ASHBOUND

Chapter Eleven: The Letter That Burned

For eleven days, I let myself be happy. I should have known better.

Cindral in spring is a strange, soft thing now. The scales are gone from the squares. People light their hearths without counting the cost, and at night the whole mountain glows like a jar full of fireflies, every window its own small unbothered flame. I have a room above Hesper’s shop with a window that catches the morning, and most mornings I wake up warm, which still feels like a miracle I’m getting away with.

Most mornings I wake up warm because Castien is there.

“You’re staring,” he said, without opening his eyes.

“I’m allowed. I freed a city. Staring is a reward.” He cracked one gold eye open and smiled, slow and lazy, and reached over and pulled me in against his chest, and I went, because being cold for eighteen years teaches you not to waste warmth when it offers itself. His heart beat under my ear. Just the one now. We cut the bond on that wall and I still wasn’t used to the quiet of my own body, the way I had to actually choose to reach for him instead of just feeling him there.

“Tell me again why we cut it,” I said into his shirt.

“So you’d never wonder if I meant it.” He kissed the top of my head.

“I mean it. In case the staring left it unclear.”

I was about to say something that would have ruined my reputation forever when the window exploded.

Not glass. Light. A thread of fire shot through the open shutters, fast as a thrown knife, and buried itself in the wall above the bed, and where it struck, the plaster went black and curled like burning paper. Castien had me off the bed and behind him before I’d finished flinching, a knife already in his hand. He keeps knives the way other people keep loose coins.

The fire on the wall was writing itself into words. Burning letters, smoking on the plaster.

SHE KNOWS YOU ARE AWAKE. COME EAST, LITTLE SISTER, OR I WILL COME WEST.

“Sister,” I said.

“I don’t have a sister.”

Hesper did, though. Hesper had everything. She came up the stairs at a run, took one look at the burning words, and went the color of old ash.

“That’s First-Fire script,” she breathed.

“Nobody’s written in it for three hundred years. There’s only one person alive who could.” She looked at me, and for the first time since I’d known her, Hesper Glass looked afraid for me instead of with me.

“The woman who built the Pyres. All of them. The first channel. The one who decided the fire should be owned instead of shared.” She swallowed.

“The Ashen Empress. And she’s just learned there’s another one of her kind in the world.”

The burning letters flared once more and went out, leaving only the smell of smoke and the black scar of them on the wall.

“Another channel,” Castien said slowly.

“She’s like you.”

“She’s the opposite of me,” I said,

and I didn’t know how I knew it, except that the fire had told me, the way fire tells me things now.

“I free it. She drinks it. She’s been drinking it for three hundred years.”

The cold came up my spine in a way that had nothing to do with my old hollow.

“That’s how she’s still alive. She’s been tithing the whole world to keep herself breathing.” Castien was quiet for a moment. Then he wiped the knife and slid it away and looked at me with that steady gold gaze that had walked toward my alley to kill me a lifetime ago.

“Then we don’t wait for her to come west,” he said.

“We go take her fire apart.”

“You’re not coming.”

“Sorrel.” He almost laughed.

“I freed a city with you. I’m not going to miss the part where we free the world.”

Behind us, Hesper was already pulling banned maps off her shelves, her hands shaking, muttering the name of a place I’d never heard.

The First Tower.

The oldest Pyre.

The source.

The east was calling me home,

and home, it turned out, had teeth.