Page 37 of Steel Heart Iron Claws

Shrieking, I jump backward.

A figure slowly approaches from the far side of the tank, his features cast in the eel’s electric glow. My heart seems to stop as surely as if Tati had raised her ten fingers.

A man enters the room like a slow, heavy mist. The air grows tense, charged with an almost palpable sense of power. His beard is graying, yet his hair is still a honey blond, pulled back into a thick knot at the base of his skull. The ten points of his crown, rising like the points of a star, are etched with the symbols of the fae court. A steel brooch pinned to his doublet is cast in the size and likeness of an anatomical heart.

It’shim.

When he steps into the brighter light, it’s like all the air is sucked from my lungs. I never saw myself in Charlin Darrow’s bulbous features.

But in King Rachillon’s?

He has my straight, restrained nose. My same sea-blue eyes. From what I can tell, the same long hair, too.

“Daughter.” His voice is raspy and deep like he’s spent a lifetime around campfires. “I’ve waited a long timeto put eyes on you.”

My body refuses to move, lips frozen, trapped between fear and awe. The king places his hands on the sides of my face as though trying to find himself in my features, too.

Shaking, I let out a held breath.

He slowly tilts my head down and brushes a kiss on my forehead. When he releases me, he touches his anatomical heart brooch and whispers, “By the gods. You look so much like her.”

Though my throat feels too dry for words, I force these across my sandpaper tongue: “My father—my adopted father—often said that I carried my mother’s features. I was too young when she died to remember what she looked like in detail.”

Rachillon strokes his long beard. “Isabeau was a beauty. But she was more than that. She had a defiance that I see in you. Which is why I know that, as much as you pretend not to be, you’re seething with anger that I took you from Astagnon.”

You took me from more than Astagnon,I think.You took me from Basten.

I seal my lips to school my temper.

Measuring my response, I say slowly, “I’m not willing to embrace a kingdom—even my parents’ kingdom—that kidnapped hundreds of godkissed people and slaughtered innocent citizens.” I tilt my chin upward toward the glowing ferns, their cool light washing over my skin. “I was there. At Duren’s arena. I saw what your raiders did at your command. The starleons, too.”

On the rare occasions that I stood up to Charlin Darrow, he corrected me with a slap that ached for days. King Rachillon, however, takes my challenge with a flare of pride inhis eyes.

“I don’t relish the death of innocents.” He paces toward a pedestal that displays a pair of worn leather gloves. “Yet such is war. The gods blessed me with my own godkiss; I cannot deny it, as you cannot silence the animal voices in your head. I must do as the gods bid. Theywantme to wake them. To do so, I required godkissed people for their ability to find the fae resting sites.”

“And?” I place the marble pedestal between us, leaning forward over the seemingly mundane gloves. “You think the gods will thank you? Reward you? The gods will just as soon put you in a grave and dance upon it.”

I tense for the slap I feel sure to come—but instead, Rachillon throws back his head and laughs. When he finally wipes the mirth from his eyes, he says simply, “You are right that the gods can be capricious.”

Capricious.

As if they’re baby goats butting their half-inch horns against one another.

He picks up one of the leather gloves with as much reverence as if it were a crown jewel. “Do you know what these are? They are Immortal Artain’s hunting gloves. Whoever wears them shall have perfect aim. Come. Look at this.”

Rachillon steers me to the next pedestal.

“This knife—” he hovers his hand over a vicious curved blade with a serpent carved into the handle, “—is called the Serpent Knife. It was used in The Sacrifice of the Golden Child. Do you know the story?”

I shake my head softly. “In the convent, we only read the stories from Immortal Iyre’s chapter.”

He runs his finger over the serpent design. “In a timebefore time, Immortal Vale promised favor to a farmer if he sacrificed the prize kid out of his goat herd to the fae. The farmer, greedy and half-mad, used the knife to kill his youngest son instead and placed a chalice filled with the boy’s blood on an altar. Vale drank from the chalice, thinking it was wine. According to legend, that was the first time a human life was sacrificed to the fae. Vale didn’t mean to drink human blood, but he did, and it gave him far greater powers. It’s what turned them all from long-lived fae intogods.”

He speaks as casually of a boy’s murder as describing the supper menu. Ice runs through my veins as I think about the blood on Iyre’s lips.

Our blood fuels their powers.

He leads me to the next pedestal, which holds a delicate vase that swirls with mystical dark blue bubbles frozen in the glass.

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