CHAPTER 7 #3
Attraction had been simple magic and inconvenient biology. This was worse. This was admiration.
"Can you hold the scent shield?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Stay visible. Boring, remember?"
"A servant carrying laundry."
"Exactly. Terribly folded. Still acceptable."
The corner of her mouth twitched despite the bolt smoking between us.
We crossed the yard together. I kept the fire shield curved toward the wall and the heat low where it brushed her cloak. The assassin tried to crawl, then convulsed once. By the time we reached the lower walkway, the body had gone still.
The hood had fallen back enough to show a light-skinned jaw and bloodless lips. He belonged neither to Kael's household nor mine. He wore no house colors.
"Poison?" Zara asked.
"Likely in a tooth. Coward convenience."
She knelt before I could object. Then she looked up, one brow raised, making the unspoken command die an embarrassed death.
"The stones are hot," I said instead. "Your left knee is near a live ember."
She shifted her knee. "Thank you."
I crouched opposite the body and sent a small flame over the gray leather without letting it catch. Hidden seams showed themselves in heat shimmer. A sleeve pocket. A throat clasp. A narrow ridge sewn beneath the collar.
My left arm throbbed.
Zara noticed. Her gaze dropped to the obsidian cuff, then to the ragged glow crawling above it under my sleeve.
"You are hurt."
"Old argument with physics."
"Kai."
My name in her mouth, stripped of title and banter, could have ordered armies into better posture. I looked away first.
"Old wound," I said. "The shield pulled hard. The cuff hates enthusiasm."
"The cuff restrains your fire."
"It edits my fire. Badly, with conviction."
"And the scars?"
I could have joked. I had a dozen ready. All of them tasted stale. A bolt meant for her smoked behind us. She had trusted my restraint when death crossed the wall. I could give her one honest thing in return.
I pushed my sleeve back with my right hand.
The scars climbed my left forearm in raised, uneven bands, disappearing beneath the obsidian cuff and reappearing above it. Fire left by panic never wrote neatly. The skin had healed light and tight in some places, copper-red in others, all threaded with ember when my power ran too close to memory.
Zara went very still.
Her stillness carried neither disgust nor pity. It gathered around the question that mattered.
"Who did that?"
"I did. " I flexed the fingers of my left hand.
The scars pulled. "And the story did. A palace burned when I was young enough to believe innocence mattered.
Another fire started it. Mine was the fire everyone could see.
I held a corridor with this arm until the roof came down and people got out behind me.
By morning, the story had improved. People like simple villains.
A fire lord standing in ashes is simple. "
Her expression changed by a degree. Court math. Rage, measured because waste helped no one. "They blamed you for saving them."
"Some did. Some knew better and enjoyed their silence. The cuff came later, after fear made my power eager. I wear it because I'd rather be mocked for restraint than remembered for one loose second."
Zara looked at the scars, then at me. "May I touch?"
My breath stopped.
She waited. No reaching. No assumption.
"Yes," I said. "If you want. Only because you want."
"I want to."
Her gloved fingertips touched the edge of a scar above the cuff.
I had been burned, cut, shot, bitten, and once insulted by a forge priest for three consecutive hours. None of it had prepared me for that gentle contact. Her touch was cool from the morning, steady from choice. It made the scars witnessed rather than soothed.
"Your fire knew the difference," she said.
"Between what?"
"Between me and the bolt. Between the assassin and the weapon. Between fear and permission. " Her fingers lifted, but she did not move away. "You could have burned the whole wall."
"Yes."
"You did not."
"No."
"Then I trust your restraint."
I wanted to answer lightly. Nothing came. So I bowed my head once, a soldier's acknowledgment, a vow without the legal teeth Kael would have given it.
"I'll keep earning it," I said.
Something warm moved through her face, then shuttered as her attention dropped to the assassin again.
"You said employers," she reminded me. "Find one."
That steadied me better than any comfort. I turned back to the body and slid a small fire under the collar seam. The thread curled away. Something silver glinted beneath gray leather.
I did not touch it with bare skin.
I drew my belt knife and lifted the object free.
A thorn lay on the blade. No garden thorn or iron shrapnel.
Thorn-silver, long as my smallest finger, worked with red enamel so fine it looked wet.
Around its base, legal script coiled in a hand I had seen on execution notices and sealed summons.
High Council work. Official enough to deny, private enough to kill.
Zara's scent shield faltered. Rosewater and iron cut through the smoke.
I did not blame her.
The assassin carried a Council thorn.