The rosemary had gone grey at the edges, its needles curling inward as if recoiling from the morning air. Aria Vance knelt between the raised beds and pressed two fingers into the soil, testing for moisture that wasn't there. Dust crumbled against her knuckles, pale as old bone.
She had watered at dawn. She had watered again an hour past. The herbs drank and drank and still their leaves curled toward the sun as though begging for what the ground refused to give.
Three weeks now since the rains had stopped. Three weeks since the well at the edge of the square had begun to taste of iron.
"Little sister, you will pickle yourself out here." Lira's voice drifted from the cottage doorway, warm and edged with something that was not quite scolding. "Your skin has gone the color of saddle leather."
"I am nearly finished." Aria did not look up. Her hands worked the earth around a row of feverfew, coaxing, coaxing. "Mother's chamomile will not see another day if I do not."
"Then let it go."
The words hung between them, quiet and impossible. Aria's fingers stilled against the soil. In the cottage behind her, she could hear the creak of Lira's chair, the small sounds of a woman pretending to busy herself with mending while her breath came thin and labored from the room beyond.
Mother had not risen from her bed in nine days. The cough had moved into her chest like a tenant taking possession of rooms it had no right to occupy. Lira brewed what she could. Aria tended what she could. Between them, they measured their helplessness in spoonfuls and sips.
"I have the feverfew." Aria sat back on her heels, brushing dirt from her palms. "And the yarrow. If you can spare the honey for the poultice."
"I can spare the honey." Lira stepped onto the porch, one hand braced against the doorframe. The morning light caught the grey threading through her dark hair, the new hollows beneath her cheekbones. She was twenty-eight. She looked, in this light, like a woman remembering what forty felt like. "Bring them in, then. I will set the kettle."
Aria gathered the cuttings, tucking them into the fold of her apron, and turned toward the cottage.
That was when she heard the hooves.
Not the lazy clop of a farmhand's mule. Not the brisk trot of a merchant's pony. The sound carried the particular weight of horses bred for distance and trained for war, the rhythm of riders who knew how to keep formation over broken ground. Aria's hand tightened on the bundle of herbs.
"Stay inside," Lira said. The warmth had gone out of her voice.
"Lira."
"Stay."
Lira crossed the porch and came down the three wooden steps with the careful, deliberate grace of a woman who intended to be seen. She smoothed the front of her dress with both palms, touched the braid at the nape of her neck, and walked toward the gate. Aria followed, because she had never once in her life obeyed that particular instruction.
The road that wound through Thornwood emptied into the square beyond the low stone wall of their cottage. From the corner of the herb beds, Aria could see most of the square: the dry fountain at its center, the tilted sign of the Wayfarer's Rest, the shuttered windows of the chandler's shop. Villagers had begun to gather at the edges of the square in the way villagers do when something arrives that will not wait to be met. They stood in clusters of two and three, arms folded, mouths set.
Twelve riders filed into the square in pairs. Their cloaks bore a device stitched in gold thread over the left breast: a lion passant, its mane rendered in fine linework, its forepaw raised above a field of ash-grey. The Ashbourne crest. Aria had seen it before, in broadsheets Lira kept folded in the bottom of the chest beneath the floorboard. She had never expected to see it crossing the packed dirt of her own village.
The lead rider swung down from his saddle. He was a broad man, heavy in the shoulders, with a face that looked as though it had been weathered by every wind that had ever blown off the northern moors. His beard was trimmed close to the jaw. His eyes moved across the square with the unhurried precision of a man accustomed to taking inventory of people the way a quartermaster takes inventory of grain.
A captain's insignia glinted at his throat.
"Citizens of Thornwood," he said. His voice carried the way stone carries heat, slow and stubborn. "I am Captain Edric Vane, of His Majesty's Royal Guard, riding under sealed warrant from the Crown of Ashbourne. You will hear me, and you will hear me only once."
A murmur moved through the gathering. Someone at the edge of the square spat into the dust. A child was pulled behind a skirts.
"There exists a people among us known as the Embertouched." The captain's gaze traveled the square without settling. "Born with the mark of fire in their blood. Marked, by law of the Second Accord, for registry with the Crown. This is not a request. This is not a negotiation."
Aria felt the herbs shift in her apron. The chamomile had begun to wilt against her hip, and she could feel the dampness of it seeping through the cloth.
"Any person within this village bearing the sign of the Embertouched will present themselves to my lieutenant before sundown. Any person who conceals, harbors, or aids the concealment of such an individual will be charged under the full weight of the Crown's authority." He paused. The pause had weight. "I do not wish to make this ugly. I have ridden a long road to arrive here, and I would rather ride a long road home. But I will."
The square was very quiet. Somewhere behind her, Aria heard the soft sound of Lira breathing.
Then Lira stepped forward.
"Captain Vane." Her voice came out steady, the southern English of her childhood polished into something she used for patients and officials alike. "I am Lira Vance, the village healer. If your men require quarters, the Wayfarer's Rest will take them, though the water is poor. If they require food, I can speak to the innkeeper."
Captain Vane regarded her. Something shifted behind his eyes, a flicker of recognition that he did not allow to settle into expression.
"I will keep that in mind, Mistress Vance."
"There are no Embertouched in Thornwood." Lira said it simply, the way one states the weather. "There have not been for some years. The last was an old woman who died of a winter chill before my sister was born."
"Is that so."
"It is."
"And yet."
The captain's attention moved past Lira, into the village, across the square. It came to rest, for a moment, on the cottage at the edge of the common where Aria stood with her apron full of wilting herbs and her hands at her sides.
Aria did not move. She did not breathe. She felt the sun on her shoulders and the dust beneath her feet and the strange, distant sound of her own pulse.
"Mistress Vance." The captain's voice had changed. There was something in it now that Aria could not name, a weight that had nothing to do with rank. "I knew your father."
Lira did not flinch. "Many people knew my father."
"I rode with Marcus Vance at the Ford of Grieve." He said it quietly, and for a moment the square seemed to listen with him. "I owe that man a debt I have not yet settled. I would not wish to begin settling it tonight by dragging his daughters before a magistrate."
"Then do not."
Lira's chin lifted. She stood in the dirt of the square with her healer's dress and her grey-threaded hair and her hands loose at her sides, and she looked at the captain of the royal guard the way she looked at a fever that had overstayed its welcome.
Captain Vane studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.
"My men will be billeted at the Rest until morning. I will speak with your village elders at first light. Until then, I ask that the people of Thornwood remain in their homes, and that any who know of an Embertouched among them use the hours they have to do the right thing." He raised a hand. "That is all."
The riders dismounted. The square exhaled. Aria felt her shoulders drop a full inch before she realized they had been raised.
Lira turned and walked back toward the cottage. Her pace had not changed, but the color had drained from beneath her skin, leaving her the shade of the dust beneath her boots.
Aria fell into step beside her.
"Lira."
"Not here."
They crossed the threshold together. Lira shut the door behind them and leaned against it with the full weight of her body, as though the oak might be persuaded to hold back whatever had followed them in.
"He knew Father," Aria said.
"Yes."
"Did Father ever speak of him?"
Lira closed her eyes. "Once."
"What did he say?"
"That Captain Vane was the sort of man who would die for a stranger and then be annoyed with himself for the inconvenience of it." Lira opened her eyes. "He also said that if Vane ever came to Thornwood with the crest of Ashbourne on his cloak, we were to take the back path into the Ashwood and not look back."
Aria set the herbs on the table. Her hands were steady. Her voice was not. "And you did not think to mention this."
"I had hoped it would not be necessary to mention."
The silence between them filled with the sound of the kettle beginning to tick against the hearth. In the room beyond, their mother's breath rose and fell in its thin, stubborn rhythm.
"Sundown," Aria said.
"Sundown."
"And if I do not present myself?"
Lira looked at her for a long time. Then she crossed the room, took Aria's face in both hands, and pressed her forehead to her sister's.
"Then we take the back path," she whispered. "And we do not look back."
The hours moved like a held breath.
Aria sat at the table and sorted the dried herbs into linen bundles while Lira moved through the cottage with the practiced efficiency of a woman arranging a life she might have to leave before dusk. Their mother's breath rose and fell behind the curtain in its thin, stubborn rhythm. The kettle ticked against the hearth. Outside, the village carried on as villages do, with the clatter of a farrier's hammer and the lowing of cattle being driven home from the south pasture.
Neither sister spoke of the decision. There was nothing left to say. One of them would walk to the square before sundown. The other would take the back path into the Ashwood with their mother on a stretcher between them, if their mother could bear a stretcher, which she could not, which meant on a blanket dragged over roots and stones, which meant slowly, which meant caught.
Aria tied off the last bundle. Yarrow for fever. Willow bark for pain. Chamomile for sleep. The motions were so familiar her hands could have done them without her, and so she let them, and she watched the window instead.
The light moved across the sill. The shadows of the apple tree lengthened across the yard. A cart passed on the lane, its wheels grinding in the dust. A dog barked once and then did not bark again.
Aria did not hear the hoofbeats until they stopped.
Lira heard them first. Her hands stilled on the latch of the chest she had been packing. Her head turned toward the door with the slow, careful attention of a deer that has caught a scent it cannot yet place.
"How many," Aria said.
"Enough."
The cottage door opened. Not the cottage door, the yard gate. The iron latch rang against the post. Boot heels on the flagstone path. A voice, low and gravelly, giving an order she could not quite make out. Then the shuffle of men trying to move quietly and not quite managing it.
Aria rose from the table. The linen bundle of yarrow fell from her fingers and she did not pick it up.
"Lira."
"I know."
"Take her out the back."
"Aria."
"Take her out the back, Lira. Now."
Lira did not move. She was looking at the door, and her face had gone the color of the linen on the table, and her hands had closed on the edge of the chest as though she meant to pull it shut against whatever was coming.
The knock, when it came, was not a knock at all. It was the flat of a gauntlet against the oak, once, twice, and then the door itself shuddered on its hinges as a shoulder was put into it from the other side.
"Open in the name of the Crown of Ashbourne."
Aria knew the voice. She had known it would come to this, and still the sound of it in the doorway of her mother's cottage struck her somewhere behind the ribs, a bright and terrible weight.
"Open, or we come through."
Lira moved then, but not toward the back. She moved toward the door, and her hand was on the latch, and Aria heard her draw a breath that was meant to steady her and did not.
"My sister is ill," Lira said to the wood of the door. "There is sickness in this house. You will not bring armed men into a sickroom."
"Your sister," said the voice on the other side, "is the one I have come to speak with. Stand aside, Mistress Vance."
The latch moved under Lira's hand. Aria crossed the room in three strides and caught her sister's wrist. For a moment they stood there, both of them holding the latch, and then Lira's fingers loosened, one by one, and Aria pulled her back and opened the door herself.
Captain Edric Vane filled the doorframe.
He was older than the man Aria remembered from the tales her father had told, though she had never seen him herself. The years had put iron into his shoulders and grief into the lines around his mouth. His cloak bore the crest of Ashbourne, a silver hart on a field of green, and the brooch that held it was the same one her father had described, the stag with the broken antler. His sword was at his hip. His hand was not on it.
Two soldiers stood behind him in the yard. A third held the gate. A fourth, Aria realized with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather, was already moving along the side of the cottage toward the back door.
"Captain Vane," Aria said.
"Lady Aria." He inclined his head. The courtesy was precise and utterly without warmth. "You have had notice of the summons."
"I have."
"Then you know why I am here."
"I know what my sister told me. I do not know what you intend."
Vane's gaze moved past her, to Lira, to the curtain behind which their mother breathed. Something passed across his face, a shadow, a tightening, and then it was gone.
"My orders are to escort you to the capital," he said. "Nothing more. You will be given a room and a fire and such food as the garrison can spare. You will be asked questions by people far more patient than I am. If your answers satisfy them, you will be released. If they do not, that is no longer my concern."
"And if I refuse."
"Then I am instructed to bring you by whatever means I judge necessary, and I have been told that my discretion in this matter is not to be questioned by the village, by your family, or by you."
Aria felt the word rise in her throat. She held it there. Beside her, Lira had gone very still.
"You served my father," Aria said.
"I did."
"You were at his side when the last king fell."
"I was."
"Did he ever speak to you of me."
Vane was silent for a long moment. The soldiers in the yard shifted their weight. The afternoon light was the color of brass.
"He spoke of you once," Vane said. "He asked me, if ever the time came, if I would see you safe. I told him I would."
"And yet here you are."
"And yet here I am." His jaw worked. "I have not come to harm you, child. I have come because I was ordered to, and because the alternative was to send men I trust less than myself. You may think what you like of me. I have thought worse of myself for longer."
Aria looked at him for a long time. The anger in her chest was very old and very tired, and beneath it was something she did not want to name, something that felt almost like pity for the man in the doorway who had come to do a duty he despised.
She opened her mouth to speak.
The soldier at the back door came through first.
He was young, brown-haired, moving with the awkward urgency of a man who had been told to cover the rear and had found a door unlocked and had not thought to wonder why. He shouldered through into the cottage, sword half-drawn, and his eyes went to Lira, who had turned at the sound, and his hand went to her arm.
Aria did not hear herself scream. She heard the scream after, as though it belonged to someone else, someone standing at a great distance. What she felt was older than sound. It rose from somewhere beneath her ribs, from the place where her father had once laid his hand and told her that she was not like other children and never would be, and that she must bury it deep, deeper than breath, deeper than bone, and never, never let it see the light.
The soldier's gauntlet closed on Lira's sleeve. The soldier's free hand went to the hilt of his sword. The soldier's mouth opened to say something, some order, some threat, some small and stupid cruelty that men in armor say to women they have been told are dangerous.
The soldier never finished.
The fire came out of Aria's palms in a single sheet, white at the center and gold at the edges, and it struck him across the chest, and he was not. The sword clattered to the floor. The gauntlet fell from Lira's sleeve. Where the man had stood there was a smell like struck flint and a drift of fine grey ash that settled on the flagstones and on Lira's shoes and on the hem of Lira's dress, and the cottage was very quiet.
Lira's scream was not a scream at all. It was a small, broken sound, the sound of a woman who has just watched the impossible happen in her own kitchen.
Vane had his sword half-drawn. His face had gone the color of old tallow. Behind him, the two soldiers in the yard had frozen where they stood, and the one at the gate had taken a step backward, and the village beyond them, which had been going about its business, was no longer going about its business, because the light that had come out of the cottage doorway was a light that no one in Thornwood had ever seen, and it had lit up the lane and the apple tree and the dusty road and every upturned face for a hundred paces in every direction.
Aria looked at her hands.
The skin of her palms was unmarked. The fire had left no scar, no welt, no trace. But her palms were still warm, and the warmth was climbing her wrists, her forearms, pooling in the hollows of her elbows, and she understood, with a clarity that was almost peaceful, that what her father had buried in her had not stayed buried, and that nothing in the world was going to make her bury it again.
She raised her eyes to Captain Vane.
The ash was still settling. The light through the door was the ordinary gold of an ordinary afternoon, and in that light Vane looked like a man who had just been shown the shape of the thing he had feared for fifteen years.
"Now," Aria said, and her voice was steady, and her voice was not her own, "you will tell me what my father asked you to keep safe. And you will not lie to me, Captain. I do not think either of us has the time for it."
Vane did not move. His sword stayed half-drawn, the steel catching the strange light from the open doorway, and Aria watched the war play out behind his eyes: the captain who had sworn an oath to a dead man, and the soldier who had just watched a seventeen-year-old girl do something that should not have been possible. She could see the oath winning. She could see it costing him.
"Your father," Vane said slowly, "asked me to keep you safe. That is what I have done for fifteen years. That is what I am doing now."
"Safe." Aria tasted the word. It sat bitter on her tongue, like birch bark. "I have lived in a village where everyone called me Vance. Where Lira mended broken bones and set fevers and never once told me why I dreamed of fire. Where you posted your men at the crossroads every harvest and told us it was wolves." She took a step toward him, and she felt the warmth in her forearms answer the step like a hound answering a whistle. "You did not keep me safe, Captain. You kept me ignorant. Those are not the same thing."
Something shifted in his face. The tallow color was gone, replaced by a deeper grey, the grey of a man hearing a truth he had been arranging his life to avoid.
"You don't understand what you're asking," he said, and his voice had dropped, roughened at the edges, the Scottish burr thickening the way it always did when he was afraid. "What your father buried in you was buried for a reason. If the wrong people learn it has woken, "
"Then tell me who the wrong people are." Aria held his gaze. "Tell me who burned our crops last winter. Tell me who has been riding the Ashwood roads at night. Tell me why you have been writing letters you thought I could not read."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Aria had ever heard.
It broke, finally, when the soldier at the gate shouted. She did not catch the words at first, only the tone, the climbing panic of it, and then Vane's head snapped around and she saw, over his shoulder, that the road beyond the gate was no longer empty.
Riders. A dozen of them, maybe more, coming up the lane at a hard canter, their cloaks the deep crimson of the Crown's Own, the king's personal guard, and at their head a figure in black armor who carried no banner because the black armor itself was banner enough.
Vane made a sound she had never heard a grown man make. It was small, and it was the sound of a man watching the thing he had always dreaded arrive at his door.
"Inside," he said. "Inside, now, Aria, I am not asking, "
"No." She did not move. "I am done being inside, Captain. I am done being kept."
But a hand closed around her wrist then, hard, the fingers calloused and strong, and a voice spoke close to her ear, low and unhurried, a voice that sounded like someone who had been waiting in the shadows for exactly the wrong moment and found it almost amusing.
"The young lady and I are going to step away now, Captain. I do apologize for the rudeness of it."
She did not have time to scream. The hand turned her, and the man behind her was already moving, and the world tilted sideways as he pulled her not toward the cottage but away from it, toward the gap between the woodpile and the henhouse, toward the hedge, toward the Ashwood that began where Thornwood ended, and Vane was shouting something behind them and then the shouting was cut off by the thunder of hooves on the packed lane and a voice she did not know calling a name she did not recognize, calling it like a hound calls a quarry, calling it with the eager cruelty of a man who has been hunting a long time and is almost home.
"Keep your head down," the man said. "Keep your feet moving. And for the love of whatever you hold sacred, girl, do not reach for that light again. Not until I tell you it is safe, and it will not be safe for some time."
They crashed through the hedge. Brambles tore at her sleeve, at her cheek, and the taste of green filled her mouth, sap and crushed leaf and the iron-wet smell of the forest floor. Behind them, back toward the village, she could hear the riders arriving, could hear Vane's voice raised in command, could hear the sharp clang of steel leaving leather, and then, after a moment that lasted a year, a scream that was not a soldier's scream and was not a horse's scream and was something she would hear again in dreams she would wish she could forget.
The man did not slow. He had her by the wrist still, and his grip was not gentle, and he pulled her along a deer track that was barely a track at all, down into a hollow and up the other side, through a stand of birches whose white trunks went past like bones in a mist, and she stumbled once and he hauled her up without pausing and without a word.
"My name is Halse," he said, when they had run long enough that Thornwood had fallen out of hearing. "Corin Halse. You have not heard of me. That is by design."
"Corin," she gasped. "Corin, I cannot, I have to go back, Lira is in the village, my sister is, "
"Your sister is not in the village." He did not slow his pace. "Your sister was taken from the village three days ago, by my hand, with her full cooperation, and is presently somewhere the king's black riders will not think to look. I would have come for you sooner. The timing, as you may have noticed, became somewhat compressed."
The forest thickened around them. The birches gave way to ash, old ash, the grey trunks leaning at angles that suggested wind or grief or both, and beneath the trees the light was the color of pewter and the air tasted of woodsmoke though there was no fire anywhere she could see. They had been running, she realized, for nearly half an hour. Her legs burned. Her lungs burned. The warmth in her arms had not faded; if anything it had settled deeper, into her spine, into the backs of her eyes, and when she blinked she saw the afterimage of the cottage doorway and the flame that had not been a flame.
Halse stopped, finally, at the lip of a ravine where a stream ran shallow over red stone. He released her wrist. She sat down where she stood, because her legs had made the decision for her, and the cold of the stone came up through her skirts and she did not care.
He crouched beside her. He was older than she had first thought, or younger than he had made himself look, with a face that was all angles and weather and a scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his jaw in a pale, clean line. His eyes were the color of the stream.
"Drink," he said, and offered her a skin. The water was cold, and it tasted of iron, and she drank until he pulled it away.
"Look south," he said then, and his voice was quieter. Not gentle. He did not seem a man who did gentle. But quieter.
She looked south. Through the trees, through the thinning trunks of the Ashwood, she could see the valley where Thornwood had been, and for a moment she did not understand what she was seeing, because the red roofs and the grey smoke of the chimneys and the green of the orchards were gone, and in their place was a column of black rising into the late afternoon sky, and beneath the column a glow that was not the glow of ordinary fire but something deeper, something that pulsed and breathed and ate the land the way a hungry animal eats.
"That is not a village burning," Halse said. "That is a containment. Someone is trying to smother what you woke, and they are using your home to do it, and they will not be careful with it because your home was never what they wanted." He paused. "I am sorry. I know that is small comfort. I am telling you anyway."
Aria watched the column rise. She watched it spread at the top, fan out into a shape that was almost like a tree, and she remembered Lira braiding her hair in the morning, and the smell of bread, and the way the kitchen light had looked an hour ago or a year ago, and something inside her folded, very quietly, like a letter being closed.
She did not make a sound. She had learned, in the years of being kept, that sound did not bring back what was lost.
Halse watched her not make a sound. Something in his face shifted, just slightly, the way a stone shifts when water has been working at it for a long time.
"There is more," he said. "And you will not want to hear it, and I am going to tell you anyway, because the people who set that fire will not stop at Thornwood, and the only advantage you have left is knowing what you are."
He reached into the front of his coat. What he brought out was small, and dark, and when he set it in her palm it was heavier than it had any right to be. A ring. Steel, plain, unadorned, sized for a hand much smaller than his. The metal was warm, and she understood, with the same terrible clarity she had felt in the kitchen doorway, that it was warm because it had been waiting for her.
"Your mother," Halse said, "was not a woman named Elspeth Vance."
He let the silence hold for a breath.
"Her name was Lyanna Emberblood. She was the last of the Emberblood line, the line that kept the fire the old kings bound beneath the Ashwood. She died the night you were born, and your father buried what she left you in your blood, and he made me swear on my life that you would never have to carry it."
Aria looked at the ring. The ring looked back, in whatever way steel can look, and the warmth of it climbed her palm and met the warmth already in her arms and the two became one, and somewhere to the south the column over Thornwood shuddered and brightened.
"Now," Halse said softly, "the question is what you mean to do about it."