Chapter 6 Ignus
IGNUS
She arrives at the Royal Forge armed with three new ways to kill me.
I can smell two of them—a contact poison on the inside of her left glove, something volatile in the tiny vial she has tucked under the lace at her collar.
The third I don't identify until she's standing five feet from me and the blade at her thigh hums against a frequency my fire magic recognises as sharpened steel recently coated in something designed to stop a heart.
Three methods. She lost one yesterday and came back with three more by morning. I like her more every hour.
"Lady Moreau," I say. "Thank you for accepting my invitation. I thought we could discuss your border dispute somewhere less formal than the audience chamber."
"You're very kind, Your Majesty."
"Ignatius."
A pause. Her jaw tightens by a fraction. "Ignatius."
My cock stirs at the sound of my name in her mouth.
Her voice does something to the syllables—strips them clean, makes them harder than they should be, the consonants bitten off the way a woman bites things off when she's holding herself on a very short leash.
My cock thickens another degree. I let it happen and move on.
The Royal Forge is the room I built first and love best. It sits at the heart of the Ember Court the way the heart sits in a chest—not by design but because everything else was built around it.
The ceiling is stone vaulted thirty feet above the floor.
The forge pit occupies the middle, fed by a channel that runs directly down to the volcano's heart beneath the mountain.
The heat in this room is different from the rest of the court—hotter, more concentrated, the air thick with it.
Humans who enter usually last ten minutes before the sweat and the dizziness send them back to the corridors.
I watch her walk in. Her body changes.
Her shoulders drop. Not in defeat—in relief.
The tension she's been carrying in her spine since the great hall loosens and her hands open at her sides and she takes a breath that fills her lungs completely and she holds it, tasting the air, and her face breaks open.
For half a second, before she catches herself and shuts it down, her face is naked and awed and hungry.
She wants this room the way I want this room. She knows it the way I know it. The heat, the smell of iron and charcoal, the particular quality of air that's been breathed by fire—she's home in this room. She doesn't know why. I do.
"The forge is nine hundred years old," I say, walking her along the edge of the pit. "I built it when I first claimed this mountain. The channel draws heat from the caldera below—the same fire that feeds the court's magic feeds the forge."
"It's extraordinary," she says, and it's the first thing she's said to me that isn't calculated to keep me at a distance. I hear it in her voice—the way it drops low, the absence of the practised Lady Moreau tone. For three words she is herself. Then she catches it and pulls back.
I show her the observation grate. A panel of heat-treated crystal set into the floor near the north wall, three feet across, looking directly down into the caldera's throat.
The magma below glows white-orange, churning slow, the heat from it pressing up through the crystal in waves that would blister human skin.
I stand on it without thinking. She stops at the edge.
"It won't break," I say. "I made the crystal myself."
She looks at me. Then she looks at the grate.
Then she steps onto it, and I watch her face as the heat comes up through the soles of her shoes and through the crystal and presses against her from below, and her eyes widen and her lips part and she makes a sound—quiet, unguarded, not a word but a breath with a shape to it, the sound of a body finding heat it's been starved of.
I hear it. I feel it in my cock, a pulse of heat that has nothing to do with the caldera beneath us.
The ridges are hot against my breeches. I've been half-hard since she walked in and the sound she just made has pushed me the rest of the way and I'm standing on the observation grate with a full erection and nine centuries of self-control and I am not going to touch her. Not yet.
Her scent has changed since yesterday. Stronger.
The Bloodwork underneath is rising—iron and heat and that sweet ancient note that makes my chest ache in a way I've not allowed myself to feel in six hundred years.
And underneath the Bloodwork, her slick.
Faint but present. Thicker than yesterday.
Her body is waking up faster than she can push it down and she has no idea what is happening to her and I'm going to let it happen and watch it happen and be here when she stops being able to fight it.
"I'd like to show you something," I say.
I go to the forge pit. I take a bar of raw Ember steel from the rack—the good steel, the kind I keep for my own work, black and dense with fire magic woven into the grain.
I heat it with my hands. Not with tools.
Not with bellows or tinder. I wrap my bare fingers around the bar and push my fire magic through them and the steel glows orange under my grip, then white, the heat climbing until the metal is soft and singing and ready to move.
I shape it with my palms. I press and fold and draw the metal the way a potter shapes clay, except what is between my hands is two thousand degrees and I'm doing this without a hammer, without an anvil, without anything except fire magic and nine centuries of practice.
The metal sings under my touch. I can feel its grain, its will, the places where it wants to move and the places where it resists.
I listen to it. I've always listened to it.
That's what makes me a maker and not just a king.
I'm watching her while I work.
She's forgotten she's supposed to be killing me. Lady Sophie Moreau is gone and the woman standing in my forge is staring at my hands with an expression that makes me want to put the metal down and put my hands on her instead.
Her lips are parted. Her chest is rising fast. Her hands are clenched at her sides, not from tension but from the effort of keeping them still—she wants to touch the metal. She wants to reach for it.
I can see the pull in her body, the lean toward the forge pit, the fingers that twitch and then lock down. She's a maker. She's been a maker her entire life and no one has ever let her see what making looks like when it's done with fire and without apology.
I finish the piece. A small thing—a fire-rose, the petals curled and thin and catching light the way real flame does, each one warm to the touch. Not significant. Not a weapon. Something beautiful for the sake of being beautiful, which is a thing I haven't made in a very long time.
I set it on the workbench in front of her. I say nothing.
She stares at it. Then she picks it up, and the moment her fingers touch the metal her breath catches and her eyes close and she holds the fire-rose in her palm the way you hold something alive and warm and I can see the heat of it sinking into her skin, into her—her shoulders drop again, her spine loosens, her face opens for the second time and this time she doesn't catch it quickly enough.
She's looking at the fire-rose in her hand and there are tears standing in her eyes and she blinks them away before they fall and when she looks up at me her face is furious.
"Thank you," she says. The fury isn't for me. It's for herself. For the tears. For the wanting.
I nod. I don't explain the gift. I don't tell her that the fire-rose will stay warm for as long as she carries it, that my fire magic lives in the metal, that every time she touches it she'll feel me. She'll discover this on her own.
We walk back through the corridor toward the guest wing. The fire-rose is in the pocket of her dress. I can feel my magic in it, a faint warm pulse against her hip, and I know she can feel it too because her hand keeps drifting to the pocket and touching the shape of it through the fabric.
She strikes on the turn between the corridor and the west staircase.
Fast. Faster than any human I've fought in four centuries.
The blade comes out of the sheath at her thigh and she spins and the edge is at my throat before I've finished turning the corner and for one bright, perfect second I'm looking at the most beautiful thing I've seen in nine hundred years—a woman with her blade at my throat and murder in her eyes and her body shaking with the effort of holding herself together while her cunt goes wet from the proximity.
I catch her wrist. Not hard. I close my fingers around the bones of her wrist the way I closed them around the metal in the forge—firmly, precisely, with absolute certainty about what I'm holding—and her arm goes still and the blade hovers a quarter inch from my throat and neither of us moves.
Her pulse is hammering under my thumb. Her scent has spiked—Bloodwork and slick and fury, the most intoxicating combination I've encountered in any century.
My cock is so hard the ridges ache. I can feel the fire magic in them pressing against the fabric of my breeches, reaching for her through the air between us.
"The blade is extraordinary," I say. My voice is steady. Her wrist is shaking in my grip. "Did you make it?"
Her mouth says she purchased it. Her face says otherwise. Her face says yes, I made it, I made it at three in the morning in a forge that doesn't deserve me, and I'm better than anyone you've ever seen and no one has ever told me so.
"I purchased it from a dealer in the eastern territories," she says.
"Of course you did."
I let go of her wrist. The blade stays at my throat for one more second—long enough for me to feel the edge, the quality of the steel, the poison working its way into the metal's pores.
Then she pulls it back and sheathes it and walks away without looking at me and her hands are shaking and she doesn't look back.
I stand in the corridor. I lift my fingers to my nose and breathe in her scent from where I held her wrist—iron and heat and Bloodwork and the unmistakable sharpening of her slick—and my cock throbs and the fire-thread in my coat blazes gold.
The blade was extraordinary. The maker is irreplaceable.
I've waited six hundred years. I can wait a little longer. But my hands aren't steady, and the place where her blade touched my throat is warm, and I'm beginning to understand that patience isn't the same thing as control.