Chapter Twenty-Two The Blacksmith’s Daughter
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE BLACKSMITH’S DAUGHTER
Eleven-year-old Reyanwyn Connery pressed her palm to the freezing stained glass window and watched the frost melt around the shape of her hand. Perhaps it would stay there forever—proof that she’d existed.
“The snows are too thick,” Hector said, his voice calm despite the lines of tension on his face.
“Well, we can’t stay here,” Gwendolyn insisted, her eyes as wild as her hair. Outside, the Etellinian Mountains echoed with the baying of hounds.
Leo wouldn’t meet Reyanwyn’s gaze. It was a rare day when her older brother bothered to look at her now.
“We won’t make it a league before their hounds catch her scent,” he said, looking every bit the soldier—tall, proud, handsome.
Six years her senior, he had Hector’s face and broad shoulders, but the rest of him had come from their mother.
Reyanwyn’s eyes landed on the Rhiterran crest in the pommel peeking over his shoulder, wondering how many people he’d killed with that sword.
Had any of them been half-breeds like her? “Let me speak to them, father.”
“Yes, let Leo talk to them,” Paxton chimed in sarcastically from where he stood by the hearth, strapping every sword and dagger in their family chest to his body. “He’ll hand Renny over just like he kisses the king’s boots!”
“Shut up, Pax,” Leo barked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Anyone could see they were brothers. Their personalities, however, couldn’t have been more different.
Where Leo was hard and calculating, Paxton was wild and brazen.
He pointed a sheathed blade in Leo’s direction, eyes glistening.
“You’re a traitor to the mountain folk. I bet you loved it when they cut your hair like theirs. ”
Reyanwyn wasn’t sure what Leo had been expecting when he returned to the mountain on temporary leave two weeks ago in his fancy Rhiterran armor, his hair shorn and his beard gone.
Mum, of course, had welcomed him with open arms. Da had been quiet but polite.
Paxton, only a year younger than her, hadn’t spoken a word to him until now.
And Reyanwyn—she might as well have been a ghost to Leo.
“I’ll kill them all,” Paxton panted.
“You will do no such thing,” Gwendolyn hissed, yanking the weapons from Paxton’s hands.
“I have to protect the house!”
More howls echoed off the peaks outside. Reyanwyn’s nostrils flared as she caught the scents. Body odor. Pine. Wet dog. Blood.
“Get her away from the windows,” Hector said to his wife.
Gwendolyn ushered Reyanwyn into the kitchen by the shoulders, and Leo took the place where she’d been standing.
Hector grabbed his son’s arm. “Do not draw that sword,” he added with a glare at the Rhiterran blade across his son’s back. “We do not initiate.”
“This sword,” Leo bit out the word, “might be the only thing that stands between this family and oblivion.”
When Reyanwyn saw where her mother was leading her, she flung off her grip. “No! Da, please! I won’t hide!”
Hector crossed the room to kneel before her, and she clutched his wrists, her right hand tightening over the braided leather cuff he never took off, which she knew concealed a single piece of Etellinian steel. It was identical to the one on her mother’s wrist.
This was all her fault. If she hadn’t been so upset, if she hadn’t lost control, none of this would be happening.
“I’ll go with them,” she said, trying to sound brave.
“Not an option, Renny.” Hector wiped the tear that escaped down her cheek with the sleeve of his shirt. It smelled of the forge.
“Then I’ll run, their hounds will follow me—Leo said!”
Hector grabbed her shoulders. His expression looked like sadness, but it felt like anger. “What are our words?”
They were branded on her heart. “Never run. Never bow. Never die.”
“Never run. Never bow. Never die,” he echoed. Reyanwyn watched with wide eyes as Hector lifted the family sword from where it was mounted above the mantel and knelt once more before her. “Hold on to it for me. Keep it safe.”
She felt Leo’s gaze on her like the point of a knife as their father placed the heirloom into her shaking hands. It was heavier than she’d imagined, far too heavy for her.
“I can fight,” she insisted.
“I know you can fight. That’s why I’m giving it to you.” He cupped her cheeks. “You are of the Mountain. And you are mine.”
A fist pounded on the door. “Open up, blacksmith!”
“Quickly now,” Hector said, and went to stand with Leo. Gwendolyn pressed a kiss to her brow and hefted open the cellar door.
Reyanwyn didn’t take her eyes off her mother’s face as she climbed down the ladder with one shaking hand. When she hit the ground, she gripped the sword hilt tight, her hold too small to fit the handprint of all the Steelborn warriors who had come before.
“Don’t make a sound, little pine,” Gwendolyn whispered. “Do not come out for anything. No matter what you hear.”
The cellar door closed shut above her, folding her into darkness. Still, she could see from the shafts of light between the floorboards. Crates of mead and food and wood trunks filled with her mother’s precious books were stacked against the walls, making the room feel smaller than it was.
The front door opened, and men stepped inside their home.
Reyanwyn followed their movements through the thin slats. Gwendolyn stood above the cellar door, hiding the small iron handle tucked into the wood with her patchwork skirts.
“Did you check the forge?” asked one with a blue stripe down the right side of his face.
“Empty,” another replied.
Leo put himself between their family and the man she assumed was their leader. Hector put his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Where is the Sage, blacksmith? The one you call your daughter. Where is she?”
“There is no Sage here, watcher,” Hector said. “This is my wife, Gwendolyn, and my sons, Leo and Paxton. I do have a daughter, but she is visiting our relatives in the south.”
The watcher stepped forward, only inches away from her father’s face. “Don’t toy with me, blacksmith. I know she’s here.”
“There is no one here but my family and myself,” Hector said firmly.
“I serve the Empire.” Leo held out his sword so the watcher could see plainly the Rhiterran crest. “I took an oath to protect Rhiterra from all enemies across the Five Seas. If there were any manner of magic-born filth in this house, I would tell you.”
Reyanwyn winced. Leo was trying to protect them, yet the words still burned.
The man examined the sword, then smiled at Leo. “Well that’s just fine. I suppose my men and I will take off and let you folks enjoy your evening.”
Reya let out a sharp breath, pressing the sword tight to her breastbone. They were going to leave.
Before Leo could enjoy his victory, the man backhanded him. His entourage chuckled. “I don’t give a damn about your oath, boy.”
Hector pushed Leo behind him.
“Now,” the watcher continued, turning his attention on their father. “Don’t make me ask again.”
“I have told you the truth.”
His answering grin was everything her nightmares were made of. “Have it your way.”
Before her family could react, one of the watchers grabbed their mother by the hair and passed her to the leader.
“Leave her alone!” Paxton screamed.
“Tell me where she is,” the watcher said to Hector.
Hector’s gaze flicked reflexively to the mantel, but his sword wasn’t there. The steel in Reyanwyn’s hands suddenly felt as though it were three times the weight. “Take me. But leave my family be.”
“Give her up now, and we will spare them. There is no need for your woman and your sons to die.”
When her father said nothing, the man turned to Leo. “What about you?”
Leo’s face contorted with rage, but he remained silent.
“And you, lovely?” the watcher asked her mother.
“Go to hell,” Gwendolyn seethed.
A chuckle. “You wanna hear my theory?” he murmured in her ear, tightening his grip on her hair.
“See, I’ve been in this business a long time.
Eleven years ago, I was on a crew that was tracking a Sage and the woman he’d kidnapped through these very mountains.
Her family offered a man’s weight in gold for her safe return.
We found her first, dead in the woods. It was clear from all the blood between her legs what killed her. Birthing a half-breed abomination.”
Gwendolyn jerked. “You son of a bitch!”
“We cornered the Sage a day later, but we never did find his spawn. Did you know we dragged him down the mountain not a league from this house?”
Reyanwyn had never seen such hatred in her mother’s eyes.
“I think his spawn was hiding right under our noses. Now I’ll ask you one more time—where is the Sage?”
“She is gone,” Gwendolyn spat. Hector closed his eyes. “She is fast as the wind and strong as the mountain you stand on—stronger than you. And she is beyond your reach.”
A terrifying silence settled over the cottage. Then in one swift movement, the watcher drew his blade across her mother’s throat.
Reya woke screaming for her mother, then promptly emptied the contents of her stomach onto the floor beside her bed.
She knelt, coated in sweat, as she attempted to scrub up her vomit.
But the harder she pressed, the more it pushed between the floorboards and the more frustrated she became, until she was rocking with her arms around her knees, weeping as she had not wept in years.
Even as Lennox had broken the girl she’d been, even as she had killed to keep from being killed, she hadn’t cried like this. These were the full-body mewls of grief, the kind she had never allowed herself for the simple reason that it had felt like giving up. Like telling them goodbye.
She couldn’t say how long she sat on the floor staring at nothing once her tears had been spent.
Sluggishly, she cleaned herself up, scrubbing her body, face, and hair until she could no longer smell the Row. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot and her skull was pounding, but she deserved nothing less after the last three nights she’d spent staring down the neck of a bottle.