Chapter One: The First Loaf

Kaelren had buried forty-one squads, and he still burned the first loaf.

He knew it was burning before the smell reached him. The oven at the back of Mareth's clinic had a hot corner, low on the left, where the bricks had cracked in some winter nobody alive remembered. The first loaf of any morning always sat too close to it, because the first loaf was always the one he put in before he was properly awake. He pulled it with the paddle. Black on the bottom. Fine on top. He set it on the stone sill to cool and did not throw it away.

Outside the shutters Emberhold was still dark. The night watch had another hour on the walls. Somewhere toward the forges a dog was barking at nothing with great commitment.

He floured his hands and turned the second round of dough onto the board.

The recipe wasn't complicated. Flour, salt, a pinch of the black seed that grew in the ash-gardens under the north wall, water warm as blood, and a fist of old dough kept back from last week, which carried the week before it, and the week before that. If you followed the line back far enough — and Kaelren could, which was the trouble with him — it went into a kitchen in a city that had been ash for four hundred years, and to a big man with flour in his beard saying, Not like that, you'll strangle it. Fold it. Like you're tucking in a child.

He folded it.

The door banged. Cold came in, then Lysa Emberbow, then her voice, which as a rule arrived before the rest of her.

"You're burning something."

"It's done."

"It's black."

"Underneath." He didn't look up. "Shut the door."

She shut it with her heel and went to the sill and looked at the loaf the way she looked at a wounded animal she was deciding whether to finish. She was twenty-three, small, all elbows and quiver strap, with a scar through one eyebrow that she told people came from a Voidborn and that Kaelren knew came from a rooftop and a bet. Her bow was across her back, even in a bakehouse. He'd taught her that. He wasn't sure he was proud of it.

"Every week," she said. "Every week you burn the first one, and every week you keep it."

"Someone eats it."

"Bren eats it. Bren would eat the paddle." She broke a corner off the top anyway, blew on it, ate it. Her eyes closed for half a breath. When they opened she was scowling, as if the bread had won an argument. "Fine. It's good. Why are you up?"

"I'm always up."

"You're always up early. This is before early. This is when thieves get up." She leaned on the bench. "Dreams again?"

He put the dough in the bowl and the cloth over the dough and said nothing. Lysa had served under him for four years and knew what his silences were worth, so she let it go — in the way she let things go, which was to put them aside with a pointed look so he'd know they'd been put aside, not dropped.

It had been the same dream. A long table. Warm lamps. A boy at the far end of it eating as if someone might take the plate away.

He wiped his hands.

"Thalen wants the squad at the east stair at first bell," Lysa said. "Patrol rota. Again. He's going to have us counting Voidborn tracks in the Ashfield like that'll make them go home."

"It tells him where they're thicker."

"It tells him they're thicker everywhere."

"Then that's what it tells him."

She made a noise through her nose. Then, because she could never sit with a thing for long: "Talla had the nightmare again. The lantern one."

He looked up for that.

"She's all right," Lysa said quickly. "Sev sat up with her and did the card trick, the one where he loses. She hates it. It works." A pause. "She said all the lanterns were leaning the same way. Toward the Gate."

The oven ticked. In the hot corner a coal settled with a sound like a small bone breaking.

"Dreams," Kaelren said.

"Dreams," Lysa agreed, and neither of them believed it.

✦

They went up through the clinic as the sky greyed. Mareth Hollowhands was awake in the front room, of course, in the good chair with a blanket over her knees, grinding dried rootwort in a bowl she held against her chest like a cat. She looked at Kaelren over the rim and said, "Leave me the burnt one."

"Bren—"

"Bren is nineteen and can eat stones. I'm eighty-one and I like the bottoms." She went back to grinding. "And put a coat on. It's cold enough up there to crack teeth."

He put a coat on. Lysa watched this with open delight.

"She bullies you," she said on the stairs.

"She's earned it."

"How?"

He thought of Mareth at nineteen, a ward-runner with no healing in her at all, carrying water up these same stairs the year the Stonehold refugees came. Mareth at forty, sewing his side shut by lamplight and asking him very quietly, with the needle still in him, why the wound was closing on its own. Mareth at sixty, the only person in the city who had ever watched him take a killing blow and stand back up.

"Long story," he said.

"You always say that."

"They're always long."

✦

The eastern wall at dawn had a smell he had never found a word for. Cold stone, coal smoke from the forges, and under both a faint sweetness like burnt sugar that came off the Shattered Gate when the wind turned. The braziers had burned down to red. The sentries on the last hour of the watch stamped their feet and gave him the quick dip of the chin soldiers give an officer they like — nothing that would cost them anything.

He went to his place by the third merlon, put his hands on the stone, and let the city come up around him.

Emberhold was not beautiful. People who said it was had either never seen anywhere else or had seen too much and lost their measure. It was a fortress built in a hurry on top of a fortress built in a hurry: black basalt patched with Stonehold granite, granite patched with salvaged Lightforge marble that still caught the dawn as if it remembered being holy, and everywhere iron — bars, braces, rivets the size of fists, chains slung between the towers to stop the old walls leaning. Below him the lower city stepped down in terraces to the markets. Above, the citadel. And at the heart of it, in the great round courtyard the founders had built the whole place around, the Gate.

Forty feet of cracked arch, standing on nothing. No wall either side. No road leading in. It had been a bridge once, to eight other worlds. Now it was a doorway without a house, and the people of Emberhold walked around it the way you walk around a grave.

He had watched it die. Not all at once. Over three hundred years, Realm by Realm, the light in the arch had gone out like a city's windows going dark at night — Flameborne's red first, then Shadowdeep's blue-black, and on, and on, until for a long time there was only Spiritveil's faint silver at the keystone, like a coin at the bottom of a well. Then, one winter, not even that.

It had been dark for a hundred and nine years.

"There's Bren," Lysa said.

There was Bren, in the yard below the forge, locked in a battle of wills with a crate of iron bolts very nearly as big as he was. He had it by both ends and was walking it, rocking it corner to corner, tongue between his teeth. Bren Ashforge was nineteen, with the shoulders of a draught ox and the face of a child seeing snow. He had joined the squad seven months ago by following them home from a salvage run and refusing to leave.

"He's going to drop that," Lysa said.

"He's going to try not to."

Bren's heel found a loose cobble. The crate tipped. For one long glorious moment the whole thing hung at an angle no crate should survive — Bren hanging off the high end, boots kicking, a forge apprentice running at him with both hands out and no plan whatsoever — and then he wrenched it level and set it down with a bang and threw both arms in the air as if he'd won a war.

Three apprentices applauded. Bren bowed to them. He saw Kaelren on the wall and waved with his entire arm.

Lysa was laughing silently into her sleeve.

Kaelren didn't laugh. Laughing came hard to him and had for a long time. But he felt the morning get into his chest a little, the way warmth gets into cold hands, and he let it.

Forty-one squads.

Somewhere in the second century he had stopped letting himself love them. It had been a sensible decision. He made it after the sixth squad, in a ditch in the Ashfield, with Corvin Hale's head in his lap, and he kept to it for a hundred years. Then a girl called Ysolde put a frog in his helmet, and he found he'd broken the rule without noticing, and understood it had never been the kind of rule he could keep. Since then he had loved every one of them, and buried most, and baked bread every week. None of it made sense. All of it was the only thing that did.

"He's going to want the burnt one," Lysa said.

"Mareth has it."

"Gods help us. There'll be war."

✦

The first bell rang from the citadel, flat and old. The watch began to change. Below, the market was opening — shutters going up, a woman shaking out a striped awning, the eel-man from the cistern farms shouting his prices at nobody yet. Talla came out onto the clinic steps in a coat too big for her, saw them, and waved with none of Bren's enthusiasm. She was eighteen, the youngest in the squad, half Spiritveil on her mother's side, and she heard memories in old stone the way other people hear rain. Behind her Sev leaned in the doorway shuffling a deck one-handed — a habit he swore was for dexterity and Kaelren suspected was so people would watch the cards instead of his face.

Kaelren lifted a hand to them, and turned back to the Gate.

The Gate was looking back.

There was no other way to put it, and later he would try. It hadn't lit. Nothing had moved. But the air in the courtyard had changed, the way the air in a room changes when someone you didn't hear come in is standing behind you. Every brazier along the wall leaned its flame the same way, at the same angle, like grass under a wind — toward the arch.

There was no wind.

"Kaelren," Lysa said, very quietly.

"I see it."

A sound came across the city. Not loud. It reached him through the stone under his hands before it reached his ears: a low hum, deep in the rock, the note a bell keeps making after it has stopped ringing.

On the clinic steps, Talla had gone white and put both hands over her ears.

Then the keystone showed, for a heartbeat, a thread of light. It wasn't silver, or any colour the arch had ever held. It was pale and shifting, the colour of a word you can't quite remember.

It went out.

The hum stopped.

In the yard Bren stood with his mouth open. In the market the woman had let go of her awning; it lay in the street like a dead bird. All over the city people had stopped mid-step, and for the space of three breaths Emberhold was as quiet as Kaelren had ever heard it.

Then a child started crying somewhere, and someone laughed too loud, and the eel-man shouted about eels, and the city decided it hadn't seen anything.

"That's new," Lysa said. It didn't sound like her voice.

"No," Kaelren said. "It isn't."

She turned to look at him. He didn't explain. He couldn't have. He was looking at his right hand.

Across the palm, from the root of the thumb to the edge, ran an old burn: a ridge of shiny skin in the shape of a flame. It had been on him for eleven hundred and four years, and it had been warm for every one of them. Warm in the snow passes of the Long Retreat. Warm in the pits under Metalcrown. Warm in this cold dawn with his hands on cold stone. It was the one thing in his life he had never had to wonder about.

It was cold.

Not cool. Cold, like iron left out overnight. Cold like a hearth nobody has lit.

And very far away — so far it might have been memory, so faint it might have been the wind he knew wasn't blowing — a voice he had not heard in four hundred years — a voice he had watched the dark swallow — said, the way it used to say it across a training yard with the sun going down and a boy picking himself up out of the dust for the ninth time:

Again, little ember.

He closed his hand.

"Get the squad," he said. "All of them. Now."

✦

End of Chapter One