Chapter 86: THE BURNER
They walked all night.
The grey found them still on the road. Cinder set each foot down like the ground might not hold it. Her head hung below her shoulders.
Aiden put his palm on her neck.
Cold. Half a night of fire and she was cold again.
The road takes back every heat she gathers before noon.
And the city’s a day off.
The cat rode Cinder. It had climbed her flank and lay along her spine, chin on her fur.
Cinder had let it happen without even turning her head.
The boy said nothing for an hour, which meant he was working up to something.
He said it where the road split.
One track ran left, down toward the canal crossing. The other bent right and took the long way round.
"I can reach the city faster alone." He watched the split, not Aiden. "They let runners through. They just look at the coat."
"They do."
"They won’t look at your coat. They’ll look at Cinder, and then they’ll look at your slip. You can’t get in. Not through a gate. Not with her."
"No."
"So I should go ahead."
"You should."
"What do I tell him?"
"That the tracker report’s on the Baron’s desk." Aiden looked at him. "And that I’m bringing Cinder in anyway."
"He won’t like that."
"He’ll know before I get there. That’s worth more than liking it."
The boy nodded. Then he looked down.
The cat had come off Cinder’s back when they stopped. It stood in the dirt between the boy’s boots and Cinder’s foreleg. It looked at her leg, then the boy’s boots.
Then it walked back and pressed itself into Cinder’s leg.
The boy crouched and held out his hand.
The cat let him touch its back. It did not come to him.
"Come on." His voice broke in the middle. "Come on. You’ve been with me for so long."
The cat pushed its head into his palm. Once. Then it settled against Cinder again and shut its eyes.
The boy stayed crouched a while.
Then he stood, and shouldered nothing, because a runner carries nothing but the run.
"Burn the page," Aiden said to his back.
"There’s no page." The boy did not turn round. "There was never a page."
He went left. He went fast.
Aiden looked down at the cat.
"I’ve got two years and three beasts, and one of them can’t walk," he said. "And you want to be number four, as if I didn’t have enough trouble this week?"
The cat began licking its shoulder.
"Right. You’re not asking for my opinion." Aiden shook his head and walked.
The cat meowed, then pressed itself against Cinder’s back.
An hour past the fork, smoke rose over the trees to the north.
It climbed straight and thin, blue at the root, grey higher. It neither thickened nor thinned while he watched.
Charcoal smoke. Somewhere north of the road, a burner had wood stacked under a shell of packed earth, smouldering slow so it turned to charcoal instead of ash.
A week of low heat that never goes out.
That’s what she needs.
He left the road and went north.
Three domes of packed earth stood in the clearing, each the height of a man, each with wood buried inside it.
Two had burned out and been raked open. The third was still working. Smoke came off its crown. Heat bled from vents at its foot and shook the air above.
The charcoal burner was short, wide, black to the elbows. He had a long hooked blade leaning where his hand could reach.
He picked it up.
He looked at the white in Aiden’s hair. At the kit bag.
Then he looked at Cinder. The blade came up an inch and stopped.
"That’s a fire-beast," the burner said. "Going cold."
"Yes."
"Keep her away from the live mound. A beast made of heat next to a week of buried fire, and one of them takes the other. I lose my coal, or you lose your beast."
"I’m not putting her in it."
Aiden kept his hands where they could be seen.
"Let her lie beside your mound. The vents heat her, and there’s no flame she can catch." He tipped his head at the mound. "She had a fire last night. We walked it off her by dawn. Nothing between here and the city gives her more than your mound does."
The burner looked at Cinder a long while. At the cat jammed against her back.
"What is she," he said. "Not what kind. What is she, that you look spent to the bone and you’re still walking her to the city?"
Aiden gave him the truth. Anyone who asked it that way would sniff a lie and stop dealing.
"Stolen. Bred warm by a House, frozen by the same House until she broke, and then she ran." He let it sit. "A forge is the only heat big enough to bring her back. That’s all of it."
The cat had worked so far into Cinder’s back that only its hindquarters showed. It was still going. Pouring what a cat has into something forty times its size, with the conviction of an animal that had not done the math.
"That one thinks it’s helping," Aiden said. "I don’t have the heart to stop it. I’ve got nothing left to give her, and it’s out here trying to thaw a wolf with its own body."
He watched it burrow deeper.
The burner’s mouth moved. Almost a smile. Not entirely one.
He looked at the live mound, then back.
"South foot. Where the vents are. Not the crown." He set the blade down. "I’m not doing it for you. I don’t watch something freeze beside heat I’m tending. That’s all this is. Don’t make it more."
"I won’t."
He brought her to the south foot.
At the campfire she had lain beside the heat. Here she pressed her whole cold flank into the warm earth and stopped moving.
The cat came out of her back. It wedged into the seam between her ribs and the mound. Then it slept.
Aiden sat down against the turf.
A long time passed. The heat went in. Nothing came out.
Then something did.
A colour rose on her flank. In the patch that had gone dark at the den.
A deep red inch rising under her black coat like a reignited ember.
It held, while he watched, longer than a breath this time. It faded when she shifted her weight off the vent. It came back when she pressed in again.
Cinder opened her eyes.
She looked at him a while. Then she pushed her muzzle along the ground until it touched his boot.
Aiden did not move his foot.
"That’s you doing that." He smiled. "Not the mound or me. You. You’re not gone yet. The city’s close. Recover."
She shut her eyes. She left her nose where it was.
One afternoon on warm ground returns an inch.
A forge runs day and night.
So it should work. Which only leaves the price.
Miasma was glowing on the kit bag. She had started while he was not looking.
Faint. Fainter than her true dark.
He set two fingers on her spines.
No pulse. No answer. The green sat where it was, dim and steady. It was the first light she had made since the hollow.
You’re recovering back too.
Take as long as you need.
Inside his coat, Nyx pressed against his ribs. Warm. It offered no opinion.
The burner worked his cold mounds. Aiden slept in pieces with a hand on Cinder’s shoulder. Every time he woke, the red was still there.
In the afternoon, she got her head up onto his leg.
It took her three tries. He watched her do it and did not help, because helping would have made it his instead of hers.
Then her head came across his thigh. The cat woke, walked on her back, and lay down between her ears.
Aiden sat and let them stay there. An hour, maybe more.
Toward evening the burner stopped raking.
"That charcoal," he said. "Where d’you think it goes?"
"The forge district."
"The forge district. Every mound on this road. All of it." He set the rake down. "Down the charcoal road to the fuel dock. The barges tie up there, and the coal comes off them, straight to the foundries. A forge district burns more than any gate-road could carry on carts."
He looked at Aiden.
"A dock like that has its own gap in the wall. It has to. You can’t float a barge through a gate."
Aiden went still.
A dock takes barges all day, and nobody checks a load of charcoal. That’s my way in.
"You’d carry us."
"As far as the dock. Not past it. The dock’s where my work stops and your trouble starts." The burner’s face did not move. "And your trouble’s already there. That’s the part you walked into my clearing not knowing."
"Say it."
"There’ve been men on the dock and along the charcoal road. Not charter men working a ground." He picked the rake back up. "Standing men. They stop every burner coming down and ask the same question."
"Which is?"
"Have you seen a black wolf?"
"Just the wolf?"
"Just the wolf. They’ve been asking it a while." He turned the rake over in his hands. "But there were two more men this morning than yesterday. And they started asking about a man with the wolf."
The baron has been watching the warm roads since she ran. That’s not about me.
The question is new. That’s the report landing.
They know by now.
The burner turned to his week’s work and put the rake into the cold mound.
"He’s not chasing you, lamplighter."
The rake bit.
"He’s been standing at the end of your road since long before you started walking it."
Night came on the clearing.
The mound breathed slow. In Cinder’s flank, the red held against the warm earth and did not go out.
Aiden sat with his back to the turf and watched the road west.
A day to the wall. One dock feeding the one district that could bring her back.
And men on it, asking after a man with a black wolf.