Chương 18: Furnace

The black haired kid's eyebrows shot up.

"Huh. What did you just say, newcomer?"

"You heard me." Solstice shrugged, easy about it.

"Come a little closer. I'll demonstrate properly. Free of charge, even. Consider it a welcome gift."

"You bastard! Have you got no shame? Picking a fight as the newcomer, and Ms. Emelia's standing right there!" Emelia had a hand over her face already. Solstice met his eyes head on.

"I. Don't. Care."

"You bastard!" The boy surged forward, telegraphing the swing from a mile out, all the subtlety of a falling rock. Solstice went in to meet him, ducking low, driving off his good leg, and snapped his head forward. It connected clean, bone to bone, and the boy staggered back cupping his nose, blood already welling between his fingers. Solstice looked down at him, smug.

"Oh. My mistake. I said hands. Didn't say anything about my head." A beat.

"Should've been more specific. I'll add it to the list for next time."

"Enough!" Emelia's voice cracked across the yard. The other kids had already started drifting backward, none of them meeting Solstice's eyes anymore, boots shuffling in the packed snow.

"Pathetic bunch." Solstice's mouth curled.

"Is this really the life you wanted for yourselves? Scared of a guy who can barely stand on both legs? I'm flattered, truly, but you're all setting the bar somewhere near the floor."

"Shut up." The boy's voice came out thick, nose still streaming.

"You don't know what we've been through." Solstice let out a dry laugh.

"Oh, please. Enlighten m…"

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Every voice cut off at once. The kids exchanged looks, unsure where to put themselves. Emelia's hand closed around Solstice's arm and hauled him off toward his room without another word. The door slammed shut behind them. Emelia took a long breath.

"Care to explain what that was."

"They provoked me." Solstice examined his own knuckles, unbothered, like this was a perfectly reasonable line of questioning to have to answer at all.

"Technically I only used my forehead. You should be thanking me for the restraint."

"So your answer was headbutting Raech."

"Yes." She put her hand over her face again, longer this time, like she was praying for patience she knew wasn't coming.' Careful. Say the wrong thing here and she throws you back out into the cold. Cool it.'

"For what it's worth," Solstice said, tone dialed down a notch, almost reasonable, "he started it. I just happen to finish things quickly." Emelia lowered her hand, studying him like she was deciding whether that counted as an apology or just a different flavor of insult.

"That supposed to be you behaving?" This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"That's me at my most diplomatic, ma'am."

'Give her nothing to grab onto. No talk of leaving. Not until I know how deep her patience actually runs.'

"I won't do it again." A pause, weighed carefully.

"Not unprovoked, anyway." Emelia exhaled through her nose, something that wasn't quite a laugh.

"That's the best I'm getting out of you, isn't it."

"Probably." She opened her mouth to say more, but a knock cut her off. The door opened before she could answer it. A woman stepped through, black hair cropped close to her skull, dressed in the same dark, reinforced coat Emelia wore, though newer, less worn by use.

"Captain." Clipped. All business.

"There's an urgent call for you." Solstice's eyes flicked toward Emelia.' Captain.' Whatever patience Emelia had left got traded instantly for something sharper. She let out a slow breath.

"Of course there is." She turned back to Solstice.

"We'll finish this conversation later. Stay put."

"Wouldn't dream of leaving." He gave her a small, easy smile. Harmless. Awkward. Probably unsettling instead of cute. The two women left. The door fell shut behind them. Solstice sat alone in the sudden quiet, staring at the door for exactly as long as it took him to decide the order wasn't worth listening to.' Stay put, she says.' He was already reaching for the wall to pull himself upright.

'Well Emilia.. You Should've locked the door if you meant that.' He eased off the bed, favoring the bad leg, and made his way into the hall. Quiet, this time of day, most of the noise pulled toward wherever Emelia had just vanished to. His room sat at the end of a corridor he hadn't bothered walking all the way down yet, always turning back before he reached wherever it led. Not today.

He kept a hand on the wall, working his way forward step by step, wincing every so often when the leg reminded him it hadn't finished healing. Bit by bit, the corner came closer. Somewhere past it, metal rang against metal, a rhythm to it like it had been going for hours and had years left in it yet. He rounded the corner. Another room opened up past it, wider than anything he'd seen in this place so far.

Kids moved through it, weaving between hulking shapes twice their size, all of them working the same glowing furnace at the center, heat rolling off it in waves he could feel from the doorway. The bulkier ones weren't kids at all. Their skin sat somewhere between gray and black, cracked in patterns like frostbite that never healed, stone showing through in patches where skin should have been. Thin hair, colorless, clung flat to their skulls. Where eyes should have been, only white.' Blacksmiths? No, wait.'

'Are those Kharuun?' He'd heard the name before, in whatever scraps of talk passed between miners who'd traveled further than the pit he'd grown up in. Never once expected to actually see one hammering metal in the back room of a children's orphanage. One of them turned. Bigger than the rest, broad enough that the two kids working beside him looked like an afterthought. No pupils to track him with, but Solstice could feel the weight of its attention all the same.

"Hey, you! Kid! What are you standing there for! Go fetch us more rocks, keep this furnace fed!"' Frozen bastard talks.' Solstice hadn't expected the voice, deep and gravel rough, to come out sounding so ordinarily annoyed. Like this was just another Tuesday and he was just another slow worker.

"Hey! You deaf, kid?" The Kharuun pointed a hand the size of Solstice's whole head.

'Ah. Great. He's actually talking to me.' Solstice pushed off the wall and made his way over, plastering something warm and useless onto his face before he got there.

"With respect," he said, voice sliding into something conversational, almost pleasant, the exact tone he'd have used talking his way past a foreman who could break him in half without trying, "I'm not able to work today." He tapped his bad leg, where a thin line of red had started seeping through the bandage again.

"As you can see. I'm Injured." The Kharuun looked him over, unimpressed.

"Hm. Who were you again?" Solstice smiled. Wide, careful, deliberately a little too much. Too creepy.

"I'm Solstice."

"You disgusting brat. Stop smiling."