CHAPTER 13 #2
"Useful answer. " I drew a slow breath. "They'd see a guest choosing contact. Only what you wish to show. If anyone makes your choice into gossip, canal inventory gets lonely."
Her fingers flexed once at her side. "Then warm my hands. Nothing else."
There were wars easier than keeping a straight face through that request.
"Yes," I said.
I offered both palms, open. She placed her hands in mine.
Her gloves were gone. Her bare fingers were cool from the road, and the air sharpened around us: rosewater, iron, and rain-wet fur threaded through mineral steam.
I warmed my palms slowly, only enough to ease chill from her fingers and keep comfort from feeling like a trap.
She watched our hands. "Your fire is quieter here."
"It knows the walls."
"And me?"
The question tilted the garden.
I kept my thumbs still against the backs of her hands. "It knows restraint better than presumption."
Her eyes lifted. The orange glass made the gray-violet warmer. "That sounded practiced."
"Every word to you gets hauled through internal committees. Badly dressed. Screaming."
This time her laugh was soft and immediate.
Desire hit me with a clean right hook. I wanted her mouth, wanted one question and one fearless answer. But the gardens were full of my people, and danger had not stopped hunting her just because she had found one warm room.
"Zara," I said, because naming her kept the world edged. "You're safe to ask. You're safe not to."
Her hands tightened in mine.
Then the north pool burped.
The sound was wrong.
A hollow concussion, heavier than steam through a vent or pressure clearing, rolled beneath the glass terraces, followed by a metallic shriek from the fire canal under the east walkway.
Every head in the garden turned.
My body moved before panic had time to put on boots. I released Zara's hands; holding her through danger would turn my grip into a decision that belonged to her.
"Canal breach," I snapped. "West stairs. Now!"
The garden did not dissolve into chaos. That was the mercy of drills.
Pale old guards rose and started herding children toward the west stairs.
Glasswrights dropped tools into safety troughs.
Attendants lifted the smallest children.
Bells rang in three clean notes from the ceiling: lower fire, broken ward, external force.
External force turned my blood mean.
The east walkway cracked from below.
A white crack raced through orange glass as something rammed it from below. A hand appeared beneath the floor, pale behind heat shimmer, thorn-silver claws biting into the pane.
Council hunters in my canals.
Morcant had put soldiers through Emberhall's veins.
My cuff flared so hot the air snapped.
"Zara," I said, and my voice had lost every decorative edge. "Behind me or beside me. Choose."
"Beside," she answered before the second impact landed.
Good woman. Terrible woman. Mine to protect only because she allowed protection, and only as far as she allowed.
The glass over the east canal buckled. A hunter burst upward in a spray of steam and bright shards, light-skinned face hidden behind a heat mask, silver hook already swinging toward the nearest fleeing body.
I threw a shield between the hook and a cluster of children. Gold-white fire curved low and hard. The hook struck it and rang.
Two more hunters came through the broken canal hatch. Then a fourth, dragging a cylinder etched with red legal script.
I knew that shape.
"Down!" I shouted.
The cylinder opened.
White fire belonged to another kind of hand, too clean and too false. It poured from the cylinder in a flat sheet that ate the oxygen above the east terrace and turned every ward it touched brittle.
My shield took the first wave. The cuff bit into my scars, drinking the surge that wanted to answer with a furnace.
"Kai!" someone yelled from the lower terrace.
The child with the wooden phoenix had frozen halfway between a copper fruit tree and the west stairs.
A pane above the fire canal split under his feet.
I was too far.
I had one hand holding the white fire off twenty people and the other shaping heat under Zara so the blast would not take her gown, her hair, her breath. The child stared down through the cracking glass, round-eyed, light face going blank with fear.
Then Zara moved.
She moved beyond ballroom polish and salt-ring drill, every hunted thing in her blood deciding the child was not prey and the world would rearrange itself accordingly.
Her head snapped toward him before the glass made its final sound. Her eyes ringed red, bright enough to cut through steam. The scent of iron roses struck the garden. On the orange glass wall behind her, her shadow rose with branching antlers.
Every person in Emberhall saw it.
Zara ran.
She moved impossibly fast. Her boots hit the walkway once, twice.
The glass gave way under the child with a clean, awful crack.
Zara reached him before gravity finished deciding.
One arm locked around his middle. She twisted with a sharp, impossible grace, using the falling pane as if it were a step instead of a death sentence.
For one breath she hung above the fire canal, auburn braid whipping through steam, eyes crimson-ringed, antler-shadow flaring huge over the dome.
My heart stopped being a useful organ.
I caught the fire beneath her.
I caught the fire beneath her with a lifted hand of power, wider than the world, and carried heat away from her boots, away from the child's bare legs, away from the glass shards tumbling around them. The cuff screamed against my skin. I ignored it.
Zara landed on the safe side of the terrace with the child clutched to her chest.
He started crying then. Loud, furious, alive.
The sound almost took me to my knees.