Chapter 3 — The City Between Walls

Halvenmoor was not the capital, but it was the biggest city Kael had ever seen, which wasn't saying much given his frame of reference but was saying something given its absolute size: forty thousand people within walls built from quarried Cinderstone, three markets that ran simultaneously on different days of the week, and a political situation Deven described as a pressure cooker that had been sitting on full heat for six years."Castor Vane controls the east gates," Deven said, as they approached from the south. "Which means we use the Merchant's entrance and we look like we're here to sell something.""We have nothing to sell," Maren said."You have charts. I have experience. Kael has—""Don't," Kael said."I was going to say 'a strong back and an honest face.'" Deven glanced at him. "But yes. Also that."The Merchant's entrance was a wide gate thick with the traffic of late afternoon — carts, animals, traders with tallied manifests. Deven moved through the crowd with the ease of someone who had done this many times. Maren stayed close to Kael, reading the city with the alert attention she gave everything new.Kael walked through the gate and felt the Cinderstone around him.It was a physical sensation — not dramatic, not sudden, but the way you become aware of temperature in a room that's been the same all along. The stone of the city walls was quarried Cinderstone, and the Cinderstone had ash in its composition — volcanic rock from the great burning of the First Age, compressed over two thousand years. He had stood next to Cinderstone before, in smaller amounts. Not this much.He put his hand on the gate arch as he passed through.The stone was warm.And for the briefest moment, he felt the city as a whole — not saw, not heard, felt, in the bones and in the chest — like putting your hand on a sleeping animal and feeling it breathe.He pulled his hand away.Maren had noticed. She said nothing.Deven found them lodging with a contact — a woman named Petra who ran a boarding house and asked no questions in exchange for a fee calibrated to her discretion. The room was small, the beds functional, and the view from the window looked out over the second market's evening dismantling: carts being folded, stalls stripped, the city shifting from commerce to night."Tomorrow," Deven said, spreading his charts on the floor, "we go to the Order's local post. There are three members in Halvenmoor. They have information about the current state of Vane's search — how close, how specific. We need to know if he has your description or just the prophecy.""He has a description," Maren said. Both men looked at her. "I heard two men at the gate talking. They were Vane's by the colors. They mentioned a boy from the eastern reaches, sixteen, ash-marked." She looked at Kael. "They said ash-marked."Kael looked at his hands. He'd never seen the mark himself — you couldn't see your own, the midwife had told the village, which was one of the more useless pieces of information anyone had ever given him. He knew it was there because people occasionally looked at his forearms with the specific expression of people seeing something unexpected."What does ash-marked look like?" he asked."Like fire scars," Deven said. "Except they don't hurt, they don't heal, and they're always the same pattern. Spirals. Running from the inner wrist to the elbow." He paused. "The Ashen Throne had the same pattern carved into its arms. Three centuries old. The pattern predates the empire."Kael rolled up his sleeve. He'd long since stopped thinking about them — they'd been there since he could remember and they didn't hurt and everyone in Cinder's Edge had the grace not to ask. In the lamplight of the boarding house room, the spirals were clearly visible: dark ash-grey against his skin, perfectly symmetrical, from wrist to elbow on both arms."Well," Maren said. She said it in the tone she used when the data confirmed a hypothesis she hadn't been sure she wanted confirmed."We should not go out tomorrow," Deven said. "I'll go to the Order post alone.""I'm not hiding," Kael said."You're being strategically unavailable—""I'm not hiding." He rolled his sleeve down. "I've been hiding these my whole life. I'm done doing it in a city full of people who apparently already know what they mean." He looked at Deven. "What do the marks mean? Exactly."Deven looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: "They mean you're the Ashborn. The one the throne recognizes. Not by lineage, not by conquest — by — resonance. The Ashen Throne responds to the marks the way a key responds to a lock." He paused. "Which is why Castor Vane wants you on his side. If you sit on the throne, by the old empire's law, his claim becomes legitimate. He stops being a warlord and becomes a regent." Another pause. "And why, if you refuse, he might prefer you simply gone.""So if I go to Vardenmoor," Kael said, "and I don't sit on the throne—""Then we find out what the prophecy means by the third thing," Maren said quietly. She was looking at the wall in the way she looked when she was thinking hard. "And Vane knows he can't use you, so he stops trying to recruit you and starts trying to eliminate you.""And if I do sit on the throne—""Then you become king," Deven said. "Or Vane's puppet-king, which is not the same as king. And the prophecy suggests you won't. Twice."Kael sat back. He looked at the ceiling."What I want," he said, "is to be a person who decides what to do with his own life.""That's a very good want," Deven said. "The question is how you achieve it when other people have decided to structure their ambitions around yours."— ✦ —