Fire Kin

by M. J. Scott

  There was still a certain amount of temptation to let it run through me and wreak some old-fashioned havoc, but that would only lead to more trouble. The aim today was to stay alive. And to not kill Invar in the process of doing so.

  When Lord sa’Eleniel finally stopped speaking, the silence seemed to hang in the air while Invar and I stared at each other. Behind me, and in front and to either side, wards shimmered to life. Meant to protect the onlookers from any stray effects of our fight. And meant to protect us from any interference from others.

  I trusted the ones behind me—those set by my father and by Bryony—but I wasn’t going to take the others for granted.

  My eyes stayed fixed on Invar as I watched him, trying to guess what he might do. He was probably wondering the same thing, but I wasn’t going to be the one to start this. He had called the challenge; he could make the opening gambit.

  I still held the shields around my power. No point giving myself away and besides, I was hoping to get through this without giving the court any hint of my true strength. This challenge was bad enough. I didn’t want to get caught up in any further idiocy while they sorted out who would take the crown.

  I counted heartbeats while I waited, a trick I had taught myself on the battlefield. The act of counting calmed me, slowing my heart as I stretched the time between numbers, evoking a form of trance where my focus narrowed and all distractions faded away.

  I’d nearly reached fifty before Invar thrust his hand forward and a circle of flame rose around me, the heat of it uncomfortably close.

  “Really?” I said to him. As gambits went, it was fairly traditional. But also a strange choice when my affinity had always been for fire. I watched Invar warily, wondering if a second attack lay behind this seemingly innocuous move.

  The fires leapt higher suddenly, the flames deepening in color, the heat scorching my cheeks.

  I had no doubt he would keep building the intensity if I didn’t act. I had a high tolerance to heat, but I could burn like anyone else.

  I loosened my hold on my power a fraction and reached for the flame. It died down almost immediately. So this was just a test. A feint to draw me out. Nowhere near the depths of Invar’s strength.

  Stellan had been strong too. Strong but arrogant. And not the smartest of men. I was hoping Invar shared that with his cousin as well.

  Arrogance and pride could be turned to useful weapons in such a fight. Goading a man into making a mistake was sometimes the easiest way to defeat him. The toughest opponents were always the calm and cool ones, and the sa’Oriels weren’t known for their even tempers.

  I gathered dying remnants of Invar’s flames around me, curled them into a ball around my hand, and flung it back toward Invar in a streak of light and heat. Again, a lazy, obvious move, but let him think that we were doing this the traditional way for now.

  The point of the challenge was to throw power at each other until one of us did something that the other couldn’t undo. At that point, the stuck one would yield and it would be all over.

  It was childish in a way, as almost all power struggles are. But I had yet to come across a single place in all my soldiering where it was done any differently. There were always men and women who strove for power and held on to it with clenched fists, most of them heedless as dogs snarling over a bone as to who they might hurt in the process.

  Invar caught the ball, and the flames vanished in his hands.

  There was a small murmur of appreciation from the assembled court that this at least wasn’t going to be one of the challenges that ended at the first exchange, but I didn’t shift my focus to see who might be commenting.

  No, I went back to waiting.

  It wasn’t a long wait. Invar made a complicated sweeping gesture and suddenly vines snaked up through the marble to wrap around my legs and arms, pulling them apart with enough force that it hurt.

  There was no time to stall in reacting this time. I sent my magic skimming over my body and outward, snapping the vines and stepping free of the remnants. Some of them wriggled toward me, seemingly intent on recapturing their prey. I set them alight with another quick spell. They burned with a nasty acrid stink.

  “Want to try something else?” I said to Invar.

  He didn’t look worried. Not even the slightest bit uneasy. Which told me that either he was a very good cardplayer or he was holding back just as much as I was.

  To push the issue a little I sent a line of fire snaking toward him. He stepped out of its path and then, with a gesture, summoned an icy wind that snuffed the flames.

  It was a neat trick. I filed it away for future reference.

  After that, the attacks grew more serious. Invar conjured strange creature after strange creature. Birds with razor-sharp glass beaks, hissing metal snakes dripping acid, a cloud of darkness that made the air steam as it approached me. Each time, I managed to turn it back, to counter. Heaps of smoking small corpses—could you call twisted, melted metal a corpse?—began to pile up on the tiles, blood and guts and acid making the tiles deadly slick in places.

  We circled the square, stalking each other warily as the intensity of the attacks grew with each round. I no longer heard the sounds of the court, straining instead for any small hint that something might be coming from behind or from the sides, trying to drown out the sound of my breathing and focus only on what was happening around me.

  Invar was serious; that much was becoming clear. The things he conjured would hurt me if I let them.

  But as I was contemplating how to bring this to an end without too much of a show of strength, Invar flung out a hand and the marble in front of him cracked and split, revealed a deep fissure. And rising from it came creatures unlike anything I had seen before. Skeletons. Or near enough. Creatures of wood and stone and something gleaming darkly like metal made of night, with no flesh and no faces, just long limbs and hands with too many fingers. Clawed fingers, ending in gleams of razor-sharp metal. They carried swords as dark as themselves.

  I wasn’t entirely sure if the blades weren’t actually part of the long arms, but there was no time to figure that out. As they stalked toward me across the expanse of marble, moving too fast for my comfort, one thing was clear. I needed a weapon.

  Which was a problem. I hadn’t been allowed to bring my sword with me. And members of the assembled court were meant to be unarmed as well. Probably some of them had broken that rule, but any weapons they carried would be very carefully glamoured.

  In fact, the only sword that I knew for sure was in any sort of reach was the one embedded in the marble at the foot of the empty throne. It had been inlaid there four centuries ago, when the Veiled Queen had forged the treaty, a symbol of the strength she held and her intention for there to be peace—and no need for swords—in the City.

  It had lain there for so long, protected by layers of spells and wards set by the queen herself, that I imagined no one even noticed it very often. It might as well have been part of the marble it lay in. But I had knelt by that sword when the queen pronounced me exiled, my eyes focused on the gold and silver length of it and the glittering jewels embedded in its hilt so that I wouldn’t look up and show my fury at her sentence.

  Every inch of it was indelibly etched in my memory.

  Though, right now, it didn’t matter how well I could picture it. It might as well have been a mile away. The throne was behind the Fae who were watching us, behind the wards that they had raised to keep us in, not to mention that the sword itself was bound behind the magic the queen had used to set it there.

  The first of the creatures had almost reached me and I readied myself to twist and blast it, but instead of attacking me, it continued past me, swinging the sword it carried back before whipping its arm forward and flinging the razor-sharp blade into the crowd behind me. Where Bryony stood.

  Bryony. I stopped thinking. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I stretched out a hand and dropped all the shields I had been holding, sending my power deep d
own into the land beneath my feet. I felt a shudder as though the ground had moved under me and then a strange sensation as though the air had warped and arrowed through me with a sharp, sudden pain that made me gasp. But then I was holding the queen’s sword and I swept around and sliced the creature in two before turning and carving my way through the other three.

  I ended up panting, facing Invar. Who had tried to hurt Bryony. Rage coursed through me. I snapped my hand open, holding nothing back, and Invar froze, bound by the threads of marble that had shot up from the stone to wrap him, binding arms and legs.

  I left his head free and his face contorted in fury as he shouted, then struggled, but the marble stayed firmly in place. With another shove of my power, I closed up the gap that he had opened in the marble, neatly carving a second wave of the skeleton creatures in half where they were emerging, and then sent a wave of fire across the marble, searing it clear of the remnants of the other beasts that had died in our fight, leaving it pristine white and gleaming in the sunlight.

  Holding the sword ready, I waited one long minute, then another, but it was clear that Invar couldn’t undo the bonds I had set.

  From beyond the wards, there was nothing but frozen silence.

  I turned to where Salvia stood, her face ashen but her eyes full of rage, and bowed in her direction.

  “Don’t bother me again unless you find someone who can beat me,” I snarled, and as the wards started to dissolve on all sides, I left the marble, pausing only to pass the sword to Lord sa’Eleniel. “I have a war to win.”

  Chapter Twenty

  ASH

  The journey home was very different. The driver spurred the horses on, keen to beat the sunset and get us all safely back in the human boroughs before dark. Wise man. For my part, I watched Bryony watching me. Waited for her to say something, to ask me how I’d done what I did.

  The truth was, I didn’t know. Nor, I had to admit, did I know what it meant that I could do it. The only certainty was that I had put myself squarely in the line of fire and, no doubt, made myself some new and powerful enemies. All the more reason to put some miles between me and Summerdale before the court had a chance to rally. I’d half expected that someone would try to stop us from leaving but no one had.

  “You have an interesting idea of not showing your hand,” Bryony said eventually. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or concern underlying her words. Perhaps a little of both.

  “He attacked you.” The words tumbled from my mouth before I could stop them. The truth might not endear me to Bryony. Nor, if I thought about it, was it a truth that lay easy with me. I’d been in control of myself, had been smart about how I’d dealt with Invar—until he threatened Bryony. Apparently that was enough to snap my control. And now the entire Fae Court had had a demonstration of exactly what power I wielded. And besides that, a demonstration of my feelings for Bryony. Feelings that might just have put her in the line of fire as well.

  “I’m capable of defending myself,” Bryony said, but her expression softened a little.

  “Maybe so. But I’m a soldier. I’m built to defend what’s mine.”

  Her eyebrows arched even as a spark of gold ran the length of her necklace. “Who says I’m yours?”

  “Are you saying you’re not?”

  “You have bigger problems than that to deal with right now.”

  “You’re not a problem.” Almost everything else was. The Blood. The Fae. The City. My Family. But not Bryony. Not unless she turned me away.

  My fingers twisted the ring on my right hand, trying to find a place for it that didn’t feel strange. Family. Roots. A strange concept after my time away. I would have liked the chance to stay awhile and speak to my father, to even see my mother, but that would have to wait. I knew now that they still thought of me as belonging, that I was still welcome to wear the ring. That would have to be enough to keep me content.

  That and the fact that Bryony hadn’t been able to say she wasn’t mine.

  BRYONY

  I left Ash at the Brother House and made my way back to St. Giles. There was more to be said between us, but now wasn’t the time. Slender black shadows were overtaking the last rays of sun across the City, and Ash needed to focus on the night ahead, on his patrols and his men.

  I, however, was free to worry. As much as I tried to bring my thoughts back to the City and the hospital full of patients who waited for me, I couldn’t shake the image of the queen’s sword rising to meet Ash’s hand.

  Idiot man. Why had he done that?

  I pushed open the door to my office, trying to wrestle my thoughts back to the here and now. There was little point to begging trouble from the future before I had to. Besides, I was fairly certain that trouble would come looking without my help.

  “What did he do?”

  I started, biting back the cry that half rose in my throat. Fen leaned propped against my desk, his long legs stretched before him, clad in leather.

  “How did you get in here?” I snapped, trying to recover my composure.

  “I told the orderly that you’d asked me to come,” he said. Amusement flashed across his face. I wondered if the orderly he’d spoken to had been male or female. Even though it was common enough knowledge that Fen only had eyes for Saskia, that didn’t stop women from losing their heads when he pointed his pretty green eyes in their direction and chose to exercise his charm.

  Beasts were notoriously charming, and Fen had that blood in his veins, along with Fae and human. However, I didn’t find anyone breaking into my office charming and I stalked around the desk, making a mental note to give instructions to the staff about privacy.

  “I’ll thank you not to suborn my staff,” I said as Fen rose and turned so he was still facing me.

  “Suborn? Hardly that. A little white lie.”

  “I’ll thank you not to lie to them either.”

  “Only because you’re jealous that you can’t.” He grinned and then shook his head. “But none of this is answering my question. What exactly did your Captain Pellar do while you were in Summerdale?”

  “What makes you think he did anything?” I said, stalling.

  “Well, for one thing, something made the magic toll like a bell a few hours ago. Loud enough that even I could feel it. And then there’s this vision that’s been stalking me all day. Something about a bloody great sword flying through the air. A bloody great sword that looked somewhat familiar.”

  “There are many swords in this city right now.”

  “Agreed. But there aren’t that many that I know by sight.” He spread his hands as though he wished he could sweep the thought he was having away as his mouth tightened. “This one is fairly unmistakable. So what does the Veiled Queen’s sword have to do with Asharic?”

  I sighed. There was little point in trying to turn Fen away from his inquiries. He was a seer. A seer trained by the queen, if only for a short period of time. He would know the truth of it soon enough. And if I was honest with myself, I could use a little insight right now.

  “He called the queen’s sword to his hand during the challenge,” I said.

  “Shal e’tan mei.”

  “Precisely,” I agreed. “Though I think we may have moved beyond that point.”

  “The sword answered to his power?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did the court take that?” he asked, somewhat warily.

  “That remains to be seen. We left somewhat abruptly after Asharic brought the fight to an end.”

  “Talk about setting a cat amongst the pigeons. Does he know what this means?”

  “I don’t think he’s thought it through to the logical conclusion,” I said. I felt suddenly exhausted, the sleepless night and the tension of the day descending upon me like the weight of one of the giant bells in the cathedral.

  “Which is?”

  I straightened in my seat with an effort, trying to drive away the fatigue and think. “You’re the seer. You tell me.”

  “You kn
ow more about the court than I do,” Fen countered. “You were brought up there.”

  “I wasn’t alive the last time the throne was empty. I don’t know exactly what happens to fill it again,” I pointed out. “So you have just as much experience with this as I do.” I rubbed my temples, seeing the sword spinning through the air again. Flying to Ash as though it recognized its true master. “And honestly, I don’t think anyone had thought of trying to call the sword before. Maybe with the queen gone it would answer to any of us.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Fen said.

  “Maybe I’m trying a little crazy DuCaine optimism.”

  “I’m not sure even DuCaine craziness can do much good here.” Fen sat down in one of the chairs that faced my desk, his hand rubbing his wrist where the scar from the iron he used to wear to control his powers still showed faintly silver.

  “Why? Have you seen something? Do you know what’s going to happen?”

  “No. Like I said, all I’ve seen all day is that sword.”

  “Will you look now?” Ash might be in denial about what he’d done, but I, for one, had a fairly good idea what might be about to happen. It would be easier if I knew if I was right. It would give me time to prepare myself.

  “Do you really want to know?” Fen said.

  His expression was sympathetic. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Yes,” I said with more conviction than I felt. The last time Ash upturned my life, I’d had little warning, nor had I had any when he returned so abruptly. If he was going to capsize me once more, then I wanted time to prepare for the impact.

  Fen leaned back in his chair. His expression turned distant, his eyes darkening. His power didn’t feel like Fae power. It was different somehow . . . the shimmer of it reverberating through the air, bouncing and echoing and fracturing in all directions before forming a whole once more.