Reeve’s throat was too thick to respond, but Sid snickered. He wished the sword would avoid reading into his desireseverytime he held it. In fact, that was a desire, wasn’t it?I want very much for that tingle to be ignored, he thought as loudly as he could.
“There’s something here, like a sigil,” she was saying, her voice echoing up the flue.
Reeve murmured out a noise, trying to keep the light steady and look anywhere but at her backside as she leaned further in. There were some tools angled up against the forge at her feet, not terribly interesting, but he would make do. A set of tongs, a rusted chisel, and something else, a stick of some sort with carvings along it. Now that—that was slightly interesting. There was an armory in Bendcrest, one he’d visited enough to be familiar with a blacksmith’s typical tools, but this he had never seen.
“I don’t know if noxscura will work,” she was saying, “but I’ll try tracing the sigils. My finger fits in the grooves carved into these stones here.”
His gaze floated up to her again because it was polite to look at someone when they spoke to you, even if they were sticking their behind in your direction. She lifted a foot off the ground as she bent further, and he had to swiftly look away again to focus on the strange, carved tool. It was long like a cane but too thin for support, only about as wide as a finger.
Reeve realized almost a moment too late what the tool was for, but that was better than not at all, and he was fast. He sprang forward, Sid dropped to the dirt floor and his glow going out, but there was plenty of fire to replace it.
Light flared up just as Reeve grabbed Celeste by the hips and yanked. She yelped as he swept her out of the forge, and the hearth burst into arcane life. The chamber blazed with heat, a pulse so intense that he was momentarily blinded, and then it dulled to a normal glow.
But the heat remained.
Hands were on top of his, but they didn’t fling him off, they only squeezed his grip on her hips tighter. Celeste’s back pressed to his chest, and she was breathing hard and fast, but that was to be expected—she had almost set herself alight in a fire meant for melting metal.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and it came out a rumble, his voice low as her ear was so close to his mouth.
Celeste said nothing, but he could see she was not on fire, the forge’s glow falling over her front. She wasn’t even singed, thank Valcord, but her chest was heaving, a bead of sweat running down her neck. He watched the droplet make an unholy creep toward the shallow valley between her breasts. If he dared to lie then, it would probably not be his arm that got lobbed off.
“Well!” Reeve gave her a push away, a bit more aggressively than he meant. “Apparently, that stick is for lighting the forge from the outside. The big, arcane ovens at the temple are like that too.”
Celeste stumbled but remained upright. “Oh, that would have been a smarter way to do it, huh?” She combed through her hair with her fingers in quick succession as she turned away.
Reeve stared into the newly lit forge, the fire dancing inside bright and…odd. Fire always moved as if it were alive, but this—this was different. At its heart, this flame was almost entirely rounded and looked as if it would spring back like jelly if he poked it.
A clearing throat from down by his boots tore his gaze away from the hearth. He scooped up Sid, checking the blade for nicks despite knowing there would be none. “So, now we wait?”
“Yes.” She picked along the smithy and then pointed. “Maybe back here would be best?”
There was enough space behind the hearth for the two to sit, backs against the sooty wall and hidden from the wide entrance. The arcane fire crackled in the quiet that batted at the inch or so between their shoulders, a struggle for Reeve to maintain while remaining obscured.
The silence spread between them as the night grew, and Reeve thought on a few occasions of something he might say, but it was always only half of something. If she would pick up the other half, he was unsure, but it was better not to risk—if they succeeded in catching this thing, as she was insisting they would, there would be no use or time for words after, only vanquishing.
And yet, Reeve was not good at sitting in silence when someone else was around, a fact he knew about himself because he had been told—many times—so he gave in because he could not be perfectly virtuous all the time.
“May I ask you a question?”
Celeste was only momentarily startled though he had kept his voice low, and then she nodded.
“Whatisa nox-touched?”
“Well, it’s ame,” she said quietly, fingers tapping on her knees with a nervous laugh. “There aren’t a lot of us. Actually, I don’t know if there are any more now, I haven’t spoken with another one since my sister, but, um, I’m really just a human—or, I was—but then I was exposed to noxscura and now…” She wiggled her fingers, and the darkness in front of them shifted slightly.
He sat with the answer a moment before he decided it did not clear things up. “May I ask you another question?”
She nodded again.
“A demon or a dominion must have been involved in granting you this power, yes? Or you learned it through study, surely?”
At this, she shook her head, wrapping a hand around her locket. “I don’t create arcana. It doesn’t come from inside me like it does for a mage like you. I can just manipulate it if it’s already around.”
Reeve took a deep breath and mumbled, “May I ask you one more question?” He was used to admitting he didn’t know things and requesting answers, but he also knew most people had their limits on how many answers they would give.
What he was not used to was the way Celeste looked up at him and nodded in exactly the same way she had done the first and second time, no hint that she would suddenly turn sour or deride him.
“Well,Ihave been exposed to noxscura.Manypeople have. Perhaps everyone in the realm, one way or another. You say you were born human, so…”
