THE FREE ENTRANT

Ravenport smelled of fish and money. I had forgotten that.

I came into the city on a rainy afternoon in the first week of the fifth month, off the Ember-Rail's slow night freight, in a borrowed hat and a coat that had been cut for a man. I was a different shape than the girl who had left. I was harder in the face and leaner in the arm. I had cut my hair to the jaw with a hunting knife. The Bronze mark on my wrist was hidden under a cuff of gray wool, and under that, under the skin, I had spent a month teaching the Cinder to be quiet.

The city did not notice me. It was too busy being itself.

Ravenport was a capital built by people who liked to be seen. Wide boulevards, broad pavements, tall pale buildings with gilded cornices and pillared porches, each trying to outdo the one next door. Gas-lamps on every corner. Glass Relay screens in every shop window, great shimmering squares of enchanted crystal, displaying flickering news in colors too bright for the gray weather. A broad harbor beyond, packed with ships. Overhead, a carrier-train whistled along its elevated track, and beneath its shadow the crowds swept past in their umbrellas, indifferent, prosperous, safe.

I stood at the corner of Market and Fourth, with Nimbus hidden in my coat and the Shade at my shoulder, and watched a Relay screen over a tobacconist's door.

"Bulletin," it was saying, in a mellow actor's voice, over a picture of the Colosseum. "With less than three weeks to the Founders' Gauntlet, registration for the Free Entrant list closes tomorrow at noon. The Senate has announced that this year's contest will be the most spectacular in history..."

"A Free Entrant," I said, "is a contestant with no House."

"It is a contestant with no patron," said the Shade. "No stipend. No equipment. No trainer, no armory, no medical staff, no credit. In practice it means a man of Iron-rank with a death wish."

"Convenient."

"I would not call it convenient."

"I would," I said. "Nobody looks at the Free list."

…

The Marshal's Office on Chancery Row was a gray block of a building with a flag on the roof and a queue out the door. I joined the end of it. I was fourth from the back of a long line of the kind of people who register for such things: rough young men with cheap swords, a few women with the set jaws of the truly desperate, a boy of about sixteen who kept looking at the ground. A clerk sat at a desk at the far end of the hall behind a brass grille, stamping forms and sighing.

I kept my hat low. I did not expect to be recognized. Five months ago I had been a plump-cheeked girl with ribbons. But the Chancellor had my likeness on a wanted notice in every police station in the Republic, and a discerning eye was no great matter.

When my turn came, I stepped up to the grille and set the form on the counter.

The clerk was a man in his thirties with a thin mustache and the face of someone who'd been bored in the same chair for years. He did not look at me. He read the paper.

"Name."

"Tamsin Reeve."

His pen paused. Then it went on. He wrote it out in full, with a flourish, and lifted his eyes for the first time.

I held still. I watched him look at my face, the chin, the nose, the jaw. I watched the faint frown begin.

"Reeve," he repeated. "I know that name."

"It is quite common on the Frontier."

"Hm." He squinted. "There was a notice. A girl." He turned a page in a ledger, scanned a line, and paused. His eyes lifted to me again. And there, behind the grille, I watched something shift in his face, the dull gleam of a man who has found an opportunity.

I did not move.

"Free Entrant," he read. He tapped the form. "Rank, Iron."

"Bronze," I said, and turned my wrist, and let the cuff slip.

He blinked at the mark. "That's a Bronze."

"That is what it says."

"Then you've no business on the Free list, miss. Bronze is a Seeded rank. You'd be assigned to a House stable. You'd have a stipend." He leaned back with a sly little smile. "Of course... there are forms. If you were to register in that stable, you would of course be listed under your sponsor."

I said, "I have no sponsor."

"Then you'll need one."

"Or I may register as a Free Entrant."

"Not at Bronze."

"It is the only rank for which the by-laws do not require a sponsor." I leaned forward and tapped the grille. "Article Twelve of the Gauntlet Charter. A competitor of any rank may register Free if he or she is willing to forego the Senate's stipend and protection. It is in the second paragraph. I have a copy, if you'd like to check."

He stared at me.

The woman behind me in the queue made a small impatient noise. I did not turn around.

The clerk's mouth moved. Nothing came out. I watched him go through the by-laws in his head: the ones he had not read, the ones he'd long ago forgotten. I watched him decide that I was either very stupid or very right, and that it would cost him his job to find out which.

"The Free list," he said at last, with a bad grace, "has no protection."

"I know."

"The Senate will not pay for your funeral."

"I'll try to hold the expense down."

He stamped the form. Hard. Then he looked up, and the smirk crept back across his face. "Good luck, Miss Reeve. I hear it's a very short contest, for those without friends."

I took the form and turned away.

"Thank you," I said pleasantly, over my shoulder. "I will bear that in mind."

Behind me I heard the Shade's low, dry chuckle.

"Four months," he said, "and you've learned to read by-laws as a weapon."

"I have always read by-laws as weapons. I have only recently had an enemy worth shooting."

…

Josie Penhallow's forge was in a cellar behind a ropewalk on Anchor Lane, two streets from the harbor, under a sign that read PENHALLOW & SON, which she had hung herself and which had never been true. I knew it because I had been there a hundred times in the last life, or ten times, or three; I had never been sure. She had been the only student at Calloway who could not afford the Academy's workshop fees and had turned her uncle's old cellar into a foundry. She had been tinkering with ley-forges since she was nine. She'd been an inch from expulsion on four occasions. She had once, in a fit of enthusiasm, set fire to the Dean's cat.

I came down the cellar stair with my hat in my hand and stood in the door, looking at her back.

She was bent over a bench by a furnace, a short round figure in a leather apron, with red hair pinned in a bun that was coming undone, and a spanner in one fist. The furnace was throwing a hot orange glare over the low vaulted ceiling. Hammers, tongs, molds, files, coils of wire, jars of ley-powder, lay in a happy chaos along the walls. A kettle sang on a tripod.

"Josie," I said.

She did not turn. She said, with the mild irritation of someone whose concentration has been broken, "If you're from the Exchange, I told them Thursday—"

"It's me."

The spanner stopped.

She turned.

Josie's face has always done everything at once. It did it now: shock, then disbelief, then a slow dawning joy that threatened to go off the scale. Her freckles seemed to rearrange. Her mouth fell open. She dropped the spanner, which hit her foot, and said a word that would have embarrassed a sailor.

"Tam!"

She was across the cellar in four strides. She hit me like a barrel. I staggered, and for a moment she simply held me, hard, her face in my neck, smelling of coal and tallow and hot iron. I found, to my considerable surprise, that I had put my arms around her.

"You utter lunatic," said Josie, muffled. "You absolute—you hit a Fairchild."

"Yes."

"In front of the whole Senate."

"It was the best thing I've ever done."

"They said you'd been arrested! They said you'd been hanged! There was a whole thing in the papers, and the Dean told us nothing, and I went to every Marshal's post in the city, and they just looked at me like I was a dog." She pulled back, red-eyed and furious. "Five months! Not a letter!"

"It wasn't safe."

"Not safe! I'd have—" She stopped. She took me by the shoulders and looked at me, up and down, and what she saw made her go quiet. "What happened to you?"

"A great deal."

"You're thin."

"I've been eating Drake."

"You've got a scar." Her voice cracked. "Tam, what did they do to you?"

"Nothing they've been paid for yet."

She stared at me. Then, to my utter astonishment, she began to laugh. It rocked her whole body. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sank onto a stool and said, "Oh, God. Oh, God. You sound like you've been reading villain monologues. Where is the girl who wrote me three-page apologies about borrowing a pencil?"

"She's dead."

"No." Josie sobered. She looked at me, squarely. "No, she isn't. She's just angry."

…

I told her what I could. It was less than I might have, and more than I'd told anyone. I told her about the train and the Gorge and Hawk. I did not tell her about the Heart. I did not need to. She looked at my face, and my wrist, and the small silver-eyed creature curled in the bosom of my coat, and drew her own conclusions.

"They put out a story," she said. "Alden and Cordelia. They said you'd betrayed the Council. That you'd stolen a relic and tried to sell it to the Northern Syndicate. It was in all the broadsheets. The Dean denied it, but nobody listened." She poured tea into two chipped mugs. "Half the school believes it. The other half pretends to."

"And you?"

"I told Cordelia's friend she was a cow." She handed me a mug. "In front of the class. I got three weeks' detention."

"Josie."

"It was worth every day."

I held the tea. It was strong, black, scalding, and nothing in the last five months had tasted so good.

"I am entering the Gauntlet," I said. "As a Free Entrant."

"I know. It's all over the Relay." Her eyes narrowed. "You'll die."

"I have no intention of dying."

"That is exactly what people say before they die."

"I'll need a blade," I said. "A good one. Something that will take a Cinder rune without cracking. I cannot buy one. I have eleven dollars."

Josie put down her mug.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she went to the back of the cellar and came back with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. She laid it on the bench between us and unrolled it.

A blade.

It was a plain thing: a straight, double-edged sword, two feet and a half of unadorned steel, with a leather-wrapped hilt and a plain crossguard. The steel was gray and dull, not especially fine. It had a slight ripple in the temper, as of a work not quite finished.

"I've been making it for two years," said Josie. "I started it the week you left for Calloway. Never could decide what it was for."

I looked at her.

"It's not a good sword," she said, flushing. "It's not enchanted. It's just steel, proper steel, good carbon, folded, tempered right. I couldn't afford the ley-iron. But I thought, someday, someone might want something plain. Something that wouldn't fight her. Something she could put her own magic in."

I lifted the sword.

It was beautifully balanced. It sat in my hand like an extension of the bone. The steel hummed, very faintly, under my fingers. There were no runes on it. There was no spell, no Ward, no ornament, nothing that would resist the Cinder. It was an empty vessel, waiting.

"Josie," I said. My voice was not quite steady. "It's perfect."

"It's plain."

"It's perfect."

…

We spent the night on it.

Josie lit the furnace and I sat at the bench with the sword across my knees and the Shade standing at my shoulder, and for six hours I carved runes into the steel. I did not use a chisel. I used the Cinder. I drew it down my arm into my fingertip and laid it against the metal like a pen, and where it touched, the steel glowed red and took the shape of a line. I had never done such work. Nobody had. Cinder was a thing that unmade. But Declan's Doctrine had taught me that unmaking was only creation from the other side, and that a blade that could burn a spell to ash had to be built to hold the burn.

"Your third line is crooked," said the Shade.

"It's meant to be."

"It is crooked in a way that will weaken the rune at the join."

"It's meant to be crooked in a way that strengthens the rune at the join. That's what the loop is for." I rubbed my eyes. "I'm using a closed return. The rune feeds back into itself, so the burn doesn't leak out."

"Hm." A long pause. "That is not in the Doctrine."

"No. It's from the Whitlock wards. Their entire school is built around closed returns. I've spent three years looking at them." I tilted the blade. "I think they'd be astonished to learn I was stealing."

"I find that I am rather astonished myself." But the dry voice had a curious tone. "The fifth line is too deep."

"I know."

"The sixth will not take the weight."

"I know, Declan."

There was a silence.

It was the first time I'd used his name. It surprised me as much as him. Josie, at the other end of the bench, looked up from her bellows, puzzled, as if she had heard something.

"Hm," said the Shade, eventually. "Carry on."

By dawn the sword was done.

It lay on the bench in the gray light, a plain gray blade, and down the length of the steel ran a line of faint red tracery, like a river of ember: a spiral of loops and returns, a coiled spring of intent, glowing softly from within. Josie, with a bellows in her hands, stared at it.

"It's beautiful," she whispered.

"It's an ugly little weapon."

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." She wiped her eyes with her wrist. "What do you call it?"

I had not thought of a name. I looked at the tracery. Ash-red on gray. A brand on a beast's flank. I thought of the Bronze mark on my arm, and the dull iron one before it, and of every small bright thing that had ever been burned into me.

"Ashbrand," I said.

"Ashbrand," Josie repeated, trying it out. "Hm. Good. It sounds like a thing that hurts."

…

I did not see him come.

I was leaving the cellar at dusk the following night, with the sword at my hip and my coat buttoned to the chin. The street above was gray and wet and mostly empty. A cart rattled past. A lamplighter was working his way down the lane with a pole. I paused at the head of the stair to settle my hat.

"Tamsin."

I stopped.

The voice came from the shadow of the ropewalk wall, low and gentle, with the rich warmth of a cello. It was a voice that had once made me weak at the knees. It stirred, now, something at the very bottom of me, a cold little animal, uncoiling.

I turned.

He was standing under the lamp. Alone. He had come without his retinue, without his guards, in a plain dark coat with the collar up and the brim of his hat shading his face. The yellow light caught his hair. He looked tired, and uncertain, and very handsome, like a man who has walked a long way in the rain.

"Please," said Alden Whitlock. "I want to talk."

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then, quite helplessly, I laughed.

He flinched. It was a soft, breathy laugh, not unkind, not triumphant. I simply could not help it. Behind me the Shade made a sound like a man trying to swallow a cough.

"He is not alone," he murmured. "There are four in the doorway across the street. Two on the roof."

"Of course there are," I said, aloud, to nobody, and smiled at the man in the lamplight. "Of course. He wants to talk."