Every eye in the room pinned me, waiting for the cadet with frosting on her lip to perform.
I swallowed the last of the donut, rolled up my left sleeve, and unwrapped the armguard.
The heirs had seen me turn the recovered metal into a bracer that fit snugly under my fatigues. Invisible unless you knew to look.
I laid the armguard flat on my palm, then blew a kiss to the dark metal, just to fuck with the dragon general. A thought later, I activated the drop of Coldiron.
The sentient metal warmed, humming through my bones. I pushed my intent, and it rippled—liquid iron shifting. In three seconds, the bracer was gone. An arrow lay across my palm. Shaft, fletching, a wicked head gleaming dull black under Stormglass light.
Gasps rose around the table.
“What kind of dark magic is that?” Commander Lee demanded.
“A new type of witchcraft, perhaps.” Colonel Karrik leaned forward, chair groaning.
“Alchemy,” Caspian said, pride warming his voice like he’d invented the discipline. He sat back, arms folded, savoring their shock.
“With respect, Your Highness,” Major Adrian said, “no alchemist could reshape metal by thought. Metal whisperers sense ore, temper alloys, improve a forge. They don’t turn a bracer into an arrow in three seconds without tools or heat.”
Aelindor smiled, coffee untouched, winter-blue eyes alighting on me. He looked like a man who’d already done the math and was waiting for the room to catch up.
“Only Cadet Max can manipulate this metal,” Drakken said and turned to me with an order. “Pass the arrow.”
I handed it to Aelindor. The Fae prince held the arrow by the shaft, turning the dark gleam of Coldiron in the arrowhead under the light.
“This metal is called Coldiron.” His voice filled the room without effort, simply the voice everyone had learned to listen to. “It surfaced after the Rupture. Myth traces its origin to the fall of Lucifer Morningstar, or to the heart of a dying star. What matters is that it’s sentient, and it answers to Cadet Max alone.”
He set the arrow on the center of the table between the two donut boxes. “Feel free to touch the arrowhead, but know it burns skin.”
Commander Lee snatched the arrow first. Her fingers closed around the Coldiron-fused head for half a second before she yanked her hand back with a hiss.
“Son of a—” She shook out her hand, the blister already shining on her palm.
The arrow went around the table. Colonel Karrik grazed the tip with his thumb and jerked away. Lieutenant Colonel Reeves touched it with one finger and pulled back, rubbing the welt that bloomed across her skin. Every officer who tried came away with blisters or burns, some worse than others. Commander Marcorecoiled so sharply that his chair scraped backward across the concrete.
“Fae are particularly vulnerable to such a metal,” Aelindor said mildly. “Iron-Coldiron compound in a Fae’s bloodstream is fatal. Some of you might’ve heard that an archdemon shot at me with this arrow on the rooftop of the train. Cadet Max intercepted it. Without her intervention, the Coldiron would have ended me. I owe her my life.”
The room absorbed that in silence. Several officers nodded at me, not the perfunctory nod you gave a subordinate who’d done well on drills, but the kind that said they were reassessing everything they’d assumed about me since I walked in. Prince Aelindor was beloved in the Covenant. Saving his life carried weight that rank never could.
I flushed. I wasn’t used to approval. In the mines, the best you could hope for was not getting beaten up too badly.
Aelindor handed the arrow back to me, arrowhead first, and gave me a small nod.
I wrapped my palm around the arrowhead.
Coldiron glowed at my touch, the dark surface brightening.
Max! Max! I did a good job. As you asked!
Coldiron’s voice chattered gleefully in my mind.
Good job,I said, and set the arrow back on the table.
The officers stared at my unblistered hand, then at the glow, then at my face.
“The strategic implications extend beyond combat.” Drakken set his hands flat on the table, pulling the room’s attention back to him. “Cadet Max has reported that Coldiron has been contaminating Stormglass shipments out of Crimson Ridge for the past decade. Approximately half of all Stormglass distributed from the mine contains dormant Coldiron, embedded at the molecular level. The metal is inactive until commanded.”
He paused to let that land.
