The cell beneath the Cinderhold was carved from the same volcanic rock as the chamber above, but here the stone was cold and damp, sweating mineral water that tasted of iron. Sorrel sat on the stone bench and pressed her forearm — the one the flame had touched — against the wall's chill.
The mark was gone. She could feel it, though, buried just beneath her skin like a splinter. And with it, fragments of the vision: that gaunt, terrified face; the unknown map; the word that tasted of grief. She tried to focus on any one image, but they slipped away like fish in dark water.
"You're not what I expected."
The voice came from the adjacent cell. Sorrel pressed her face to the iron grate that separated them and saw a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in the red robes of a fire-priest. She was perhaps forty, with close-cropped gray hair and a face that might once have been beautiful before something — weather, or grief, or time — had simplified it to its essentials.
"You're a priest," Sorrel said.
"Was. Cassia Emberthorn. Defrocked, imprisoned, and thoroughly disgraced. In that order." She smiled without warmth. "I challenged the orthodoxy about the flame's origins. They didn't appreciate it."
"What did you say?"
"That the Ember Throne's flame wasn't placed there by the First King, as the scriptures claim. It predates human settlement in Ashenmere by several thousand years. The fire-priests know this. They've always known. The coronation ritual is a lie built on a truth they don't understand."
Sorrel thought about the cold obsidian basin, the flame that burned without fuel. "If the First King didn't light it, who did?"
"That's the question that got me locked up." Cassia leaned forward. "I heard what happened above. They say you killed the sacred flame."
"It was an accident."
"Nothing that involves the Ember Throne is an accident. The flame has burned for millennia through earthquakes, wars, and floods. It didn't go out because a blacksmith bumped the basin." She paused. "What did you see?"
Sorrel hesitated. Then, because she was going to die anyway and secrets lose their weight in the shadow of the executioner, she described the vision. The gaunt face. The map. The word.
Cassia's expression changed. The ironic detachment fell away and beneath it was something raw and desperate.
"The word," she said. "Can you repeat it?"
Sorrel tried. The syllables felt strange in her mouth, like speaking in a dream.
"Vael'khari," Cassia whispered. "You saw — that's Old Ash. The language of the First King's people. It means 'the ones who came before the cold.'" Her hands were gripping the grate between their cells. "The flame chose you. It passed its memory to you before it died."
"Flames don't choose people."
"This one did. And now you're carrying something the Crown has spent a thousand years trying to suppress — the truth about what the Ember Throne really is." Cassia's voice dropped. "They won't execute you, Sorrel. They'll try to extract it. And if they can't extract it, they'll bury you so deep that the memory dies with you."
"How do you know?"
"Because that's what they did to the last one. Two hundred years ago. A servant girl, just like you. They locked her in the Cinderhold's deepest vault and sealed the door." Cassia paused. "I found her bones during my research. She was still reaching for the handle."
The sound of boots on stairs. The guard change was coming.
"I can get us out," Cassia said. "I know passages the guards don't. But you need to trust me."
"I don't even know you."
"You know I'm the only person in this castle who wants to understand what's in your head instead of burying it." She held out her hand through the grate. "Trust me, Sorrel. Or trust the Crown. Those are your only options."
Above them, Sorrel could hear voices — Prince Aldric's advisors arguing about what to do with a kingdom that had just lost its most sacred artifact. Below, the volcanic rock hummed with deep earth heat. And inside her forearm, the ember of a dead flame pulsed once, warm and insistent.
She took Cassia's hand.
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