The tunnel began to rise. Soon she heard movement, and soft humming. The hum stopped as he coughed briefly, then spat. Daja sucked her light into herself. A cold draft rolled down the tunnel: she was near the surface. On she went, the earth icy under her bare feet. She sent warmth into them to ward off frostbite.

The tunnel flattened, then opened into a small wooden shed. He sat on a bench just outside, checking the fit of a pair of skates by the light of a lantern hung on a hook by the door. She watched as he rebuckled his right skate. With the lamp between them, he couldn’t see past its light into the shack.

He wore the fur-lined, embroidered coat of a caribou herdsman from the north, as well as a blond wig in the herdsmen’s style. A fat pack rested beside him. She wondered if he’d kept it ready somewhere before this, or if he’d packed after his mother’s murder.

He still wore the living metal gloves. It seemed he couldn’t bear to take them off any sooner than he must.

He’d have to conceal them to flee Kugisko, but he would wait until the last minute to remove them.

She sighed. He jerked around, shading his eyes to see past the lamp. “Daja,” he whispered. “Of course. Of course you would come. Fire is your element.”

If she was going to talk nonsense with a madman, she preferred her scarecrow in his borrowed robe. He at least had a heart. “You aren’t leaving, Ben,” she informed him. “You have accounts to settle. Time to pay what you owe.”

“Money-grubbing Trader talk,” he retorted scornfully. “You’re above that.”

“I am a Trader and proud of it,” she reminded him. “We know that some accounts are written in blood and can be paid only in that. You have blood debts to settle.”

“I owe no one anything,” he snapped. “I did them a favor. I slaved to teach them how serious fire was. When they were too stupid to learn, I gave them lessons that would stick.” He seized his pack, and ran the few steps to the canal, balancing on his skates. Daja let him reach the ice. She even let him set the pack on his shoulders. He was three yards away when she sent heat into his skates. They immediately sank an inch deep into the ice: Ben went sprawling. Daja walked toward him, trying not to slip as ice melted around her own bare feet.

Ben scrambled onto his knees and lunged up again. This time she sent a harder burst of heat into the metal skates, fusing them together. Down Ben fell. When he pushed himself up to see what had happened, she reached for the power in the living metal gloves and smacked her palms together. The gloves fused, shackling Ben’s arms from fingertip to elbow.

He fell again, then rolled onto his side to stare at her as she approached. The wig was falling off: he’d cut his red curls short to make it fit better. “Daja, please,” Ben said. He’d gone dead white, the shadows cast by the great fire rippling over his pale skin. “You can’t do this. You’re my friend.”

There was nothing she could say to that. Instead she looked toward the hospital-they weren’t that far from the soup kitchen dock. People were still there. She took out her mirror and fed it enough heat to make it shine brightly. Raising it, she flashed it at the crowd.

“Do you know what happens if I’m accused of deliberately setting fires?” he asked, as if he thought she still might believe his innocence. “Do you? They’ll burn me alive.”

Someone in the crowd waved a torch overhead, once, twice. Daja responded with two quick flashes of her mirror. A sleigh turned from the dock and drove toward them.

Daja looked at Ben. “I know they will,” she told him. “And I will be there, to pay off my account to you.”

Kugiskans wasted no time in bringing an arsonist to trial, not one who had killed over 150 people and injured hundreds more. Four weeks after the destruction of Yorgiry’s Hospital, Daja stood before three magistrates and a packed hearing room to tell of her friendship with Bennat Ladradun, from their first encounter to their last meeting on the ice off Blackfly Bog. She listened as Heluda spoke of her discovery of the garret workroom where Ben had created his devices, and heard the tales of people at the hospital, bathhouse, and Jossaryk House.

Throughout it all Ben sat in an iron cage, built to protect him from the vengeance of those he had harmed. He stared blankly at his hands without ever looking at anyone.

No one doubted how the magistrates would decide, and they surprised no one: execution by fire. Namornese law dictated that a criminal’s execution take place on the site of his greatest crime. The healers and directors of the hospital refused to allow it: as worshippers of Yorgiry they would permit no murder, even one approved by the state, on ground just reconsecrated to life. Bennat Ladradun would burn to death the week before Longnight, at the Airgi Island bathhouse.

Nia insisted on going with Daja, though her lips trembled as she announced it: she felt that someone ought to witness for Morrachane. Daja went because she had promised Ben she would face what she had done by capturing him. Frostpine came without saying why. He didn’t need to; Daja knew he’d come to help her. Room had been saved for them at the front of the execution ground. When they arrived, they found their space was shared by Olennika Potcracker and Jory, the councils of the islands who had suffered Ben’s fires, and the families of the slain. Heluda and the magistrates’ mages, wearing black coats with gold and silver trim, stood at a right angle to their group. Before them was the stake, its large base of stacked wood and kindling topped by a platform. Opposite Daja’s group, on the far side of the stake, waited the governor, the city council, and the officials who served the courts and the lawkeepers. Beyond those three banks of witnesses stood the crowds: those who had come to see justice, or just to watch a horrible spectacle. They were oddly quiet as they waited.