ASHBOUND

Chapter Eight — The Long Burning

They came out of the fire. Not Wardens. Not men. Hands. Dozens of them, reaching shapes of light wearing the faces of everyone the Pyre had ever swallowed, and they took hold of me before Castien could close the three steps between us.

I’d spent my whole life taking fire. I had never once had fire take me.

It poured into the hollow in my chest, except I hadn’t opened the window — the Grand Pyre Lord had broken it. He stood with his hands raised and his calm face lit gold, and he was using me like a pipe. Not asking the channel to drink. Forcing the whole murmuring inferno to surge through me and out, past the iron walls, out into the sleeping tiers of Cindral aboveus, where a hundred thousand people lay banked and unaware.

I felt the Long Burning start to take them.

A baker three tiers up, his coal flickering as a year was pulled out of him in his sleep. The boy from Tallow Square — the boy I’d saved — his small flame guttering. The seamstress who’d wept at the scales. All of them. Every fire in the city, leaning toward me, toward the pipe he’d made of my body, ready to pour down and feed the Pyre to bursting so one silverhaired man could hold three centuries of warmth in his two hands and rule whatever was left.

“Sorrel.” Castien’s voice, raw, somewhere behind the roar.

He’d thrown himself at the Grand Pyre Lord and been knocked flat; I felt the bruise of it bloom on my own ribs, the bond sharing it out. He couldn’t stop me. That was the trap, built so carefully. If Castien broke the channel by force — if he struck me down to stop the Burning — the bond would take him with me.

The leash. Working exactly as designed.

To save the city, the boy who’d just kissed me on the stairs would have to kill me. And die doing it.

I felt him decide to do it anyway. I felt him reach for the knife at his belt, his whole body shaking with the refusal of it, tears on his face.

“Don’t you dare,” I gasped.

“Don’t you dare, Castien Aldermoor—”

And then, in the great murmuring flood pouring through me, I heard one voice.

I’ve turned this moment over a thousand times since, and I still can’t make it sound like anything but a story. But in that inferno of three hundred stolen years, among all those reaching hands and half-faces, one of them knew me. One thread of fire, very old, very tired, wound itself gently around the channel I’d become — not to pour through, but to hold — and a warmth I had no memory of and recognized with my whole ruined heart pressed close. The way a mother holds a child she only got to hold once.

Elowen. They hadn’t destroyed her. Nothing here was destroyed. She’d been burning in the dark of the world’s root for eighteen years. Waiting. And now her daughter had walked back into the fire.

And she showed me the thing the Grand Pyre Lord didn’t know. The thing the Pyre built its whole reign on never letting a channel realize.

A pipe runs two ways.

He was forcing the fire out through me, into the city, to drain it. But I was the channel. I was the hinge. And a hinge can swing.

So I stopped fighting the flood.

I opened the window all the way — not against the current, with it — and I took hold of three hundred years of hoarded, stolen, murmuring fire. My mother’s flame. The burned Ashkeepers. The baker’s stolen year. All of it.

And instead of letting it pour down into the city to drain it —

I turned the hinge, and pulled the whole inferno into me.

“What are you doing,” the Grand Pyre Lord said, and for the first time his calm voice cracked.

“A channel can’t hold — you’ll rupture, you’ll—”

“I’m not going to hold it,” I told him.

I think I was smiling. I think it was a terrible thing to see, because his face went grey.

“We were never meant to keep the fire, my lord. We were meant to move it.”

The crown-fire emptied out of the root of the world and into the girl with no light. And for one impossible, blinding moment I held three centuries of stolen years inside my hollow, hungry, finally-full chest —

— and then I let go of every last one of them at once.