Chapter 91: COUNTER-TRAINING
The boy found him at the smith’s the next morning.
Aiden had bought a name and nothing else. The proctor was sending more than that, unasked.
"My master found you a way out."
"Did he?"
"He says you’ve only got a day left before staying becomes too dangerous. After that, anyone watching will know you’re planning something."
"Planning what?"
"You have that look." The boy said it flat. Reporting, not his own words. "The one where you’ve already decided, and you’re just doing the sums on whether it kills you. His words."
He’s never wrong. It’s the most irritating thing about him.
Aiden crouched to check on Cinder.
The layer of slag had fallen off her muzzle. The first ember-patch held steady. A second had lit up beside it. It was faint. It must have appeared during the dead hour.
"Two patches now." He ran his thumb along the new one. "When did you grow that? You could have said something. I’d have made a fuss. I like making a fuss. It’s one of three pleasures I have left."
Cinder leaned her head into his hand, which was her answer.
On the kit bag, Miasma raised her head to watch them.
"Don’t look at me like that. You had your fuss when you grew your spines."
She held his eyes a moment. Then she put her chin back down on her forelegs.
She remembers the speech. She’s just decided not to argue about it today.
The smith pushed himself away from the forge.
"She’s nearly there. One more forging and she’s the D she was bred at. Herself again. Full." He nodded at the grey glass heaped in the corner. "The slag restored most of her strength. You did the rest."
Then he looked at Aiden, the same look as the first night. The smith looked him over and saw the cost without asking.
"You look worse than when you came in. I can see it now, same as I saw it then."
"I’ve got enough strength left for one more."
"Enough for one more. Then you’ll have exhausted yourself raising a beast that eats like a draft horse." The smith set the bar down. "I’m not telling you to stop. Just understand what it’s going to cost you."
He picked the bar back up.
"She comes back to her D. She’ll want to keep climbing. A bloodline like hers wants to evolve. Slag and a forge won’t take her any further."
"The fruit will take her further. I know."
"So take her to it. Soon." The old man almost smiled. It looked terrible on his burn-scarred face, and Aiden found he liked it. "Get her out of here before she’s strong enough to have opinions about where she goes."
They went back to the forge in the dead hour.
I lit lamps at this hour for four years. Turns out the habit carries. Work while everyone sleeps, and nobody notices what you’re doing.
He put his hand on Cinder’s flank, over the place the fire lived. The smith struck the steel.
Aiden pushed.
The first time, she’d been so cold he had to force the warmth into her.
The bond answered. This time it accepted the energy immediately. He stopped forcing the energy into her. She began drawing it in herself.
The second patch brightened. A third started under his palm.
That’s what it should have felt like the first time.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ LINEAGE AWAKENING — RESTORATION COMPLETE ]
Beast: Cinder (Ember Wolf)
Method: Ancestral Resonance (forge-driven)
Lineage: E->D, native rank restored
Cost: 0.4 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 1.3 Years ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
More than the last one. She took what she needed.
I don’t think she knew she was doing it.
Cinder rose.
Not the careful rising of a beast managing its own weakness. A wolf standing to her full height in a low brick room.
She filled the workshop. Every step made the room feel cramped.
Heat came off her in a wave. It put sweat on Aiden’s neck. It made the cat sneeze and sit up, looking personally insulted.
"There she is," the smith said. Quiet.
Cinder turned in the small space, taking it in. The door. The drain runs. The man. The cat.
That’s a different look. She’s no longer acting like a wounded animal. She’s judging the room.
She put her nose to the cold Chamber wall once, hard.
It’s still there. You still want to go in. I know.
Then she came back. She slammed into him hard enough to nearly knock him over.
"All right." He caught the wall. "Strong now. Understood."
She did it again, gentler. Gentler, from her, still almost knocked him over.
"I brought you back on your feet so you can knock me over." He straightened. "Worth it. No notes."
Inside his coat, Nyx came out along his collarbone and stopped there. It was watching Cinder.
It had gone warm again. It stayed warm now.
The cat climbed Cinder’s foreleg to her shoulder, as though riding her had been its idea from the start.
Miasma came off the kit bag and crossed the brick to Cinder’s forefeet. She looked up at her.
Cinder lowered her head until it was level with Miasma.
The two of them stayed like that for a moment.
She kept you walking when your legs were folding under you.
You haven’t forgotten. Neither have I.
The boy watched all three of them and remembered why he had come.
"My master sent the escape route," he said. "And something else with it. He said you’d want the escape route so badly you’d take it without listening to the rest. He says the rest is the part that matters."
"Escape route first."
"Nobody guards it. It’s too filthy." The boy made a face. "If you go through at night, nobody will notice."
"Where does it come out?"
"The drainage cut, a mile east of the wall. From there you’re in the marches by dawn. The mid-belt by the second night."
"A sewer," Aiden said. "Of course I’m escaping through a sewer. Everything I do with my life leads me through sewers, and I’d like it noted that I’ve spotted it."
"Now the rest."
"There’s one more thing." The boy hesitated. "My master’s man read the Vane charters again. He looked at the mid-belt. The unlicensed belt. The one with your tree."
"If it’s unlicensed, why hasn’t anyone claimed it?"
"Nobody else claimed it because Vane never needed to." The boy looked at Cinder. "He doesn’t sell anything from that land, so he never filed for it. He still uses it."
"Uses it how?"
"The wild trees out there bear the same fruit as the ones inside his charter. He doesn’t gather them to sell." The boy swallowed. "He gathers them for his own beast."
"The Frost Wolf."
"The big one he keeps at his kennel."
Aiden understood immediately.
You don’t feed fire to a frost-beast.
So they don’t feed it fire.
"You train it against them," he said.
"My master calls it counter-training." The boy said it in a rush. "You make an ice-beast work against the fire that should kill it, over and over, until fighting fire becomes its greatest strength."
"How long?"
"Its whole life. Handlers held the burning fruit close to it with tongs." The boy looked at the floor. "It already knows how to put out the exact fire Cinder needs."
He stopped.
"And the mid-belt’s where they do it. The wild trees are the training ground. That’s why nobody’s stripped the one that’s bearing. They leave the wild ones standing to train against."
Nobody spoke.
Somewhere upriver, workers were hauling the broken pieces of the frozen chamber back toward the city.
Aiden organized the facts in his head.
The only fuel that doesn’t cost me my lifespan grows on a single tree.
The tree stands in the one belt outside Vane’s licence.
Harken never claimed the land because he doesn’t harvest it. He uses it as a training ground.
He has spent a beast’s entire life teaching it to kill exactly the fire that tree makes.
"So the fruit that makes her strong enough to fight his Frost Wolf," Aiden said, "grows where he trained that wolf to kill it."
"That’s it," the boy said. "My master said if I told you about the escape route first, you’d never ask about this."
Cinder put her head against him again. Full weight this time.
Aiden looked at the cold Chamber wall. Past it. East.
A mile of stone. Then the burned forest. The Frost Wolf had spent its whole life there, learning to extinguish that fire. Now Aiden had to take Cinder straight into its training ground.
I’d lead Cinder through a sewer... then straight into the one place built to stop her from evolving.
Naturally.
"Right," he said. "Good. Love that."
He shouldered the empty kit-bag.
"When do we leave?"