Chapter 8: The Debt

Phlegon's POV

I had locked the crown in the vault myself, with three iron chains and a ward I hadn't used since I was young.

I sat on the floor in front of it until the lamp burned low.

It didn't need a ward to tell me what it was.

I knew every line of the work.

The old god who had made it had made it for one purpose, and it wasn't to sit on a girl's head at a wedding.

It was made to find a borrowed fire in a living body and pull it out.

Slowly, at first, over a night or two.

Then all at once.

And I knew exactly whose fire it would find.

I stood at the door of the vault to stretch my back, and the chains were lying on the floor.

They hadn't been cut.

They had been opened, one link at a time, by hands that knew the ward.

I ran.

I took the stairs two at a time with a bad leg and no cane.

I hit the bedchamber door so hard it cracked.

The crown was on my pillow.

Helia was sitting up beside it with her arms wrapped around her ribs, shivering, her lips gone pale.

"Don't touch it," I said, and then I did.

I caught the crown in both hands.

The red-gold burned, and I didn't care.

I put what I had into it.

Twenty years of fire I hadn't been able to use, all of it, in one white rush down my arms.

The crown flared once, blinding, and went dark.

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