I am like no one but myself.

Ikari’s voice came like a breath on the wind. “It is time, my lady. It is done.”

• • •

Eliana lived in a humming cloud of fire.

She was afraid to move, so she kept her breathing shallow and thin. Light-headed, she used the tongs to lift the crucible. It was too heavy to move easily, even with her mind swimming in its strange overheated euphoria, and her arms trembled. But when Simon moved to help her, his hands cupping hers, his breath hot against the back of her neck, she shook her head.

If he joined her on this thrumming ledge, it would crumble.

Distantly she realized tears were streaming down her face, the flames pulling heat from her eyes.

She poured the molten metal—a dirty gold color, smoking and glossy—into the mold the acolytes had fashioned for her, and lowered the crucible back into the hearth. Then she used the tongs once more to lift the mold away from the fire and set it on a stone ledge to cool.

“My lady,” said Ikari gently, “might I suggest going to wash your face while the metal cools?”

“No.” Eliana shook her head. “I’m not leaving until it’s done.”

• • •

She sat silently beside the mold, hugging her legs to her chest. Beyond her blurry field of vision, the hearth fire blazed, ecstatic and vicious.

Without a word, Simon set a cup of water beside her.

She ignored it. The balls of her bare feet balanced on the rocky ledge. A sly wind butted against the backs of her knees, trying to unbalance her.

But she was not afraid.

She sat beside the Forge’s hearth, its flames dancing against her skin, and pushed the air out of her lungs, down her arms, into the cooling metal—strengthening it, gilding it with her mother’s blazing blood.

The world was suffused gold with light. The shimmering air undulated around her.

Eliana breathed, and for a wild instant, her weariness so complete her mind felt stretched thin as fine paper, she thought she felt the world breathe with her.

• • •

Two hours later, the metal was cool enough to remove from the mold.

Eliana rose, shoulders and legs and chest aching, eyes burning. Using the tongs, she removed the twin pendants from their molds and placed them on an anvil the acolytes had provided for her. Then she sat beside it and, with a charcoal pencil, drew shapes on the pendants’ rough surface.

She was no artist; her lines were crude and uneven. But she refused to let anyone else touch the pendants. They carried the weight of her inside them. They were hers to use, and perhaps, someday, if she wished it, hers to destroy.

Her exhaustion was so complete she hardly understood her own actions. But she continued working, hunched over the anvil. Once her drawings were complete, she retrieved a small hammer and chisel from the array of tools the acolytes had spread out for her and began chipping away at the metal, along her clumsy sketched lines. Each strike of the chisel jarred her bones.

For hours she worked, refusing Simon’s silent offers of water. She accepted only the rag he offered to wipe her face, and when at last she had finished, one of the pendants boasted a crude etching of a sun.

On the other, a jagged-bladed dagger—her Arabeth, her beloved. The mother killer.

One of the acolytes brought her a honing stone. Bleary-eyed, dry-mouthed, heartsore, she used the stone and thick, soft rags to file down and polish the unadorned sides of the pendants and their rims until they gleamed.

At last she sat up, her shoulders cracking, her back muscles screaming, and she thought she heard the Eliana sitting by the hearth fire let out a soft sob of exhaustion.

The real Eliana, however, was standing on the edge of the cliff upon which she had balanced for an age.

She peered down into the chasm that awaited her to find that it was no longer a chasm, but a river, near and roaring and golden. It didn’t look like blood, but she knew that it was, and she craved it as she had craved nothing else in her life. Not Harkan, not the tongue of the Orline woman Alys, nor the girl she had given her first kiss at the edge of seven. Not Simon, not finding Rozen. She dipped a toe into the river’s swirling gold eddies, and a charge ripped up her leg, pinning her where she stood.

She looked up, dazed. The forging room was hot and quiet, the flames dying. Morning light shone through the room’s high windows, illuminating Saint Grimvald’s stern face. Shapes moved through the room, shadowed and gentle.

“My lady, are you ready?” asked Ikari, very near.

For answer, Eliana held up her hands.

Using lengths of chain so slender and cool that they felt like ribbons of silk against Eliana’s skin, Ikari and two young acolytes settled the pendants in her palms. The chains hooked over her middle fingers, along the backs of her hands, around her wrists.

When they had finished, Eliana’s pendants sat against her palms like twin drops of fire. The metal had cooled long ago, and yet the pendants jolted her, branding her, and she wondered how she had ever existed without these chains around her wrists. They were a part of her, and always had been, that much was obvious. She had carved slivers of bone from her ribs and fashioned them into these discs now cradled in her hands.

A sharp energy swelled within her, drumming eagerly against the husk of her skin, and it felt both strange and familiar. Familiar, because she had lived a long time with the knowledge that she was ill-fitting in the world.

Strange, because at last she understood why.

She blinked, returning to herself with a sharp lurch, as if awakening from a wild dream. Her hunger, her thirst, her fatigue, the throbbing pain knitting her muscles to her bones—it all crashed down upon her at once, and she staggered forward with a cry.

Simon caught her before she could fall, and she was too tired, too overcome, too angry to fight him. She hadn’t asked for this—being born to the Kingsbane; escaping death on the night of her birth, only to be flung into a doomed future by a frightened little boy.

Bitter tears rose to her eyes as she considered the awful truth that beyond finding the antidote that would save Navi, she knew nothing of what the future held for her, nor how to face it.

Feeling ill and fevered, her shift soaked through with sweat and stained with soot, she turned into Simon’s chest and allowed him to fold her into his arms. Though she fully intended to disappoint him in the end, she decided she would allow herself this one small moment of respite, for he smelled like smoke and sweat and hot metal. He smelled of death, and that comforted her, for death was one thing she still understood, even as the rest of her world had changed before her eyes.

“Now what?” she mumbled against his shirt, her hands trapped between them. Her voice sounded worse than she felt, and she hoped that would make him pity her.