The village still smelled like bread.
Cassian sat on the low stone wall behind the bakery, feet swinging, eleven years old and sunburned across the nose, watching smoke curl up from a dozen chimneys instead of a dozen ruins. Somewhere behind him, someone was arguing about the price of salted fish. Somewhere in front of him, chickens scattered from a dog that didn’t care enough to chase them properly. It was the most ordinary morning in the world, and in the dream he knew, the way you always know inside a dream, that it was the best morning he had ever had.
"You’re going to fall off that wall."
He didn’t need to turn around to know the voice. Zayd dropped down beside him anyway, arms crossed, already looking bored with a day that hadn’t started yet.
"I’ve never fallen once."
"You fell in the river two weeks ago."
"That doesn’t count. Aurelia pushed me."
"I did not push you," Aurelia said, climbing up on his other side with far more care than either of the boys had bothered with. Her white hair caught the morning sun and turned it the color of frost. "I startled you. There’s a difference."
"There is no difference."
"There is a very large difference, Cassian."
He laughed the easy, unguarded laugh of a boy who has never once had to wonder whether tomorrow will look like today and for a while the three of them just sat there, listing the small, precious nothing of their lives back at each other. Zayd had finally managed to shape his sand into something sharp enough to shave with, after weeks of practicing alone until his hands cramped. Aurelia had finally frozen a whole bucket of water solid without cracking it. Cassian’s own hands still smelled faintly of smoke from the fire he’d coaxed into his palm that morning, small and obedient, exactly the way Azhur had taught him.
"Where is he, anyway?" Aurelia asked. "Your teacher."
"Forest. He’s always in the forest." Cassian shrugged, the way only a child who trusts completely can shrug at the mention of the person he trusts most. "He says he likes the quiet."
"Your father doesn’t like him much."
"My father doesn’t like anyone taking me anywhere he can’t see."
Zayd smirked. "Because you’d get yourself killed in an afternoon."
"I would not."
"You walked into a hive of hornets last summer because you wanted to know if they’d sting a fire user."
"That was research."
"That was idiotic."
Aurelia’s laughter rang out over the square, bright and unhidden, nothing like the quiet, careful girl who flinched at loud noises when she was awake. In the dream she laughed with her whole chest, and the sound of it settled into Cassian’s bones like sunlight settling into stone. He wanted to hold onto that sound. Some small, distant part of him the part that was eleven and dreaming and did not yet know it was dreaming — understood that he should hold onto it as hard as he could.
He didn’t understand why yet.
The bell in the square rang for midday meal, and Moros came around the corner of the smith’s forge with his sleeves rolled up and soot on his forearms, looking for all the world like an ordinary village chief who had spent the morning fixing a plow instead of a man who could split the air with a blade of pure violet light. He caught sight of Cassian on the wall and something in his face eased, the way it always did, the way a father’s face eases only for one person in the whole wide world.
"Off the wall," he called. "You’ll break your neck."
"I’ve never fallen once!"
"You fell in the river."
"That doesn’t count!"
Moros just shook his head, smiling despite himself, and for one perfect, suspended moment the whole village held still around them the smoke from the chimneys, the arguing fishmonger, the dog that had given up on the chickens, Zayd’s smirk, Aurelia’s laugh, his father’s tired, fond smile. Cassian would spend the rest of his life, waking or sleeping, trying to get back to that exact moment.
Then the sky turned the wrong color.
It happened the way it always happens in dreams that are not really dreams without warning, without the courtesy of a transition. One heartbeat the sun sat high and gold over the square. Then next, the light had gone the sick orange-red of a world on fire, and the smoke rising from the chimneys had become smoke rising from the roofs themselves, and the sound of the fishmonger arguing had become the sound of people screaming.
"Cassian"
Aurelia’s voice, but wrong now, cracked down the middle with fear. He turned to find her, and the wall he’d been sitting on was gone, and the square was gone, and everywhere he looked houses he had known his whole life folded inward into ash. Zayd was shouting something he couldn’t hear over the roar of the flames. His father was already moving, already burning bright violet, already cutting toward whatever threat had come out of the trees to do this.
And standing in the middle of it all, untouched by the fire, utterly calm, was Azhur.
"Azhur!" Cassian tried to run to him some part of him still believed, even now, even with the whole world burning, that his teacher would turn and put himself between Cassian and whatever was happening, the way he always had. "Azhur, help them, please"
The lion-man turned his head. His eyes had gone from the warm amber Cassian knew to something colder, something that watched him the way a man watches an insect he has decided not to bother stepping on.
"You’ll understand eventually," Azhur said, in the same easy voice he used to correct Cassian’s stance in the forest, and then he raised one clawed hand toward the row of houses where Zayd slept, and where Aurelia slept, and where every person Cassian had ever loved was sleeping, laughing, arguing about the price of fish.
The fire that answered him was not the fire Cassian had learned to call. It was older, hungrier, and it did not stop at the houses. It climbed the well. It climbed the bell tower. It climbed the stone wall Cassian had sat on that very morning, certain he would never fall, and it did not slow until there was nothing left standing to burn.
Cassian screamed until his throat tore. He screamed for his father, for Zayd, for Aurelia, for the bakery and the fishmonger and the dog that had given up chasing chickens. No one answered. In the place where the village had been, there was only fire, and ash drifting down like red snow, and Azhur’s voice, patient and almost gentle, saying his name over and over as if it were a kindness.
Cassian. Cassian. Cassian.
He woke gasping, and the world came back to him wrong no dirt under his cheek, no cold ground beneath his hands. Instead there was motion. A shoulder pressed hard into his stomach. The slow, rhythmic jolt of someone else’s footsteps, someone else carrying his weight through the trees like it cost them nothing at all.
For a long moment he didn’t know which world he’d woken into the one where the village still stood, or the one where it hadn’t, for three months now, and never would again. His body ached in a dozen unfamiliar places that had nothing to do with the dream: a bruise blooming deep in his stomach, his ribs still tender from a beast he half-remembered fighting.
Then the smell reached him woodsmoke, but the wrong kind, someone else’s fire, not his own and not the one that had swallowed his home and it all came flooding back at once. The deer. The bearded man. The boy with the tattoos, and the two precise, controlled blows that had put him out cold before he’d finished deciding whether to trust them.
He didn’t move. He kept his breathing slow and even, the way he’d learned to fake sleep during three months of nights he hadn’t dared close his eyes for real, and listened.
"He’s dreaming," a voice said above him the boy’s voice, flat and unbothered. "Talking in his sleep."
"Let him." The bearded man’s voice, farther off, unhurried. "Whatever’s chasing him through his own head, it’s not our business yet."
Cassian’s eyes stayed shut. His mind was still half in the square, still hearing Aurelia’s laugh crack down the middle into a scream, still watching Azhur’s hand rise toward the row of houses where everyone he’d ever loved had been sleeping. He pressed the feeling down the same way he’d pressed it down every night for three months, forcing his breath to stay level, forcing his fingers not to curl into fists against the tattooed boy’s back.
When he was sure neither of them was looking, he let his eyes open the barest sliver just enough to catch a slice of unfamiliar trees sliding past overhead, dark against a sky gone the deep blue of early evening. Not the trees he knew. Not the trail he’d spent three months learning by heart. Somewhere new. Somewhere he hadn’t chosen.
He thought of the fire that had eaten the stone wall he used to sit on. He thought of Azhur’s voice, patient and almost gentle, saying his name over and over like it was a kindness instead of the last thing he’d ever wanted to hear from that mouth.
I’m going to find you, he thought, not trusting his voice not to give him away. However long it takes. Whatever I have to become.
He let his eyes fall shut again, let his body go slack over the stranger’s shoulder, and did not sleep. Somewhere behind his ribs, in the space grief had occupied alone for three months, something colder had finally found room to stand beside it.
Revenge did not feel like a decision. It felt like the only thing left standing in him the one wall the fire hadn’t managed to take down. And for the first time since that night, he wasn’t planning to carry it alone.