Page 43 of The Beautiful Blade

“You’re nothing." My uncle spat on the ground. "Always have been. Always will be.”

Olric swung the hammer in a nervous arc, as if testing its weight.

Dain muttered something under his breath, too low for me to catch.

I didn’t care. They could call me whatever they wanted. Their words couldn’t reach me anymore. I turned my back to them and walked away.

“Crackling coward.”

I had no idea which one of them bellowed that at my back. Their voices sounded the same as the insults came fast and thick. I kept walking, every muscle in my body ready to react should one of them try to strike.

Their voices grew louder, desperate to reclaim some semblance of power. I could hear it in the pitch of their taunts, the rising hysteria. They needed me to react, needed me to turn and engage.

Something whistled through the air.

I didn’t need to turn to know what it was. Metal had always spoken to me. I could feel the weight of it, the shape, the familiarity of its build. A hammer was airborne and aimed for the back of my skull.

I lifted my prosthetic arm, aiming without turning. A pulse of energy surged through the plating, gears shifting into place as I unleashed the blast.

The hammer never reached me.

The shockwave met it midair, sending it hurtling backward like a comet returning to its maker. It struckthe forge with a deafening crack, colliding with the roof before bouncing into the piles of wood and scattered embers. A hiss filled the air as the first flames licked hungrily at the dry beams.

Maris cursed. Olric and Dain scrambled, their heavy footfalls shifting from pursuit to panic. The thick smoke curled into the air. The heat licked at my back.

I didn’t stop.

Didn’t turn.

Didn’t spare them so much as a glance.

Their fate wasn’t mine to hold.

They had made their bed in cinders. Let them lie in it. The past was ash, and I wasn’t staying to breathe it in.

I wasn’t the broken boy they’d once beaten into submission. I was a survivor. A fighter. And I had someone to fight for.

I picked up my pace. Charlotte was my future, my everything. And no one—not my family, not prince or queen, not even the gods themselves—would keep me from her.

I needed to get back to the capital. But I couldn't walk. I needed a functioning ride or a fast ley line. The closest was in Evergrove.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHARLOTTE

"Ileft to wed the Prince of Solmane, only to finally realize that I am a princess of Evergrove."

I stood before the gathered crowd in a simple dress. I'd almost come out in leathers but thought that would be too much on this, my first address as their queen. The gathered crowd—nobles in embroidered silks, merchants in practical wool cloaks, commoners in work-worn linen—stood in wary silence.

They didn’t trust me.

Whyshould they?

I had been a ghost in my own home, a princess who never looked beyond the gilded walls of the manor to see the toil of the merchant class, who dined among the nobility but never truly saw them, who passed the servants in the halls without knowing their names or the burdens they carried.

They had all been shadows at the edges of my world, faceless and voiceless. I had never asked about their lives, never wondered what dreams they held or what struggles they endured beneath my mother’s rule. I had been wrapped in silks and expectations, my world no larger than the path laid out before me. I had let my mother’s reign crush them beneath debt and neglect, just as she had tried to do to me.

"I renounced the throne of Solmane."

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