Chapter 89: A NAME FOR A RELIC
Aiden did not sleep.
He sat outside, against the forge’s warm wall through the dead hour.
One year and four months, to put Cinder back on the rung she fell from. He had one year and eight.
I’d have summer left if I pay it all.
Just summer to live.
An Ember Wolf never stopped climbing once it starts. Her blood remembers what it had been. The smith had said as much.
I’d spend myself getting her halfway up a ladder she’ll continue to climb over my grave.
He worked the problem as he worked a broken lamp.
The bond carries what I put in it. I’ve been putting years in because they’re the only thing I have.
But a bond is just a channel.
A channel carries whatever goes down it, so there has to be a fuel that isn’t me.
He was still holding that thought when the boy came up the slag-lane at first light.
The boy’s shoulders hung low, pressed down by something he did not want to say.
"My master sends word."
"Say it."
"He’s glad you’re alive. The report’s gone through and burned." The boy stopped walking. "He says nothing he’s done so far has cost you anything. Waiting at the undercroft. Pointing you at the smith. He says that was the free part."
"And the part that isn’t."
"He wants the relic."
Aiden went still.
The relic was in the kit bag. It had been in the kit bag since he left the city. Before that, it had been under his floorboard. He had never once taken it out for anyone to see.
"He knows what I’m carrying."
"He’s known since before you went east. He never asked for it before." The boy kept his eyes on Aiden. His master had drilled that into him.
"He says you can’t keep carrying it. Not with Baron Harken Vane hunting you. It’ll get you killed the moment he learns about it. He says he can hide it where no House will ever find it. In return, he’ll give you the one thing you actually need."
"Which is."
"Standing," the boy said. "Not tamer grade, that’s an Academy thing, and he’s got no say in it. But he can put your name back on a registry. Low. Quiet. Enough that you can walk in the city without every clerk wondering who you are."
Aiden looked at the kit bag.
Miasma’s ancestor’s heart. The thing that had raised her from F to E. Traded for one more chance to exist on paper.
That’s not a cruel price. The proctor is not someone cruel. He asks the exact worth of his help against a noble house. Then he lets you feel the price.
"Tell him I’ll think about it."
"He said you’d say that." The boy’s voice dropped. "He told me to remind you every hour you spend thinking is an hour you don’t have."
"Say it."
"The room’s moving."
Aiden’s chest went cold.
"He’s got someone watching Vane’s permits. Three days ago, they filed one for a heavy river barge. The kind you use when whatever you’re hauling can’t move by itself."
The boy looked past him. Cinder was glowing low at the banked fire. "The tracker told you moving the room would be slow. My master says slow started three days ago. You’ve got weeks. Maybe less."
Weeks.
Not the loose months the tracker had let him expect at the fire.
It’s already on the water. In pieces. Coming down to the wall.
He looked at Cinder.
She had come off the forge floor sometime in the night. The fire he’d driven into her held steady through the night, one flank glowing where the hammer had struck.
The cure works, but Harken’s moving too fast.
I can’t pay in years. I don’t have them.
"The smith said the bond carries what I put in it," he muttered, too low for the boy to hear him, and half to convince himself. "I put years in because years were all I had. But she’s not built to run on a man’s years. She’s built to run on fire. The right fire."
He looked west, through the open front of the forge.
"There’s a fruit that grows on lightning trees. The Embercore. The fruit Harken’s man tried to sell me."
"My master’s mentioned it. We saw the trees in the march during the field exercise."
"Third ridge." Aiden heard the trap close as he said the next part. "On Vane’s charter."
The fruit’s loaded with the kind of fire Cinder’s bloodline climbs on. I put that down the bond instead of my lifespan. She climbs. I don’t die doing it.
The boy went quiet, then shook his head. "Every lightning tree on the marches is Vane-chartered."
Aiden looked west through the smith’s open forge front toward the wall and the country beyond it. "The only fuel that isn’t my life is growing on land that’ll be crawling with Vane’s patrols."
Cinder turned from the fire. She pushed her nose against the back of his hand.
He turned and let her have it.
She had started doing this in the night. She initiated, he held still, and she decided when it was done.
He didn’t know what she found so interesting about his hand. The forge-heat, maybe. Or just that it was still his hand, still smelling like him, still smelling like wires and oil lamp after every year he had spent.
She finished, then rested her head against his knee.
Every road that doesn’t cost me my life runs onto Vane’s ground.
He sat with that a while.
The smith worked his bar and did not ask. The boy waited at the lane’s mouth like he had nowhere else to be.
That was exactly how his master had taught him to wait.
Aiden ran the trade over in his head first. That was an old habit, from the lamp routes.
Give up the relic. Get his name back on the books, low and quiet. With a legal name, he could walk the smith-rows without every guard asking questions. Hire a barrow. Stand in a queue. Buy what he needed.
Without it, he was a ghost. A ghost could keep a wolf warm in an undercroft and do nothing more.
I need my name cleared. That’s not a choice.
It only feels like one because of its cost. But...
He looked at Miasma. She sat on the kit bag, her green eyes open.
Can I take your ancestor’s heart because I let Harken corner us?
Miasma held his gaze another second. Then she stepped down the bag, onto his leg. No sound. She didn’t wait for him to speak. She lay on her spot.
Beneath her closed eyes, her mouth curled slightly.
Thank you.
He took the kit bag and placed it between his legs.
He opened it.
He took the lamp containing the relic out for the first time since the floorboard.
It pulsed green as it always had. It was worth several lives to the right buyer. It was worth less than his name.
I carried this out of the city. I carried it to the marches. I brought it back.
I never once brought it into the light. Let the proctor do something with it.
He held it out to the boy.
"Tell your master yes. He keeps it where no House can claim it. He does not pull it out of the lamp. The relic kills whoever does."
The boy took the lamp with both hands. He almost dropped it. Then he secured it as if it belonged to someone else and he was only carrying it.
"He’ll have your name on the ledger by morning."
"Tell him one more thing."
Aiden looked at Cinder. At the steady ember holding in her flank. "Tell him I’m going back out the wall. To the marches. To the grove."
The boy stopped.
"That’s the baron’s ground."
"He can have the relic. He can have the report." Aiden shouldered the empty bag. "He can’t have me spending my life a hammer-strike at a time."
"So you’re walking back into the baron."
"I was meant to the morning I bonded Cinder." Aiden looked west.
The only question was whether I’d pay for Cinder with my life or Harken’s trees. I’d rather owe him the trees.
The boy left with the relic.
Cinder rose off the banked fire the moment Aiden moved. She had started doing that every time now. She put herself beside him without being told.
The cat looked at the boy walking away. Then at the wolf’s warm side. It picked the wolf again.
"That relic was worth more than my life," Aiden told her. "A man who wears bodies like suits tried to kill me because I looked at it. And I traded it away to stand in a queue."
He placed Miasma on his bag and smiled at both beasts.
"When you’re the size of a draft horse and melting ice off people’s faces, remember I bought your medicine with our only good thing, and a fake name. Small statue. I’m not greedy."
She leaned her whole weight into his side.
She didn’t need to. She wasn’t unsteady anymore. She did it anyway.
He had bought his name back.
He was about to spend that name walking straight back onto Vane’s ground.
For the one fire that could save her without killing him.
A name meant nothing if she died from the cold while he queued for oil. He’d burn it gladly to see her climb into sunlight, no longer a dying ember.