ASHBOUND

Chapter One — The Girl With No Light

The morning the Pyre came to count the children, I rubbed ash into my throat so no one would feel how cold my skin was.

Everyone in Cindral burns.

It’s the first thing you learn, before you can even walk.

Somewhere under your ribs there’s a little flame the Pyre lit the day you were born.

It’s yours.

It’s also a debt.

The rich keep theirs banked up gold and warm.

The poor spend theirs down to coals, buying bread and one more month of being allowed to breathe.

Everyone has one.

Everyone but me.

The priests have a word for what I am.

Wick.

Born wrong.

Born hollow.

A candle with no fire of its own, just the hunger to take somebody else’s.

There’s a law older than the city walls that says my kind will get burned the day we’re found.

Not killed.

Burned.

Fed back into the Pyre to pay off the light we were too broken to carry.

I’d survived eighteen years by being very, very good at looking like no one at all. So when the Ember wardens marched into Tallow Square that morning, dragging the big brass scales behind them in their grey coats, I did what I always did.

Chin down.

Hands still.

And I stood close to the woman beside me, close enough that a little of her warmth leaked into my skin, in case anyone bumped me and felt how dead I was inside.

It was Tithing Day.

Twice a year, the Pyre comes to collect from the people who’ve fallen behind, and they don’t collect in coin.

They collect in years.

You kneel at the scales, a Warden lays his hand on your chest, and he pulls the fire out of you in a thin bright thread. A piece of your life goes with it.

An old man at the front gave four years and stood up looking ten years older. A tailor gave three and cried the whole time.

I’ve never had a flame to lose. The only thing I risk at those scales is the secret of why.

Then they brought out the boy.

Seven, maybe. Behind on a debt he’d inherited from a dead father, the clerk said, reading it off a ledger like it was the weather. The boy’s mother was screaming that he had nothing left, that he’d burn out, that the law allowed mercy. The Warden at the scales — thick neck, a scar splitting his eyebrow — told her the law allowed no such thing, and put his hand to the child’s chest anyway.

I felt it the way you feel a cut on somebody you love.

His flame was almost nothing. A guttering coal. And the Warden was reaching for all of it.

I should have looked away. I’d looked away a hundred times. Looking away was the whole shape of my life.

Instead, I shoved through the crowd, dropped next to the boy, and drank.

Not from him. From the Warden.

I’d never tried it on a Pyre-man. Their fire is trained, locked up behind walls. But his hand was wide open and pouring light, and an open flame was a feast to something like me. I caught the thread leaving the child, yanked it sideways into myself, and for one blinding second the whole world went gold and loud and warm — warmer than I had ever been in my life.

The boy gasped and fell back. Alive. His little coal was still burning.

The Warden snatched his hand away like I’d bitten him. He stared at his own palm. Then at me.

“It turned,” he said.

“The fire — it turned—”

I was already gone. You learn to move. Back into the crowd, under a fishmonger’s cart, running for the mouth of the alley, my whole body shaking with stolen heat and the awful knowledge that I’d just used my power in broad daylight in front of a hundred people and the Pyre’s own scales.

Three steps into the dark, something tugged behind my ribs. Like a hook setting. It dragged my eyes back across the square against my own will.

A man was standing at the edge of the platform.

Younger than the rest. No scar. Tall, dark hair, Warden's grey cut finer than the others, a collar of black iron at his throat that meant he was something more than a foot soldier. He hadn’t moved toward the screaming mother. He hadn’t moved at all. He was just standing there, perfectly still, looking right at my alley.

At me.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about being hunted: the dangerous ones are the beautiful ones. You forget to run.

He couldn’t have seen my face. I was a smudge in the dark, one shape out of hundreds. But his head had turned the second I drank, the way you turn toward a sound only you can hear. And now his eyes had found the exact corner I was hiding in, like I was the only lit thing in the whole city.

He felt it, I thought. And all that stolen warmth went straight to ice.

He felt me take it.

The beautiful Warden stepped down off the platform. And he started walking toward me.