THE LAST TRAIN WEST

I did not run. Running is what people expect.

I turned my back on the Marshals with the unhurried air of a woman who has remembered an errand, and walked toward the side door. Behind me someone shouted. A hand closed on the back of my dress, and I let the Cinder flare once along my spine, a flick of red heat, just enough to char the Marshal's glove through to the skin. He yelped and let go. By the time the other one had worked out what had happened, I was through the door, and Dean Holloway had pulled it shut behind me and turned a key.

"This way," she said, and set off down the corridor at a speed that belied her fifty years.

I followed. The passage was narrow and unlit, a servants' way behind the Great Hall that smelled of candle-wax and damp plaster. Our footsteps rang. Behind us the door boomed once, twice, under the Marshals' fists.

"That key will hold them four minutes," said Holloway, without turning. "Perhaps five. They will think to go around by the cloister, and that is another six. I should like you out of the building before the Chancellor remembers he has a telegraph."

"Why?"

She glanced back. Her face in the half-dark was lined and dry and unsentimental. "Because you are going to ask me why I am helping you, Miss Reeve, and I would rather save us both the conversation."

"I would like to hear it."

"You will not like it." She turned a corner. "I have been Dean of this Academy for twenty-two years. In that time I have seen eleven students arrive here with a gift for the old magics, and I have seen nine of them leave in the care of the Senate. Not one has been heard from since." She reached a plain oak door and put her shoulder to it. "I am not a brave woman. I have never been in a position to be brave. But I know what I saw on that dais, and I know the look on the Chancellor's face, and if I am any judge, you are about to be the twelfth."

The door opened onto a cold gray yard behind the kitchens. A cart stood by the wall. There was a battered leather satchel on the seat, and a heavy gray coat.

"Money," said Holloway, tapping the bag. "Forty dollars in silver. Your papers, a scholarship stipend I have just forged, and a ticket." She handed me the coat. "If you stay in Ravenport, Crane will find a way to hold you here. A hearing. A wardship. A concern for your health. The Frontier is the one place where his writ runs thin. It will take him weeks to organize a proper hand there."

I put on the coat. It smelled of lavender and chalk.

"You are betting a great deal on a first-year Iron," I said.

"I am betting," said Holloway, "on a girl who read page forty of the Charter in a hall of six hundred people and did not blink." She almost smiled. "Go. The Ember-Rail leaves the Central Depot at ten past noon. It is the last train West before the Chancellor's embargo, which I expect to be announced by one."

I looked at her for a moment longer.

"Thank you, Dean."

"Do not thank me," said Marguerite Holloway. "Come back and make me regret it."

…

The Central Depot of Ravenport was a cathedral of iron and glass, and at noon on the day of the Ceremony it was bedlam. Porters, trunks, children, commercial travelers, women with hatboxes. Great black locomotives hissing under the glass, each trailing a pennant of white steam. Overhead, a flock of messenger-birds wheeled and shrieked under the girders.

The Ember-Rail was the pride of Halvern. Its engines burned no coal; they ran on ley-fire, captured in great brass cylinders at the head of each train, and they ran fast and hot and without stopping from the Eastern ports clear across the continent. I had ridden it once in my life, coming East at sixteen with a scholarship letter in my pocket and my father's old satchel on my knee. I had been very much a child.

The platform guard looked at my ticket, and my uniform, and my coat, and did not look at my face. I climbed into the last carriage as the whistle blew.

I found a seat in a freight coach, among bales of wool and crates of canned peaches, and sat down with the satchel in my lap and my back to the wall.

Only then did I allow my hands to shake.

It lasted perhaps a minute. A bright, fine trembling, from the shoulders down, and then it was over. I breathed it out and watched the platform slide away. A knot of gray-coated Marshals came running onto the concourse as the train picked up speed. They were too late by half a minute, and they stood in a row at the end of the platform with their hands on their hips and their hats in their hands, getting smaller.

One.

It was an odd feeling. I had not been free in a long time. I had forgotten that it came with such a clean cold taste.

…

They caught me up outside the town of Harlan Ford, at three in the morning.

I had been dozing. I woke when the train shuddered, a long slow shudder that ran down all its length, and the lamps flickered and the steam-whistle gave one short, wrong note. I was on my feet before I knew it.

Footsteps overhead.

It was not the clatter of luggage. It was the long deliberate tread of a man in good boots crossing the roof of the car, and with it came a thin bright pulse of power that I knew. I'd felt it a hundred times through a wall.

Marshal Whitlock.

Not Alden. His uncle, Torrance Whitlock, the head of the Marshal Corps, a big handsome man with a pointed beard who in the last life had spoken three sentences to me in five years, all of them about my posture. He must have taken a fast courier-engine from the Capital and boarded at the last junction. He was going to be very thorough about this.

I climbed the freight ladder, set my back against the hatch, and shoved.

The night rushed in: cold, enormous, smelling of coal-smoke and wet grass. We were rolling through flat black country under a thin moon, the rails flashing beneath us in the ley-light. Mist lay in the low fields. Far ahead, the engine's lamp threw a long white wedge into the dark.

He was standing on the next car forward, twenty feet away, with his coat snapping around his knees.

"Miss Reeve." His voice carried easily over the wind. "I regret this. I do. But the Chancellor has been quite clear." He lifted one gloved hand. A pale blue lattice of Silver-grade magic spread from his fingers across the roof between us, a fine woven net, humming. "You will come back with me quietly. You'll be treated with every courtesy."

"You said that to the last one."

"I'm sorry?"

"Never mind."

He threw the net.

I did not try to dodge. There was nowhere to dodge to. I met it with my palm instead, and let the Cinder come up through my arm in one bright thin line, the barest filament. The net touched it. Where it touched, it unraveled, each knot of the weave losing its grip on the next, until the whole thing came apart in a shower of blue sparks and drifted behind us into the dark.

Torrance Whitlock stared at his empty hand.

He was not a stupid man. He understood perfectly, and in the space of a breath he drew his sword.

I had not planned for the sword.

He came across the gap between the cars in two long strides, as the roof pitched under us. His blade was a good one, a basket-hilted Silver-ringed thing, and he used it like a professional. The first cut took the hem of my coat. The second went through my left sleeve and laid a stripe of fire across my forearm. I gave ground, step by slippery step, until my heel hit the rim of the roof and I felt the whole black rush of the night open behind me.

Think.

I was an Iron. In the eyes of every instrument in Halvern, I was nothing. And a man who believes he is fighting nothing makes the mistake of fighting with his weight forward.

I let him have the third cut. It came in high, and I dropped under it, and put my shoulder into his belt and drove up. The Cinder was in that shoulder. It went through the silver wards he wore under his coat like a hot wire through candle fat, and his whole body jerked, and I felt his balance go.

He went off the side of the car with a long outraged cry. There was a thump, a crash of branches, and then only the clatter of wheels.

I crouched on the roof for a long moment, hands braced, listening to my heart.

He would live. There was a soft river bank under that stretch. It would take him a day to walk to the next station, and by then I would be two hundred miles away.

Two, I thought.

I climbed down into the freight car, sat on a crate of peaches, and wrapped my sleeve around my arm. And since there was nobody to see me, I allowed myself a small grim laugh.

…

By morning the land had changed.

The wheat gave way to long rolling plains, tawny and wide, and the sky grew very high and pale. Fences became rare. Houses became rarer. Far to the west, along the edge of the horizon, a line of red mesas stood up out of the haze like the ruins of some giant's table. I leaned my head against the window and watched them come.

I took a notebook from the satchel, a cheap thing with a cardboard cover, and uncapped a pencil.

I had always been a person of lists. In the last life I had made them in the Whitlock townhouse, in the quiet room, in a hand that grew smaller and smaller as the paper ran out. I wrote:

1. Bronze. Within three months. Widow's Gorge.

2. Hawk. Tools, a bench, a roof. He will ask no questions he does not want answered.

3. Money. The Gauntlet is in five months; enrollment closes in four. I will need a rig, a blade, and a free entry.

4. The Heart. Learn what it is. Learn what it does. Learn what Crane thinks it is for.

5. Whitlock. Fairchild. Crane. In that order.

I looked at it for a while. Then I turned the page and wrote, on a clean sheet, two lines in my small cold hand.

In this life there is no second person.

There is only me.

It looked very simple on the paper. It felt, in my chest, like a door shutting.

The Emberheart, banked under my ribs, did not argue.

…

We crossed the Frontier at dusk.

There was no line on the ground, only a change in the light: the green of the East draining out of the grass, the dust turning red. A rail-gang camp flashed by, tents and horses and a line of men looking up from their shovels. A signal-tower. A lone windmill. A boy on a fence waving a hat. The Redwater Frontier opened on all sides, huge, empty, as hard and beautiful and indifferent as the day I'd left it.

I had been born here. I had not meant to return as a fugitive.

The sun was low. Our shadow ran out long before us across the plain. Far ahead, where the rails curved toward a cluster of lamps that must be Redwater Junction, the horizon was broken by something dark. A fault in the land. A black gash, miles long, running north and south, with a mist in it that glowed faintly, even in daylight, the color of a bruise.

Widow's Gorge.

I knew it the way one knows a scar. When I was nine, my father had taken me to the rim and let me look over. He had not said a word. He had simply held my shoulder very tightly, and afterward we had gone home, and he had never taken me again.

The Emberheart beat once in my chest, and then, an instant later, twice.

Two beats where there should have been one. A hard, deliberate double knock, like someone rapping on a door they had been waiting a very long time to open.

I put my hand over my breastbone.

"Yes," I said, to the dark gash in the earth. "I heard it too."