A Smoulder-Kept beast keeps the shape it had, charred black and cracked open, with a dull red glow in the cracks that never brightens and never dies. Embers drift from its coat when it moves. Its eyes are two dim points of orange, like the Child’s. It moves stiffly, as a burned thing would, and leaves a trail of fine grey ash. Its breath is a dry crackle. It smells of singed hair and cold hearth, and, close to, gives off almost no heat at all: the fire in it has gone grey, and the creature is freezing from within.

They are found in burned places, most often near where the Child has been: fire-cleared woods, gutted farms, the cold ruin of a town that burned and was never rebuilt. They wander, but not far from where they were caught.

They seek warmth. A Smoulder-Kept beast comes to a campfire, a hearth, a sleeping body, and presses against it, as a cold dog does. That is the danger: what it touches it draws the warmth from, and its embers catch. A Kept deer that lies down beside a sleeper by night leaves a burned and frozen corpse by morning. They are not cruel. They are cold, and the cold never ends.

They do not die of their burns, or of anything ordinary; the Child’s grip holds them in the act of dying. They draw warmth from what they touch, and set dry things alight. Fires near them gutter, as near the Child. They can be released, not killed: in ashen country, people say a Kept beast lies down and goes out at last if someone builds a new fire for it and lets it watch the old one end.

They give nothing. They are deadly to sleepers and to anyone who takes pity on them; a child who lets a burned dog in from the cold may not live to morning. People who live near old burnings keep their doors barred at night and their fires small, and drive Kept beasts off with water rather than blades.

All peoples know them, mostly by rumour: "the burning that does not end", the stag on fire in the woods, the cat that walked out of the house fire and came back. Many believe they are the souls of the burned, but they are the burned themselves, and the Child’s grief keeps them. Some hold that a Kept beast is a sign that the Child is near, and that it is wise to let a dying fire go out on purpose.

Hunters who chase a burning stag through the woods in the tales always lose it at the edge of an old burning, and the wise ones turn back there; the tale ends with the lord who did not, and the fire that took his whole hunt.