ASHBOUND

Chapter Twelve: Fire in the Rain

We went east, and the east did not want us.

Three weeks of hard road brought us to Greymarsh, a border town squatting where the kingdom of Asharra ends and the Empress’s reach begins. You can feel the difference. In Cindral the fire is free now. In Greymarsh, the scales were still up in the square, and the people moved the way I used to move, eyes down, flame banked low, owing every breath to a tower they’d never seen.

“She still has them,” I said, looking at the scales. Something in me went hot.

“Three hundred years and she’s still bleeding them dry.”

“Sorrel.” Castien caught my arm.

“We’re trying not to be noticed.”

“I noticed them first.”

I walked into the square in broad daylight and put my hand on the scales, and I drank.

Not from a person. From the great iron weight of the thing itself, from three centuries of stolen years humming in its bones, and I turned the hinge and gave it all back at once. The scales shattered. Fire poured up out of them and into every banked chest in Greymarsh, and a whole town gasped as one and stood up straighter, suddenly warm, suddenly theirs.

It was beautiful. It was also extremely loud.

The Ashen Guard came out of the garrison like wasps out of a kicked nest. Black armor, white fire, faces hidden behind iron. Not Wardens. Something older and worse, made to hunt exactly what I am.

“There it is,” Castien said, drawing both knives, putting his back to mine without being asked. We’d learned to fight like this in Cindral. I move the fire, he moves the bodies. “I love a quiet entrance.”

“You love me.”

“That too. Left side, they’re flanking.”

What happened next happened in the rain, because the sky opened up the moment the first guard reached us, like the weather wanted in on it. I pulled the fire out of their white blades and left them holding cold iron. Castien put two of them down before they understood their weapons had gone dead. I caught a third one’s flame and gave it to a beggar woman crouched in a doorway, who lit up like a lantern and started laughing.

A guard lunged at Castien with a spear of white fire and I snuffed it mid-thrust, left him swinging a cold stick, and Castien took him off his feet with one boot to the chest.

“Stop putting them out before I’m done,” he shouted over the rain.

“I’m trying to look impressive.”

“You’re standing in a puddle.”

“Impressively.” I grabbed his collar and yanked him under a guard’s swing, felt the blade pass through the air where his head had been, and gave that one’s fire to a soaked child watching from a stair. We moved like one thing now, the way we’d learned in Cindral. Two halves of the same dangerous idea. We fought our way across the square in the pouringrain, soaked, breathless, and when the last of the Guard broke and ran, Castien grabbed me by the front of my wet coat and kissed me hard, right there in the wreck of the scales, rain running down both our faces.

“What was that for,” I said, when I could talk.

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself too much,” he said.

“I got jealous of the fire.”

I laughed, and that was the moment a slow clap started from the edge of the square.

Renalt Crane stepped out of the rain. Thinner than I remembered, half his fire still gone from the night I drained him, a fresh scar at his jaw and a worse smile. He’d survived the Spire. He’d ridden east. And the Ashen Empress, it seemed, had given the dim, drained, traitor Warden something to do.

“You two are revolting,” Renalt said pleasantly.

“Truly. I almost couldn’t watch.”

He spread his hands, and behind him, more Guard, rows of them, filled the far end of the square.

“The Empress sends her warmest regards, little sister. And an invitation you can’t refuse.” His ruined smile widened.

“She has the old man. Your apothecary. Took her on the road behind you while you were busy being in love.”

Hesper. My blood went to ice.

“Bring her to the Tower,” Renalt said, already turning away, the Guard closing around us like a fist,

“and the Empress will let the old woman keep her years. Refuse, and she tithes Hesper Glass down to nothing while you watch.” He glanced back.

“She’s very good at making people watch.”