15. Corrine
CORRINE
We lose them in the dead vines and find the cavern mouth an hour past midnight. By then I can't feel my hands.
Theren took the loud half of the plan north—lights, noise, a trail worth chasing.
That was the deal before we split: he draws them off, I take Leoric down where the maps stop.
He didn't like it. He looked how he did back at the waystation, like I'm a wound he can't get closed, and then he went, because the other option was a council price on Leoric's head and mine printed next to it, out in the open.
The caverns under the old salt works go deeper than anyone bothered to chart.
I moved product through the upper chambers two winters running and never touched the bottom.
The upper rooms are the warm ones, where the rock breathes heat up from somewhere I never wanted to find the source of.
Hot springs, the trade word, though it's nothing that kind.
Just water that comes up and stays warm with ghosting off it into air that should be freezing.
I bring us down three levels and stop. Above us, faint boots. Not close. Searching the wrong stone. We're not safe. We're just harder to reach, which in my experience is the most safe ever gets.
Leoric lowers himself onto a shelf of rock and goes still in that careful way that means the cold has gotten into the old damage and is doing what it does. His cloak is soaked through from the vines. His left arm sits awkward.
"Get in the water," I suggest. "Before the cold sets and you can't move that side at all."
"I'm fine."
"You're gray. Fine left an hour ago." I crouch by the pool, test it, pull my hand back. Warm enough. "I've thawed people worse than you in worse than this. Get in or explain to Theren why I let you seize up in a cave."
He considers what I said. Then he reaches slow, deliberate, watching me instead of his own hands like he's being cautious of what he's about to show me.
"It was dark," he says. "In the cabin."
"I know."
"You saw the chest. Not everything else."
"I know that too."
He gets the cloak off. The shirt under is stuck to him and he peels it without a sound, and I make myself stay where I am and look, because looking away would be the cruelest thing I could do right now and we both know it.
The fire took the whole left side of him.
Not the clean edge of a wound—fire doesn't work clean.
It went up the ribs and across the shoulder in sheets, the skin pulled tight and shining in some places, ridged and ruined in others, dragging down the arm and disappearing below the waistband.
It's worse than the chest. The chest was the polite version. This is the rest of the sentence.
I helped do this. The thought appears the way it always does, flat, without permission.
I lit that fire, walked away, and slept that same night.
He was inside it, burning, becoming this.
I don't say what I'm thinking. There's nothing in saying it that helps him, and using his scars to confess my guilt would just be one more way of making him carry me.
He's watching my face anyway. For the flinch, I think.
He's observed every version, I'd bet—horror, pity, the careful blankness of people pretending not to see.
He's spent seven years being looked at. I don't give him any of them.
I just look until I've actually seen it, all of it, and then I meet his eyes.
"Okay," I start naturally. "Now get in the water."
Something moves across his face. He gets into the pool.
The heat hits the scarred skin and I watch him breathe through it, the bad kind of relief, the kind that hurts first. I strip to what's decent and follow him in because the cold's in me too and there's no point being noble about it.
The water comes to my collarbone. The pool is small and the dark is large and there's nowhere in here that isn't near him.
I reach for his shoulder. He catches my wrist—not hard, just stopping it.
"Don't," he says. "You don't have to."
"I'm not doing it because I have to."
"People touch this when they want something. Or when they're proving they can stomach it." His voice is level, which is how I know it isn't. "I've never let anyone near the worst of it. Not willingly. Not once."
"Then this is the first time you have. And I'm not stomaching anything. And I don't want anything off you that touching you is going to get me."
He releases my wrist, and I put my hand flat against his shoulder.
It's strange under my palm—too smooth in the burned-through places, then suddenly rough where it healed bumpy.
I don't pet it and I don't avoid it. I just keep my hand there, and move it slow across the worst of it, and let him feel that I'm not going anywhere and not making a face about where I am. He shudders once. Not from the water.
"They put me in a poster," he says, quiet, almost to the steam.
"Six weeks after. Had an artist render the left side worse than it was, if you can believe there's worse.
The Ash King. Proof of what your kind does.
" A breath. "I've been a warning, a weapon, and a thing mothers point at.
Every use a face like this has. I don't think anyone's just—looked. And stayed."
"I am." My fingertips move over the seam where the burn meets the unburned. "I'm not looking away."
We stay like that long enough that the boots above us fade out.
"I had a sister," he says eventually. Out of nowhere. "Before the war made me what it needed. She'd be older than you now. Wanted a house with too many windows. Said she was tired of dark stone." His mouth does something that isn't a smile. "She didn't get it."
"What was her name?"
"Sephir." He says it like he hasn't in a long time. "I stopped saying the names. It's easier to be a symbol if you don't have any."
I think about my home. The smell of it before the soldiers—bread and woodsmoke and my mother's bad singing.
I think about the version of me that might have stayed there and grown old and never learned what fire does to a person.
I haven't let myself want that woman in years.
Wanting her means admitting I traded her for something I can't take back.
"I had a future too," I hear myself say. "Boring one. I think I'd have been boring." My throat does something I don't like. "I keep her where I can't reach her. Because if I think about her I have to know what I did instead."
"And what did you do instead?"
"You're sitting in it." It comes out cracked at the end and I let it.
He turns his head. "You were twenty-four and lied to by men who counted on your decency to do it."
"That doesn't put the fire out."
"No. It doesn't. But you don't need to burn in it forever to prove you're sorry. The dead don't get warmer the longer you stay cold."
What he says lands somewhere I've kept sealed since it happened, and the seal doesn't break clean—it just gives a little.
I'm not forgiven. I'm not going to be. But for one second, in warm water that's hiding us from men who want us dead, I don't only see what I did.
I see what survived it. And when he looks at me—exhausted and choosing, for once, to be a person instead of a story—I let myself believe the same thing might be true of me.
"Sephir," I say. "I'm glad she existed."
He doesn't answer. But his hand finds mine under the water and holds them there against the worst of the damage, like he's the one keeping me now, and we stay until the cold above us forgets to look for the warmth below.