Chapter 103: THE COLD IS COMING
Out in the country, there was nothing overhead to hide Aiden and his beasts.
The sky was open in every direction. Cinder’s glow could be seen from a ridge half a day away.
"You glow," Aiden told Cinder on the second night, lying in a dry ditch under a hedge that hid nothing. "I knew you glowed. I didn’t know the whole countryside would know too."
Cinder banked down to ember.
"Now I’ve got the one beast in the marches that comes with her own lighthouse."
She had learned to bank her heat in the sewer. Now she did it whenever Aiden told her to hide the glow.
She had also learned where to hide. Stay in ditches and low ground. Keep a ridge or bank between herself and anyone watching. Watch the high places where a man would sit.
She knows what it means to be hunted. She knows how to hide.
She considers this an insult.
Every night she pressed her banked warmth against his numb side and slept facing the open country.
Aiden did not need a fire. Cinder kept him warm without smoke to give them away. But even banked, her body still gave off enough light to mark them in the dark.
And Vane’s men now knew to look for her glow.
The first town appeared beyond the next rise, low and brown against the clay. More buildings appeared behind it, one after another. Brick walls. Tall kiln chimneys. Thin smoke rising into the sky.
The ground had turned to hard red clay, and the air smelled of baked dust and woodsmoke.
More towns followed, stretching along the clay-belt.
The towns were smaller than the forge district and were built around their kilns.
The kiln-villages had their own beast-folk. At night, each kiln had a tender and a low-tier ember-beast to keep the fire burning until morning.
Nobody in the clay-belt looked twice at a fire-beast.
They looked twice at Cinder.
"That’s no stoke-lizard," a kiln-woman said, watching Cinder fold herself absurdly small behind a wall that did not begin to cover her.
The woman was not afraid. She looked Cinder over instead.
"That’s a real working breed." She went back to loading her barrow. "You’re a long way from wherever pays for a breed like that. What brings you this far out with her?"
"She was wild when I found her," Aiden said. "We’re just traveling to a place she’ll find warm enough."
"Travel carefully then. Vane riders were through here yesterday."
Aiden kept his face still.
"They were asking people at the kilns if anyone had felt the weather go wrong. Cold where it shouldn’t be." The woman did not look up. "Funny question, in spring."
"What did you tell them?"
"No. We tell Vane riders no on principle." She hefted the barrow. "But they were asking. And they don’t ride the belt for nothing."
Cold where it shouldn’t be.
So much for Vane’s subtlety.
He continued through the clay-belt until he passed the last village by dark.
They don’t know which road I took. But they’ve stopped asking where I went.
He worked that out in the next ditch, and then Nyx made it worse.
It had been out of his coat since the kilns, riding his shoulder in the open, which it seldom did.
Now it went stiff.
Not still. Stiff. The edges of Nyx’s body stopped shifting across his collar. It hardened against his shoulder.
Aiden put two fingers into it.
Usually his hand passed through Nyx like smoke when he touched her without warning. Tonight his fingers met resistance. The shadow was cold.
What’s wrong?
I’ve never seen you like this.
He turned Nyx’s belly close to Cinder.
You’re made of shadow. Shadow moves. Is that thing freezing you? The closer it gets, the harder it is for you to move?
Miasma came down his other arm and stopped at his wrist. She put her nose against the stiff Nyx, jerked her head back, then flattened herself against Aiden’s wrist.
You can feel it too.
"All right. Both of you. Listen."
He kept his voice under the wind.
"You feel it before I do." He looked at Nyx. "And before Cinder does."
He let his hand rest over Nyx’s cold back. The shadow did not ease. It could not, now.
"She remembers what it did to her. That’s why she reacts to it." His fingers pressed lightly into Nyx’s shadow. "But you... You recognize it."
He turned Nyx slightly toward him.
"You’ve been telling me it’s coming," he said quietly. "And I kept thinking you were scared."
Nyx eased again.
"Right. New job." He shifted Nyx so she sat comfortably on his shoulder.
"You hate jobs. I’m sorry. You’re the only one who can do this one."
Cinder lifted her head at his voice. The ember came up an inch in her flank.
"Not tonight," Aiden told her. "Go back to sleep."
She lay down again, but kept her eyes open, facing north-east.
He let himself think he had a plan.
Nyx could warn him before the cold reached him. He could cross the country at night and keep Cinder’s heat banked. If Nyx gave him enough warning, they could hide in a fold of ground and let the thing pass.
The warning came four hours later.
Nyx went rigid on his shoulder. Not stiff this time. Completely rigid.
Aiden was awake before he knew he was moving.
Cinder was up faster. The ember flooded her flanks. She stopped banking her heat, and the ditch filled with warmth.
And the ditch was cold.
That was the tell. It had been ordinary spring cool an hour ago. Now Aiden’s breath clouded in front of his face. The hedge above him had gone pale.
Ice was forming across the rainwater at the bottom of the ditch.
Three weeks into spring.
He put his palm down on the frozen puddle.
Cold bit into his palm. Not chill. The dead pull he had felt from the cradle in the sink. The cold that takes heat instead of making it.
Cold where it shouldn’t be.
It’s here.
It had found their trail.
It was close enough to freeze the ground they were lying on.
Cinder bared her teeth toward the north-east.
Something was coming down their trail.
Slow. Certain. The same pace as the handlers in the bottom.
The pace House handlers used when they moved property nobody would dare take.