The road into the Ashfields stopped being a road about a mile before the gate, and Bastian rode the last stretch over glass-black cinder that had once, a decade ago, been a garrison of four hundred men.
Bastian Rourke was twenty-seven, a Crown-sworn ashguard out of Harrow’s Reach, and he had volunteered for this posting over the objections of every officer who knew his surname. Wardens of Ashgrave did not, as a rule, last. The first held the post nine months before requesting reassignment. The second lasted a season. The third had simply ridden out one grey morning and not come back, and no one had gone looking, on the theory that a man who wanted to leave Ashgrave badly enough to abandon his post had probably had good reason.
Bastian did not intend to leave. He intended, if the histories were even half true, to look the man responsible for his brother’s death directly in the face, and he had waited a decade for the chance.
The fortress rose out of the crater like something that had grown there rather than been built—black stone fused glassy in places, as though the walls themselves had been present for whatever had scorched the valley flat. A warden’s bell hung at the gate with no rope left to ring it. Bastian struck it with the hilt of his knife instead, twice, and waited while the sound rolled away into the ash-grey distance and did not come back.
The man who answered the inner gate was not what six years of garrison stories had prepared him for.
He was tall and dark-haired, dressed in undyed wool gone soft with wear, and there was nothing about him that read as monstrous except the eyes—an ordinary brown, watching Bastian with the specific, careful attention of someone counting exits. A thin grey ash drifted up from his sleeve as he pushed the gate wider, curling the wrong way, like smoke that had forgotten which direction was up, and settled the instant he saw Bastian notice it.
“You’re new,” the man said. “They usually send a letter first, so I can decide whether it’s worth unlocking anything.”
“Emeric.” Bastian said the name like it cost him something, because it did. “The Ashborn.”
“Just Emeric will do, unless you’ve brought a speech. I’ve had three wardens and none of them gave one, and I’d hate for you to be the first.” He stepped back to let Bastian lead his horse through. Up close he looked exactly like what the ledgers said he was—thirty-two—though the ballads always painted him twenty and cursed, because a young monster sold better than a tired man. “You’ll want the east tower. Fewest holes in the roof.”
“I know what you did at Sable Hollow.”
Emeric went very still, and the ash at his cuff, which had settled, lifted again—a slow grey unspooling that had nothing to do with any wind Bastian could feel. “Do you,” he said, in a voice gone perfectly flat. “Most people know the ballad. There’s a difference.”
“My brother was in the third company at Sable Hollow.”
Something crossed Emeric’s face that was not quite fear and not quite grief, gone before Bastian could name it. “Then you’ll want to know,” he said, “that I am, whatever else the ballad gets wrong, entirely guilty of that part. Your tower’s this way, Warden.”
The ward wanted blood once a week and Bastian’s word every morning, and beyond that Ashgrave asked surprisingly little of him. He had braced for a monster’s court and found a household of two: a man who cooked competently, read too much, and had apparently spent a decade teaching himself to mend a coat rather than ask a warden to do it for him. Bastian caught himself, more than once, revising the shape of the story he’d carried out of Harrow’s Reach for six years, and hated how easily it came loose.
So he went looking for reasons to keep hating cleanly. The official record of Sable Hollow was Crown property and sealed, but Ashgrave kept its own accounting—ledgers Emeric had written himself in the years just after, in a hand that got worse the further into the account it went. Bastian read them by lamplight in the archive tower while Emeric was elsewhere, and then, not finding what he expected, read them again.
The ballad said the Ashborn turned his fire on his own garrison out of madness or spite. The ledger said something else: an order to put Sable Hollow’s surrendered garrison to the sword regardless of the white flag, a refusal, a ward-break improvised in the space of a bad hour to stop it, and a collapse that had killed forty of Emeric’s own men when the counter-ward he’d never been trained to hold came apart in his hands. Guilty, by his own account, of exactly one thing: he had broken a ward badly rather than let four hundred surrendered men die cleanly. The Crown had needed a monster more than it had needed the truth, and Emeric had been standing there, convenient and already burning.
“You could have let me go on hating you efficiently,” Bastian said, when he finally climbed down to the kitchen with the ledger still in his hand. “It would have been less work for both of us.”
“I did try.” Emeric didn’t look up from the pot he was stirring, though the ash at his collar had started to drift, restless, toward the far side of the room—away from Bastian, like it was trying to give them both some privacy. “You’re the one who went looking in the archive at midnight instead of sleeping.”
“My brother is still dead.”
“Yes.” Emeric set the spoon down, and when he finally met Bastian’s eyes there was no performance left in it at all. “He is. I have never once told myself it was someone else’s hand that killed him, whatever else the ballad gives me credit for. That is not an apology, because I do not have one that would be worth your having. It is only the truth, since you came all this way for it.”
Bastian had spent a decade building purpose around arriving at exactly this conversation, and none of it told him what to do with a man who agreed with him.
It got harder after that, not easier. Hatred had been simple to live inside; this was not. Emeric kept the fire lit in Bastian’s tower without being asked and pretended he hadn’t when Bastian thanked him for it. He argued, cheerfully, about the correct way to salt a stew, and about whether the crater’s ash-storms were worsening, and once, unthinkingly, put a hand at the small of Bastian’s back to steady him on a broken stair—and then left it there a half-second too long before taking it away, the ash at his shoulders gone bright and restless and entirely unhidden. Neither of them said anything about it, which was its own kind of admission.
“Your ash,” Bastian said, one night, when it had drifted close enough to warm the back of his hand where it passed. “It does that when you want something.”
“It does that,” Emeric said carefully, “when I have stopped being able to help it. There is a difference, Warden.”
“Bastian.”
“Bastian,” Emeric repeated, like he was testing whether the floor would hold him, and the ash came drifting all the way across the room to settle, warm as breath, against Bastian’s open palm.
Bastian was the one who crossed the room, because he had spent ten years arriving at the wrong conclusion about this man and he was done being slow about the right one.
He put his free hand to Emeric’s jaw—rough with two days’ stubble, warmer than the ash-cold kitchen had any right to be—and felt Emeric go still under it the way he’d gone still at the gate the first day, braced for a blow instead of whatever this actually was. “I’m not here to forgive you,” Bastian said, low. “I don’t think that’s mine to give. I’m here because I’ve stopped wanting to hate you.”
“Bastian—”
“Say if you don’t want this and I’ll go back up to my cold tower and we’ll never mention it again.” He was close enough now to feel the change in Emeric’s breath. “Otherwise stop asking me questions and kiss me.”
Emeric made a rough sound against his mouth that had nothing careful left in it, and kissed him instead of answering, one hand fisting in the front of Bastian’s shirt like he needed something to hold on to that wasn’t a wall he’d built himself. He tasted of the woodsmoke that clung to the whole fortress, and he kissed like a man who had spent a decade rationing himself and had just run out of reasons to keep doing it. The ash around them lifted all at once, filling the kitchen with a slow bright drift that gave off real warmth, a hundred small coals let loose from wherever he usually kept them banked down.
“That’s new,” Bastian managed, when they broke apart long enough to breathe.
“That’s you,” Emeric said, rough. “I don’t have much practice not burning the things I want. Tell me now if that frightens you.”
“It’s the warmest I’ve been since I got here.” Bastian pulled him back in by the collar, and this time it was Emeric who walked them backward, past the pot cooling on the stove, through the door to the small room off the kitchen that held nothing but a narrow bed and a fireplace that, for once, was already lit.
They undressed each other without grace and without hurry, and Bastian catalogued every place the ash had marked him—faint silver-grey lines along his ribs, his collarbone, like old scars from a fire he’d survived by inches—and kissed each one, because Emeric’s breath caught differently every time he did. Emeric’s hands were careful in a way that had nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with a man double-checking, at every step, that he was still permitted this; Bastian answered every check by pulling him closer, until Emeric stopped asking with words and started asking with his mouth instead, working down the line of Bastian’s throat, his chest, lower, until Bastian’s hand came down hard in his hair and he said Emeric’s name like an order he was glad to be given.
When Emeric finally settled over him, skin to skin, the ash filled the room like low firelight, and Bastian felt the actual weight of him—the gravity of a body that had spent a decade convinced no one would ever want to be this close to it—and pulled him down until there was no more room for either of them to hold anything back. Emeric moved slow at first, watching Bastian’s face like he was memorizing a map he intended to walk again, and Bastian dug his heels into the backs of Emeric’s thighs and told him, plainly, to stop being careful. He stopped. The next thrust had nothing careful left in it, and the sound Emeric made—low, wrecked, like something in him had finally been given permission to break—undid Bastian more than anything that had come before it. He could feel every place their bodies met: the tremor in the arms braced either side of his head, the give of muscle under his palms, the ash gathering warm and restless at every point of contact like it wanted to be closer than skin allowed. Bastian hooked a hand behind Emeric’s neck and pulled him down until there was no space left to be careful in, until Emeric’s breath was ragged against his ear and his own name was the only thing either of them still had words for. The bed was narrow and the fire was small and neither of them noticed; Bastian arched up into every thrust with his fingers dug into Emeric’s shoulders, breath ragged, the drifting ash-warmth pressing against his skin like a second pair of hands, and when he came apart it was with Emeric’s name in his mouth and no thought left in him of ballads or brothers or ten wasted years of hatred. Emeric followed him under a moment later, face pressed hard to Bastian’s throat, shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
Afterward, with the fire burned down to coals and Emeric’s ash settled into a slow warm drift across the blanket, like a hearth that never quite went out, Bastian lay with his head on Emeric’s chest and did the thing he’d avoided doing for a decade: he let himself grieve his brother without needing anyone in the room to have earned it first.
“I’m not staying because of the oath,” he said, eventually. “I want you to know that. I could requisition a release from this assignment inside a month, if I wanted one.”
“I know what the oath requires.” Emeric’s hand moved slow along his spine. “I’ve had three wardens keep it. This is the first time it’s felt like a choice instead of a sentence.”
“There’s a clerk of records in Harrow’s Reach who owes my family a favor,” Bastian said. “I’m going to use it to find out who actually gave the order at Sable Hollow. It won’t undo the ballad. It might undo the sentence.”
Emeric went quiet long enough that Bastian lifted his head to look at him, and found an expression on his face that ten warded years alone in the Ashfields had apparently never had cause to produce: something that looked, unmistakably, like hope, badly out of practice and entirely unhidden.
“Then I suppose,” Emeric said, “you had better stay long enough to finish it.”
“That,” Bastian said, settling back against him as the ash banked low and gold around them both, “was always the plan.”
