Chapter 181

Malachi

I knew whose fire it was before I was out of the bed.

Not from the smoke. Smoke is smoke. From what wasn’t in it. I had my nose full of it, wood and pitch and burning wool, so thick I could taste it, and under it, where there should have been the scent of whoever had walked up to my door in the dark with a can and a match, there was nothing at all. Nobody. The same nothing that had stood under Sloane’s window in the autumn and left no mark in the frost.

I had seen her make that nothing. Once. In the mill house, over a bowl of something black, with three of Brask’s men standing in front of her with their shirts off while she painted it on their chests. So the dogs can’t follow, she had said, and smiled at me, because she knew what I was.

She had always liked fire.

“Up,” I said. I had Sloane’s arm. She was up. She was coughing so hard she was bent double, and she had my shirt balled in one fist, and I didn’t know why, and there wasn’