CHAPTER14
The hammer is a meditation.
Strike. Pause. Inspect. Straightening blow. Heat. Repeat. Cool.
There is a rhythm to the forge throughout the year—planning in spring, stocking in late summer when the traders arrived, forging hard through fall and winter. Drew always said he hated those late months. That was when we would get ahead for the coming year while the weather was cool and the smithy was all the more lovely to be in as a result.
For the longest time I thought it was because my brother was lazy. How could he not enjoy the smithy when the world outside was piled high with snow? But then he became a hunter, and a lazy man does not hoist the sickle.
So, one Yule, as I stood off to the side of the town square—forbidden to dance, of course—with Drew keeping me company even when he could dance with any eligible lady he desired, I asked him why he hated it outright. He told me that he hated the smithy in those cold, long nights not because he didn’t want to work, but because the constant striking of metal rang painfully on the inside of his skull—a relentless noise that lingered even long after he went to sleep and brought an ache in the morning.
I didn’t understand his resentment for the noise then.
I still don’t.
To me, these sounds are a heartbeat, echoing across my ancestors. We have all shared it, and many more will share it in the years to come. Or perhaps not. Perhaps, as the vampires put it, this long night will finally draw to a close. Hunter’s Hamlet will wake from the nightmare it has existed within. We will reemerge into the human world, bleary-eyed and hopeful. We can see the sea, and distant cities, and maybe even grassy plains so vast the horizon swallows them whole.
The vampires come to me, one by one. Everyone but Ventos.
Lavenzia brings Ventos’s broadsword—the one thing he was unable to carry earlier. I’m surprised to find I don’t mind her company. She’s silent as she sits by the window, staring out at the cold mountains turned platinum in the moonlight. Silent companions are the best kind because they don’t distract me from my work.
Winny is the next to come, with dozens of little daggers that weren’t in the armory when Ventos was collecting things because she “doesn’t trust them out of her sight for long.” She has a bow for her fiddle now, and she draws it along the strings deftly. I almost think that she is playing to the beat of my strikes because every time I change up my rhythm, Winny’s playing changes, too. Light and fast, slow and soulful. The duet has me fighting a smile.
They come and go, silent guardians, or perhaps jailers. I pay them no mind regardless. I have a job to do, one that keeps my hands busy, muscles strained, and brow dotted with sweat. I think I am the closest to happy that I can expect to be here.
But it comes to an end, as it always does.
When dawn breaks, I’m wiping soot and metal from my hands. I admire my handiwork. It’s then that I realize just how much I completed. More than should have been possible. I’ve forged like this before, lost to the world. But even at my most productive, even at my strongest, I couldn’t complete this much in the span of a day and still feel this good.
It must be the bloodsworn magic. The vampire power and strength that still surges within me. I touch the hollow between my collarbones. My work feels tainted by—
Him.
It’s as if I’ve summoned Ruvan with a thought.
A hazy dawn shines in beams, cut by the iron of the windows, striking a patchwork on the floor. I opened the shutters long ago to have the light of the moon to work by and now the sun has entered without welcome. The vampire lord stands underneath the archway that leads to the old armory. The thick night that continues to slumber in the castle is wrapped around him like a blanket.
His hair is silvery in the low light, the same color as the metal I’ve been working with for hours on end. It’s a complement, even I must admit, to the golden hue of his eyes. He is a man of pure night and winter’s chill, and yet…he does not feel frigid in this moment.
Something about him is scalding.
It’s like I’ve stood here before. Like he’s come to me in this smithy many times. This moment, his presence, it’s achingly familiar and yet so different that an intense awareness has taken me. I know him in my blood. I feel him there, threatening to overwhelm me if I’m not careful.
“Are you finished?” His low rumble cuts through the smithy, reminding me of just how silent it has been since I stopped working and started cleaning.
“Yes.”
He steps forward. I straighten away from the weapons, staring, stunned, as he walks into the gray light of morning. He doesn’t burst into flames. His skin is kissed gently by the sun. The only reaction he seems to have to sunlight is blinking a few times.
“Are you prone to staring at men?”
My cheeks burn instantly and I look back at the table of weapons. “I wasn’t staring.”
“Admiring, then?” He draws out the words with purpose.
“Hardly.” I snort. “I thought vampires burn in sunlight.”
“When the curse claims us, in life or death, we do. But not before,” he says. “The vampir are not a people of the night naturally. Yes, our magic has always been at its strongest around the full moon. But it was the curse of the hunters that caused our people to begin existing only by moonlight.”