Chapter 100: ACCOUNTED FOR
The undercroft could not hold Cinder anymore.
Cinder followed Aiden into the room where she had been dying a week ago. Her shoulders brushed the low brick arch, so she lowered her head to get through. The beam blackened where the fire along her back touched it.
She looked at Aiden, then at the low ceiling. There was a question in her eyes.
"I know," he said. "We’ll find you somewhere with a higher ceiling. I’ve spent my whole life making do with places that weren’t built for me. We’ll work it out together. Family tradition."
He said it lightly. It was not a light problem.
A dying wolf can hide in an undercroft. This one can’t.
Wherever we hide her, she’ll warm the whole room. Some Vane clerk will notice the walls drying out and start asking questions.
Someone cleared his throat from the corner of the room.
Aiden turned, his hand reaching for the knife in his boot, then paused.
The smith sat on an upturned crate, arms folded, staring at what Aiden had brought back up from the bottom.
"Forty years," he said. "I told you I’d seen that coat once, on a beast the old Baron kept. I lied a little. I saw it in a book. A drawing, when I was a boy. I never thought I’d—"
He stopped.
He never left a sentence open. He left that one open.
"You made it possible," Aiden said. "She needed your fire."
"I just gave you some fire. You gave her everything else." The smith rubbed a hand over his beard. "That’s the part I don’t like."
"What?"
"It’ll cost me nothing. It’ll cost you plenty." The smith’s expression hardened. "You understand what you’ve done. Not to her. To you."
Forty-six years and a dog the size of a cart. There’s a back to that coin.
"I’m choosing to look at the good part a little longer."
The smith looked away. "Enjoy it while you can."
Aiden looked at the front of the coin for two days.
Then Cinder made him look at the back.
Every time Aiden woke, she was facing the stairs.
You’re not resting. You’re keeping watch.
He sat up and counted the problems she had already understood: the Ice Heart was unseated, two handlers had seen what happened, and one of them had already reached the people upstairs.
I’ve been sitting here two days being grateful, while someone up there writes it down.
Miasma came down off the warm rafter, crossed the brick, and stopped beside his boot.
She turned and looked at the stairs too.
"Yes," Aiden said. "I see it now. Late. But we deserved a break."
She did not argue with him. She sat down where she was.
Nyx was already in the dark at the foot of the stairs. It had been there since they came up. Aiden had not noticed, which was the point of it.
All three of you worked it out before I did.
We have to go. Tonight, if I can find somewhere.
He could not work out where.
Cinder needed somewhere big enough to hide her. Aiden didn’t know of such a place in the city. Every warm room belonged to someone, and someone always answered to a House.
Give me a day. One day to find a door.
A quarter-mile away and a hundred feet up, in a Vane counting-house, a clerk was reading a slate.
The account had come up the night before from a handler with no voice. Another man had written it down for him.
He discounted most of the report as tall stories told by frightened men down a hole. A frightened man with a crushed throat told taller ones.
But two things in the account did not read like fear.
The unseated Ice Heart. A week of careful work undone in a quarter of an hour. A frightened man invents monsters. He does not invent maintenance schedules.
And a coat. White-gold. A dead bloodline returned.
The clerk did not discount the coat.
He was new. He was ambitious. He had read enough of the old charters to know which color the House had spent forty years making sure stayed dead.
And to know what happened to the name of the man who brought that color to the Baron’s attention.
He copied the account cleanly onto good paper. He noted the date. The place. The two things that were not fear.
At the bottom he wrote the line that started the next thing.
Recommend the retrieval permit be drawn. The relic to be moved and re-seated under guard. The matter referred up.
Then he set it in the tray for the morning.
The paper did not reach the Baron. It reached a man two floors below him, who read it standing up and then sat down.
By the time he finished it, he had a second file open on his desk. A lamplighter’s registry slip, flagged three weeks ago and marked for his attention.
He put the two side by side.
A dead white-gold bloodline, walking through the city. A struck man with no name and three bonded beasts, last logged going east.
He did not need a third piece.
That’s the one who stood in front of a panel and made Harken Vane put a paper down.
He wrote out two instructions.
The first went to the forge district. Find someone outside the House who can legally work this district. Send him to look at cellars, depots, and undercrofts that run too warm, and pay him for a sighting, not a capture.
You do not spend House men confirming a rumour. You spend somebody else’s.
He wrote the second instruction more slowly, and did not seal it.
It said the Ice Heart was to be held unseated. Not repaired. Not moved back.
If the beast is what the slate says it is, we will not be putting the Ice Heart back in its cradle. We will be putting it in front of her.
He put that one in his own drawer. It would stay there until they found her.
Then he went to find a warmer place to finish his shift, because the counting-house that night was unaccountably cold.