HER CROWN, HIS FLAME
Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
CHAPTER SEVEN: BLUE FIRE AND IRON
Bastian's forge sat in a hollow behind the house that Olivia had somehow never noticed in two weeks of living there, a low stone structure built into the hillside itself, its chimney disguised as a broken tree trunk, its heat rolling out through the open front in a wave that hit her a full ten paces before she reached the door. Inside, the walls were hung with half-finished blades and curling scraps of metal, and the air smelled of scorched iron and something sharper underneath it, something that prickled against her skin the way lightning did before a storm broke.
"You're late," Bastian said, without turning around. He stood at the anvil with his back to her, forearms bare and scarred, working a strip of raw metal with the patient, brutal rhythm of a man who had been doing this for longer than her entire kingdom had existed. "Elliot said you woke a stone circle yesterday. Congratulations. Stone doesn't care whether you deserve it. Fire does."
"I didn't ask fire's opinion."
"You will." He finally turned, and Olivia understood, meeting his cobalt eyes, exactly why the others had warned her, in careful, sideways ways, that Bastian would be the hardest of the seven to win over. "Elliot thinks you might actually be what you claim. Theo's certain of it. I think you're a very convincing grieving princess who's found herself a convenient army to point at her stepmother, and I have not yet decided whether that makes you dangerous to us or simply dangerous to yourself."
"Does it matter which, if I still end up teaching you either way?"
Something that was not quite a smile moved across Bastian's mouth. "No. It doesn't. Come here."
❖ ❖ ❖
The task, when he finally explained it, sounded simple, and proved, within the first ten minutes, to be nothing of the kind.
"You'll forge your own blade," Bastian said, laying a strip of raw, unshaped metal across the anvil. "Not because we're short on weapons. Because metal only listens to someone who understands it, and you cannot learn to command something you've never had to shape with your own hands." He nodded toward the low, banked fire in the forge's heart, a strange, restless blue instead of ordinary orange. "That's not coal fire. That's ours. It will not burn you the way a normal flame would, if you can hold it properly. If you can't, it will burn you considerably worse."
"How do I hold it properly?"
"You'll find out."
She found out within the first quarter hour, the blue fire licking up her forearm the moment her concentration wavered, a burn unlike anything she had ever felt, cold and sharp at once, gone as quickly as it came but leaving behind a mark that throbbed in time with her pulse. She did not cry out. She had learned, in two weeks among these people, that crying out accomplished nothing except giving Bastian one more reason to believe exactly what he already suspected about her.
She picked the metal back up, and tried again, and burned again, and did not stop.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adam appeared at the forge's entrance sometime during the third hour, ostensibly delivering water, and Olivia caught the particular tightness in his jaw the moment he saw the raw, angry burns tracking up her forearm.
"That's enough for today."
"It is not remotely enough for today," Bastian said, not looking up from where he stood supervising Olivia's grip on the tongs. "She's barely begun to understand the fire's temper."
"She's bleeding."
"She's learning." Bastian's voice did not rise, but something in it hardened. "If you keep stepping in every time this costs her something, Adam, she will never learn to survive the cost on her own. Is that truly the lesson you want to teach her? That someone else will always be there to catch her before she falls?"
Adam's hands curled into fists at his sides. "That's not the same as watching her burn for sport."
"No one is burning her for sport. I am burning her for truth, which is considerably less comfortable and considerably more useful." Bastian finally looked at his younger brother directly. "You want to protect her. I understand the impulse better than you think I do. But protecting her from every hard thing is not protection, Adam. It's a different kind of cage."
Olivia, watching this exchange over the glowing metal in her hands, said nothing at all, though something in her chest ached at the casual, furious way Adam had said watching her burn, as though the words had cost him something to release.
"I'm still here," she said, finally, when the silence had stretched too long. "I can speak for myself."
Both brothers turned to look at her.
"Then speak," Bastian said.
"Leave him out of it. This is between you and me." Her hands, raw and burned, tightened around the tongs. "You think I'm using you. Fine. Prove me wrong the only way that will actually convince you. Teach me until I can't fail, instead of standing there deciding, in advance, that I will."
Something that looked almost like approval crossed Bastian's scarred face. Adam, in the doorway, said nothing further, but he did not leave either.
❖ ❖ ❖
By the fifth hour, exhaustion had burned away whatever patience Olivia had left, and when Bastian, testing her focus, deliberately let the blue fire flare too close to her hands during a critical fold in the metal, she did not simply flinch away from it. She turned, tongs still in hand, and swung them at him in pure, unthinking fury.
Bastian caught the blow easily, but something in his eyes sharpened with interest rather than annoyance.
"There it is," he said. "Now we're getting somewhere."
He came at her properly then, not with a blade but with his bare hands and his considerable strength, testing her, forcing her backward through the scattered debris of the forge floor, and Olivia understood, with a clarity that cut through her exhaustion like cold water, that she could not win this by matching his strength. She had never been able to win anything that way.
She looked instead at the forge floor around her, at the scraps of curled, discarded metal scattered from a dozen unfinished projects, and felt something in her chest answer the pull of it the same way it had answered the stones in Elliot's circle.
The metal rose at her call, jagged and half formed, and folded itself into a rough, ugly shield in front of her just as Bastian's next blow landed, ringing off the surface instead of her body, sparks scattering across the packed dirt floor in a bright, startled arc. For one suspended second neither of them moved, the shield still glowing faintly at its rough-forged edges, humming with the same restless blue heat that lived in the forge's heart.
"Well," Bastian said, and this time the almost-smile made it all the way to something real. "That'll do."
❖ ❖ ❖
The burns, once the adrenaline faded, hurt considerably more than they had during the fight itself, and Olivia found herself sitting outside the forge as the evening cooled, forearms raw and stinging, watching Bastian and Elliot discuss something low voiced near the anvil that she was too tired to try to follow.
Adam sat down beside her without asking, a small clay jar of pale ointment already open in his hands.
"You don't have to do this," Olivia said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same words she'd once said to Theo over a very similar bowl of linen and water. "Rowan could—"
"Rowan's busy with Bastian's own idiot burns. He does this every time he trains someone new." Adam took her arm without further ceremony, his touch far gentler than his usual manner suggested it would be, working the ointment carefully into the raw skin. "Hold still."
She held still. It was easier than she expected, watching his face rather than her own arm, the careful concentration he brought to a task he clearly did not want anyone to notice him being careful about.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to regardless."
"Why do you do this?" She gestured, with her free hand, at the ointment, at him, at the whole quiet, careful shape of the last quarter hour. "You spend half your time making it very clear you hate me. And then you do this."
Adam's hands did not still, but something in his jaw tightened.
"I don't need to like you," he said, finally, "to not want you dead."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting." He finished with her left arm and reached, without asking, for her right, his touch still careful, still deliberate, entirely at odds with the flatness of his voice. "You're going to keep doing reckless, ridiculous things in front of Bastian and Elliot and everyone else who's still deciding whether you're worth the trouble of saving. Someone has to make sure you survive long enough to prove them right."
Olivia studied him for a long moment, the firelight catching in his red hair, the particular, stubborn set of his jaw that she was beginning to recognise as the shape he wore whenever he'd said more than he meant to.
"That sounded almost like you believe in me," she said, quietly.
"Don't get used to it."
But he did not pull his hands away when he finished, not immediately, and the silence that settled between them afterward felt different than the silence they'd carried for the past two weeks, less like a wall and more, Olivia thought, like a door someone had finally, carefully, left slightly open.
❖ ❖ ❖
She thought about it later, lying awake on the narrow bed nearest the fire, turning the day over the way Rowan had taught her, looking at it plainly instead of the way she wanted it to be. Adam had not once told her she'd done well. He had not needed to. He had sat beside her with a jar of ointment and steady, careful hands, and that, she was beginning to understand, was simply the only language he had ever learned for saying the things he could not bring himself to say out loud.
Two new powers of fire and metal now lived somewhere beneath her skin, alongside the stone Elliot had given her, and Olivia fell asleep counting the small, quiet ways a boy who claimed to hate her kept proving, without ever once admitting it, that he did not.