Chapter five
1160 Words
Saul
I did not sleep that night, and it was not the first time.
Sleep was a luxury for men whose blood ran cool. Mine ran like the forge fire at the heart of this mountain, and lately it had been getting hotter. I stood at the window of the western tower long after my brothers had gone to their rooms, watching the eternal flame burn at the peak above me, and I tried to understand what had happened in that hall.
A Cinder.
The Emberlight had reached for a Cinder.
I have ruled House Ashborne since I was sixteen years old, since the fever took our father and left the three of us to hold a kingdom together. I have learned to trust nothing I cannot see, weigh, or break. The bond I felt tonight, that searing, undeniable pull toward a soot-stained servant girl, was none of those things. It was a feeling. And feelings, in my experience, are how men get betrayed.
I know that better than most.
Her name was Lira. She came to the last Veiling, three seasons past, a highborn daughter from the river packs, and for one foolish month I let myself believe the fire had chosen her. It hadn't. The Emberlight never moved for her, not once, but I was tired and the curse was eating at me and I wanted, Goddess help me, I wanted to believe. She knew it. She played it. By the time we learned she had been feeding everything she heard to our enemies on the eastern border, three of our finest warriors were dead and a village had paid for my weakness in blood.
I do not make that mistake twice.
So when the fire bent toward the girl in the grey dress, my first thought was not finally. My first thought was trap.
And yet.
I pressed my palm to the cold glass and closed my eyes, and I could still feel her. The bond was a live coal sitting behind my ribs, glowing whether I willed it or not. When I had rejected her, the words had felt like tearing out my own tongue. And the rejection had failed. In a thousand years of Ashborne records, no rejection has ever failed. The bond simply refused to break.
That should have been impossible.
Unless the bond was true.
I growled low in my chest and turned from the window. I would not let a feeling do to me what Lira had done. I would not lose another village, another brother, to a pretty face and a clever lie.
But there was more to the girl than a feeling, and I knew it. Cael was right, curse him. He was always right, in that quiet, watchful way of his. A Cinder does not know her wolf's name. A Cinder's wolf does not wake at the sacred fire. Whatever Grace of Lowburn was, she was not a simple glassworks servant.
The wolf that had answered the Emberlight tonight had been old. Noble. The kind of bloodline that took centuries to breed and only a moment to destroy.
I had destroyed a few of those in my time.
A knock came at my door. Rook, of course. He never could leave a thing alone.
"You're brooding," he said, letting himself in without waiting. He dropped into the chair by my cold hearth and propped his boots on the table the way he knew I hated. "I can feel it through the bond, you know. It's like sharing a soul with a thundercloud."
"Get out."
"She got to you." He grinned, but his eyes were sharp. Rook plays the fool, but he misses nothing. It is what makes him useful and exhausting in equal measure. "Admit it. The mighty Saul, rattled by a servant girl."
"She is hiding something," I said. "And I intend to find out what."
Rook's grin faded. "I felt it too, you know. When the fire moved." He looked down at his own hands. "Three seasons I've watched you carry this. Watched Cael go quieter every year. Watched myself get angrier. The burning's getting worse, brother. The eastern ridge wasn't the last village we'll lose if we don't anchor this thing." He looked up at me. "She might be the only chance we get. Are you really going to throw her away because some river witch broke your heart three years ago?"
"This is not about Lira."
"It's always about Lira."
I did not answer, because he was right, and we both knew it.
He stood and stretched. "Cael's already got servants watching where she goes. He doesn't trust her either, for what it's worth. But Cael trusts the fire, and so do I." He paused at the door. "She bargained for open doors, Saul. A frightened girl asks for safety. She asked for freedom of the house. She's looking for something in here." He shrugged. "I'd want to know what, before I decided whether to keep her or kill her."
The door clicked shut behind him.
I stood alone in the dark a long time after that, my mind turning the same thought over and over like a stone in a river.
Whatever she's looking for. It's inside these walls.
And then, because I am a careful man, I went to the one place in the Emberhold that holds the answers to every secret we have ever buried. The lower archive, where the records of every house in the Caldera are kept. The births, the bonds, the crimes, the executions.
I lit a lamp and pulled the ledger for the season of her birth, and I traced the lists with one finger, looking for any noble line that had lost a daughter eighteen years ago.
I found it faster than I wanted to.
A line crossed out in red ink. A house struck from the rolls. A father and mother executed for treason in the square below this very tower, on the order of my own father, the season I turned twelve. I remembered that night. I remembered the fire.
I remembered that two daughters had been listed.
One taken. One never found.
The house was called Marwood.
And in the margin, in my father's own hand, were three words that turned my blood to ice.
The bond-blood. Hidden.
My father had known. He had known there was a Marwood child out there carrying a bloodline strong enough to anchor the Tri-Heart, and he had hunted her, and he had failed to find her.
Until tonight.
She had walked through my front gate and into my fire on her own two feet.
And somewhere in this very fortress, if the ledger was right, the other Marwood daughter, the one who had been taken, might still be alive.
I closed the book with a hand that was not quite steady.
Grace of Lowburn was no Cinder.
She was the last thing my house had ever feared.
- Writer
