Chapter 109: THE ROAD TO TIER THREE

Three towns east, a kiln tender had a cold kiln nobody used anymore. A barn behind it. And the clay-belt habit of telling Vane riders no on principle.

She looked at Aiden once. At the white in his hair. At the enormous wolf folded behind him, drying the morning damp off her yard.

Then she pointed at the barn and went back to work.

"People keep doing that," Aiden said, lowering himself onto the straw with stiff, aching knees. "Just taking us in. I keep waiting for the price."

The price was stacking her fired brick. Feeling slowly returned to his frost-numbed arm as he worked.

He paid it gladly. A price he could see was the only kind he trusted.

His lungs stayed clean.

That was the one mercy. The detox had taken the cough out of him, and paying fifteen years hadn’t brought it back.

He breathed clear. His chest just felt fifteen years older.

His hand trembled on and off. Getting out of bed took longer.

Traded nothing I was using. That’s what I’ll tell Cinder.

She won’t believe it, but I’ll tell her.

Cinder would not leave his side.

She curled against him the first night in the barn, and it was different from the cold wolf against the one warm man.

She did not need his warmth now. She would never need it again.

She lay against him with her whole weight and watched him sleep.

When he woke, she was already awake, her eyes fixed on the white in his hair.

I told you fifteen years was cheap.

"Stop it," he said on the third morning, finding her eyes on him again. "I can hear you counting. You’re as bad as the baker’s boy. He was six and thought his mother’s bread made Miasma evolve."

Cinder did not stop.

"Look, that was fifteen years. I had forty-six. Now I have thirty-one." He put his hand in the fur of her shoulder. "That’s still thirty-one. I was a one-year man last winter."

Her eyes did not soften.

"You didn’t take anything from me I’d have kept. You put it into something I can watch breathing."

She kept looking at him.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

Then he said the true thing.

"I’d do it again." Quiet. No joke under it. "If that wolf came back right now, I’d open the bond and pour in the rest without thinking twice."

Her ears went back and a low whine escaped her.

"I know. You hate it." He scratched under her jaw. "So sit there resenting a debt I’d gladly run up again. Or let me up. I have bricks to stack, and I need to find a way to stop this from happening again."

Cinder’s eyes stayed on him. But she let him up.

For Cinder, that was as close to agreement as he was going to get.

He stacked bricks while thinking through the problem. Work had always helped him think.

They had survived the Frost Wolf. They had not beaten it.

It was out there. Still hunting. Still Vane’s. The only reason the Frost Wolf wasn’t on them was the kilns. Cinder’s heat was lost among dozens of furnaces, and the wolf couldn’t pick her out.

The House handlers had likely stopped to draft a new plan to kill them. A simpler one.

Aiden’s beasts couldn’t hurt the Frost Wolf. That meant the man in the good coat no longer had to worry about the Baron asking why his beast had been wounded. He could stop protecting it. He could let it loose and let it kill them. Faster. Easier. Cleaner.

And we’d be running again.

I’ve bought mornings my whole life. I’m tired of buying one morning after another without ever getting anywhere.

There was one thing that could end the Frost Wolf instead of forcing them to run from it.

Cinder, one whole tier higher. Tier Three.

Even Master Tamer Halvern Coade and the Academy board members had only Tier Two beasts.

Harken Vane and his entire House raised a Tier Two Frost Wolf. It was powerful enough to make him a national power.

Tier Three is where noble families start sending recruiters, and where governments talk with a tamer on equal ground.

Most tamers who owned a Tier Three beast had chanced upon an egg or pup from a Tier Three lineage and raised it.

Evolution was different. It took years, rare catalysts, and an environment that could kill the beast before the change was complete. The Academy manuals offered little more than vague theories and strict requirements for the tamer’s energy.

We won’t earn half a step at the whim of a resonance I don’t understand. She’d make it give ground. If it keeps chasing us, she’ll bury it for good.

But Tier Three wasn’t something he could make with metal waste and a hammer. It wasn’t something he could make with a stolen fruit and the sink under the Hearthstone Chamber.

The smith had told him, in the tone bards used to recount a legend, about something even hotter than an Embercore fruit.

Magma Sap.

It came from trees that grew in volcanic ground hot enough to kill them, but that refused to die.

It was orange and smelled like the inside of a forge. The smith said one vial would have made Cinder hot enough that they wouldn’t have struggled against the Ice Heart being assembled in the sink.

It grew in one country. East and south, where the clay-belt’s gentle fired earth gave way to the real thing.

The Ember Peaks.

He knew three things about the Ember Peaks, and none of them from a book.

The first was that the ground burned. Not the surface. Underneath.

The second was that nobody ruled it. No House held a charter up there. No House had ever managed to claim a range that cooked the men sent to survey it.

The third was the one that mattered.

Old things lived up there. Things that had been there for generations.

The kiln-tenders called them the mountain’s own and would not say more. A clay-belt woman who would tell a Vane rider no on principle did not go quiet for nothing.

Aiden climbed the brick-stack on the fourth evening and looked east.

The brick under his boots still held the day’s firing. Kiln smoke rose in thin grey columns across the valley, all drifting east.

The motes showed him the Peaks before his eyes found them.

He had to sit down on the brick.

I thought the kiln-belt was a warm country. I thought the Hearthstone Chamber was a deep fire.

The gold to the east was no longer a few motes. It filled the horizon, rising from the mountains against the dusk.

It looked like staring into a forge-mouth.

Cinder wouldn’t just be safe there. She’d be home.

Which is more than I’ve ever been anywhere.

For a moment he imagined himself living there. The thought felt awful even in his head.

Then he remembered the academy.

He was still, on paper, a student. Field Provision 7. For tamers whose beasts were too weak to earn a place in the Academy’s halls.

Field Provision 7 came with one condition. Show your face at the east annex every month. Let a clerk mark you present.

He had not shown his face in two months.

Miss three months, and they strike you for absence. Not by a Baron. By a clerk and a calendar.

A House struck me off the city’s books. Now my own absence is about to strike me off the Academy’s.

A man can only disappear from so many records before he stops existing on paper.

That was why the Peaks could not just be a place to hide.

Cinder could stay in the Ember Peaks forever. I can’t. Whatever I do up there, I have to come back down and walk through an Academy gate.

Harken and his brother have to watch me do it.

Then he saw the mountain passes leading into the Peaks.

Points of heat stood out against the golden motes like coals in a full hearth, each seeming bigger than Cinder.

They stood motionless, one on every pass along the range.

Four years lighting roads at night. I know a guard when I see one.

So those are the mountain’s own.

"Of course, even unclaimed mountains have sentries," Aiden said to the dusk.

Cinder came up the brick-stack behind him and put her head against his side.

She looked east at the burning peaks. The orange light from the Peaks washed over her golden coat.

Her ears lifted, and she leaned toward the burning mountains.

She was not afraid of it.

She wanted to go.

You look at a country full of monsters and get hungry.

I wanted you to be scary. I suppose this is what I get.

Miasma climbed from his shoulder onto the warm brick and turned east too. Her green pulse brightened and stayed bright.

You want to go too?

Inside his coat, Nyx yawned once and stayed still. It had no interest in places that bright.

"Yeah." Aiden put his hand on Cinder’s neck. "I see it. If Miasma points there, that’s where the Magma sap grows. That’s the road."

He looked at the line of heat along the mountain passes.

"We’re going to need a much better plan than the last one. That one cost me fifteen years. Cinder seems to have opinions about doing it twice."

The peaks burned on against the dark, patient, guarded, and did not care about their opinions at all.