Nathan stood in front of the flame and understood.
This was his. The wolf inside the fire, the endless black, the room with space for a thousand more lights. Nobody had built it for him and nobody had shown him the door. It had simply been here, under everything, the whole time, and he’d spent half of last night trying to reach it and failed.
’I couldn’t get in. Up in that tree, I tried everything.’
He thought back to it, the commands said out loud, the reaching, the picturing. All of it useless.
’And then I got in anyway. So what changed?’
He turned it over slowly, and the answer came from the shape of the two times together.
Both times, he’d been dying. Both times, everything else had stopped. No hunger, no pain, no fear, no plan. The noise in his head that never once went quiet in his whole life had finally gone silent, and only then had the black opened up and let him through.
’It wasn’t the dying.’
’It was the quiet.’
He stood very still with that.
’Dying just made me quiet. That’s all it did. It shut everything off, and the door was there the moment it did.’
He didn’t need his throat opened to get here. He needed his mind emptied. He needed to stop thinking, stop wanting, stop turning things over, and drop down through the still water underneath all of it.
And he knew that feeling, didn’t he.
Every child in the empire knew it secondhand. The awakened talked about it in the same hushed way, the deep stillness they sank into to reach their divine plane, the place inside themselves where their god’s power waited. Priests sat in it for days. Nobles paid tutors to teach it. He’d always assumed his own path would look nothing like theirs, that a cursed class dragged out of the dead would work by different rules entirely.
’But it’s the same trick.’
’Empty the mind. Go still. Drop in.’
’They call it reaching a divine plane. I call it this.’
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
’Not so different after all.’
He filed it away, folded and certain. A way in that didn’t cost him his life. The next time he wanted to stand in front of these flames he would sit down somewhere safe, go quiet, and simply arrive.
Something to be grateful for. He was collecting those. There weren’t many.
Which left the other thing. The thing that had been sitting at the back of it since the screen named his killers.
He was still here.
Last time, he hadn’t lasted more than a few moments in the black before the warm light came and hauled him out and stood him up in the forest, gasping, whole, his throat sealed. It had been fast. Almost immediate.
This time there was no light. No pull. Nothing reaching for him at all. Just the flame, and the dark, and Nathan, waiting.
’Why haven’t I woken up?’
He looked down at himself, at the shape of himself that stood in this place. It looked fine. It felt fine. But somewhere out there in a cold room his actual body was lying on a floor with its blood running toward a drain, and whatever brought him back had not brought him back yet.
He made himself reason through it instead of dreading it.
’First time, one wound. Throat. And I came back almost before I’d finished falling.’
’This time.’ He didn’t flinch from it. ’Throat and a blade in the side, turned. Worse. A lot worse.’
’So it’s taking longer.’
That tracked. That felt true in the way real answers felt true, clicking into place with a small ugly weight.
’It’s a cost. Dying isn’t free, even for me. The more it’s done to me, the worse I’m broken when it happens, the longer I lie in here while it puts me back together.’
He turned the idea over and found the edges of it.
’Or until the body’s worth coming back to at all.’
That was the colder version, and he made himself hold it too. There had to be a limit. Somewhere out there was an amount of damage this couldn’t fix, a point where there was nothing left worth pouring a soul back into, and the flames would just go on burning in the dark with no one to stand in front of them.
’Don’t find out where that line is.’
’Ever.’
He looked at the wolf in the fire, steady and patient and waiting, and felt the time stretch out around him with no clock to measure it by.
’So I wait. However long it takes. And when I open my eyes, I’m in that room, with those two, and no strength, and no weapon.’
His hands closed.
’Fine.’
’Then that’s the room I wake up in.’
The room, at that moment, was not thinking about Nathan at all.
"The eyes first," Hask said. "Before they cloud. He said fresh, they’re no good to him clouded."
"And where do you put eyes while you’re taking the rest, genius? In your pocket?" Perrin was crouched by the shelf, turning a jar in the grey light, frowning at it. "You take the eyes first, you’re working around a hole in his face for the next hour. You do the big pieces first and the eyes last, they keep in the brine either way."
"He said fresh."
"He says a lot of things. He’s not the one doing the cutting." Perrin set the jar down and rubbed the back of his neck. "Heart, liver, hands. Eyes at the end. That’s the order."
"You don’t know that’s the order. You’re guessing."
"I’ve done more of these than you’ve had hot dinners."
"Then why’re we arguing?"
Perrin opened his mouth, closed it, and let out a long breath through his nose.
"Because I don’t want to open him up and take the wrong thing and have that madman refuse the lot of it," he admitted. "That’s why. He’s particular. Last time it was three fingers off the left hand and nothing else, remember? Three fingers. Who wants three fingers?"
"A mage, apparently."
"A mage." Perrin shook his head. "No. We’re not guessing on this one, there’s too much coin standing on it. He’s coming to look at the boy himself before we cut. He can tell us what he wants and in what order, and then it’s on him, not us."
"So we just sit on the body."
"It’ll keep. It’s cold enough in here." Perrin glanced over at the corner. "And her?"
The girl had gone completely still against the wall.
"She keeps too," Perrin said. "Clean her up before he comes. If he doesn’t want her, there’s a house two streets over pays well for that age, and pays more if she’s not marked up." He picked the jar back up, held it to the light again. "So don’t mark her up."
Hask grunted.
The girl stared at the floor, at the dark line spreading slowly across the stone from the boy who’d offered her his bread, and she did not make a sound.
Neither of them looked at her again.
They settled in to wait for the buyer.
And on the floor between them, unmoving, his blood cooling toward the drain, Nathan Avenworth waited too.