Chapter 1 The Hammer Before the Crown

The forge was the only room in Ironhold where nobody came looking for Bryn, and that was exactly why she loved it.

Sparks bit at her wrists as she turned the blade in the coals, watching the metal shift from orange to something closer to gold. It was a commission for the garrison captain, a simple short sword, nothing that required a princess's hands. But her hands were the ones that knew how to do it, so here she was, past midnight, alone with the fire while the rest of the castle slept off another day of being royal.

She liked it that way. Nobody watched her work here. Nobody compared her to Yara here.

The bellows creaked under her foot, steady as a heartbeat, and for a while there was nothing in the world but heat and rhythm and the small, satisfying hiss of metal cooling into something useful. Bryn had never understood people who found silence lonely. Silence was the one place nothing was ever asked of her.

So when the forge door scraped open behind her, she almost didn't turn around. Only the servants and her father ever came down this late, and neither of them wanted conversation.

But the footsteps were wrong. Too light, too quick, catching on the hem of a dress not made for stone floors.

"Yara?"

Her sister stood just inside the doorway, still in her traveling clothes for tomorrow, though tomorrow was still hours away. Her hair, usually pinned into the kind of careful perfection the court expected of her, had come half loose, and her face had the pale, stretched look of someone who had been holding something in for so long that holding it had become its own kind of pain.

Bryn set the tongs down. "You're not supposed to be up. Father wants you rested for the road."

"I know." Yara's voice cracked on the second word.

That was the sound that made Bryn cross the room. Not the words, the crack underneath them. In twenty four years she had heard her sister cry over spoiled dresses and broken engagements and one particularly unforgivable haircut, but she had never once heard her sound like this, like something was actually breaking instead of just being inconvenienced.

"Yara. What happened."

Her sister's hand went to her collar, the way it had been doing for two years without Bryn ever once catching the meaning of it, and pulled out a thin cord that had been hidden beneath the fabric. A ring hung from it, plain iron, the kind a soldier's pay could actually afford.

"His name is Tomas," Yara said, and once she started, the rest came out of her like something dammed too long. "He's in the lower garrison. I met him two years ago, at the spring tournament, when his horse threw a shoe and I was the only one who didn't laugh at him for it. I have been meeting him every week since. In the orchard, mostly. Sometimes by the river."

Bryn stood very still, the way she did when a piece of metal was about to do something unexpected and she needed to see exactly where the crack would run.

"I love him," Yara said, simply, like it was the only true sentence she had left. "And tomorrow I am supposed to get into a carriage and go be a tribute to a dragon for a year, and everyone in this castle will tell you it's an honor, and none of them will ask me what it costs. I will lose him. Not because he'll stop waiting. Because I know myself, Bryn. I know what a year in that mountain will make of me. I'll come back correct. I'll come back exactly what Father needs me to be. And there won't be room left in me for an iron ring and an orchard and a man who laughs when his horse embarrasses him."

The fire popped behind them, and neither of them flinched.

"Does Father know," Bryn asked, though she already knew the answer.

"No one knows. You're the first person I've ever said his name out loud to." Yara's laugh came out broken and small. "I don't even know why I came down here. I think I just wanted to say it to someone before I have to stop being someone who gets to want things."

Bryn had spent her whole life watching her sister get chosen. Chosen for portraits, chosen for suitors, chosen, everyone assumed, for the mountain long before either of them had a say in it, because Yara was the pretty one, the correct one, the daughter the court could put in front of a dragon king and feel proud of. Bryn had been handed a hammer instead of a crown at six years old and told, kindly enough, that she was better suited to being useful. She had built a whole life out of that sentence. She had never let herself notice, until this exact moment, how much it had cost her sister to be the one who was wanted instead.

She looked at the ring. She looked at her sister's face, still open in a way Bryn had never seen it, not guarded, not performing, just afraid.

And somewhere underneath her ribs, before her mind had finished catching up to what she was about to do, her hands had already started moving.

"Take it off," Bryn said.

Yara blinked. "What?"

"The ring. Take it off and keep it somewhere Father will never find it. And go to bed. You have a carriage to miss tomorrow."

"Bryn, I can't ask you to."

"You didn't ask." Bryn was already unbuckling her forge apron, already reaching for the plain travel bag she kept under the workbench for jobs that took her out to the border towns, already thinking three steps ahead in the way she thought about everything, what tools she would need, what she could carry, what she could leave behind without anyone noticing until it was too late to stop her. "I'm telling you. Go to sleep, Yara. Let me handle it. That's what I do."

Her sister was crying now, properly, the kind of crying that comes after fear finally has somewhere safe to land. She reached for Bryn's hand and held it too hard, the way she used to when they were children and the thunder got too loud.

Bryn let her. Just for a moment. Then she gently pulled free, because there was work to do and the night wasn't going to wait for either of them to feel their way through it.

She crossed the forge to where Yara's traveling cloak hung on its hook by the door, the fine grey wool already brushed and ready for a mountain road neither of them had chosen, and took it down with both hands.