The forge used to empty me out. I'd heat the iron and strike it, and the noise in my head went quiet, because there was only the metal and the next blow. Now I'd catch the hammer at the top of the swing and find my head turned south, toward the cottage where she woke under another male's roof.
I'd set the work down, breathe, put the want back where it lived, and start again. I got good at it. Five days, every hour, I reached down my own throat and crushed the thing flat, and it grew back, and I crushed it again.
Chloe was Zarcal's. I'd handed her over with my own hands to starve exactly this, and instead I'd set it howling.
Then she walked into my forge on the fifth day.
"Good morning," she said, ducking under the lintel I'd never once had to duck under myself. "I'm told you're the only man in town who can fix this without setting it on fire. Which, given your whole situation," she waved a hand at the furnace, the coals, the literal fire, "feels like a stretch."
She held up a hand winch, one of Zarcal's, the spring sheared clean through. Zarcal sent her on errands out of pure good-hearted instinct, never once dreaming where they led. He'd have told her the surly smith was harmless. He had no idea the surly smith had stood at Kazan's fire a week ago and watched her walk away so he wouldn't have to feel the thing he was feeling now.
"Leave it on the bench," I said, and turned back to the anvil, because looking at her cost me and I was already overdrawn.
She didn't leave it on the bench. She came all the way into the heat and the dark, set the winch down, and stood there looking at the rack on the east wall with her head tipped, all those blades catching the furnace glow, oiled and sleeved and waiting.
"That's a lot of knives," she said.
"Tools."
"My dad had a garage full of tools and never finished one project. Aspirational man." Chloe wasn't smiling now. She walked the length of the rack, slow, not touching, and I kept my hands on the work and my eyes on the iron, because I knew what that wall said about a man and I was waiting for her to say it back to me. She got to the end and turned. Whatever she'd worked out, she kept it. "What are you so sure is coming?"
Nobody asked me that. Remmen called it morbid. Kazan and Korfas kept their mouths shut about it. She walked in, looked at my scars hung up oiled on the wall, and asked it plainly because she wanted the answer.
"Who knows?" I said. "That's the point of being ready."
She let it go. She ran a finger down the bench, picked up a pair of tongs, turned them over, and set them back exactly where they'd been. "You and Zarcal," she said. "You're close."
"We've known each other over twenty years."
"That's not what I asked. I've known people twenty years I wouldn't cross the street for." She looked at me sidelong. "Close?"
"When the arena gate opened, it opened on both of us." I didn't have a cleaner way to say it and didn't go looking for one. "He's my brother. Blood never came into it."
She nodded slowly.
"He'll talk about anything, you know," she said. "Give him a fence repair and he'll make an epic of it. But there's a room in him he keeps the door shut on. You walk near it and he goes around, smiling the whole way." She set the tongs down. "So... If something came out of that room one night. If a person happened to hear it. Would she be telling tales, taking it to you? Or doing right by him?"
"Depends what came out."
"Right." She picked at the edge of the bench, and when she spoke again, the lightness had worn down to almost nothing. "He doesn't sleep. I had him figured for the type that's out like a lamp, big strong man. He isn't. He's up in the dark, and last night he was talking. Low. Giving orders." Her eyes came up to mine. "I have no idea who he was talking to. Calm as you like, to nobody at all. I lay there and didn't go to him because everything in me saiddon't, and I've had no one to ask who'd know what it was. No one who'd hear me ask and know I was asking for his sake and not my own."
The cold thing that went through me then had nothing to do with wanting her.
"When he gives orders to the dark," I said, "you don't wake him. You get out of the room. Slow. Hands where he can seethem. You don't touch him and you don't put yourself between him and the door."
Chloe had gone very still. "You're scaring me a little."
"Good. A little scared keeps you fast." The words came out flat and certain, and I stopped, because it was the most I'd said to anyone in a year, and I'd handed it to her the only way I knew how to hand anyone anything.
The right thing to do would have been to walk her to Nezara's office that same hour and pull the match apart with my own hands. I'd handed her to a man who woke up fighting, to spare myself one feeling. I knew it standing there, and still I didn't move.
"Words won't be enough," I said instead. "Not in the dark, not if it comes to his hands. You should know more than words." I held my hand out, palm up. "Give me your arm."
She looked at the hand, then at me. "Why?"
"Because you're not built to win a pull against one of us, and someday you might have to try. Give me your arm."
She set her forearm across my palm, light, watching my face the whole time. Her wrist was nothing in my hand, the bones of it thin under my fingers, the pulse going quick. "If he takes hold of you when he's in that state," I said, "you don't fight the entire hand. You'll lose. You drive at his thumb, the one weak place, turn your arm against it, and step off his line. Like this."
