Her eyes moved over me the way the others sized up a length of raw stock, weighing what it might become.
“What for?” she wanted to know.
I pushed up my sleeve and showed her the Coldiron armguard.
“I want to make six more like it. Four for the heirs.”
Coldiron chirped at the exposure, delighted, and its power rolled out into the room. Hessa sucked in a breath. So did everyone else within reach of it.
“What’s the metal riding on the iron?” she asked.
I hesitated. It was still classified.
“You can sense it?” I asked instead.
She shook her head. “Not the whole of it. A feeling. I’m no alchemist, but I read metal closer than most metalsmiths do, and yours sits wrong with me—unlike anything I’ve handled.” She wiped her palms again, slower this time. “Lady Vaelith briefed me on the Foolsilver just yesterday.”
Okay, then. Foolsilver it was.
I nodded.
We are not Foolsilver!Coldiron protested, indignant.We are not fool!
But you could have a nickname,I coaxed. When Coldiron was offended, bad things happened.Like master of disguise.
Like when you dressed as a boy!
Exactly. Best lie there is. Deception. Clever,I offered.
Clever. Very clever.Coldiron turned the words over, mollified, and went warm against my wrist.
Down in my gut, it felt safer to give the world Foolsilver than Coldiron—the name my inner demon had handed me.
Hessa led me to a pile of unforged stock against the back wall: dented ingots, snapped blades, a tangle of scrap that had failed some test or other and been set aside for the melt. Bins of ore squatted beside it, raw and dull, awaiting their turn at the fire.
“Iron and steel mixed in there,” she said. “Some bronze. Take what you need.”
I crouched and picked out a fist-sized lump of scrap iron, nothing special about it. Then I worked a single drop of Coldiron loose from my armguard and pressed it to the iron.
The drop sank in, woke, and hummed up through my bones. I pushed my intent into it.Reshape.The iron answered, softening, going pliant as wet clay under my fingers, and I was the potter, drawing it long, thinning it, curving it to the bones of a forearm. The cold of it never touched me. In a handful of breaths, the scrap was gone, and a Coldiron armguard lay across my palm, dark and singing faintly.
“That’s an eye-opener,” Hessa breathed.
She was staring. So were the others. They’d drifted close without my noticing, their soot-streaked faces ringed around me.
“None of the alchemists can do what you just did,” a man from the far bench said.
Hessa looked at the floor and then at her people. “What you saw here doesn’t leave this room. Understood?”
They nodded.
I didn’t tell them why none of the alchemists could do it. The truth was that I wasn’t exactly one of them. No one could command Coldiron but me.
No—not no one. There was another. Coldiron called the being the False Heir. An alchemist, maybe, or something else, like me. Whatever it was, it kept close ties to the demons and bent them to its will. I suspected the passenger riding in my own skull knew exactly who the False Heir was. And I had a low, ugly feeling that whatever let me command Coldiron traced back to a bloodline that had nothing to do with the parents I’d known. If I pulled that thread—if I kept pulling—the whole foundation ofwho I was would come apart in my hands, and I wouldn’t like what was left.
If you think too hard,the demon had told me once,it’ll break you.
It hadn’t been lying. I let it go. I had enough on my plate without digging up the rest. Some truths were worth chasing. Some were better left buried, like mine.
