Chapter 83: BORROWED FIRE
Aiden got to his feet.
Cinder rose with him. She had not waited for a hand or a word. His weight shifted. She was up before he was.
Then she looked at him.
Aiden looked back.
Everything you had is in that hollow. Two of them in the ash and one on the slope. I’ve got two years and a road west. Between the two of us, we make about one whole thing.
She held his eyes a moment longer, waiting for commands that never came. Then she turned and walked back to the edge of the hollow. She stood over the two small bodies with her head down.
Aiden went ten paces and stopped.
He let her say goodbyes.
She came at her own pace. She looked back once at the smoke. After that she kept her eyes forward.
She came to his heel.
Not his side. His heel. The exact place the Snow Wolf had walked behind the tracker, one length and half a step back, waiting to be told.
Aiden stopped walking.
He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her forward until she was beside him.
She stopped and looked up at him, ears half back, confused.
"I’d carry you if I could," he smiled, his voice soft. "Miasma rides the bag. Nyx rides my coat. But you’re much bigger than them." He nudged her shoulder again with his knuckles. "So you walk. Next to me. Like a partner."
She did not understand a word. She understood Harken’s leash, the chenil master’s whip, the cold commands, not what a partner was. She stayed where he had put her.
His hand was still on her shoulder when he registered her cold.
You’re an Ember Wolf. Warm is what you should be. I’ll find something to help you.
He looked at the patches on her flanks. Still black on black. They went out when she burned her den and never lit up again.
He walked on, and Cinder came with him.
The Snow Wolf lay at the foot of the burned trees, the rime around it dark and wet now, its white throat the only pale thing left.
Aiden stood over it a moment.
A knife wound under the ear. No beast does that. The tracker will come back for you with men and a cart.
Burying it would take half the morning with one working arm. The ground here was root and ash. A fresh hole would tell the tracker more than the body did.
He left it.
He found the boy and the cat a few hundred paces ahead, where the gully ran out of the burn into the second growth.
The boy sat against a trunk with the cat in his lap, and his coat pulled around both of them. When he saw Aiden, he stood so fast the cat went off him sideways.
Then he stopped.
He stared at Aiden’s white lock of hair.
"I told you to go south," Aiden said.
"I went south." The boy’s voice was thin. "Then I stopped."
He was still staring.
"You look different. Older." He swallowed. "Are you all right? What happened to you?"
"I paid for something."
"Paid what?"
"Later."
The cat had already crossed to Cinder.
It strode to the big cold wolf sure-footed. It pressed itself against her foreleg and moved around it. Whatever heat a cat that size makes, it put all of it into her.
Cinder’s lip pulled back off the teeth. The growl never came. She let the cat continue.
Aiden watched them.
One cat against a whole wolf gone cold. That’s a candle in a cellar.
Miasma came off the kit bag.
She crossed the ground to Cinder’s forefeet and stopped. No glow. No sound. She turned her head west, pointing down the road.
Cinder looked at the small dark shape at her feet.
Miasma held west.
Cinder started walking.
"She listened to her," the boy said.
"She did."
Inside his coat, against his ribs, Nyx shifted.
Aiden nearly stopped walking.
Since the pup died, Nyx had been a stone out of a river. Through the trees. Through the killing, and through the light. No warmth in it anywhere.
There was warmth in it now. Faint. Coming up slowly, like something remembering how.
He had no idea what had changed in Nyx. All he had was the warmth coming back into his coat where there had been none. That, and a guess. Nyx approved of something without understanding what.
They went west with the light behind them.
"What is she?" the boy said, after a while. "I heard the tracker say it. I want you to say it."
"She’s the Baron’s," Aiden said. "Bred D, frozen down a grade in his cold room, and held there too long. She went over his wall and denned on his own ground."
"And now?"
"Now she’s bonded to me."
The boy stopped walking.
"To you."
"This morning. In the ash."
"That’s—" The boy’s mouth worked. "That’s a Baron’s beast. That’s a contract. Having two is rare already. Three now? You can’t just—"
"I know what it is."
The boy walked in silence for a hundred paces.
"She’s freezing," he said. "She’s freezing right now, isn’t she?"
"Yes."
"So she needs heat."
"She needs heat that stays. Not a man’s hands. Not a cat."
"Would a forge do? There’s a whole district of them in the city."
"That’s where I’m heading."
"But your slip." The boy’s voice changed. "My master said the ledger’s hour was this morning."
"It was."
"Then they’ve read it. They’ve read your name into the column."
"While I was sitting in ash, two days east of the desk."
Aiden said it to the country ahead, not to the boy.
I’ve been walking away from that room since the day Harken flagged my slip. This morning it happened without me, and I did not feel it happen.
There is no going back to the route. There is a forge district. And there is a House that wants Cinder.
"Then what’s in the city for you?"
"The only heat that can fix her," Aiden said. "In the only place the man who wants her back can reach me."
The boy was quiet a while.
"My master will want the report," he said eventually. "That you lived. That you’re bonded to Harken Vane’s wolf. That you have three beasts." He kicked a stone ahead of him. "He’ll read it four times, burn it, and pretend he never had it."
"Then he’ll know," Aiden said. "That’s a start."
Aiden had put the forge district at half a day’s walk when they left the den.
He had planned for a slow pace, for a wolf running out of fire.
Cinder fell behind before the sun was high. He stopped, waited until she drew up beside him, and started again slower. An hour later he slowed again.
After that he stopped counting how many times he slowed.
He drank when she needed rest and pretended the stop was his. She stood while he did it and did not drink herself.
By afternoon he could hear her breathing from three feet away.
By sunset her legs were barely moving. He had seen legs do that before. Under her jaw. The pup on the slope.
She kept walking.
Twice her front legs folded and she caught herself before her chest hit the ground.
Both times Miasma came off the bag.
She climbed Cinder’s shoulder and lay against the side of her neck, her whole small body pressed against it.
She did not point. She did not ask for anything.
She stayed until Cinder’s breathing slowed. Then she stayed longer.
Both times Cinder put her legs back under her.
She’s not telling her to get up.
She’s telling her she isn’t doing this alone.
By dark they had made maybe half the distance.
Aiden took everyone off the road into a fold in the second growth where a stand of green broke it.
He worked out what he had.
The cat’s warmth, which was a candle. The heat of the day, which was leaving. And after that, nothing until a forge she would not reach tonight.
What should be half a day is going to take us two at this pace. She hasn’t got two.
He looked west, at the dark coming up over the country between Cinder and the city.
Then he looked east.
The smoke was still rising from Cinder’s den, a thin grey column standing into the last of the light.
A fire here would be a second column. Smaller. Ten miles from the first, on open ground, with the road between.
Aiden began scraping a ring clear in the dirt with his boot.
The boy watched him do it.
"You’re lighting a fire."
"I am."
"Out here?" The boy’s voice climbed. "The tracker’s coming back for his wolf. He’ll see it from the road. He’ll see a fire where there’s no reason for one. He’ll know exactly who lit it."
"Yes."
"And he won’t come back with takers this time. He’ll come back with fighters. Beast-handlers. Men the House keeps for this."
"Yes."
"Then why—"
Aiden looked at Cinder lying in the grass, with the cat pressed against her foreleg, and no heat anywhere in her body.
"Because I won’t let her freeze while I keep myself safe."
He laid the first dry wood in the ring.
The cat came off Cinder’s foreleg and sat at the edge of the cleared ground, where the fire would be. Nyx came out of his collar and put itself in the dark just past the ring, warm now, close enough to watch Cinder.
Miasma waited.
Cinder lifted her head off her paws and looked at the empty ring. Then at the man building it.
Something moved behind her eyes that had not been there since the hollow. Not grief.
Want.
You know what that’s going to be.
He struck the spark.
The fire that keeps her alive tonight tells the tracker where we are by morning.
There is no version of tonight where I don’t light it.
The wood caught.
The light came up in the fold. Cinder rose and moved at its edge.
She lay down close enough for the heat to reach her hide. She put her chin on the ground and shut her eyes.
Only then did Miasma move. She lay against Cinder’s ribs. She glanced at the big wolf, then west.
Are you telling her we’re almost there?
Cinder shifted her foreleg and drew Miasma in against her chest.
Miasma let her.
The patches on her flanks took the firelight and brightened.
Not their own ember. Somebody else’s fire, borrowed, sitting on a black coat.
It was the first warm thing she’d had since the morning.
It was also a column of light on open ground.
Somewhere east on that road, a man had turned back for a wolf that was not coming.