Chapter 46: First Fire
The east corridor smelled of old stone and new mortar, and beneath both, faintly, of char that had soaked into the walls decades ago. Violet stood in the doorway with the chest under her arm and did not go in right away.
The room had been a storage cupboard last week. Now the forge squatted at its heart like something waking, black iron belly, copper hood, the chimney flue running up through fresh-cut stone. Evander had drawn the plans himself. She could see his hand in the proportions, the window set low and wide so dawn would fall across the anvil instead of behind it.
Behind her, Cassian shifted the chest in her grip. "Want me to carry it in?"
"It's my chest." She stepped over the threshold. "I'll carry it."
The leathers were at the bottom, wrapped in a wool cloak that had kept the worst of the dust off. Boiled hide, stiff with age, scorched pale at the cuffs where her wrists had hovered too close to the forge when she was young and careless and laughing about it. She lifted them out and the smell rose off them, tallow and smoke and something like her own sweat from a life two hundred years gone.
She sat on the crate by the wall and pulled them on over her shift. The hide fought her at the hips. She swore, wiggled, and got the buckles done, and when she stood the leathers sat snug across her thighs and backside exactly as they always had, worn into the shape of a body that hadn't changed since.
Cassian made a low sound in his throat.
"Not a word," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your whole face said something."
He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, golden eyes tracking her from the heavy apron to the scarred edges of the cuffs. Evander had come in behind them and stood by the window, silent, watching the light climb the anvil face.
Violet opened the forge's firebox. Charcoal, kindling, the striker Evander's requisition had included. Twenty years since she'd done this. Her hands hovered for a breath, and then they stopped hovering.
Cup the tinder. Strike the firesteel. Feed the kindling slantwise, never flat, so the draft could climb. Pump the bellows in a rhythm, not a rush. She did all of it without thinking, and somewhere in the middle of it she realized she wasn't thinking, and that was the miracle. The craft hadn't left. It had only waited.
The fire caught. It climbed the charcoal in orange tongues and she stood back and looked at it, and her eyes stung.
"Violet." Evander's voice, low. "Do you want us here?"
She turned. Both of them in the doorway and the window light, two enormous men being very careful not to crowd her. Her chest went tight in a way that had nothing to do with grief.
"Stay," she said. "Both of you. I want witnesses."
Cassian grinned and dragged the second crate over for himself, close to the wall but close to her. Evander took the other side and said nothing, but his hand found the back of her neck and squeezed once, and that was its whole speech.
The metal came out of the chest next. She'd brought stock from the requisition crates: steel rod, silver wire, a small ingot of fine silver she'd claimed from the treasury stores with the specific delight of a woman spending her husband's money on herself. She set the rod in the fire and watched the color climb. Cherry. Orange. The pale straw-yellow she wanted.
Her first hammer blow rang off the anvil like a bell struck too hard.
The sound went down the corridor like weather. She heard it bounce off stone, heard a door somewhere open, heard Pell's quick steps stop and then start running in the wrong direction, toward the noise instead of away. Cassian laughed at all of it.
Violet didn't laugh. She was already drawing the steel out under the hammer, and her body remembered everything. How to angle the work. How to read the color, not the clock. How much the metal moved per blow and how little she needed to force it. Her forearms burned in a way she had missed like a missing limb.
"First heat's for the spine," she said, mostly to herself. "Then I split the tines."
"A comb," Evander said.
"A comb." She flipped the glowing work. "For my hair. Since apparently I'm a queen now and queens are supposed to have crowns, and nobody's gotten around to the actual crown."
"You'll have a crown," Cassian said. "I'll commission one tomorrow. Gold. Rubies. Ridiculous."
"I don't want ridiculous. I want useful." She quenched, reheated, worked the split. "So I'm making my own."
The silver went in next, softened and drawn fine, inlaid into the steel as she carved the channels. Her hands were steady. Steadier than they'd been at anything in twenty years, and that included the healing work, which had always been safe, always been permitted, always been small.
She carved the sun into the left tine. Freehand, no scribe, the lines flowing the way the rune glowed on her shoulder. Cassian went very quiet. When she cut the moon into the right, silver against steel, frost-bright, Evander stood and came to the anvil's edge and watched with his jaw tight.
"It's us," he said.
"It's you. On my head, if it works." She braced the tines and bent them. "Hold still. Both of you. This is the fiddly part."
The fiddly part took an hour. The sun needed filing and refiling; the moon's curve fought her twice and she cursed at it in Academy cant that made Cassian's eyebrows climb. Her arms shook by the end, fine tremor under the burn of effort, and she did not stop until the last wire was set and the polish cloth had done its work and she could hold the thing up in the dawn light.
Steel the color of dark honey. Sun on the left, gold inlay catching fire. Moon on the right, silver gone pale as frost. Small enough to cup in one hand. Heavy enough to matter.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she took her hair down.
She always wore it up, braided and pinned, tidy, unremarkable. She pulled the pins now and let the curls fall heavy past her shoulders, and both wolves went still in the way they went still when they scented something. She gathered the mass up, twisted it, and set the comb. The tines sank in and held. Sun at her left temple. Moon at her right.
"Well?" She turned to face them. "Say something. Anyone."
Cassian opened his mouth, closed it, and crossed the room in three strides and kissed her, one hand cradling the back of her skull with a care that was almost funny given the size of it. When he let her go, Evander turned her gently with a hand on her waist and kissed her the other way, slower, his beard rough against her chin.
"You're wearing it tomorrow," Cassian said against her ear. "To court. In front of everyone."
"Was planning on it."
"And every day after."
"Also planning on it."
Evander's thumb moved along her jaw. "The corridor heard you. Half the palace heard you. Harn will have opinions."
"Good." She stepped back, and the movement put her in the window light with the leathers still on, scuffed and scorched and fitting her like they'd never left, and something in her chest sat up straight. "Let them have opinions. I'm done being careful."
That was as far as she got before Cassian's hands found her hips.
He'd been watching her work for three hours and it showed. His mouth went to her throat, open and warm, and she felt his breath come heavier against her pulse, felt the wolf just under his skin lean into the heat of her. Evander moved behind her, and she was suddenly very aware of being between them, the two of them and the forge-fire and the leathers creaking as Cassian's grip tightened.
"Tell me to stop," Cassian murmured.
"Don't you dare."
His grin pressed into her neck. Evander's hands settled on her shoulders and began working the buckles of the apron strap, unhurried, precise, the way he did everything. "These stayed on," he said. "For now. I like the cuffs."
"Scorched," she said. "Fifty years scorched."
"Good."
The apron came off and hit the crate. The hide trousers stayed, and Cassian made another of those low sounds when his palms slid over them, the boiled hide warm from her body and the fire. She reached back and got a fist in Evander's collar and pulled him down to her shoulder, the left one, where his mark sat under her shift, and he took the invitation and pressed his mouth there through the fabric until the rune underneath lit warm.
The forge-fire threw their shadows up the stone wall, three figures merged into one shifting shape. Cassian dropped to his knees in front of her. It was an obscene sight, a king on his knees on soot-black flags, and he did it with total ease, unlacing her boots, working the hide down her legs with a patience he showed no one else alive.
"Step," he said, and she stepped, one leg free, then the other, and then his hands were on her bare thighs and his mouth followed, kissing up the inside of one while Evander pulled her shift up over her hips from behind and did the same on the other side. She braced a hand on the anvil. It was still warm from the work. Her whole world was warm.
"You lit a fire," Cassian said into her skin, "at dawn, in front of the whole palace, wearing those leathers. What did you think would happen?"
"I thought you'd both behave."
Evander laughed against the back of her neck, low and rare, and she felt it more than heard it. "You've known us a year."
"Longer. I was your advisor for five."
"And I spent those five years," Evander said, his hands sliding up her ribs, "thinking about this."
She laughed, and then stopped laughing, because Cassian's mouth found her through the thin cotton and everything went white at the edges. Her hand came down and buried itself in his dark hair. Evander stripped the shift over her head in one motion and pressed his chest to her back, and his hands covered her breasts, heavy and sure, his beard dragging across her shoulder as he mouthed the mark there.
The comb held. That was the thing she kept thinking, absurdly, as sensation piled up. She'd forged it herself and it held, sun and moon nested in her curls while her kings took her apart between them.
Cassian worked her with his mouth until her knees went, and when they went he stood and caught her, and turned her, and lifted her onto the anvil's edge with an ease that made her breath catch. The iron was warm under her bare backside. Evander stayed behind her, his arms crossing over her collarbone, holding her back against his chest, and Cassian pushed his trousers down just enough and pressed into her slowly, watching her face the whole way with those gold eyes gone almost molten.
"Yes?" he said, breath ragged.
"Yes. Cassian, yes."
He set a rhythm that matched the bellows, deep and even, and Evander held her through it, one hand at her throat now, fingers light, feeling her pulse race under his mark. The forge crackled. The corridor outside stayed blessedly, conspicuously empty, though she had no faith in that lasting. She was a queen with a steel comb in her hair and a king inside her and another king wrapped around her back, and she was loud about it, and did not care who heard, and that was maybe the best part of all of it.
"Again," she gasped, when the first wave broke and left her shaking. "Both of you. I've got twenty years to make up for."
"Oh, sweetheart," Cassian said, and swapped places with Evander without either of them asking, the two of them moving around her like they'd rehearsed it, like mates did. "You picked the right morning to start."
The sun was fully up when they finally let her rest. She sat on the crate wrapped in Evander's coat, hair wrecked, comb still holding, watching Cassian bank the fire with a competence she hadn't expected and decided not to tease him about. Somewhere down the corridor a door closed, tactfully.
"Harn's going to need a report," Evander said.
"Harn can read the smoke." She touched the comb, checked the tines. Sun, moon, seated firm. She stood, and looked at the two of them, and at the forge still breathing heat into the room, and felt the shape of the next fifty years arrange itself. "Same time tomorrow. I'm making Sera a bracelet with a ward in it before her next test. And then," she tapped the comb, "a crown. A real one. I'll design it myself."
"You just said no ridiculous," Cassian said.
"Ridiculous was your idea. Mine has a forge behind it."