Page 101 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

That thought drew me up short. I chastised myself for being dramatic. The man who now held my hand as though it was a death grip did not want me because he thought I had god’s blood.

The idea, even though he was the one who voiced it, terrified him. I could see it in his eyes as he spoke the words, and I wasn't sure I had ever seen him truly afraid before.

The worry was still clear in his dark eyes, in the set of his shoulders. He was afraid of what it meant for me—for my safety.

Master Cassius had agreed with Io's assertion though—whole-heartedly and with a return of some of the excitement from when he was first dissecting the prophecy. It had not been news to him.

And because my brain had not yet managed to bridge the gap between what I already knew and this newfound information, Master Cassius did it for me.

"We once believed that Amon's advanced gifts, that golden fire in particular, came from a long-dormant drop of nephilim blood in the Aldur line.

The nephilim had great and powerful light magic.

After much study, we determined it was not possible that Amon retained this magic.

Shadow magic could never exist in someone with the blood of the gods.

Shadow magic was something so foreign and oppositional to the light that they were said to have feared it—absolutely abhorred it. "

I glanced at Io beside me, thinking of the beautiful shadows just under his skin. I felt myself becoming unreasonably angry at those old gods for their ignorance in fearing something that they had likely just not understood.

Io didn't seem to notice or care about the fear of some long-dead gods though, as he explained to the master his theory that I had the same golden fire. I watched Cassius' face light up again.

"That only lends credence to the theory, don't you see?"

I, at least, did not see, so the master explained.

"The gods were known to be all powerful—their magic as infinite as the stars.

Where the mages of this world can summon magic, the gods could create the same using only an ember of the elements around them.

If we are correct and you have the blood, then you could be taking an ember from Amon and. ..and multiplying it!"

"That would explain why she has also shown an affinity for blood and life magic, even in those cuffs," Io added, taking my hand where it lay on my lap, my fists tightly clenched.

Master Cassius’ excitement seemed near to bursting even as I was still shaking my head. "So where does Amon's fire come from, then?"

"We don't know!" Master Cassius admitted, never losing a bit of his exuberance.

It seemed they hadn’t known a lot, I thought, as we reached the forge. A group of men and women with almost universally thickly muscled arms crowded around me to examine the cuffs on my wrists.

Several were dwarves as I could tell by their slightly shorter stature and general dwarvish features. Many of them were bearded, men and women alike.

The Master Armorer of the Citadel, a pretty, red-gold-haired dwarf woman with muscular arms and massive thighs beneath her leather apron, shook my hand with vigor as she announced herself.

“Pettal Standifer, formerly of Morgus Tyrrund,” she said proudly. Morgus Tyrrund was one of the smaller underground cities in the Vildspher Mountains.

The armorer smiled affectionately at me. She had wide, unassuming green eyes and a soft, downy-looking beard. She was not at all like any of the dwarves I’d met in Albiyn. They were shorter, rougher, and a great deal hairier.

Pettal was soft-spoken, even though her words held a ring of authority as one of the Citadel's masters. She had the usual deep, rich Vildspher accent that seemed to rumble pleasantly from the chest instead of the throat. I liked her immediately.

"Removing the cuffs will take a great deal of spell work," she told us, not unkindly.

I sat back and watched as Pettal and a young, male apprentice wound copper wire around each of the cuffs before shoving a strip of leather between them and my skin.

It looked like I was wearing leather vambraces by the time they had finished

"Can you help shield her from the heat, My Lord?" Pettal asked Io.

"I can," he said, coming to perch behind me on the wooden bench where I sat with my hands laid across a large black anvil.

His arms came around me, and he slid his hands down my forearms. A chill, icy sensation ran all the way to my fingertips as he rested his chin on my shoulder lightly. The feeling of him behind me was a comfort, at least.

I was full of nervous energy as Pettal began to speak, at first muttering under her breath as she held one end of the wire from each cuff in her hands.

The apprentice stood with a pair of massive metal snips poised in the air to cut the cuffs when it was time.

"Wodus tictus wodus conflagrium." Pettal's words were loud and clear as she chanted the spell, her eyes scrunched up under a brow already beaded with sweat. "Wodus tictus wodus conflagrium," she repeated, her voice rising.

The metal of the cuffs began to smoke and blacken. The mellitrium made a popping, cracking sound, and then gold began to bubble up and run down across the leather.

"Wodus tictus ignittus mettribium," the armorer said, the words slightly altered as her voice carried down the chamber. Sweat began to slide down her forehead even though the room had grown chilly.

When a thin stream of molten gold ran past the edge of the leather and onto the skin of my arm, Io's shield protected me. It rolled off harmlessly, dropping onto the anvil's surface where it cooled into a rounded bead of gold.

"Wodus titctus wodus conflagrium. Wodus tictus ignittus mettribium." Pettal chanted until I felt my eyes glaze over with boredom.

Finally, after what felt like nearly an hour, the metal cuffs began to glow. They grew brighter until they were two burning, red-hot rings around my wrists. I still felt not even a whiff of heat through Io’s shield.

"Now!" Pettal shouted.

The apprentice moved in with the snips, angling them up to catch one of the cuffs in the jaws. He groaned and worked and huffed, trying to break it open.

Even Pettal joined in after spending several more minutes re-working the spell to return the cuffs back to a red-hot state.

When Pettal failed again and again, she grew more and more frustrated.

I suggested Io do it himself, but he refused to let go of the shield between my hand and the burning metal. He assured me the metallurgy of the dwarfs would match his strength, in any case.

Several more armorers came, each of them taking turns to try to remove the cuff, or work the spell, acting together or alone. When all failed, they turned to arguing over the best approach to get them off, their many loud voices becoming a din in the chamber.

I wanted to cry with frustration.

"The spells are too strong. They were crafted with deep shadow magic," one smith said.

"Indeed, too strong," another added, frowning. "I have never seen a binding like this in mellitrium. It's like the magic Penjan uses to bind armor plates to their wyverns."

"Even Penjan no longer does that. It’s unthinkable even for those wicked, ugly beasts!" someone pointed out.

"Who did this to her?" An old, stooped man in a leather apron said, speaking as though I wasn't there. He studied me with one eye squinted in his wrinkled face.

"A necromancer did it to me," I spat, regretting the anger in my tone immediately. But I was so sick of this smoky chamber I could have screamed.

They continued arguing, mentioning spells and mages I’d never heard of. Offering up suggestions for how they might go about removing the shadow magic binding.

I was no longer even listening as I began to undo the metal wires, now gone cold after so long spent bickering.

Io reached out to help me, and as he did so, the shield retreated, and the stuffy heat of the forges hit me in the face like a furnace.

I yanked the wires off and rose, taking a deep breath as I turned to Pettal.

Her face was a mask of dejection. "Thank you for trying," I said, giving her a half-hearted smile.

I felt my lips tremble with a flood of emotion I would not allow to surface—not in front of all these men who had looked at me like some poor, pathetic bound creature.

"Thank you all for trying," I said and turned to leave the chamber before tears burst free. I didn’t even look to see if Io followed.

I found myself in a round chamber after turning the wrong way out the door.

It was made of darker stone than the rest of the forges and looked similar to the walls of the lava tunnels that led to the mineral hot spring.

The walls were lined with little alcoves featuring full suits of armor on display. The spaces between were hung with shields and weapons of every kind.

A sword made from what looked like the bottom jaw of some fearsomely large beast, sharp teeth intact, lay behind the glass of a tall case.

Seeing all those sharp, deadly weapons went some way toward tempering the disappointment rolling through my chest. Especially when I saw what lay on a stone slab in the center of the room.

Pale, white, and ethereal lay the Dagda's elderwood sword. I knew it must be it—though I had only ever seen a crude drawing of it in some old book.

It was long—even longer than a longsword should be, and so massive I was sure that even Io would need two hands to swing it.

It had no embellishments, not even a grip wound around the handle. I was sure leather could not have survived so many millennia anyway.

There were no adornments at all other than the simple crosspiece with faintly curved ends. It was a single piece of ancient petrified elderwood that looked so organic it reminded me of bone.

No one knew how the sword had been made. Petrified elderwood was known to be the hardest material in the world, unable to be carved, broken, melted, or manipulated in any way.