Chapter Thirty-Four Metal and Bone
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
METAL AND BONE
Gwendolyn Connery’s blood was dripping between the floorboards.
Three drops landed on Reyanwyn’s cold, freckled cheeks. She pressed her fingers to her face, and when she pulled them back, they were crimson.
It could have been paint, she decided, like the paint Paxton had used for her hair in the drawing he’d done on the kitchen cabinet.
Hector dove for his wife’s limp body, pressing a hand to her throat like he could put the blood back in. When it didn’t work, he bellowed, and Reyanwyn had never heard a more terrible sound. It was worse than the sounds the animals made when they went hunting.
Reyanwyn didn’t care what she’d promised. She would burst through the cellar door with the sword and surprise them. They would never see her coming.
“What will it be, soldier?” the watcher asked Leo. “Will you let your father die, too?”
“Leo,” their father warned even as the watchers struggled to pin him next to their mother.
Reyanwyn looked up, right to where Leo’s eyes had drifted to the floor. Their gazes locked.
“Leo,” Hector repeated, calmer this time. “It’s okay.”
Muscles in Leo’s face spasmed like he was being ripped apart; hate swam in her brother’s eyes, and agony, too, the kind she didn’t yet understand.
There was a scrape and a thunk, then a grunt that turned into a groan. Another stream of blood ran down into the cellar, painting her hands.
Leo screamed, and it rang in her ears until she could no longer hear it, could no longer hear anything. The cellar door above her exploded in a flash of light.
When the monster inside her saw the man and woman on the floor, hands still reaching for each other, it keened from her throat. Light erupted from her chest, her palms, her mouth.
Wood splintered. Glass shattered. Men cried out and died. And she felt no pain—only an unquenchable rage and singular purpose: Make them hurt like you hurt.
There were two boys in the corner. The monster snarled at them both, and then hesitated—long enough for the larger one to throw the smaller to the ground, shielding him with his own body as the house exploded.
When Reyanwyn could see again through her own eyes, she staggered and fell to her knees. Silence swept over the mountain.
Alder Hollow was gone. All that remained was the floor.
Wafts of glinting black powder drifted up like stardust on a winter wind, mingling with the snow and fading into the night until it was nothing at all.
Snow fell upon the ruin of bodies and splintered wood, flakes of ice turning red as they landed.
It was the sight of the hounds, though, that made her retch.
That’s when she saw her father’s handsome, upturned face. It looked like him, but the eyes were wrong. The mischievous twinkle, the understanding, the kindness, were gone.
“What have you done?” Leo said, his face twisted in horror as he pushed onto quaking knees and beheld what remained.
Her brothers were huddled in the one spot on the floor that remained untouched around both them and their parents’ bodies.
A perfect circle. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” Leo nearly tripped over the upturned head of a corpse, the bottom half of its body gone.
Paxton stayed frozen on the floor, like he didn’t understand.
“Leave now before I kill you,” Leo said, spit flying from the corners of his mouth, eyes glittering with the kind of hatred that she knew even then came from the heart. She took a step back. Another.
“GO! NOW! LEAVE!”
She just stared at him, tears making fresh tracks through the dirt and blood on her cheeks. Where was she supposed to go?
“I don’t give a damn where you go or what you do!”
Had she asked out loud? Reyanwyn could see in his bloodshot eyes—the same blue as their mother’s on the floor—that he meant it.
Her fist tightened on the sword still in her grip. Leo’s gaze followed the movement.
“If you even think—REYANWYN!”
She didn’t look back. Snow crunched beneath her, and she sank deeper with every step, soaking her trousers to the knee.
Leo sprinted after her, but she was too fast for him.
She always had been. Where she moved, streaks of red ran over the fresh powder, her parents’ blood melting the ice crystals like ugly gashes on unmarred skin.
She didn’t dare turn around, not when Leo’s voice carried on the wind after her.
“NEVER COME BACK!”
Reyanwyn sobbed until the tears came out of her nose and the mountain wind froze them to her skin.
She heard the long, high-pitch sound of Ash’s distress and knew she couldn’t leave him behind.
Sprinting for the stables, she threw open his stall door with a cry.
The stallion bowed low, allowing her to climb onto his back before he rose and tilted his head so one dark eye met hers in question and sorrow.
“Run, Ash!” she wept, and clutched his mane as he galloped into the night. Leo’s words echoed in the screech of wind off the peaks as they rode together through the perfect winter.
The girl trudging through the snow faded into mist. Her brothers faded, too, then the ruined cottage, until nothing remained except that cellar door. She knew that Reyanwyn of the Mountain was still trapped down there, looking up through the floorboards at something she could never change.
Someone else had climbed out of the cellar that day. Someone harder.
Now, Reya stood before the cellar in her Crimson Dagger armor.
Leo would never hate her as much as she hated herself.
For being weak. For leading the Blood Watchers to their doorstep.
She had spent years punishing herself for it, locking away the parts of her that had put that look in Leo’s eyes.
But they were parts she could never change, parts Leo had feared long before that night.
She had never understood how Leo and Paxton had survived. All these years, she’d told herself that Ryksis himself had reached down to protect the Connery sons from the slaughter. But it had been her. She had shielded them.
A truth the Rage had taken from her.
Her eyes stung, and she shut them like it might stop the tears from coming. The wind whistled in her ears, and then just as suddenly died on a gust, replaced with the pop of charcoal and crackle of flame.
When Reya opened her eyes, she was standing in a forge. Around her, the air was hot and hazy with ash that seemed to stick to every surface and leak into every pore. She knew this place.
The blacksmith shoveled more charcoal into the hearth, where it began to glow. Reya’s heart stopped.
“Da?”
His salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back into a knot, revealing flushed skin damp with sweat and soot that melted together like watercolors. Hector Connery gave her a warm smile, emphasizing the crow’s feet on the outer corners of his dark eyes. “Yes, my girl.”
Her vision blurred. “You’re alive.”
A bear of a man, Hector was nearly as large and as broad as Caelan. But where Caelan’s strength had come from war, Hector’s had come from long days working metal and a deep pride in his work. “You know I’m not.”
Reya didn’t think her heart could break any further, but it did, another crack in an already shattered organ. She knew there was no logic to this place or the phantom before her, but she asked anyway, “Why am I here?”
He handed her a hulking cross-pein hammer. “Because we have work to do.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
His smile never faltered. “Yes, you can.”
A sob wracked her so hard she keeled forward and covered her face with her hands. “I lost the sword. I’m so ashamed.”
She itched to reach for the hilt of a blade that wasn’t there, the blade that should have been her father’s final resting place.
That was why she’d taken it. So she could keep her father’s soul in this world.
Her father had shown her what to do, how to set the pyres and meld bone and iron.
It would have taken days in the heat and smoke and ash.
Days to work the metal and sing the laments, to hand-engrave the knots and words.
Days to grieve and weep and tell the stories.
But that was how the mountain folk honored their dead.
It was blood and bone that made Etellinian steel so strong.
When a Steelborn warrior died, their sword was melted down and their bones reforged into the blade, eliminating imperfections in the metal and making the steel stronger with every forging.
It was why every etching of Ryksis showed him missing the finger he’d used to forge the first Etellinian steel sword.
In exchange for the knowledge, the Steelborn swore to honor Ryksis’s sacrifice.
Hector’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing the rune inked in black along his right forearm—the same rune etched on every Steelborn sword. One line to represent the craft, and a circle to represent the All-Gods. Together they made the eternal pathway.
To be Steelborn was not to die, but to live on forever.
She had denied her father that.
Never run. Never bow. Never die.
Hector had imparted the secret of Etellinian steel to one person. Her. Until she found his bones and performed the sacred rite, Ryksis would bar her father’s way into the afterlife, and his soul would be left to wander the mountains alone. Was that why he had come to her now?
Reya felt Hector kneel before her. His hands gently pulled her own from her face. “You can get it back.”
She shook her head again.
He placed his hands on her shoulders the way he had that night he’d told her not to make a sound and that everything would be okay.
When he’d told the lie that had made her hide.
“You are Steelborn. You are my daughter. I have loved you from the first, and when my existence is long forgotten, I will love you still.”
Tears rained down her cheeks. “You should have never given it to me.”
He pulled her to her feet and pressed a firm kiss to her brow. “I would have given it to no one else.”
She forced herself to ask the question that had been hovering on her lips for ten years. “Why didn’t you fight them?”
A distant world lingered on the edges of her vision of this place, this time that had long since passed.
“It takes far more strength to put down a sword than it does to pick one up,” he said. “Only the bones go into the blade, Reyanwyn. I live on in you.”
She choked on a sob as he extended the hammer to her again, his smile never leaving his lips, and she accepted it with trembling hands.
Then he slid a pair of tongs into the fire and removed the yellow-orange billet he’d buried beneath the charcoal.
The start of a blade. He placed the glowing steel on the face of the anvil, holding it steady for her.
All her life she’d stared at the words on the sword, recounted them like a mantra, but she’d never really understood them. Until now.
No hammer or anvil could give her father his place in the afterlife.
He’d earned it a thousand times over. Even if Ryksis barred his way, immortality wasn’t found in ore and fire or the favor of the All-Gods.
It was in the way a person lived. The memories they left behind. The loved ones they protected.
Immortality was in what they died for.
Her grip tightened on the handle. She would not waste one more second of the life her father had paid for with his own. She would not guard herself against the love that had made him so strong. She would live.
“Forge the steel, Reyanwyn.”
The sword had not been lost. It had been stolen.
And she could steal it back. Because she was the Crimson Dagger, and no one was better at that than her.
She was everything this world had made her and more. She had survived. And surviving wasn’t always clean. Sometimes it was ugly and cruel.
Thief. Liar. Killer. She would own it all—the light, the dark, and everything in between. Because there was no part of her that was not worthy of the rest.
Eyes on her father, Reya drew back with a grunt and threw the hammer down. Metal sang, and a flash of orange sparks shot across the anvil. She drew back and struck. Harder this time.
No more running. She would love her brothers, even as they cursed her name. She would not forget this place, the family she’d been given, the name she had been gifted.
The crash of steel was an anthem in her blood—one she’d played a thousand times. It was branded on her heart. On her soul.
“Try again.”
Her tears turned to steam on the coals of her anger.
“Try again.”
Again.
Again.
Again.
She swung until she couldn’t anymore, until on a rooftop in Edris, her shoulders finally stopped heaving. Then the Steelborn daughter of Gwendolyn and Hector Connery lifted her face to the stars, and got up.