close attention to whatever walks through my door tonight with a poisoned blade and hands that know how to forge.
I pull the steel from the fire. Hold it up to the light. The blade I'm making is adequate. Functional. Dead in the way all my work has been dead for six centuries.
I set it down.
Then I go back to the vault and I open the ledger and I turn to the page I already know by heart.
The last page. The youngest names. Children who were not in the settlements when my fire came.
Children whose parents had sent them away, or hidden them, or begged a human family to take them in.
Most of them were found within the decade.
Their names have lines through them. But eleven of them—the youngest, the smallest, the ones who disappeared most completely—have a single word beside them.
Unaccounted.
I run my finger down the list. Eleven children.
The oldest was fifteen. The youngest was six.
They vanished into the human population and I never found them, and their children's children would be alive now, and their blood would carry the Bloodwork gift whether they knew it or not, and if one of them had learned to forge—
Superior craftsmanship in her weapons.
I close the ledger. The amber light sits around me and I feel something I haven't felt in so long it takes me a moment to find the word for it.
Not guilt. The guilt never left. This is something under it—something that moves like heat through cold stone.
Interest.
I'm going to let her in.
I go upstairs to dress for the festival.
The court is already in motion—servants carrying crystal, fire dancers rehearsing in the great hall, the diplomatic staff arguing about seating.
I walk through all of it without stopping.
My skin is still hot from the forge. The servants flinch when I pass, stepping aside without being told.
My horns catch the firelight of the corridor sconces. No one meets my eyes.
In my chambers I strip and wash the forge-soot from my hands and chest. The water steams where it hits my skin.
I dress in the formal black the Harvest Festival demands—fabric woven with fire-thread, the gold filaments reading mood the way a fire reads air.
Tonight they sit steady. Neutral. I look at myself in the mirror.
Golden eyes, dark horns curving back from a face that hasn't changed in eight centuries.
The body underneath the formal black is the body of something built to burn, and I haven't used it for anything worth burning for in longer than I want to count.
I straighten my collar. My cock is still half-hard. I haven't bothered to address it. It can wait.
She can't be far now.
Superior craftsmanship.
We will see.