He strokes my hair back, searching my eyes. “Why do you fear your power?”
“This isn’t power. It’s death.” My chest hurts as I curl my left hand against my side, closing my fist around the medallions. “I can take something beautiful and alive, and I can twist it. I can make simple, perfect things ugly and cruel.”
He continues to study me quietly. “Do you believe that whenyouuse your power, it can only be dark and malicious?”
“I know that’s all it is. I’ve taken life, turned living flesh into stone and ash.”
“In the defense of others.”
“A horrible defense.”
“Death is never anything but terrible.” He strokes my back as he speaks. “Your power doesn’t have to mean death, though, Asha. Milena could make you a hammer of light, not darkness.”
“Would she, though?” Bitterness rises within me because I’m not so sure. “When Thaden Kane first arrived, he relayed a very clear message from her: She thinks I’m a traitor to all Blacksmiths. Even if I hadn’t made this deal with the fae, she didn’t give me the correct hammer when she had the chance. If Malak told you the truth—and he could have fabricated all of it—then it means she actively chose to leave me powerless.”
“True,” Erik replies. “But you’re a Blacksmith. There are very few of you left. And you were my prisoner, not a traitor. It has to make her think twice about ending you.”
I grimace. “My vow to kill her…”
“Could work in your favor,” he says. “She may seek to bargain with you—a hammer for her life.”
I chew my lip. “Maybe.”
“As for Malak, he didn’t make it up. At least, not the parts I told you. I verified his story over time, piece by piece, by asking questions of those who saw and heard parts of events.”
“Like Genova.” I nod. “She said you asked her about the night Milena disappeared.”
“She confirmed Milena came to see her that night and that she was terrified.”
I remember what else Genova told me. “Milena brought a baby with her that night. Genova said she was sure it wasn’t a human baby.”
“It was a Blacksmith child, but I don’t know more than that.”
He doesn’t?I peer at him. “But something Malak said must have caused you to ask.”
He nods. “He mentioned it in passing in the context of how normally his sister was behaving that night, as if she hadn’t been about to betray him. He said she went out to welcome the latest Blacksmith baby into the world so she could begin the process of fashioning a hammer for them. Apparently, she liked to meet all Blacksmith children soon after birth.
“He was angrier about the fact that she would have known from the time ofyourbirth that you were like him, and she never told him.”
“So… the baby wasn’t important, after all.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not.” Erik’s jaw clenches. “When I crushed the Blacksmiths, I drew a line. I wouldn’t kill children. But in the end, I didn’t have to. Other than your siblings, the youngest Blacksmiths were around our age. And by fuck, I had no problem taking them down.”
He ends on a snarl and his intensity doesn’t surprise me. All of those youths walked in their parents’ footsteps. Their age didn’t make them innocent. In fact, some of them treated humans more viciously than their parents did. They thought they could gain favor with Malak that way.
Pushing away the memories, I rapidly work through the passage of time in my mind from the baby’s birth when I was five years old—when Erik would have been six—to the time when I was sixteen and he brought down my people.
“That child would have been eleven years old,” I say. “Maybe twelve, at most, depending on exactly when it was born.”
“That’s right,” he replies. “And yet, I didn’t encounter a Blacksmith child of that age.”
He’s peering at me as if I might have information about it, but I shake my head. “My life was dictated to me. ‘Go here.’ ‘Go there.’ ‘Do this.’ ‘Do that.’ I didn’t meet every Blacksmith or know about all of them.” I peer right back at him, since he’s had far longer to think about it than I have. “You must have a theory?”
His expression is shadowed now. “Malak was enraged that his sister had pretended everything had been normal by going to see that child. My suspicion, as fucking awful as it is, is that the area of the city he destroyed included that child’s home. Especially if he had a sense that the child would grow to be powerful.”
Genova described how the baby had bent a spoon with their little fist.
I shudder at how calculated Malak’s fury could have been. “Other Blacksmiths were killed that night. All part of the supposed rebellion.”
