ASHBOUND

Chapter Two — What the Bond Took

I ran like the city was on fire. Which, one way or another, it always is.

Cindral is built on cinders. Eight hundred years of them, packed into streets that climb the mountain in crooked steps. I knew those streets better than my own face. Up through Tanner’s Reach, where the stink slows down a clean grey coat. Over the rope bridge at Smokegate. Down the broken stairs behind the chandlery, where a stranger snaps an ankle.

I did everything right.

And every time I looked back, he was there. Not running. Walking. Steady, unbothered, that black collar catching the light. And the hook behind my ribs pulled tighter with every step I put between us, like the distance was a rope and he was holding the other end.

That’s when I understood, and the dread of it nearly put me on my knees.

I hadn’t just stolen a Warden’s flame. I’d stolen his. The boy had only opened the door. The fire I’d actually swallowed in that gold half-second had come off the young one on the platform, and it was huge, royal, the kind of fire that doesn’t belong in someone like me. It sloshed around my hollow chest like wine in a cup that was never built to hold it.

I cornered myself by accident. The dead-end yard behind the old Ashkeeper shrine. Walls on three sides, a locked gate on the fourth, no way up.

He came through the archway a second later and stopped.

Up close, he was worse, because up close he was more beautiful, and like I said, that’s the dangerous kind. Twenty, maybe. Hard, fine-boned face. Jaw tight. Eyes the gold of banked coals. He was breathing harder than that lazy walk had earned — and not from the chase. From me. From whatever was strung between us now.

“You’re a wick,” he said.

Not a question. Low, level, the voice of a man carrying something heavy and refusing to let you see him strain.

“I’ve hunted three of your kind. Never once felt one take. Not like that. You reached into a sanctioned tithe and turned the fire into the Warden’s own hand.” A muscle moved in his jaw.

“Do you have any idea what you just did to me?”

“Saved a child,” I said.

Fear makes me mouthy. It’s the closest I get to bravery.

“You drank from the heir to the Ember Throne.” He watched my face fall apart when he said it.

“I am Castien Aldermoor. My fire is sworn to the Pyre and nothing else. It does not leave me. It has never left me.”

He turned his right hand over. In the dim light I saw it. A mark, spreading across the inside of his wrist. Thin black lines branching out like cracks in cooling glass.

“And now it’s done both.”

I looked at my own wrist. Same mark. Black lines climbing up from the heel of my hand, settling in like they’d always lived there. And they were warm. Mine, in a way nothing had ever been mine.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Something crossed his face that wasn’t anger. It looked, of all things, like fear.

“An ashbond.” His hand dropped.

“The old kind. Wick-work, from before the Pyre burned your line out of the world. When a hollow one drinks too deep from a single source, the fire doesn’t just feed her. It ties her. Your life and mine. Knotted into one cord.” He breathed out slowly.

“If your flame goes out, so does mine. And if I lay you on the scales and burn you — which my oath and my blood and my father the Ashking would all very much like — I burn with you.”

The yard went dead silent.

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Eighteen years of disappearing, ash on my throat, eyes on the ground — and the one time I reach my hand into the world, I chain myself to the single man in Cindral most sworn to kill me. And chain him right back.

He didn’t laugh. He was looking at me like I was a fire he didn’t know how to put out without losing both hands.

And here is the part I’m not proud of. Standing in that yard, certain I was about to die, I noticed his mouth. The shape of it. The way the bond between us hummed when he stepped closer, low and warm, like a second pulse settling into mine.

His eyes flicked down. To my wrist. Then back up, sharp.

“Stop that,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“You’re— I can feel it.” His jaw clenched. A faint, furious color climbed up his neck.

“The bond goes both ways, wick. Whatever you’re feeling, I feel it too. So, whatever that just was—” he gestured between us, looking like he’d rather be on fire “—don’t.”

Oh.

Oh, no.

If he could feel what I felt, then he’d felt me notice his mouth. My face got so hot I could’ve lit a lamp off it.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, with absolutely zero authority.

“Believe me.” He dragged a hand down his face. “I’m trying very hard not to.”

Down in the Reach, faint and getting less faint, came the boots and bells of the Wardens working their way up.

His jaw set. He held out his marked hand. Not gently. Like a man picking up a blade at the wrong end.

“It seems I can’t turn you in,” he said.

“And I can’t leave you here, because they’ll feel the bond and follow it straight to me. So you’re going to take my hand, you’re going to come quietly, and you’re going to pray to whatever the hollow ones pray that I cut this thing before it kills us both.”

The bells were close now.

His hand was warm. I’d been cold my whole life. I told myself that was the only reason I took it.

I took it.