Chapter 82: TWENTY YEARS
The mother did not understand the words.
He had known that before he said them. A wolf takes tone. Posture. Smell. Not words.
He said them anyway. He needed to hear his own voice make the promise before he could pay for it.
His good hand came off the ash.
Miasma was on his chest. She had come down there at some point, and he had not felt her arrive.
He put two fingers on her spines. She looked at him.
You’ve been asking me for this.
Take all of it.
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[ LIFESPAN CONTRACT — EXPENDITURE ]
Drawing on: full reserve
Channel: Miasma — Vesperian luminescence, amplified
Cost: 20.0 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 2.0 Years ]
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The cost went out of him through his hand.
Not slowly. It emptied from his chest, down his arm, into the small body under his fingers. It took his breath with it. His vision went white at the edges. His heart missed, caught, missed again.
Miasma’s spines lit.
Not the low green she ran in true dark. Not moon on wet stone.
White climbed her back and kept climbing. The light filled the air above the hollow until Aiden had to squint through it. Her light had always stopped at one body’s length.
It went past that and kept going.
Inside his coat, Nyx pushed itself deeper into the dark beneath his arm.
The light went down into the hollow.
It ran over the two small bodies and did not stop on them.
It stopped a hand above them, thickened, and took a shape.
A pup. Made out of the light, pale all the way through, the black root showing faintly behind its chest.
Then a second one beside it.
Then a third.
Aiden looked at the third one and had to look twice.
It was standing on its own legs.
Those legs had never worked. Not once, the whole time it was alive. They had hung under its mother’s jaw while she carried it into the sun and pushed it after light that was already gone.
Now it stood on them. It shifted its weight from one to the other, deciding which way to go first.
Something broke open in Aiden’s chest, and he could not have said what it was.
The mother came off him.
She crossed to the hollow. She stopped a pace short of the three pups and put her head down until her muzzle was aligned with the nearest one.
She breathed in.
Aiden watched her do it. A long breath off a pup with no smell. Her ears came forward. She waited for something that was never going to arrive.
She pushed her nose forward into it.
Her muzzle went through the pup’s shoulder and came out the other side. The light closed behind it without a mark.
She stopped.
She stood there with her nose inside her own dead pup.
Then she pulled back and sat down in the ash.
She did not touch them again. One breath had taught her what touching them would do.
She sat there and looked at them.
The light held for a long while.
Then it began to go.
The third pup went first. The legs faded before the rest of it, so that for a moment it stood on nothing, and then there was nothing standing.
The second one went from the edges.
The mother stood.
She took one step toward the last pup and stopped, because she couldn’t get closer.
The first pup thinned until Aiden could see the burned root straight through it. Then the root was all there was.
The hollow came back grey. The black struts. The cooling smoke.
The two small bodies were where they had always been, and the light had never touched them.
The mother stood over them a while.
Then she turned around.
Aiden was on his back in the ash and could not get up.
His arms had gone. That was the first thing. He put his good hand down and pushed. The arm folded under him as if it belonged to somebody else.
He got up on the second try, as far as sitting.
Everything hurt in the wrong places. His knees. The small of his back. The joints of his fingers.
He looked at his hand.
The skin across the back had gone loose. The knuckles stood out. There was a vein there he had never seen before, running from the wrist to the second finger, blue and close to the surface.
That’s not my hand.
He pushed his hair off his face. A piece of it fell in front of his eye. It was white.
Not grey. Not the grey that had come into his temples after Nyx’s egg.
White. A lock, thick as two fingers, white from the root to the end.
He pinched it between two fingers. Then he let go and pushed it back with the rest.
Twenty years.
That’s what twenty years looks like when you pay it in one morning.
He did not call the wolf. He had nothing to call her with and nothing to offer if she came.
She came anyway.
She crossed the burned ground at a walk. She stood over him the same as she had stood over him with her teeth in his throat. She looked down at him a long moment.
Aiden lay still under her and made himself breathe.
Then she put her head down.
Not at his throat. Not toward the hollow.
She put it on his chest. On Miasma.
Miasma was dark. There was no light left in her anywhere, and she had not moved since the glow went out of her spines.
The mother laid her head against the small dark body that had shown her the pups. She left it there. She shut her eyes.
Aiden lay under the weight of her head and did not move, because moving would have ended it.
He understood why she had come.
Her den was a burned hollow. Her pups were two bodies in the bottom of it and one on the slope. The men who did that had walked south and taken their cold with them.
Of everything left standing on that ground, there was a man and a Venomspine Stalker who had shown her the three pups one last time.
There was nothing else to stand beside.
You picked me because I was the last thing here.
That’s all right. I’ll take it.
Miasma had chosen him in a gutter, half dead, for about the same reason. Nyx had come out of an egg nobody would have paid a copper for.
Neither of them had come to him because he deserved it. They had come because he was there, and then they had stayed. Somewhere, it had turned into more than staying because he happened to be there.
You’re not a tool I picked up on a burn line.
You’re going to be someone.
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[ CONTRACT FORMED — anomalous ]
Beast: EMBER WOLF (designation pending)
Bond type: not recorded in standard registry
Tier: 1
[ no lifespan cost — the cost was already paid ]
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 2.0 Years ]
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He read the last line twice.
The cost was already paid.
Twenty years, and it had not brought back one of them. He had known it would not. He had paid it anyway. An hour with her three pups and their legs working was the last thing in the world he could give her.
That was the end of what he could do about the pups.
It was not the end of what he could do about her.
He brought his good hand up to her head and set it on the black of her skull, above the eyes.
She was cold.
He had expected a coal banked somewhere under her hide. Something.
There was nothing. Her skull under his palm was as cold as the ground he sat on.
You had one fire in you. You spent it all burning that den, and nothing came back.
You are not going to lie down on this ground and go out.
"Cinder," he said.
He did not know where the name came from. It arrived ahead of anything he decided.
It was what a fire leaves behind. It was also a thing you could blow on to rekindle.
She did not take the word. A wolf does not take words.
She stayed.
He sat in the ash of her den with two years in him and a lock of white hair in his eyes.
Then he made himself look at what he had taken on.
She was the Baron’s.
Bred D. Frozen down to E. Gone over a kennel wall and denned on Harken Vane’s own charter ground, because it was the last warm place she knew.
The Baron wanted her back before anyone could look at what his cold room had done to a D-line.
And she has decided to stand next to the man with two years left.
He had sat at a child’s grave in the Ashwood once. The wood of the marker was new. The name cut into it was Mira Vane.
Three Corpse Lotus blossoms grew where the soil was darkest, thick-stemmed and fed.
They plant their own children where the flowers pay.
He had taken one for Miasma and said thank you to a girl who could not hear him.
A House that does that to its own daughter is not going to think twice about a wolf in a cold room.
And I’ve never once stood in front of something they wanted buried.
The Baron would send the bigger cold for her. Not today. Soon.
I’ll be standing next to her when it comes.
I don’t regret the twenty years. She’s cold all the way through, and there’s nothing in her to burn. I’ll find out what fixes that.
Two years is enough time to make somebody very sorry.