13
BOUND BY IRON
The heat of Temple’s forge consumed him, lining every inch of his body as he leaned over his workshop table, wrapping twin strips of iron around the mandrel.He pushed one lower down the mandrel, forcing the circlet larger.The other he let cool on the smaller end where it mirrored the size of Diana’s finger.His father had forged his wedding bands.Temple’s best friend, Nico, had forged his wedding bands.
Alchemists always did, a wedding rite that traveled so far back in time, it seemed to have no beginning.Where there was an alchemist ready to take a partner, there was a band of metal ready to bind them together, cut from the apprentice stone he kept most of his life in his pocket.
He considered the two newly made rings.They were the right size.They were the right material.But something was missing.He swiped his thumb over the smaller one, letting its heat imprint on his skin, letting it tell him what he was missing.
Something distinctly Diana.
The night they’d met, she’d been wearing lapis lazuli beads around her neck, and their color had wobbled a bit when light hit it.She needed something bright, something that wobbled a bit, spilling into other colors.
Rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck from side to side, he left the worktable.Across the workshop there was a large cupboard composed mainly of small drawers.Each drawer was meticulously labeled, and he drew his fingertips down several of them, pausing here and there.Ruby?Diamond?Both beautiful but neither entirely right.They better suited his sisters, his mother.The only women he ever made jewelry for.Many alchemists found their calling as jewelry makers, seeking rhythm and purpose in the natural connection between stones and metals.
Temple knew how, but he didn’t find delight there, wasn’t enough of an artist for it.
He grunted, his hand pausing.This one.He pulled open the small drawer and scooped up a handful of rough opal.Something fluid about it, the colors difficult to catch.Opals were a bit like water, pinks and purples and yellows shifting away before they could fully be caught.
And Diana… she had run him a merry chase.She was an opal—shifting and fluid and out of reach.
By the time he’d returned to the worktable, he’d crushed the opal in his hands, heated it.He dragged his thumb through his opal-powdered palm then, concentrating the intense heat of his body into that digit, he spread the opal around the outside of Diana’s ring as it cooled on the mandrel.It glowed now, even as the heat at the iron’s core began to cool.It would always glow.He’d left a bit of his own heat in the pearlescent streak.Next to his own plain iron band, Diana’s seemed a bit of divinity.
Perhaps…
He lifted his ring from low on the mandrel and rested on the outside of Diana’s ring.He twisted, round and round, adding a bit of heat with his fingertips.
Iron boiled inside him.Hell, he hated making jewelry.When he made bigger things, he could swing a hammer, beat the heat out of his body.But when he was forced into small, precise work, the heat built and built, hardening his muscles, lengthening his spine.He’d barely fit through the doorway when this was through.He’d need some physical release after this.A necessity.
When he’d finished twisting the opal from the outside of Diana’s ring into the iron on the inside of his own, he settled it once more low on the mandrel, right at his ring finger’s size.Then he cleaned up the shop, waiting for the rings to cool.Once they had, he pocketed them and headed home.Years ago, he’d moved away from Nickleby House to Bloomsbury Square.His neighbors were other alchemists, and the terrace houses there came with workshops at the back alongside the mews.His bedchamber was but an alley’s width and a short flight of stairs away.
Tomorrow his wedding day.He should get some sleep.
But he only got so far as the back door of his house when he diverted his course and made for the broad streets beyond the mews.He rolled his shoulders in his too-tight jacket and cracked his neck left and right.He needed a walk more than he needed sleep.He needed movement so his feet didn’t pinch in his boots and he didn’t appear a hulking brute when he stood up with Diana in the small London chapel tomorrow morning.He’d corner her before the ceremony, place his ring on her finger when they were alone.Or maybe he could give it to her tomorrow night.In his bed.
He should have told the king about the wedding, sent an invitation, even.Instead, he’d acquired a marriage license and sent Sybil, Helen, and his mother to browbeat Diana into buying a new gown.Diana would not have accepted money from him.But she’d not been able to tell three of the strongest women of the Grant Army no.
Sometimes he was too clever.
He’d need to be for what awaited them.They couldn’t keep the marriage secret forever.He needed her on his arm in public to keep the king happy, and once that happened… He rolled his shoulders back and increased his pace.Damn it to hell.Once she was on his arm for all to see, her cousin would see her, too.
Could he… have Fordham killed?Then the danger would be well past, and?—
No.Diana would likely kill Temple for thinking it.Surely Fordham wouldn’t touch her with Temple by her side and in her bed.Not when Temple was a favorite of the king.
Hell.He should be thinking about other things.Not keeping Diana safe.She was a means to an end—secure a wife, appease the king, open new doors for his family.
He stopped mid-stride, looked up at the building to his right.
Damn.
If she was nothing more than a means to an end, why had he come here?To Lady Guinevere’s Potions?
Diana’s window was dark.No—there—a flicker of light in a bottom corner.The iron of the hanging sign had already been fixed.He’d made sure it was the morning after he’d ruined it.But it wasn’t set.He’d thought it better to leave an easy pathway to Diana’s window.Just in case.
He winced before he jumped up to hang from the thin bar.Hopefully Lady Guinevere could wait a bit longer for him to fix it again.He was getting married tomorrow.
He swung a few times, leveling himself up until he supported his weight in his arms on the bar.The iron and the brick it was attached to groaned.The walk had not been enough to drain the iron from his body.It still boiled there, ready.He let it loose, grasping the iron of his precarious ledge and stretching it up toward her window.
