Page 1 of Embers of Midnight
Before the Flame
Melina
24 years ago.
The trees burned in clean lines where oil had caught, heat rippling low over snow. Melina ran barefoot, bleeding, one hand locked around the black-fletched shaft driven straight through her shoulder. Poison rode the barb; the arm below it shivered with numbness. Labor had already taken hold—tightening bands that started in the back and ripped forward, sharp enough to bend her in half. Behind her, hooves hammered along a timber road. Hunters. The arrows had carried the same stink since childhood.
They didn’t know what she carried. They must not.
The stand of spruce broke and opened onto a narrow clearing. A single timber hut leaned under a roof patched with tin. No lamp. No smoke. Suitable enough.
She shouldered the door; the hinge complained; the wood gave. Inside: a cot, a short table shimmed with a stone, a bucket of water with ice along the rim. She dragged the cot across the threshold and set it as a bar. It would delay no one trained to enter; it gave her minutes—enough to matter.
Another contraction rose—a deeper, grinding wave that forced a sound from her and then stole it. She tore her skirt for cord, set a clean knife by her knee, braced wide on the boards, and breathed the way she had taught so many others: jaw soft, throat open, the body working because that is what bodies do.
The world narrowed to pain and counting and the exact places to put her hands.
When the crown pressed through, the cry that followed was small and fierce all at once. Melina folded forward and lifted the new weight against her skin. A girl. Warm. Slick with birth, lungs testing air in sharp takes, mouth already forming objections to a world too bright and too cold. Dark curls. Pale skin. Eyes that cracked open for a heartbeat and showed red-gold like banked embers.
Tears blurred everything. “Seraphina,” Melina whispered, breath catching on the middle syllable. “My fire-born star.”
Cord tied. A careful cut. The girl protested and then settled, pressed into the hollow of her mother’s collarbone, breath steadying with each pass of Melina’s hand across a tiny back. Relief hit hard enough to topple her. She held.
The light in the doorway changed—pressure in the air before sound. A shape filled the frame: armor scorched, hair wet with blood and melt, jaw locked to keep the rest of him from splitting. The presence that had turned armies now halted on bare boards and fixed on the child.
He came to his knees without elegance. “Melina,” he said, and the name broke in his mouth.
She lifted her face to him and found the line of his eyes. No accusation. Just recognition that had lived in her since the first time he reached for her as if she were not a prize but a person. “You found us,” she said. The words were small and full. “I knew you would.”
His hands hovered, trembling, then settled—one on the floor beside her hip for balance, one cupped beneath the curve of the cloak. He drank in the sight of the girl as if it hurt and he welcomed the hurt. “She’s… ours.” The word softened iron.
“Take her,” Melina said, and eased the bundle into his arms.
He held the newborn like a standard, reverent and terrified, a universe cradled against a breastplate that still carried scorch marks. The baby blinked once, yawned, and rested her cheek on leather, as if the heat under his skin belonged to her.
“I can fix this,” he said, eyes flicking to the arrow, the blood, the way her color had drained. The offer was raw and impossible.
Melina met the truth and did not look away. “There isn’t time.” The poison had already drawn a dark line along the veins at her shoulder. Each breath came narrower than the last. “Listen to me.”
He bent close, forehead to her hair, because distance was more than he could stand. He breathed like a man who had run too hard for too long and only now understood why. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
“Hide her,” Melina said. “Bind what’s in her. Bury it deep where no one can scent it. Let her be small. Let her be late on rent. Let her curse buses and cheap coffee. Give her years.” She swallowed; the swallow hurt. “Please.”
His jaw worked. “I can’t lose both of you in one night.”
“You won’t.” She lifted a shaking hand and found his cheek. Her thumb left a smear of ash and blood along the line of his face. “You will carry her out of this and make the world forget her for a while. Then you’ll bring her the truth when she can choose it.”
“Tell me to bind her,” he said, because orders were easier to obey than grief.
“I’m asking,” she answered, and the softness in it shattered whatever was left of his armor.
He shifted the girl to the crook of one arm and set his other palm above the tiny sternum. Heat gathered without gesture, drawn by will and oath. Lines resolved in the air—angular marks olderthan temples, assembled from pressure and power, not ink. The sigils nested, locked, and lowered like a net sinking through cold water. The baby stiffened once, mouth opening in a silent complaint, then settled again. The glow slipped beneath skin and bone to the deep place where power sleeps when someone stronger tells it to.
On the surface, nothing marked her. Under Melina’s ribs, the long, familiar warmth that had pulsed since the first quickening eased down, as if coals had been covered. “Good,” Melina breathed. “That’s good.”
His hand shook when he lifted it away. He had sealed cities and sworn oaths that bound nations; nothing had cost like this.
“Alaska,” she said, finding the word they had set aside for the worst day and the best reason. “Too much winter. Not enough gossip. A house that feeds children and forgets origins.”
