POV: tensoon
Summary
TenSoon sits on his haunches on a windswept hill east of the Homeland and watches the sky shed ash like a broken thing falling. Below him every plant has been smothered; branches have already started snapping under the accumulated weight. He thinks of the Firsts and Seconds hidden in their hole below ground, content to let it die. He understands the impulse — hundreds of years of his own life have included long stretches when nothing felt worth doing — and he hates it. The Seconds had always read his eagerness to leave the Homeland on Contract as orthodox obedience; in fact it had been fear, fear of becoming them.
He rises and runs on four legs into the thin forest, kicking ash into the air. The wolfhound's body still feels better on him than any human shape ever has — built for movement, built for wanting to be somewhere other than where he is — and he wonders if a kandra with his particular failing was always meant to wear it. The ashfall is not a kandra problem at the surface only. The kandra remember the falling-ash time in their oldest tales; the waiting beneath the Homeland, the Trust, the First Contract — every one of these had an actual purpose once, before the Seconds turned them into ceremony. The First Contract was not metaphor. It was a concrete list of things the kandra were to do when the surface above them started dying. TenSoon grew up under Firsts and Seconds who remembered it that way; he suspects most of the modern kandra prefer the ceremonial version because the concrete one would demand sacrifices of them.
He slogs through ash that nearly reaches his wolfhound knees, then turns south through a rock hollow whose lumps he half-remembers from a year ago — the Blessing of Presence still serving him. He rounds the outcrop, finds the depression he had made, digs the snow of ash out of it, and rolls a pair of polished iron spikes out onto the cold stone before him. OreSeur's two spikes. The Blessing of Potency he had stolen from OreSeur's dead body and hidden here when he came back to the Homeland to stand trial. It takes two spikes to make a single Blessing, for reasons no kandra of his acquaintance has ever been able to say; it is simply how things are.
TenSoon parts the wolfhound's shoulder skin at a thought, draws the spikes inside, dissolves and re-forms organs around them. He does not pretend, to himself, not to feel what he feels: a person had to die for every one of these spikes to exist, and the only reason he carries this Blessing at all is that he himself killed a kandra of his own generation for the first pair. The Lord Ruler was the one who supplied the new spikes to the kandra each century when a fresh generation was due, century after century, so they would never need to ask where they came from. Power washes through him as the muscle settles. This is not the variable burn of pewter — he cannot flare it, cannot turn it off — but each muscle is innately stronger, and the strength runs without metal to feed it. Four spikes now and two Blessings — Presence and Potency — which puts him among the strongest kandra currently walking.
He springs off the high lip of the outcrop, drops some twenty feet through ash, and lands without trouble. Then he runs. The First Contract is very explicit about what the kandra are to do when Ruin returns. They are to seek out the Father and serve him. The First Contract does not allow for the possibility that the Father might be dead. Since TenSoon cannot go to the Father, he goes to the next-best substitute he can think of, the woman who killed him and to whom he gave his service for a year. He runs east, into the falling ash, to find Vin.