Chapter 102: THE FORGE GOES COLD
The forge was cold when Aiden stepped inside.
The old man had kept that forge lit every night since Aiden walked in with a dying wolf.
Now the coals sat grey and raked flat. The long bar he had been working on leaned cold against the wall.
A cold forge is a packed bag.
"You’re closing the forge," Aiden said.
"I’m closing this one." The smith did not turn from the dead coals. "Forty years I’ve held this fire against that charter. Forty years they’ve tried to buy me out. You know why they never pushed harder?"
"Because you weren’t worth the trouble."
"Because I wasn’t worth the trouble." He nodded at the grey coals. "A stubborn old man with one forge. Beneath their notice. Same as you were a month ago."
He picked at a coal with his boot.
"That’s what this district is."
Aiden said nothing.
I knew what he was going to say the second I saw the coals. Hearing it sooner won’t make it easier.
"Then you brought a dead bloodline back wearing white-gold, in a lane with a House man watching," the smith said. "Now I’m worth their trouble."
"Because of me."
"Because of what was in the undercroft beside my forge. A forge vents wrong, fine, men believe that for a day." He finally turned. "A forge doesn’t vent a Solarflare Hound."
"How long have you got?"
"Before a good coat comes asking questions about what happened in my forge?" The smith shrugged. "Days. Less, now they’ve had their look."
The burn-scarred smith’s face stayed still.
Aiden knew that silence. It was the one Marsh used when something was already lost.
"I’m not angry at you, Aiden. Don’t look at me like that."
"I brought this on you."
"I knew what I was lighting the fire for." The old man’s voice stayed flat. "A man my age doesn’t get to do something that matters twice. I did. That’s all I’m saying."
"Come with us."
"With you? Where?" The smith almost laughed. "You don’t have a place to go. You’ve got a Hound that warms a room through a wall. And a fake name on a registry that gets you nowhere once they connect it to you."
He picked the cold bar off the wall.
"You’re not leaving because you found somewhere better. You’re leaving because this city isn’t safe anymore."
He turned the bar over in his hands.
"I’ll go to my sister’s, in the kiln-villages. An old man with burned hands is just an old man with burned hands out there. You’ll go wherever you can keep Cinder without someone noticing." He set the bar down. "They’re not the same direction. That’s all."
Aiden stood in the cold forge with a debt he could not repay. The smith had refused the only thing Aiden knew how to offer.
He told me not to make that face. He’s earned being obeyed.
So he did not apologise.
Four people in my life have been kind to me with no price on it. He’s one.
I’m leaving him a cold forge and a reason to run. That’s the price for knowing me.
"The fire was always yours," Aiden said instead. "Everything Cinder became started with your fire. You held that fire for forty years so it would be there the night I needed it."
The smith looked at him.
"When she ends the House that froze her, and she will, your fire will be part of it." Aiden shouldered the same empty bag he had brought in. "I’m not going to insult that by being sorry it worked."
The old man was quiet for a long moment.
"That’s a better thing to say than sorry," he said. "You learned that somewhere hard."
"I learned it from a proctor who never says a kind thing he hasn’t charged for. You’re the first man to give me one free."
"Don’t get used to it."
He set the bar against the wall. Gentle. Like a tool he was not going to pick up again.
"Go say the rest of your goodbyes. The boy’s upstairs."
"How is he?"
"Crying and pretending he hasn’t. You’ll let him pretend."
Aiden went upstairs.
The boy sat on a crate with his legs folded against his chest. His eyes were red, but he was trying not to cry.
Aiden sat across from him. He used the same silence Marsh had used with him.
You can sit here until you’re ready to talk.
After a while, the boy’s breathing evened out.
"My master says I go back to him full-time now," the boy said. "No more running for you. He says once they notice you, they’ll notice me too, and I’m worth more unnoticed."
He scrubbed his nose.
"He’s right. He’s always right. I hate it."
"He’s right," Aiden agreed. "That’s the most annoying thing about your master."
The boy laughed, wet and surprised.
Aiden watched him for a moment. They had come a long way together. Now it was time for goodbyes.
"You logged it all," Aiden said. "The marsh. The pups. The den. My gamble. The forge. You were the only one writing it down."
"There’s no page. There was never a page."
"I know. That’s why I’m saying it out loud. So it exists somewhere."
Miasma came off Aiden’s shoulder onto the boy’s knee.
She had never once done that.
The boy went very still. Then he put one finger on her back. Carefully. Like touching something that could kill him and had chosen not to.
She let him. She put her feet on his forearm for two seconds. Then she climbed back to Aiden’s shoulder and settled.
"She’s saying goodbye," the boy said.
"She’s saying you were useful. From her, that’s a poem."
Aiden stood.
Cinder came behind him, the cat riding on her shoulder.
The boy looked at it.
It had come out of Vane’s charter grounds with them and never returned to him. Neither of them had ever talked about it.
It came down off Cinder, crossed to the boy, and put its head against his hand. Once. Then it went back to Cinder’s shoulder and sat down.
The boy’s mouth trembled.
"Cinder remembers you too," Aiden said. "You were at the den. She doesn’t forget who was there."
The boy reached up slowly and put his hand on the side of Cinder’s jaw.
She held still and let him touch her.
His hand rested on Cinder’s warm white-gold fur.
"Be terrifying," he said, thick. "For both of us."
She will. It’s what she’s best at now.
Aiden left the undercroft that night. Against the sewer current, in the dark, in the dead of night.
Aiden carried out no more than he had carried in. The empty bag. Miasma on his shoulder. Nyx in the dark of his coat. A cat that now rode a Solarflare Hound.
And forty-six years of lifespan he still could not quite believe were his.
He looked back once. At the wall. At the city’s glow above it. At the forge district, where a stubborn old man was raking out a forty-year fire so the clerks would find nothing unusual.
A mile out, in the dark, Cinder stopped.
She raised her head. Not back toward the city. Ahead.
Aiden looked in the direction she was facing and saw nothing.
She felt the cold in the basin before I saw it. She felt it in the sink before I did.
The river ran north and east from here. That was also the direction a House would use to move something it wanted kept out of sight.
Heat brightened along her flanks.
Nyx came out of his coat and went still on his shoulder, facing the same way.
She only stands like that for one thing.
It fought her half-built, and it nearly won.
It’s coming again, and it won’t be half-built this time.