Chapter 297
The furnace-giant hauling on the last white-hot chains. Aska sagging in them, her last fire tearing out of her toward the crowned flame of the King, rising from the ash a little higher. The Manticore on the slope below, wings spread. The crews coming up through the broken ring.
dimming, looking up into the sky of Helios. And inside them, very small, a memory lighting, like a match struck in a dark room.
The same branch. The same crown, without the pyre-hill: just a stone bier. A king laid on it, old, crowned, burned to ash a week before. Around him, kneeling, a dozen priests in plain white, and one at the front with a lantern: the first High Flame.
Aska, exactly as she is now, slight and charcoal and smoke-haired, kneeling at the bier, her palm in the ash. Counting.
The Ember King relit, sitting up on the bier: an old, tired man in a burned crown, looking at his own hands, at his kneeling priests, at the red sky. Not glorious. Tired.
at 58, leaning down to the woman of charcoal beside him, very quietly, so only she and the first High Flame can hear.
at 60, as the King burns back to ash, standing up, turning to the other kneeling priests with his lantern raised, and saying, loudly, clearly:
The priests rising, lighting torches off the King's ash, building it into a pyre, and the first chant going up into the red sky:
(And a woman of charcoal sitting on the step below them, coal eyes on the High Flame, saying nothing. Nobody had asked her.)
her coal eyes flaring back up out of embers. Lifting her head in the chains. Turning it toward the furnace-giant. Her voice hoarse as smoke, and suddenly loud, carrying over the whole crown of the Burn.
freezing mid-haul, stove-door eyes on her.
to the Everlasting on the slope, the white robes, the soot halos, every one of them turning to listen.
On the pyre's slope, the Everlasting lowering their chains. Looking at one another. At the black hill they've kept smouldering for five centuries. A white-robed old woman sinking to her knees.
shaking his blazing head, the chains still in his fists.
looking at him. Not angry. Sorry.
Rougeina, at the summit at last, one Swap a beat: blink, beside Aska; blink, the chain on her left arm swapped with a lump of cold ash; blink, the right. The last chain across her chest.
Vigolas behind Rougeina, grabbing the last white-hot chain across Aska's chest with both bare hands, his palms searing, lightning crawling up his arms, and tearing it off her.
(Aska falls free into his arms.)
in Vigolas's arms at the top of the pyre, almost out, her cracks a web over all of her. Looking up at him. A hand on his chest.
touching the pyre's ash, and an Ember-Trail lighting from her footprint: a line of fire running down into the heart of the King's pyre, under the ash, deep, to the place where the five-hundred-year fire has been smouldering and never, ever been allowed to finish.
closing his eyes. Listening, the way Njord taught him. Feeling the fire of the pyre the way he felt the squall: not a weapon. Weather. Where does it want to go?
The whole pyre's fire, and the fire swallowed inside the furnace-giant, and the King's crowned flame: all of it leaning one way. Not up. Not out. Down. Into the deepest ash. To finish. A fire that has been kept from finishing for five hundred years, and wants nothing else.
The crown of the Burn. A pirate at the top of a black pyre-hill with a woman of charcoal in one arm and his other hand open toward the ash. Out of his open hand, green lightning, released, not thrown, pouring down Aska's Ember-Trail, and the trail running emerald, a line of green fire racing down into the heart of the pyre.
And all the fire on the crown going with it: the King's crowned flame bowing and pouring down into the ash; the furnace-giant's chest tearing open as five hundred years of swallowed fire rushes out of him and down the emerald trail after it, home; and deep in the pyre, the King's ash finally, completely, burning through: a last great soft bloom of gold light from inside the black hill, and then nothing. Cold. Done.
Around it, the Everlasting on their knees, faces turned up in the last gold light. The Manticore folding its wings.
The pyre-hill grey. Cold. A hill of plain ash, smoking faintly, no glow anywhere in it for the first time in five hundred years. The crown of the Burn still burning round it, the branch still cracked with ember-light, but the pyre itself: out.
on her knees, putting her palm flat on the grey ash. Cold. Crying.
the Manticore shrinking in a shower of gold back into a golden retriever, padding up the hill, and lying down on the warmest footprint left on the cold pyre: one of Aska's.
in Vigolas's arms, her cracks still deep, her coal eyes glowing a little stronger now that nothing is pulling them out of her.
where the furnace-giant stood. The giant gone. A man lying in the cold ash in the rags of a red-and-gold showman's coat, his ribs dark, gaunt again, smaller than ever.
curling up on the cold ash, his knees to his chest, his breath steaming in the hot air of the Burn as if he were lying in snow. Shaking.
The crews coming up round him on the cold hill: Krydog, Kompis, Kali, Smurjan, the Everlasting drifting back to stare at their High Flame. Nobody raising a hand. There's nothing to fight.
reaching a shaking hand toward the nearest glowing crack in the branch at the pyre's foot, crawling toward it, too weak to reach it.
still in Vigolas's arms, looking down at the shaking man who chained her. A long look.
looking at the Kindler too. At the city he came from. At the cold.
The cold grey pyre at the crown of the burning branch. The crews standing round it. The Everlasting kneeling. And in the middle of them, on the ash, a man in a ragged showman's coat curled up like a child in snow, shaking, his breath steaming, his lips turning blue under their scars.
eyes half closed, frost forming on his lashes in the heat of the Burn.