PROLOGUE
Lorkin
Metal didn't lie to you.
You put it in the fire, you waited, you struck it while it glowed. It became what you made it and nothing else, and it never decided overnight that it wanted to be something different.
It never looked at you with its entire face open like the world had ever once kept a promise.
I trusted three things on Ceres-9: The fire, the hammer, and the row of blades along my east wall that no one had ordered and no one would ever need. That was the hope, anyway. If the weapons I forged were needed, our old troubles had returned.
I'd hung eleven of them that winter. Short, heavy, balanced for a minotaur's grip, oiled and sleeved and waiting. Remmen called it morbid the one time he saw the rack. Kazan never said anything, which was worse, because Kazan had stood in the same transport hold I had with blood in his eyes, and he knew exactly why a freed man might want a wall of edges between himself and the dark.
We'd been slaves once, weapons before we were ever men. The Protos Empire bred us for the pits and penned our womenlike stock, and when we tore the bars off and took the fleets and bled our way to this cold wet rock, somebody decided we got to be farmers now. Smiths. Citizens.
Monsters who filled orders and paid taxes, and danced badly at feasts.
Fine. I could be a smith. But I'd watched too many good ones die behind a cage that wouldn't open, waiting on help that didn't come, to ever again be a man with empty hands.
Now, I forged blades nobody asked for, and I slept fine. Mostly. I slept fine in the way a man sleeps when he knows where every sharp edge in the building is and can put his hand on three of them between the bed and the door without opening his eyes.
The settlement thought I was respectable.
Remmen liked to say it at meetings, gesturing at me with his cup: there's Lorkin, he keeps forty workers honest, pays his taxes. He's never any trouble.
He meant it as a compliment. He didn't know that the respectability was just the war wearing work clothes. A man who'd been a weapon his whole life didn't stop being one because somebody handed him a forge and a charter and a word likecitizen.He just found a shape for it that wouldn't frighten the neighbors. The orderly shop. The tools racked to the inch. That row of blades, oiled and patient, that I told myself was for the others, for the day the gate opened again, when really it was for me, because I could not lie down at night in a world I didn't have a weapon's reach away from.
Kazan had the orchard. Korfas had found a kind of quiet. Zarcal had cider and a laugh that fooled most people.
We'd each found our own way to carry the thing out of the pit. Mine was iron. I'd made my peace with it years ago, and I did not need a bride to come complicate the one arrangement I'd ever gotten to work.
The terminal on the wall pinged.
I knew what it was before I crossed the shop because it had been pinging for three weeks and I'd been ignoring it for just as long. The Agency seal had stopped being a surprise around the time Remmen sent a clerk out to read it to me in person.
You have been selected.An appointment to choose a bride. My name. My citizen file. A countdown blinking in the corner like I'd asked for any of it.
I hadn't.
Someone had decided for me. There were only two men in New Knossos soft enough or smug enough to do it, and one of them had spent the last year catching figs in his kitchen with a tiny human woman throwing them at his head.
Today the countdown read zero. Below it, fresh text.Non-compliance will be noted on your record. Mayor's office cc'd.Remmen, making it official. Making it the kind of thing that followed a man.
I set the tongs down hard enough to leave a mark and went to get my name struck off that list myself.
The Agency office sat in a clean off-world box wedged between the apothecary and the cider house, looking like a tooth from somebody else's mouth. The door was built for humans. I had to turn what was left of my horns to clear it, and I'd ground those down years ago.
I smelled her before the door had fully closed.
It came in under the cheap paper and the off-world solvent, and it had no business in that room. Warm. Bright, somehow, the way a struck spark is bright. Something green and sweet I couldn't name and wanted, suddenly and with my whole body, to put my face into and breathe until I drowned.
My nose flared. My hands closed on nothing.
Mine.
The word arrived ahead of thought and didn't bother asking permission. It went in behind my breastbone and lodged there like a splinter of hot iron, and every other thing I'd walked in to say went out of my head at once.
Mate.
