Chapter Text
The new office still smells like someone else’s decisions—old polish, candle smoke trapped in wainscoting, a darker bite of oil that lives in the hinge of every drawer. Cain has been Commander for six days and the room has mostly stopped resisting him; the maps lie flat now, the shelves hold the ledgers he wants held, and the chair creaks at the right point in his spine when he takes the weight off his heels. Order is an animal he knows how to break. Routine lives on the desk in tidy stacks, sharpened pencils aligned like a picket line.
Discipline carries him through first light: signatures, rosters, the morning briefing where rookies pretend not to stare at the Tin Man with a Commander’s sash. He rides the outer wall before breakfast and walks the inner yard after, takes a turn on the line with a training pistol because nobody under his command gets to forget that he knows the work in his bones. The day slots into him like the teeth of a gear.
Then the air shifts.
It’s not smoke, not soap, not anything he can tie to a bottle or a flower pressed in a book. It’s sweetness sharpened into ache, clean as first snow under sunlight, bright as the nick of a blade along the thumb. It hooks behind the ribs and drags. He stands very still in the corridor between barracks and office, breath stopped, and for a second the entire city narrows to the little feral thing that scent makes of his chest.
“Commander?” Jeb’s voice from the yard—too far to be inside the moment, mercifully. The ache loosens a fraction. Cain blinks hard, exhales slow. The air is just air again, the corridor just a corridor tiled in patient stone.
He doesn’t answer right away. He pins his jaw into place with the same pressure he uses on a trigger, turns his shoulder, walks. In the yard he corrects a recruit’s stance at the shoulder not the hip, which is how you teach an entire arm to remember. He says good. Again. Good. Reset. His son watches him with a little wrinkle between the brows that means concern and raised by a soldier both. Cain tips his chin once: I’m fine. The wrinkle eases, but doesn’t go away.
By midday the scent has threaded the city’s breath. It’s not constant. It’s worse. It comes like a tide he can’t chart yet: a wash across the street outside the north gate that takes his hands from steady to already curled; a brush of it on the stairwell that makes his back teeth throb; a ghost through the Commandery corridor that turns every intake of air into a decision. He keeps choosing. He knows how to. The Tin Suit didn’t leave him much, but it left him that.
He eats the lunch Jeb pushes onto his desk and tastes nothing. He flips a ledger to the next page and his pulse hops in his throat like a fish on a dock. By dusk, he has rubbed the ache at the base of his thumb raw and the bruise across his knuckles says he misjudged a doorframe.
He locks the office when the last runner leaves. He doesn’t trust the latch; he tests it anyway, twice. The room holds its breath with him. The map of the city glows in late sun, streets fading to thread. On the sill, the tiny glass jar he uses for spare buttons throws a fleck of light that twitches like a nervous eye. The sweetness walks through the door after him without opening it.
Cain crosses to the basin. The water is the temperature of metal. He runs both hands under it until numbness climbs his wrists; the ache only curls deeper, patient, knowing a different watch than his. He presses his palms to the porcelain and leans. His reflection puckers in the rippled glass above the washstand—lines etched deeper this year, hair cut too short to grab, eyes too bright. He inhales and that makes everything worse. He exhales and the room still smells like a promise buried under stone.
The first sound he makes is a growl, low, a grater dragged through wool. He swallows it. He doesn’t have use for a voice like that inside a room with a door that locks. Outside, maybe. On a field, maybe. Here, it’s just an animal talking to itself.
He goes to the window. The city below him is a book lying open under streetlamps. The towers of the palace are evening’s teeth against the indigo. Somewhere in there is the source, or the reason, or the person—for a sliver of thought he lets the word mate flash along the inside of his skull like lightning in cloud, then he slams all the shutters in his head because naming a thing is one step toward breaking it and he is not about to break this with his own mouth.
He breathes through the slice of his nose until the urge to tear something apart meets the wall he’s built for that purpose. He counts backward from sixty, because when control gets loud you make it countable, you put edges on it. On forty-three the scent peaks again, honey over steel, bright ozone. The bottoms of his teeth ache. He shuts his eyes.
He thinks of cold water in winter creeks. He thinks of the Tin Suit—iron and sweat-soaked straw, a world narrowed to breath and sound, the stink of rust and despair. He holds that until it bites. He lets it go before it poisons.
Movement steadies him. He rolls his sleeves and clears the desk from left to right, one crisp gesture per stack. He audits the requisitions with a precision bordering on cruel, rejects the bad ink and the sloppy numbers, writes what needs writing in a hand that never shakes. He does push-ups until his shoulders protest, then command-sits in the chair until the animal inside settles into a long, irritable crouch.
It’s a long day. He outlasts it. The city clock grinds into midnight. The smell thins like a tide going out, leaving him scraped raw and strangely clean. He leaves the office with his collar unbuttoned and his sleeves still rolled. He tells himself he’s going to bed. He tells himself that control is the same thing as patience. He doesn’t lie to himself about much; he won’t start now. He’s something like proud and something like murderous by the time the corridor empties him into the moonlit yard and the night air hits his teeth like ice.
Across the city, in a room that used to be a polite gauze-cloud of a princess’s and now belongs to someone who keeps a pair of boots by the bed and a knife behind the clock, DG can’t sleep.
Sleep refused her first at suncare, when the ward-lamps hummed too loud and the sheets felt like the wrong kind of skin. It was a distraction at dusk, a nuisance at nightfall. By midnight it’s an occupation. She lies on her back and watches the plaster ceiling breathe. The patterns shift, crawl, rearrange themselves into maps that she doesn’t know how to read. The skin at the base of her throat glows on and off, a pulse that doesn’t belong to her heartbeat. Magic skitters under her skin like fireflies that got lost and are now furious about it.
“Stop,” she says to no one, and flops onto her stomach, and the mattress laughs in springs.
Heat licks behind her sternum. Not fever. Fever is stupid and dull and the same all over. This is smart. It finds edges she didn’t know she had and traces them with a hot, amused finger. She rolls to her side and pulls her knees up and that doesn’t do anything except press the ache into a different arrangement of her bones. She sighs and that trembles into something more like a whine, and she tells herself absolutely not, we are not doing that.
She tries a cooling charm. Tutor taught it to her when she was twelve and refused to sleep in summer without every window open, which made the curtains into sails and the lamps into tiny lighthouses. She lets the syllables tumble off her tongue and lifts a hand the way the diagrams insist and the air over the bed goes frost-bright—then a rose-colored shimmer sparks at her wrist and that brightness softens, curls, warms like breath in a cupped palm. The ache purrs.
“Okay,” she says, and laughs because there’s nothing else to do. “Okay, so it’s like that.”
She throws the blanket off and then drags it back up because her skin misses the pressure even as the heat complains. She gets up and pads across the rug to the mirror and sees… not a stranger, exactly, but a DG drawn by someone who knew other flavors of her. Her pupils are blown wide, too wide for this light. There’s a sheen on her cheekbones that has nothing to do with a room’s temperature and everything to do with the way the air tastes. Her hair is a rumor around her head. She looks young and ancient at once and that scares her for half an inhale, and then she catches the way her mouth keeps trying to part and she has to look down at her own hands to stop from staring at herself like a painting she doesn’t quite trust.
She presses her fingers to the place that keeps flashing at the base of her throat. Warm. Not hot, not fever, not wrong. Just… awake. The red she thought she imagined this morning in the bath—something ribbon-thin waving under the skin—flickers again, definite now, as if it’s turning over in its sleep to face the sound she makes.
“What are you?” she whispers, but it comes out as, Who are you looking for.
She should call for Raw. He would hum at her and tell her in that soft, careful way of his that the city’s heart has a new rhythm and hers is joining it. He’d be right. She should call for her mother. Lavender Eyes would drink tea and tell her a story that isn’t a story about a girl who was too much and a world that learned how to hold her without breaking. DG should call for anyone. The idea of opening the door more than an inch makes the muscles at the base of her skull lock.
She opens the casement instead. Night pours in, dark and barley-sweet, the city smelling like rain that hasn’t fallen yet and iron that remembers what it was forged for. She grips the sill and leans into the air as if it might meet her halfway. The ache is a tide now, same as the one pulling whatever it is across town through corridors and over stone and under other people’s conversations. She doesn’t need words to know it’s coming in waves. She feels it when it crests. She feels it when it breaks.
Fae, she thinks, and the word is wrong and right. Auntie’s stories were always the safe kind, with thorns that had names and doors you could choose not to open. The histories in the sealed library were not safe at all. Names like knives; laws like mazes. Wings that appeared when you needed to fly or when you needed to fight. Oaths that bound like silk and cut like wire if you strained in the wrong direction. DG touches the glass with her fingertips and hears, at the edge of hearing, a thread being drawn out of an old spool: a red one, bright as mouth-bitten fruit.
“Not now,” she says to the thread. “Please. Be kind.” The word heat leaves itself unsaid, but it waits on her tongue like a taste she knows she knows.
The palace isn’t asleep. No palace sleeps. Servants pass like stitches in the halls. Guards yawn and shift their weight and pretend they aren’t counting toward dawn. Somewhere, a door shuts like the punctuation at the end of a sentence that doesn’t want to end. DG closes her eyes and lets the noise crawl up from the street, through the courtyard, over the sill, into her. The ache answers. Magic rolls onto its back and shows her its belly: here I am, scratch, fix, help, need.
She bites her lip and startles because it’s too easy to let her head tip back and breathe the way her body wants to breathe, throat open, spine softening, palms going still with a weight she can’t see. She sets her teeth in the inside edge of her cheek just hard enough to anchor. She counts backward from a number she doesn’t tell anyone she knows: sixty and then fifty-nine. The ache relishes the challenge. It meets her, playful, relentless.
Time does a slow fold. When she looks up again, the moon has moved to a different tile of sky. The light in her room has the empty blue of late-night kitchens and old heartbreak. Her heartbeat has become a pendulum, pendulum, pendulum. Every few swings the red at the base of her throat answers the bell of it with a pulse of its own, and each time it does her magic flutters its wings like it’s trying to learn how to fly inside her bones.
There’s a knock she can’t hear that lands soft on the back of her mind: Raw, probably, or a servant checking lamps. She ignores it and it leaves obediently. She’s not alone. The not-alone is terrible and wonderful. It makes the sweat between her shoulder blades feel like a promise. It makes her mouth dry. It makes the inside of her wrists itch like a storm coming in from the west.
By the time she crawls back into bed, the sheets are cool again. She turns her pillow to the other side and curls on it like a cat wraps itself around a decision. She puts one hand at her throat and the other under the edge of the mattress where the wood is earnest and real. She breathes. The room breathes with her. The city breathes with the room. The ache follows, a half-step behind, amused that she’s pretending she can lead.
She almost sleeps. The doze comes on her like a cloak—first at the shoulders, weighty and kind, then over the arms, then the ribs. Her knees uncurl a degree. Her mouth remembers how to close.
When it recedes, it does it without apology, and the heat is there in its place, not shy anymore. Not fever. This is a pull toward, not away; a call, not a warning. It drops through her like a stone into a well and the ripples hit all the edges she has filed smooth with practice. Her breath changes. She can’t help that part. She can’t pretend it’s normal. She can only make it quiet. She presses her lips together and hums, very gently, a lullaby she hasn’t sung since a tin man needed something to hold on to besides iron.
Out in the yard, Cain stops under the shadow of a barrack’s eave because that hum—he shouldn’t be able to hear it; he knows he shouldn’t; his skull shouldn’t be built to catch that frequency—but his bones recognize it the way a hound recognizes a note only it can love. His hand goes to his neck without orders from him. He looks at his palm like it’s a thing that might have words. It doesn’t. Not yet. He makes his hand come back down. He stands in the unlit strip of yard where moonlight doesn’t quite reach and, for the first time that day, lets himself admit that the scent is not going to stop because he wants it to. The admission is cool water and hot metal at once.
He wants to move. Every muscle he owns is a horse straining at harness. His control sits heavy in the driver’s seat and keeps the reins even. He thinks of Jeb sleeping two buildings over, head on a pillow stuffed with clean straw. He thinks of the rookies snoring in their rack. He thinks of the city that decided to give him back to himself and what he owes it for that choice. He thinks of an office still unlocked because he had to leave it to breathe and how he’ll double-check the latch in the morning.
He looks up at the palace, square shouldered against the sky, and feels something in it look back.
DG’s eyes are open in the dark. She hasn’t decided to open them. They simply are. She is aware of everything: the squeak of a cart on some far street, the tiny pop of cooling candlewax in its cup, the way the woven rug holds the day’s warmth while the flagstones under it give nothing at all. She is aware of her heartbeat and the other beat that is not her heartbeat and how they are learning a duet. She brings her hand away from her throat to see if that makes the red go dark. It doesn’t. It brightens, quick, like a delighted bird.
“Okay,” she says again, and the word is more honest this time. “Yes. I hear you.”
The heat purrs and kneads. There’s no fear in it. That surprises her even as she acknowledges that of course she would be this kind of fool, the kind who can stand in the doorway of a forest people warned her out of and step forward instead of back. She climbs to her knees to feel what her body feels like when it holds itself up instead of collapsing into the mattress. Her hair falls in her face and she blows it out and laughs because the laugh sounds like someone else for a second and she likes her.
She looks at the window. The city looks back. Somewhere out there, a man who wears his jaw like armor is standing very still and pretending the stillness is enough. She doesn’t know how she knows that; she knows it anyway. The red pulse in her throat agrees.
“Tomorrow,” she tells the room, and the room doesn’t believe her. The room has seen too much of her to fall for that voice.
She slides down under the blanket and drags it over her shoulder and takes one deliberate, deep breath and then another. She lets the ache lap at the edges and refuses to let it climb onto the furniture. Control isn’t about denying; Tutor said that once. It’s about choosing. She chooses to let the magic hum, to let the heat mark the corners in chalk, to let the sweetness in the air write itself in the margins of the book she’s reading called Herself. She closes her eyes and holds the image of a ribbon, redder than any ribbon she’s actually owned, curling on a tablecloth next to a cup of tea. It seems like a kind of kindness to give the ache a shape.
Somewhere beyond the wall, the scent lifts again, bare and bright. Cain lets the breath he’s been holding go. He looks like a man carved out of the notion of control and then sanded until the corners are handsome. Inside that statue, something old is pacing, smiling with too many teeth. He turns toward his quarters and makes his bootsteps even, because evenness is a gift, and he is merciful where he can be.
In her bed, DG dreams of a door. It is not the door she knows. It is carved with patterns she has seen only in the oldest books, vines that are not vines, thorns that are not thorns, a ribbon that is a river and a road and a promise. She reaches for the latch, not because the story says she must or because a lesson says she must not, but because the heat under her skin becomes a little quieter when her hand is there. The room breathes with her as she does. The city breathes with the room. The scent breathes with the city.
She does not open the door. Not yet. The tremor that started and didn’t have a name has one now and refuses to tell it. The word hangs just out of reach, laughing under its breath like someone who knows you’ll chase them when the time is right.
The night holds them both: a man who outlasts his own hunger and the girl who has stopped pretending it isn’t hers, the city caught between like a drumhead stretched to the right pitch, waiting for the first deliberate strike.