CHAPTER 18 #2
"May I?" I snapped.
"Yes. Chain only."
I caught the chain three inches from her wrist and burned it open.
Pain slammed up my left arm. The cuff cracked with a sound like winter glass. Fire leaped from the split, hungry and old, and for one terrible heartbeat every ash field around us answered.
Too soon. Too wild.
I shoved the fire down before it took that shape. The ground beneath my boots charred. Zara's breath hitched, but she held her place.
"Kai," she said.
My name. An anchor.
Then a hunter on the ridge aimed a cylinder at her back.
I saw the line before it fired. White fire. Thorn-silver core. Council script ready to make impact a record: Zara injured by unlawful Ardent flame. Her protectors guilty by heat signature.
She was half turned toward the chain. Kael's wall held. Ezra's shadow seam guttered thin. The shot belonged to me.
The cuff had one rule left in it.
I broke it.
I left the band in place, hooked two fingers through the split, and tore the obsidian open around my scars.
The cuff screamed.
So did my fire.
Forbidden flame came through me phoenix-bright and wrong for a border road, the part of House Ardent histories described only after counting the dead. It wanted the hunters, the mirror, the forged evidence, the Council's elegant throat.
Zara stood in front of me.
So I gave the fire a task smaller than rage.
Shield her.
The flame struck the incoming shot in midair and folded around it like a fist closing over a knife. Gold went white. White went red. The air buckled. Sound left the world.
Ash began to fall upward.
Gray flakes lifted from the road, the wagon frame, Zara's cloak hem, rising past our faces as if the sky had become a grave refusing burial. The false flame peeled away from the real. Council script writhed red in the air before vanishing. The mirror cracked.
I held the shield around one subject.
Her.
The forbidden flame curved around Zara in a bright, terrible arc and did not touch a hair on her head.
The hunter on the ridge dropped the cylinder and ran.
I wanted to let him. I wanted to burn him. Both wants were loud.
Zara turned inside the shield.
Her gray-violet eyes met mine through ash falling the wrong way.
For one breath, I saw myself reflected in her face: amber eyes incandescent, scars lit from beneath, broken cuff hanging open like a black jaw. Fire moved over my skin without burning me. The air tasted of metal, old terror, and too much power.
Monster, memory said.
Useful monster, fear corrected.
Still monster.
The last of the Council shot collapsed in my flame. I snapped my hand shut and cut the fire.
The world crashed back in: horses screaming, Kael's cold command, Ezra's blade kissing air, chains falling dead onto ash. The mirror spat black glass into the road. Bloodmere riders surrounded the fleeing clerks before I trusted myself to move.
I took one step back from Zara.
Then another.
The broken cuff swung from my wrist, half attached. My scars glowed through open air. Smoke rose from my left arm in thin ribbons.
Zara looked down at it.
I knew that look. I had invented it in nightmares and put it on every face I feared losing. Horror. Disgust. Proof that restraint had been a costume.
"Kai," she said.
I stepped back again.
"Do not. " Her voice sharpened.
I stopped because the command hit the part of me that still wanted to be worth commanding.
Kael approached from her right, but Zara lifted one hand without looking away from me. He halted. Ezra, blood at his temple and shadows at his feet, did the same.
"Are you hurt?" I asked.
"No."
"Burned?"
"No."
"The chain?"
"Leather scored. Skin intact."
"Good. " My voice sounded like gravel dragged through a forge. "Then step back from me."
Her eyes narrowed.
Ah. There she was.
"Try again," she said.
"Zara."
"No. Try again with honesty instead of fear dressed as an order."
The broken cuff clicked as a piece fell into the ash between us. The upward fall had stopped. Gray flakes drifted down again, ordinary and humiliating.
"You saw what happens when it comes loose," I said.
"I saw you save me."
"You saw forbidden flame."
"I saw you aim it."
"It almost became more than that."
"Almost is not the same as did."
I laughed once, raw and humorless. "Lovely sentence until it's written over bodies."
Something moved in her face. Anger with its crown on.
"Do not use dead people to leave the living ones," she said.
That struck harder than any chain.
I looked away toward the wagon, the broken mirror, the hunters bound under Kael's law. My fire wanted tasks. Repair. Burn. Pursue. Anything but stand still while Zara looked at the worst thing in me and refused to make it simple.
"I need distance," I said.
"You may have distance after you help repair what broke."
My head turned back. "The cuff?"
"The field first. The evidence. The witnesses. The men still alive because you chose a shield instead of slaughter. Your arm. Then the cuff. But you do not get to retreat and call it restraint."
I stared at her.
Ash clung to her lashes. A thin red ring lit her eyes, the hart beneath her skin listening to danger. Her cloak was scorched by the Council chain, not by me. Her hand remained steady.
"Repair," she said. "Not disappear."
My throat closed.
"I'm afraid," I said.
"Good. Fear is testimony. Not law."
I had said something like that to her once in a practice yard with smoked salt on my fingers. The words returning in her voice felt like being handed back a weapon cleaned of rust.
"If I touch the evidence, my flame signature contaminates it," I said.
"Then tell Kael where to look."
"If I tend the burned ground, it may flare."
"Then tell me the safe distance, and I will hold it."
"If I stay near you and the cuff fails completely--"
"Then you tell me before you become a martyr with excellent hair."
That broke a sound out of me that was almost a laugh and almost pain.
Her mouth stayed solemn. Her eyes smiled, barely. "There. Useful."
I breathed in through my nose. Smoke, ash, rosewater, iron. Zara, alive. Zara, unburned. Zara, furious enough to keep me from mistaking self-punishment for virtue.
"All right," I said. "No one touches the wagon's left axle. White-fire primer. Kael, red script's under the ash; it'll bond to your witness record if you bleed near it. Ezra, mirror has a second seam. Don't stand in front unless you want Morcant complimenting your cheekbones while stabbing you."
Ezra, who had absolutely been moving toward the mirror, paused. "Useful. Insulting, but useful."
"I multitask."
Kael's gaze flicked from my arm to Zara. "And you?"
I looked at the broken cuff. "I keep my hands visible and my fire low until someone wiser tells me what to do next."
Zara stepped closer.
I did not retreat.
She stopped just outside reach. "May I see your arm?"
The old answer tried to rise: hide this, hide the ugliness without the safety of obsidian around it.
But she had asked.
She always asked.
I extended my left arm slowly. The broken cuff pieces hung loose around the scars. Ember moved under raised skin in painful threads. Zara's gaze traveled over every ruined line. Her face did not make the shape I feared.
"It needs cooling," she said.
"It needs a forge priest and several terrible choices."
"Cooling first. Terrible choices later."
She looked toward Ezra. "Can you cut a small cold seam without moving us?"
Ezra's brows lifted. "Yes. It will bite."
"Good. Kai?"
I swallowed. "Yes."
Ezra opened a palm-sized slash of Night Road beside my arm. Cold smoke breathed out, and every scar seized. I hissed.
Zara's hand rose, then stopped. "Touch?"
"Yes," I said, before fear could edit me.
Her fingers settled around my wrist below the worst damage, cool and steady. Her grip held witness instead of captivity.
The fire in my arm quieted by degrees.
I could have wept from the pain of it. I did not. Heroic of me. Also there were witnesses, and I had a reputation to disappoint later.
The second mirror seam chose that moment to wake.
Black glass lifted from the road in a jagged oval. Every rider turned. Kael's law wall snapped up. Ezra's cold seam vanished. I shoved Zara behind no one, because I valued my life, but I did step with her, beside, fire low and ready.
Morcant's face appeared in the broken mirror.
He looked elegant, pale, and unbothered by the failed ambush. Thorn-silver gleamed at his collar. Red cathedral light washed the air behind him. His gaze took in the bound hunters, false evidence, my broken cuff, and Zara's hand at my wrist.
His smile was small enough to be a legal clause.
"Lord Ardent," he said. "How fortunate. The border has clarified much."
Zara's fingers tightened once, then released my wrist by choice. She stepped forward. "You failed."
"Did I?" Morcant's gaze moved to me. "Forbidden flame before witnesses. A damaged restraint. Three houses acting under an unratified woman's direction. I would call that educational."
"Call it what you like," Zara said. "Your men live because Kai chose discipline. Your evidence burns with Council script. Your trap is witnessed."
"Your attachment to witnesses is charming," Morcant said. "So is your attachment to human comforts."
The road went colder.
In the mirror, the red light shifted. A figure was brought into view by two pale acolytes in gray.
Liora.
Her rose-fair face was bruised, but she stood upright in a torn Aurelia gown, wrists bound with thorn-silver. Fear shone in her eyes. So did rage. Bless the woman, she looked more offended than broken.
Zara went utterly still.
My fire did too.
Morcant rested one elegant hand on Liora's shoulder as if presenting evidence.
"Red moonrise tomorrow," he said. "Bring Zara Vale to the Crimson Cathedral without army, without fire, without shadow tricks, and your little human friend continues breathing. Refuse, and I will teach Aurelia how easily daylight loyalties burn."
Liora lifted her chin. "Zara, do not--"
The mirror went black before she could finish.
Zara's silence after it broke was worse than any alarm bell.