Chapter 84: THE FIRE WE COULD NOT HIDE
Cinder’s breathing changed in the third hour.
It had been fast and shallow since the road, the same short pulls she had been taking when her legs folded under her. Now it slowed. It went deep. Her ribs pushed against the black coat, paused for a moment, then sank again.
Aiden had been listening to it for so long that the change woke him out of a doze he had not meant to fall into.
He put his hand on her side.
There was heat under the hide. Not much. Enough that he could tell it from the fire’s heat on his own palm.
There you are.
She had lain down at the edge of the ring at last light and had not moved away since. Closer to a fire than any wild beast would lie. After a while she rolled and gave the flames her other side. The patches on her flanks took the firelight and threw it back.
Borrowed. Not her own. But she was taking it.
The cat had given up on warming her from outside. It had worked in between her forelegs, where the heat pooled against her chest. It slept there with its chin on her leg.
Cinder had let it. She had not even lifted her head to watch it do it.
Aiden left them and went to the kit bag.
Miasma was on it, and she had not moved either.
He crouched and put two fingers on her spines.
Hey.
Nothing. Then, slowly, her head came up off her forefeet, maybe an inch. Her eyes opened.
She looked at him. She put her head back down.
His chest did something painful.
Twenty years went through you and out. I did that to you. You’re as exhausted as Cinder. You just didn’t show it to her.
You didn’t even flinch.
He sat with her. Then the system spoke without being asked.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ BONDED BEAST — STATUS ]
EMBER WOLF — lineage suppressed
Native: D · Current: E (sustained cold, prolonged)
Thermal reserve: critical
Holding on external heat.
External heat sustains. It does not restore.
Re-awakening requires ancestral heat, sustained.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
He read it twice and set it against what the tracker had said at the stake row.
They matched. Bred D. Frozen past E.
A campfire is a wick held against something that needs a forge.
It keeps her till morning. Nothing more.
The forge district ran hot day and night. Half a day west at a walking pace. Two days at hers.
And a forge is still only heat. Ancestral, it says. Sustained.
Nothing about a brick furnace brings a beast back up its own bloodline.
He knew what did. He had paid for Miasma a few days ago. The judge in the ground had cost him a year, and it had only worked because the site was Vesperian and so was she.
Twenty years bought her one hour with her pups.
Whatever brings a beast back up a grade costs more than that. I’ve got two.
So I spend the two and die before she’s whole, or I keep them and watch her stay like this.
There has to be a third answer. I have two years to find it.
Or I’ll watch her wither in a forge.
He put that where he put everything he could do nothing about before morning.
Then he dealt with what was left.
The fire was a beacon. He could not put it out without killing her. So he made it work for him instead.
He went back to the ring and crouched by the boy.
"You sleep. I’ll be past the trees."
"You’re not staying at the fire?"
"No."
The boy looked at the dark, then at Aiden, and did not ask why. He had been out here long enough now to work it out for himself.
Aiden set him with his back to the green where the wind broke, the fire between him and the open country. He put the kit bag beside him with Miasma on it.
Then he walked out of the light.
He went to the edge, where the firelight stopped and the second growth began. He sat with his back against a burned trunk, the small blade out of his boot.
Behind him, at the ring, Cinder lifted her head.
She watched him go into the dark. Her ears came forward. She got one foreleg under herself.
"Stay," Aiden said. Quietly, across forty feet of firelight.
She did not know the word. She heard the tone. She put the leg down. She kept her head up. Her eyes stayed on the place where he had disappeared.
You think I’m leaving.
I’m not. That’s the whole point of where I’m sitting.
He reached into his coat for Nyx.
It came out. It went into the deeper dark under the trees without a sound, all the way to the treeline, and then it came straight back and pressed itself against his ribs.
Warm. Warmer than it had been in two days.
"That’s not where I put you," Aiden said.
Nyx did not move. It only looked at him with its pale eyes. Fixed. Wanting to stay.
Miasma already claimed my leg. I guess you took my side, and neither of you asked for my opinion. That’s fine. I like it here too.
He put his hand on it and smiled.
Then he looked past the trunk at the fire, forty feet off, burning in an empty ring.
From the road it would show a lit fire with nobody sitting at it, and a black treeline behind.
He’ll read that in one look. He works for a House that hunts people.
He’ll walk in anyway. He has a dead wolf to explain to a Baron.
Aiden waited.
The tracker came in the deep part of the night.
Nyx went stiff against his ribs before Aiden heard anything.
Then he heard it. Boots, a hundred paces out, not trying to be quiet.
One man. Walking heavy, past caring who heard him.
Aiden’s hand closed on the blade.
The tracker came up the open ground alone. The place behind his right leg was empty.
He found her.
The tracker stopped in the half-light at the edge of the ring, where a careful man stops. From there he could see the fire, the boy, the cat, and Cinder’s big black shape lying at its edge.
He looked at Cinder longest.
Aiden watched him do it. The black coat. The dead patches on the flanks. The cat bedded in her chest. How still she was, and how close she lay to the fire.
A Tier 1 should have been on her feet from the tracker’s scent.
She had not moved.
"She’s bonded," the tracker said.
He said it to the fire, not loudly. Saying it aloud to find out whether he believed it.
"She is," Aiden said.
The tracker did not turn toward the dark.
That was the first thing Aiden learned about him that the stake row had not taught. He had known where Aiden was before he stepped into the light.
He had stepped into it anyway.
"You’ve got me," the tracker said. "I walked in knowing that."
He crouched at the edge of the firelight, slowly, and put his hands open on his knees where they could be seen.
"If you can see me and I can’t see you, I’m already dead. That’s if you want me dead."
"Yes."
"I found my wolf in the burned trees south of the ditch." His voice did not move at all. "Knife wound. Under the ear. No beast gives another beast that."
"No."
"Her eyes were open." The tracker looked up, into the dark, at nothing. "Both of them. Nothing wrong with either one. She died blind. I’ve handled beasts for my entire life, and I can’t tell you what did it."
Aiden said nothing.
"You’re not going to tell me."
The dark did not answer him.
"No." Something moved in the man’s voice for the first time. Not much. "No, you wouldn’t. I’d not tell me either."
He was quiet a while.
At the ring, Cinder’s head came off her paws.
She had the man’s scent now. Her lip pulled off her teeth, and an inch of ember sparked along her flank, dull red under the black.
It went out before she finished lifting her head.
She held the head up anyway.
The tracker watched all of it.
"So that’s the second thing I walked in knowing," he said.