ASHBOUND

Chapter Four — The Things We Burn For

We went out the back. We were fast. The bell wasn’t an accident, and we both knew it.

“They’re tracking the bond,” Castien said, pulling me into the shadow of a chimney as grey coats spilled into the street below.

“I can feel them feeling for it. The mark’s too new. Too loud. Every Warden in the lower city can sense you now, and the closer they get, the brighter you ring.”

“So we run.”

“It doesn’t work like distance. It works like me. I trained these men. They follow the strongest signal, and right now the strongest signal in Cindral is the heir’s fire sitting inside a wick where it has no business being.” He looked at me, and I watched him decide something he hated.

“Unless we drown it out.”

“With what?”

“With more.” He pushed up his sleeve. Held his bare wrist out into the cold air, marked up.

“If you take from me again — on purpose, all the way — the bond floods. The signal scrambles. For a few minutes, they can’t tell where I stop, and you start, and we walk out in the noise.”

I stared at his wrist. At the pulse jumping under the skin.

“You said taking from you might kill us both.”

“It might.” His voice didn’t shake. His eyes did.

“I’d rather gamble than burn. Take my hand, Vane.”

Below us, the grey coats fanned toward our row. I took his hand. I’d drunk off a hundred strangers in passing. A sip of warmth off a shoulder, a thread of a sleeping drunk. I had never once meant it. Meaning it turned out to be a different thing entirely.

I wrapped my fingers around his wrist, over the mark, and I opened the hollow in my chest the way you’d throw open a window in a sealed room — and his fire came in like the tide.

Nothing like the panicked snatch in the square. This was deep and gold, and it roared, and under the roar was him. Not just heat. Him. The anger and the loneliness and the cold tower of his whole sworn life. The boy handed an iron collar and a fire to feed before he was old enough to ask what it cost. And I felt him feel me back — the cold, the ash, the eighteen years of looking at the ground — and I felt the exact moment he stopped being able to pretend he didn’t want this.

His other hand came up. Caught my jaw. Not pulling me anywhere. Just holding. Like he needed something to hold.

I have never been warm like that. I didn’t know a person could be.

The bond flared white between us. The night went loud. The grey coats below stopped, turning in confused circles, their tracking gone to static.

I let go. We were both shaking. We were standing very close. His hand was still on my jaw.

“That was the bond,” he said. He did not sound sure.

“Right,” I said. I did not sound sure either.

“We needed to scramble the signal.”

“We did.”

“That’s all that was.”

Neither of us moved.

“Castien,” I said.

“Your hand is still on my face.”

He let go like I’d burned him. Which, technically, was backwards.

“Move,” he said, hoarse, and we ran. Through the static, past the spinning Wardens, up two tiers, into the dark of an old cistern where the bells went muffled and far. We dropped against the curved wall, side by side, our shared heart hammering one frantic rhythm, and for a long minute neither of us could look at the other.

“It would be simpler,” he said finally, to the dark,

“If you were the monster they told me you were.”

“I could try,” I offered. “If it helps.”

He laughed. A real one, surprised right out of him, and it cracked his whole face open into something young and unguarded, and through the bond I felt it hit him at the same moment it hit me — oh no, I like her — and felt him panic about it, which honestly made me feel a lot better about my own situation.

Then torchlight bloomed at the mouth of the cistern.

A voice I didn’t know — but that Castien clearly did, because every muscle in him went to stone — came drawling out of the dark.

“Aldermoor. There you are.”

A tall Warden stepped into the light. Older, sharp-faced, a second iron collar, a slow smile. His eyes went towards me. To the mark on my wrist. The smile widened.

“And you brought the little ghost. Do you actually know who she is, heir? Because the Grand Pyre Lord does. He’s wanted her since the night she was born.”

The smile turned to a blade.

“She’s the one who’s going to bring the whole Pyre down. And you’ve gone and tied your life to hers.”