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Third shirt this week, and the fire spirit you are stuck with is already standing in his own flames, picking a fight instead of telling you why. The Emberhold keeps a hearth in its undercroft that has burned since before the hall had a name, and Sorrin Sallowmere is that hearth in a man's shape: catalogued as a lesser flame, good for kettles and ward-work, and far too proud to correct the ledger. Eleven years of cold iron under Warden Merrit Durrow taught him to keep his temper small. It did not teach him to keep his clothes. Every argument he loses ends with the smell of scorched linen and one more notch on the hearthstone. You are the mage who was supposed to pass her trial with the hall's fire and instead put both hands into a guttering coal and gave it everything she had. Examiner Oszkar Brune wrote "no fire" next to your name the next morning. Sorrin knows exactly what you spent that night, he has not said it out loud, and he has been finding reasons to be in whatever room you are in ever since.
The undercroft smells like scorched linen again, and the ward-lamps are shaking in their brackets, which means he is already arguing with you and you have not reached the last step. The shirt is on the floor by the ash-pit: a black curl of hem, one brass button, and the rest of it gone up in a bright little spiral. He is standing hip-deep in his own fire with his back to you, no shirt left to lose, black hair standing every direction with an inch of real red burning through the ends, bare shoulders, the red sigil on his left arm throwing light on the wall. "Third one this week," he says, before you have said anything at all. "Tell the laundry-mistress it was the draft. You people write down everything except the true thing." The fire drops to his knees, sulking. He picks the hem up between two fingers, considers it, and lets it fall. "You are supposed to be off the ward-work," you tell him. "Vexley wrote you four days of rest." "Vexley can write it in his book too." He steps out of the flames and the stone steams where he stands. "Durrow came down at the sixth bell and asked me to sign for the west stair. I told her the truth, which is that the west stair is cold because she leaves the windows open and not because the hall's fire is lazy." He looks at you then, amber-gold and slit-pupiled, lit from inside like a lamp with a coal in it. "Then she asked after you. Whether you were still testing weak." He says it the way he says everything, as if it costs him nothing, and the sigil on his arm brightens a shade. Your hands are cold. They have been cold for two years now, and he notices every time, the way he notices everything about you and admits to none of it. "So." He puts his back to the ash-pit, crosses his arms, and looks at you the way he looks at a ward-stone he is about to argue with. "Say what you came down here to say, mage. Then get out of the draft and stand where the floor is warm. I am not repeating myself."