My heartbeat calms again.
My brother has always been a source of strength for me. His unbending belief in my strength and intelligence has kept me alive even at times when I struggled to believe we could survive.
Not for the first time, I remember the way he looked up at Asha when we huddled behind Malak’s throne, waiting for the Vandawolf to come and end us.
I’ll fight beside you.
Gallium has lived his life to that creed.
I hoist my chosen pack over my shoulder and follow closely behind him, conscious of Thaden’s presence at my back.
The path through the forest behind the castle grows darker where the trees thicken and then even darker still when we reach the opening to a gently sloping corridor down the side of the mountain.
“This is it,” Gallium says, his voice hushed. “The way the dirt along the bottom is undisturbed tells me the fae don’t use thispath. Probably because they don’t need to. They can ride their thunderbirds down to the plain.”
“Are you certain it lets out below and doesn’t come to a dead end somewhere?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not completely. But when I scouted for ways out of here, I didn’t see any other safe paths down this mountain.”
“How nice to have a thunderbird,” I murmur, knowing that we will need to keep an eye on both our path and the sky above us, since the birds can camouflage themselves against the night sky when they want to.
Thaden steps into the pass, studying the rock walls that curve up and over it. “I’m willing to take the chance. These walls are solid. They won’t collapse on us.”
Gallium and I follow, descending into the corridor. The farther we go, the higher the rock curves up and over us on both sides until only a slip of sky is visible above us.
The farther down we go, the darker it gets until Gallium dislodges stones with every step and whispers to me to watch where I walk.
It gives me an idea, an opening I can’t pass up.
A moment after Gallium’s warning, I allow myself to trip and stumble, making a lot of noise about it before I veer sharply to the side of the rocky corridor and press against it, my breathing unsteady.
Thaden is immediately at my side, and in the darkness of this cave-like corridor, the scent of dragon fire that radiates from his body is overwhelming. “Tamra?”
“It’s too dark,” I say, squinting at him in the gloom. “I don’t have your eyes.”
I’m too fucking helpless.
Or that’s what I want him to believe.
“You should get out your hammers,” he replies, faster than I thought he would. “Accessing your power will sharpen your eyesight, won’t it?”
As he speaks, I make out the turn of his head, but I can’t see exactly where he’s looking, only that his dragon scales seem to be catching the light right now, and his focus isn’t entirely on me.
“Good idea,” I whisper. “I don’t want to trip and break my neck. Gallium, do you agree?”
I wait for my brother to reply, his outline approaching me in the dark. He’d made it a few extra steps ahead of me when I tripped.
“Agreed,” he says. “We should carry our hammers into the fae encampment, too. Concealed under our clothing, of course. We don’t want it to look as if we’re about to attack them.”
I slide carefully to the ground, reaching for his arm before I drop my pack onto the ground between us and huddle over it. He places his pack beside mine, also huddling over, our heads nearly side by side as we retrieve our tools.
For the last ten years, we got very good at hiding the fact that we had access to our parents’ hammers and medallions. When I first picked up my mother’s hammer, I was terrified that her cruelty would have been imbued into the metal like Malak’s had been imbued into his hammer and medallions.
But the metal obeyed me, almost as if it had beenrelieved.
Its reaction to my touch made me wonder if the hammer might have originally belonged to my grandmother, since she’d fought against Malak when he’d first risen to power. From the little our mother had mentioned of her, I knew enough to recognize that she had been an incredibly powerful Blacksmith. It was only because our mother had betrayed her that she had been defeated and killed.
Within moments, Gallium’s copper hammer is in his right hand while my silver hammer is in mine. The copper hammerwas our father’s and Gallium has struggled with it. Our father’s House was Copperstream, and the Blacksmiths of that House did not share the kind of compassion and hope that our grandmother had.
