Chapter 670: The Burning Coast

Ashe smelled the East before she saw it.

It came to her in the dark, on the second night out from Ithen, somewhere over the strait. She was sitting where she always sat, in the middle of the Lark’s deck, with her new sword across her knees and Nyx asleep against her shoulder, and the wind changed, and suddenly there it was. Pine resin and cold salt and old stone. And under it, faint and bitter and unmistakable, smoke.

She had not smelled it since the autumn, since the evening tide that had carried them west out of Korreth harbor. She knew it the way she knew her own name.

"We’re close," she said.

Sarai Vell, at the helm, glanced back at her. "How can you tell?"

"Because it smells like home," said Ashe. "And home’s on fire."

They saw the coast at dawn.

It came up out of the grey sea ahead of them in a long dark line of cliffs and headlands, the eastern shore of the continent that had refused to die, and every headland was burning.

Not the towns. Ashe saw that first, and her heart came down a little. The towns were dark. She could see them in the bays between the headlands, small and grey and huddled, with their boats drawn up high on the shingle and no lights in their windows. But on every high point of land above them, on every cliff top and every bare rocky spur that ran out into the water, there was a fire. Not a beacon. A bonfire, enormous, stacked with whole trees, roaring up into the morning in pillars of orange and black. They went on down the coast as far as she could see, like a line of torches held up along the edge of the world.

"They’re lighting them on purpose," said Valerica slowly, at the rail.

"Yes."

"Why?"

Ashe did not answer at once. She was looking at the water below the nearest headland.

Something was moving in it. Several somethings. Long dark shapes in the shallows, very large, sliding slowly through the grey water toward the foot of the cliff where the fire was burning. They did not hurry. They did not seem to be hunting. They were simply drawn, the way moths are drawn, toward the heat.

"Oh," said Nyx softly. She had woken and come to the rail. Her eyes had gone opal. "They want to be warm."

"Like Oruth," said Isole.

"Like the ice," said Valerica. She had gone pale. "They worked it out. Someone over here worked out what we worked out. The things from the deep come to warmth. So they’re giving them warmth." She looked along the endless line of fires. "Out on the headlands. Away from the towns."

"Lures," said Vane.

Ashe nodded slowly.

She knew this. Not the fires, not the beasts, but the shape of it. She had learned it before she could read. Every child in the East learned it, in the songs. When the Empire came with its armies, we burned our own fields so they would find nothing. We burned our own towns so they would have nowhere to sleep. We gave the fire what we loved so that the fire would keep the enemy from what we loved more.

Her people had always known how to burn their own land. It was the oldest thing they knew how to do.

"They’re giving the sea the headlands," she said. "So it doesn’t take the towns." She swallowed. "That’s my father. That’s how he thinks."

Sarai Vell brought the Lark down where Ashe told her to: on the cliff path below the compound at Korreth, where the stone steps came down from the high sanctum to the sea.

Kaito was waiting at the bottom of them.

He looked as though he had not slept since the winter. There was soot on his face and a burn across the back of one hand, and he stood at the foot of the steps with his arms folded in the posture Ashe had been standing in since she was nine, which she had never once noticed until now. He looked at the pale ship, and then at his sister climbing down from it with a stranger’s sword across her shoulders, and something in his tired face loosened.

"You took your time," he said.

"You didn’t write."

"He wrote." Kaito jerked his head up the steps. "Himself. I nearly fell over." He looked past her at the others, at Nyx in particular, and his expression changed. "He’s on the point. He’s been there two days. He won’t come in."

Ashe went past him without another word.

Ryuken was standing at the end of the long rocky spur below the compound, alone, with his hands at his sides.

There was a stack of timber behind him, taller than a house, and barrels of oil, and nobody near it. He was looking at the sea, the way he had looked at the space where the forms had been on a hundred mornings. The pressure that came off him was what it had always been: quiet, absolute, unhurried, a Transcendent’s weight held so perfectly in check that it barely stirred the grass at his feet. Nobody on the eastern continent had ever made Ryuken hurry, and the sea had not managed it yet either.

He did not turn when she came up behind him.

"You’re heavier," he said.

He had said it to her a hundred times when she was small, and it had never once been praise. You’re too heavy. You’ll never make friends there. Now, standing behind him on the point with the smoke of the burning headlands blowing between them, she heard it for the first time as what it was. An observation. Exact, and nothing else. And, underneath it, something that in any other man would have been pride.

"Mid Expert," said Ashe. "Since the winter."

"I felt it from the harbor." He glanced at the sword across her shoulders. "That is not your blade."

"Mine broke. On a woman who was harder than me. Then I was harder than her."

Ryuken considered this, and nodded once, as though it were the correct answer to a question he had set her years ago.

"You wrote," Ashe said. "Yourself."

"Kaito would have softened it." He was still looking at the sea. "The sea has come up all down this coast. It has never done that. Not in my time. Not in my teacher’s." He lifted one hand, very slightly, toward the line of fires burning on every point to the north. "It goes to warmth. Kaito saw it first, on the night the harbor at Tessin burned and every one of them came in toward the flames. So we give it warmth where we can spare it. Out on the points, away from the towns."

"Like the old songs."

"Like the old songs." His voice did not change. "The headlands are holding. Barely. There are four left that we can light. After that there is nothing between the sea and the towns but the towns."

Ashe heard Nyx come up the spur behind her. She heard her stop.

"Sennet," Ashe said. Her voice did not sound like her own. "The harbor town, south of here. Is it on your list?"

Ryuken turned his head at last.

He looked at his daughter. Then he looked past her, at the woman standing on the rock behind her with her arms wrapped around herself and an old, soft, folded letter held against her chest, and his still face did something Ashe had seen it do perhaps three times in her life. It moved.

"The princess of Verath," he said quietly. Ashe had never once heard him call her that.

"Yes," said Nyx.

Ryuken was silent for a long moment.

"Sennet is where your people live," he said. "The ones who came over the water fifteen years ago. I gave them the harbor myself." He looked back at the sea. "It is the next town south of the last point. If the points do not hold, it is the first one the sea will reach." A pause. "Tomorrow night."