The bloodforged ledger

Chapter five

The cathedral had been dead longer than the war-golems in the Rustfields, its spires gutted and its windows long since stripped of glass, but someone with money and no reverence had built a market inside its bones anyway. Corin followed Seren through a side door set into what had once been a confessional alcove, and the noise hit him before the light did, a low roar of voices arguing over things worth more than his entire life.

Torches burned in iron sconces along walls that had once held saints, and where an altar might have stood there was instead a raised block of dark wood, polished smooth by years of coin changing hands across it. The pews were long gone, replaced by rows of cushioned chairs filled with people who smelled of perfume expensive enough to mask the old stone dust still clinging to the air.

The Ember Exchange ran on rules nobody wrote down. Relics too dangerous or too illegal for the crown’s registries changed hands here, laundered through private bids and quiet nods, and the people doing the bidding wore silk that cost more than Corin’s family home once had. He stood just inside the door in his scavenger’s leathers, wire-scarred hands shoved into his pockets, and felt every eye that passed over him catalogue and dismiss him in the same breath.

Someone laughed behind a raised fan. Someone else muttered a word that sounded like scrap-rat.

“Ignore them,” Seren said quietly, at his shoulder. She’d changed into something plainer than her royal blacks, a hood drawn low, though Corin noticed she never once let the spear out of arm’s reach. “You’re not here for their approval.”

“I’m aware.”

He found a place near the back of the auction floor and waited, watching lot after lot cross the block, relics and bones of dead magic sold to the highest whisper. A cracked helm that still whispered its dead wearer’s name. A shard of something that hummed faintly blue and made the front rows lean back rather than forward. Corin barely registered the numbers being called, his mind circling instead around the weight of the chest hidden beneath his coat, the months of nights spent hunched over broken cores in borrowed forges, telling himself each time it was for nothing more than a rainy day that would never come.

His pulse didn’t settle until the auctioneer, a thin man with ink-stained fingers, called the next item and the whole room seemed to lean forward at once.

“The Emberheart Bloom,” the auctioneer announced, and a hush spread through the crowd like something physical. “Recovered from the ashfields beyond the old border. The only known specimen to surface in over a decade. Sole recorded cure for the Wasting Rot.”

Corin’s chest tightened. He’d heard the name only once before, whispered by a physician who couldn’t afford to stock it, spoken like a legend rather than a medicine.

Then he saw who was seated in the front row, and his stomach dropped clean through the floor.

Isolde, in a gown the color of good wine, and beside her, Adric Thorne, already leaning forward with the easy confidence of a man who’d never once lost a bid he wanted. Adric’s gaze found Corin across the room, and something cruel and delighted crossed his face, like he’d been handed a gift he hadn’t even had to ask for.

“They’re not here for the cure,” Seren murmured. “They’re here because they know it might be the only thing in this room you’d crawl over broken glass for.”

The bidding opened, and Adric didn’t wait for the auctioneer to finish his first call before he named a number absurd enough to silence half the room. He said it looking directly at Corin, chin lifted, daring him to try.

Corin matched it.

The room’s attention swung toward him in a single, disbelieving wave. Adric’s smile faltered for exactly one heartbeat before he doubled his own bid, certain the scrap-rat in the back would finally slink out the way everyone expected.

Corin doubled it again.

Isolde’s face had gone the color of old parchment. Adric’s jaw tightened, disbelief curdling fast into something uglier.

“You’re bluffing,” he called across the room, loud enough for every noble present to hear. “You don’t have that kind of coin, Vale, and you never will. This is a fraud.”

“Void the bid,” Adric demanded of the auctioneer, standing now, his voice climbing. “The boy is lying. He’s wasting the house’s time.”

The auctioneer hesitated, glancing between Adric’s title and the strange, quiet certainty on Corin’s face, clearly unwilling to offend either.

Corin walked forward instead of answering, past rows of silk and jewels, until he reached the block itself. He set down the chest he’d carried the entire night beneath his coat, months of relic repairs done in secret, in back alleys and abandoned forges, paid in aether-marks he’d told no one about. Not the physician. Not Seren.

He set it down hard enough to crack the wood of the auctioneer’s table.

“I made every coin in this chest,” he said, looking straight past Adric to Isolde, “with the hands you told me were only good for grave-robbing.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fans had stopped moving.

Isolde didn’t speak. She sat frozen, staring at the chest like it might bite her, and Corin watched something in her carefully composed face fracture in a way he’d waited a long time to see and found, now that it was here, brought him no satisfaction at all.

Adric’s humiliation curdled fast into fury. Two hundred of the capital’s wealthiest had just watched him accused of lying about a scavenger’s coin and lose. He wasn’t a man built to survive being wrong in public.

“Guards,” he shouted, voice cracking with the force of it. “Seize him. He’s a thief, a fraud, get him out of my sight before he steals something worse than a bid!”

The command hung in the air a beat too long before anyone moved, the room caught between the spectacle of it and the uncertainty of who, exactly, still had the authority to make such an order stick inside walls that answered to no crown at all.