Chapter 92: THE FIELD OF FIRE
Aiden left the city through the sewer.
The tunnel was brick, wide enough for two men, tall enough that he did not have to stoop. Workers had built it to maintain the tunnels. Then the city forgot it existed.
The water ran ankle-deep. Warm. Exactly as foul as the boy had promised.
By the third bend he had stopped smelling it.
Four years on Sewer Row gave me one gift. My nose gives up faster than other men’s.
"I want you to know," he told Cinder, "this is the third sewer this year and the first one I picked. That’s progress. A man should celebrate his progress."
Cinder did not celebrate his progress.
She had her own problem with the tunnel. She barely fit in it.
He should have expected that. A dying wolf makes itself small. A wolf full of fire takes up space.
Her shoulders scraped both walls. Her spine brushed the ceiling.
Heat poured off her and ran down the tunnel. It dried the slime on the walls. Rats and Rotfang Scavengers fled ahead, and Aiden felt them move more than he heard them.
"You’re announcing us," he said. "To rats. Fine. Rats don’t file reports."
He put his hand on her flank to slow her down. Her flank was hot enough that he took it back.
"But you’re a furnace in a chimney. Chimneys have tops. Gratings sit over the tops, and streets sit over the gratings." He wiped his palm on his coat. "Bank it. Like you did under the dock. Just until we’re out."
Cinder did not bank it.
Every day he had known her, she had been too cold to hold her own fire. Then she clawed it back, patch by patch, in a smith’s forge. Now she had all of it for the first time since Harken locked her in the cold room.
And he was asking her to hide it in a sewer.
She turned and looked at him. Her light was the only light down there, and her eyes held something she had never shown him before.
She was refusing.
"That’s a face. You have opinions now."
He nearly laughed. Standing in filth, in the dark, with 1.3 years left, losing an argument to a wolf.
"You were the warmest beast I bonded with. I told myself that was love."
Cinder held the look.
"It was hypothermia. You don’t even like me. You like that I’m warm and I bring rocks."
Her fire did not drop.
So Aiden stopped ordering her.
She lost her pups and almost died because she trusted Harken. I was an idiot to think she’d trust someone else so easily.
All right. I’ll wait until you see me as more than the tamer who was there when you needed it.
He told her the truth instead.
"Ahead of us, there are men who trained something to kill exactly what you are." He kept his voice low. "Not what you were. What you’re about to become."
Her ears turned toward him.
"They trained it in the field we’re walking into. They might be training it tonight. The only advantage we have is that they don’t know you’re coming."
And that advantage is her staying dark. Not glowing up a chimney for some man on the street to report.
"Hide it for them. Not for me. I don’t care if a rat sees you." He pressed his palm flat against her. "Hide it so whatever wants you dead can’t start early."
Cinder looked at him for the length of two steps. Then, her light receded.
Not all of it. She could not go dark like Nyx. She was made of fire, and the fire stayed, low, sitting in the patches.
Pilot light.
That’s what I’m calling that. To myself. Forever.
But she pulled it back to a man’s reach of warmth. The heat stopped running ahead of them. The rats stopped fleeing. The tunnel went quiet.
"Thank you," Aiden said. "That cost you. I noticed. I notice everything. It’s a sickness."
The cat had ridden her shoulder through all of it. It gave Aiden a look he decided to call solidarity.
"You’re no help. You like her better. Everyone likes her better."
Nyx shifted against his ribs inside his coat.
"Except you. You don’t like anybody. That’s why we get along."
They came out a mile east of the wall, against the current, where the tunnel emptied into a reed-choked ditch under open sky.
The stars were out. The city wall stood black behind them with its glow above it. Ahead, the land dropped east toward the marches in dark folds.
Aiden let Cinder come up to full glow.
A furnace in a field is a campfire. Nobody looks twice at a campfire.
She lit up gold. Then she put her head against his chest and leaned all her weight on him.
They hid through the first day in a dip of dead ground under a fallen hedge.
Aiden did not sleep. With 1.3 years left, every hour unconscious felt stolen.
So he watched her instead.
Cinder slept heavy, sprawled across a hedge’s worth of dead grass, warming the ground under her, the cat tucked into the angle of her jaw.
The two of them made a comfortable heap that no longer needed him as the source of their warmth.
Aiden watched the ember patches along Cinder’s body.
I learned to read flames the same way I learned to read lamp glass. Every shade tells me something about the fuel underneath. It’s steady now.
Healthy. I stopped using that word for anything years ago.
That was the part that caught him, with his back against a root and his hands loose in his lap.
She needed me for heat. That was all of it. I told myself it was the bond.
The smith had been right. So had the sewer.
She’s her own furnace now. She doesn’t need my warmth for anything.
She had lain against him in the undercroft anyway, the night they returned to the city. Close in, where she did not have to be.
"Don’t," he told the sleeping wolf, quietly. "Don’t make it mean something. I’ll fall apart, and there’s nobody out here to be embarrassed in front of, which is somehow worse."
Cinder did not make it mean something. She slept.
Miasma sat on the kit bag with her head up, watching the hedge line while Aiden watched the wolf.
You never sleep when I don’t. I’ve noticed that too.
The cat opened one eye, judged him, and shut it again.
They moved again after dark.
Cinder went from putting herself behind him to wanting to lead. She led. Aiden gave up the argument, the same as he had in the sewer.
Something that’s itself again remembers it had somewhere to be. Out here it pulls at her harder than it did under a mile of city stone.
He kept her to the low ground and the dead folds. She let him.
She had learned the one lesson. Bank it. Don’t announce us.
Everything else she did on instinct, better than he could have taught her, picking the same cover he would have picked.
"This is humiliating, you understand," he told her back. "I spent four years learning to read ground nobody would let me walk on. Now I’m following a wolf who learned it in two nights."
Cinder did not slow down. She never slowed down for the talking.
She’s filed it under noises I make that don’t need answering. Same drawer as my old breathing and cough.
And he found he did not mind being something she had learned to live with. It was more than most people had ever let him be.
They reached the edge of the mid-belt on the second night.
Cinder stopped before Aiden did. Her glow dropped to ember on her own, without being asked.
Aiden came up beside her and looked where she was looking.
The mid-belt opened below them, a long shallow basin of burned trees.
A third of the basin was on fire.
Not lightning. Men had set it. Fires burned in rows across the basin floor. Handlers walked between them in heavy gloves, feeding the flames with iron tongs, keeping each line at the same height.
At the centre of the rows, something walked through the fire.
Cold rolled off it. Aiden felt it before he could see the creature clearly. The flames shrank when it passed through them.
The reeds under Aiden’s boots turned white with ice on a warm spring night.
A handler carried a burning branch toward the shape on his tongs.
The creature took it. It walked straight through a line of fire that should have killed anything made of cold.
It came out the other side. The fire guttered and died behind it. The handler was already turning to light the next row.
That’s the training. They don’t feed it.
They walk it through fire that should destroy it. Over and over. Until walking through fire is what it does best.
The Frost Wolf was awake. It was working.
And somewhere in that basin stood the tree bearing the only fuel that could make Cinder its equal.
Tonight that field held fire and men, teaching the cold to kill it.
Cinder’s ember went out.
She had never seen the Frost Wolf. She knew it anyway. The same as she had known the silence at the den. The cold-iron. The smoke.
That shape gave off the same cold that had lived inside her for a year.
Aiden put his hand on her flank. It went cold under his palm for the first time since the forge.
No joke for this one. There isn’t one.
"Yeah," he said. Very quietly. "I know. That’s the same cold that has been coming down the river."
Down in the basin, the white shape raised its head. It left the fire half-dead behind it.
It turned.
It looked up the slope. At the reeds. At ice that had no business being there.
It had felt Cinder too.