An Ember in the Ashes (13 page)

“We use the finest leather and hardware!”

The seal will lift cleanly enough, but I can’t be jostled. If the letter tears or the seal is smudged, the Commandant will probably cut off my hand. Or my head.

“Bags, purses, and satchels! Silk-stitched!”

The bag-seller is right behind me, and I’ve a mind to tell him off. Then I smell cedarwood and glance over my shoulder to see a shirtless Scholar man, his muscled torso tanned and sweating. His hair, flaming red, glows below a black cap. Shock and recognition jolt my stomach. It’s Keenan.

His brown eyes meet mine, and as he continues to yell out his wares, he tilts his head ever so slightly toward a side alley leading out of the square. My hands sweat in uneasy anticipation, and I make my way to the alley. What will I say to him? I have nothing—no leads, no information. Keenan doubted me from the beginning, and I am about to prove him right.

Dust-coated brick houses rise four stories on either side of the alley, and the noises of the market fade. Keenan is nowhere to be seen, but a woman draped in rags detaches herself from a wall and approaches me. I eye her warily until she lifts her head. Through the filthy tangle of dark hair, I recognize Sana.

Follow
,
she mouths.

I want to ask her about Darin, but she’s already hurrying away. She leads
me through alley after alley, not stopping until we’re close to Cobbler Row, nearly a mile from Execution Square. The air is dense with the chattering of shoemakers and the gamy scents of leather and tannin and dye. I think we’re going to enter the row, but Sana turns instead into the narrow space between two buildings. She heads down a set of basement stairs so grimy that they look like the inside of a chimney.

Keenan opens the door at the base of the stairs before Sana can knock. He’s replaced the leather bags with the black shirt and brace of knives he was wearing the first time I met him. A lock of red hair falls into his face, and he looks me over, his gaze lingering on my bruises.

“Thought she might have a tail,” Sana says as she pulls off the cloak and wig. “But she didn’t.”

“Mazen’s waiting.” Keenan puts a hand on my back to nudge me forward into the narrow hallway. I wince and recoil—my lashes are still painful.

His eyes cut sharply to me and I think he’s going to say something, but instead he drops his hand awkwardly, brow slightly furrowed, and leads us down the hallway and through a door. Mazen sits at a table in the room beyond, his scarred face lit by a lone candle.

“Well, Laia.” He lifts his gray eyebrows. “What do you have for me?”

“Can you tell me about Darin first?” I ask, finally able to voice the question that has plagued me for a week and a half. “Is he all right?”

“Your brother’s alive, Laia.”

A sigh gusts out of me, and I feel like I can breathe again.

“But I can’t tell you any more until you tell me what you have. We did make a deal.”

“Let her at least sit.” Sana pulls out a chair for me, and almost before I’m in it, Mazen leans forward.

“We have little time.” he says. “Whatever you’ve got, we need.”

“The Trials started about—about a week ago.” I scramble to connect the few scraps of information I do have. I’m not ready to give him the letter—not yet. If he breaks the seal or tears it, I’m done for. “That’s when the Aspirants disappeared. There are four of them. Their names—”

“We know all that.” Mazen dismisses my words with the wave of a hand. “Where were they taken? When does the Trial end? What’s the next one?”

“We’ve heard that two of the Aspirants returned today,” Keenan says.
“Not long ago, in fact. Maybe half an hour.”

I think of the guards talking excitedly at Blackcliff’s gate as two horsemen came up the road.
Laia, you fool.
If I’d paid closer attention to the auxes’ gossip, I might have learned which Aspirants had survived the Trial. I might have had something useful to tell Mazen.

“I don’t know. It’s been so—so hard,” I say. Even as I speak, I hear how pathetic I sound and hate myself for it. “The Commandant killed my parents. She has this wall with posters of every rebel she’s caught. My parents were up there—their faces—”

Sana’s eyes widen, and even Keenan looks slightly sick, his aloofness falling away for a moment. I wonder why I’m telling Mazen this. Perhaps because some part of me wonders if he knew the Commandant killed my parents—if he knew and sent me to Blackcliff anyway.

“I didn’t know,” Mazen says, sensing my unasked question. “But it’s all the more reason that this mission must succeed.”

“I want to succeed more than anyone, but I can’t get into her office. She never has visitors, so I can’t eavesdrop on her—”

Mazen holds up a hand to stop me. “What
do
you know, exactly?”

For one frantic moment I consider lying. I’ve read a hundred tales of heroes
and the trials they face—what harm if I invent one and pass it off as truth? But I can’t bring myself to do it. Not when the Resistance is placing their trust in me.

“I . . . nothing.” I stare at the floor, ashamed at the incredulity on Mazen’s face. I reach for the letter but don’t pull it out.
Too risky. Maybe he’ll give you another chance, Laia. Maybe you can try again.

“What, exactly, have you been doing all this time?”

“Surviving, from the looks of it,” Keenan says. His dark eyes flash to mine, and I can’t tell if he’s defending or insulting me.

“I was loyal to the Lioness,” Mazen says. “But I can’t waste my time helping someone who won’t help me.”

“Mazen, for skies’ sake.” Sana sounds aghast. “Look at the poor girl—”

“Yes.” Mazen eyes the bruises on my neck. “Look at her. She’s a mess. The mission’s too difficult. I made a mistake, Laia. I thought you’d take risks. I thought you were more like your mother.”

The insult levels me faster than a blow from the Commandant. Of course he’s right. I’m nothing like my mother. She’d have never been in this position to begin with.

“We’ll see about getting you out.” Mazen shrugs and stands. “We’re done here.”

“Wait . . . ” Mazen can’t abandon me now. Darin is lost if he does. Reluctantly, I take out the Commandant’s letter. “I have this. It’s from the Commandant to the Emperor. I thought you could look at it.”

“Why didn’t you say that to begin with?” He takes the envelope, and I want to tell him to be careful. But Sana beats me to it, and Mazen gives her a brief, annoyed look before gently lifting the seal.

Seconds later, my heart sinks again. Mazen tosses the letter to the table. “Useless,” he says. “Look.”

Your Imperial Majesty,

I will make the arrangements.

Ever your servant,

Commandant Keris Veturia

“Don’t give up on me,” I say when Mazen shakes his head in disgust. “Darin doesn’t have anyone else. You were close to my parents. Think of them—please. They wouldn’t want their only son to die because you refused to help.”

“I’m trying to help.” Mazen is unrelenting, and something about the set of his shoulders and the iron in his eyes reminds me of my mother. I understand now why he’s leader of the Resistance. “But you have to help me. This rescue mission will cost more than just lives. We’ll be putting the Resistance itself on the line. If our fighters are caught, we risk them giving up information under interrogation. I’m gambling everything to help you, Laia.” He crosses his arms. “Make it worth my while.”

“I will. I promise I will. One more chance.”

He stares stonily at me for a moment longer before looking to Sana, who nods, and Keenan, who offers a shrug that could mean any number of things.

“One chance,” Mazen says. “Fail me again and we’re done. Keenan, see her out.”

SEVEN DAYS EARLIER

T
he Great Wastes. That’s where the Augurs have left me, in this salt-white flatness that stretches for hundreds of miles, marked by nothing but angry black cracks and the occasional gnarled Jack tree.

The pale outline of the moon sits above me like something forgotten. It’s more than half-full, as it had been yesterday—which means that somehow the Augurs have moved me three hundred miles from Serra in one night. At this time yesterday, I was in Grandfather’s carriage, on my way to Blackcliff.

My dagger is driven through a limp piece of parchment and into the scorched ground beside the tree. I tuck the weapon into my belt—it’s the difference between life and death out here. The parchment is written in an unfamiliar hand.

The Trial of Courage:

The belltower. Sunset on the seventh day.

That’s clear enough. If today counts as the first day, I have six full days to reach the belltower or the Augurs will kill me for failing the Trial.

The air’s so dry that breathing burns my nostrils. I lick my lips, already thirsty, and hunch beneath the paltry shade of the Jack tree to consider my predicament.

The stink in the air tells me that the glittering patch of blue to the west of me is Lake Vitan. Its sulfurous stench is legendary, and it’s the only source of water in this wasteland. It’s also pure salt and so completely useless to me. In any case, my path lies east through the Serran Mountain Range.

Two days to get to the mountains. Two more to get to Walker’s Gap, the only way through. A day to get through the Gap and a day to get down to Serra. Six full days exactly, if everything goes as planned.

It’s too easy.

I think back to the foretelling I read in the Commandant’s office.
Courage to face their darkest fears.
Some people might fear the desert. I’m not one of them.

Which means there’s something else out here. Something that hasn’t revealed itself.

I tear strips of cloth off my shirt and wrap my feet. I have only what I fell asleep with—my fatigues and my dagger. I’m suddenly, fervently grateful that I was too exhausted from combat training to strip before sleeping. Traveling the Great Wastes naked—that would be its own special sort of hell.

Soon the sun sinks into the wild sky of the west, and I stand in the rapidly cooling air. Time to run. I set out at a steady jog, my eyes roving ahead. After a mile, a breeze meanders past, and for a second, I think I smell smoke and death. The smell fades, but it leaves me uneasy.

What are my fears? I rack my brain, but I can’t think of anything. Most of Blackcliff’s students fear something, though never for long. When we were Yearlings, the Commandant ordered Helene to rappel down the cliffs again and again until she could drop with nothing but a clenched jaw to betray her terror. That same year, the Commandant forced Faris to keep a bird-eating desert tarantula as a pet, telling him that if the spider died, he would too.

There must be something I fear. Enclosed spaces? The dark?
If I don’t know my fears, I won’t be prepared for them.

Midnight comes and goes, and still the desert around me is quiet and empty. I’ve traveled nearly twenty miles, and my throat is dry as dirt. I lick at
the sweat on my arms, knowing that my need for salt will be as great as my need for water. The moisture helps, but only for a moment. I force myself to focus on the ache in my feet and legs. Pain I can handle. But thirst can drive a man insane.

Soon after, I crest a rise and spot something strange ahead: glimmers of light, like moonlight shining down on a lake. Only there’s no lake around here. Dagger in hand, I slow to a walk.

Then I hear it. A voice.

It starts quietly enough, a whisper I can pass off as the wind, a scrape that sounds like the echo of my footsteps on the cracked ground. But the voice gets closer, clearer.

Eliassss.

Eliassss.

A low hill rises before me, and when I reach the top, the night breeze curdles, bringing with it the unmistakable smells of war—blood and dung and rot. Below me sits a battlefield—a killing field, actually, for no battle rages here. Everyone’s dead. Moonlight glints off the armor of fallen men. This is what I saw earlier, from the rise.

It’s a strange battlefield, unlike any I’ve encountered. No one moans or pleads for aid. Barbarians from the borderlands lay beside Martial soldiers. I spot what looks like a Tribal trader and beside him, smaller bodies—his family. What is this place? Why would a Tribesman battle against Martials and Barbarians out in the middle of nowhere?

“Elias.”

I practically leap from my skin at the sound of my name spoken in such silence, and my dagger is at the throat of the speaker before I can think. He is
a Barbarian boy, no more than thirteen. His face is painted with blue woad, and his body is dark with the geometric tattoos unique to his people. Even in the light of the half-moon, I know him. I’d know him anywhere.

He is my first kill.

My eyes drop to the gaping wound in his stomach, a wound I put there nine years ago. A wound he doesn’t seem to notice.

I drop my arm and back away.
Impossible.

The boy’s dead. Which means that all this—the battlefield, the smell, the Wastes—must be a nightmare. I pinch my arm to wake myself up. The boy tilts his head. I pinch myself again. I take my dagger and cut my hand with it. Blood drips to the ground.

The boy doesn’t budge. I can’t wake up.

Courage to face their darkest fears.

“My mother screamed and tore at her hair for three days after I died,” my first kill says. “She didn’t speak again for five years.” He talks quietly in the just-deepened voice of a teenaged boy. “I was her only child,” he adds, as if in explanation.

“I’m—I’m sorry—”

The boy shrugs and walks away, gesturing for me to follow him onto the battlefield. I don’t want to go, but he clamps a chill hand on my arm and pulls me behind him with surprising force. As we wind through the first of the bodies, I look down. A sick feeling seeps through me.

I recognize these faces. I killed every one of these people.

As I pass them, their voices murmur secrets in my head—

My wife was pregnant—

I was sure I’d kill you first—

My father swore revenge, but died before taking it—

I clap my hands over my ears. But the boy sees, and his clammy fingers pull mine away from my head with inexorable force.

“Come,” he says. “There are more.”

I shake my head. I know exactly how many people I’ve killed, when they died, how, where. There are far more than twenty-one men on this battlefield. I can’t have killed them all.

But we keep walking, and now there are faces I don’t know. And it’s a kind of relief, because these faces must be someone else’s sins, someone else’s darkness.

“Your kills,” the boy interrupts my thoughts. “They’re all yours. The past. The future. All here. All by your hand.”

My hands sweat, and I feel lightheaded. “I—I don’t—” There are scores of people on this battlefield. Well over five hundred. How could I be responsible for the deaths of so many? I look down. There’s a lanky, fair-haired Mask on my left, and my stomach sinks because I know this Mask. Demetrius.

“No
.
”
I bend down to shake him. “Demetrius. Wake up. Get up.”

“He can’t hear you,” my first kill says. “He’s gone.”

Beside Demetrius lies Leander, blood staining his halo of curly hair, trickling down his crooked nose and off his chin. And a few feet away, Ennis—another member of Helene’s battle platoon. Further ahead, I spot a mane of white hair, a powerful body. Grandfather?

“No. No.” There isn’t another word for what I’m seeing, because something so terrible shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I bend next to another body—the gold-eyed slave-girl I’ve only just met. A raw red line cuts across her throat. Her hair is a mess, snaking out every which way. Her eyes are open, their brilliant gold faded to the color of a dead sun. I think of her intoxicating smell, like fruit and sugar and warmth.
I turn on my first kill.

“These are my friends, my family. People I know. I wouldn’t hurt them.”

“Your kills,” the boy insists, and the terror inside me grows at the sureness with which he speaks. Is this what I will be? A mass murderer?

Wake up, Elias. Wake up.
But I cannot wake, because I’m not asleep. The Augurs have somehow brought my nightmare to life, unrolled it before my eyes.

“How do I make it stop? I have to make it stop.”

“It’s already done,” the boy says. “This is your destiny—it is written.”

“No.” I push past him. The battlefield has to end eventually. I’ll get by it, keep going through the desert, get out of here.

But when I reach the edge of the carnage, the ground lurches and the battlefield stretches out ahead of me again in its entirety. Beyond the battlefield, the landscape has changed—I’m still moving east through the desert.

“You can keep walking,” the disembodied whisper of my first kill brushes across my ear, and I start violently. “You may even reach the mountains. But until you conquer your fear, the dead will remain with you.”

This is an illusion, Elias. Augur sorcery. Keep walking until you find your way out.

I force myself toward the shadow of the Serran Range, but every time I reach the end of the battlefield, I feel the lurch and see the bodies spread out before me yet again. Every time it happens, it gets harder to ignore the carnage at my feet. My pace slows, and I struggle to stumble on. I pass by the same people over and over, until their faces are burned into my memory.

The sky lightens and dawn breaks.
Second day
,
I think.
Go east, Elias.

The battlefield grows hot and fetid. Clouds of flies and scavengers descend. I shout and attack them with my dagger, but I can’t keep them away. I want to die of thirst or hunger, but I feel neither in this place. I count 539 bodies.

I won’t kill so many.
I tell myself.
I won’t.
An insidious voice in my head chuckles when I try to convince myself of this.
You’re a Mask
,
the voice says.
Of course you’ll kill so many. You’ll kill more.
I run from the thought, willing with my entire mind to break free of the battlefield. But I cannot.

The sky darkens, the moon rises. I cannot leave. Daylight again.
It’s the third day.
The thought appears in my head, but I hardly know what it means. I was supposed to do something by now. Be somewhere. I look to my right, at the mountains.
There. I’m supposed to go there.
I force my body to turn.

Sometimes, I talk to those I’ve killed. In my head, I hear them whisper back—not accusations, but their hopes, their wants. I wish they would curse me instead. It’s worse, somehow, to hear all that would have been had I not killed them.

East. Elias, go east.
It’s the only logical thing I can think. But sometimes, lost in the horror of my future, I forget about going east. Instead, I wander from body to body, begging those I’ve killed for forgiveness.

Darkness. Daylight.
The fourth day.
And soon after, the fifth
.
But why am I counting the days? The days don’t matter. I’m in hell. A hell I’ve made myself, because I am evil. As evil as my mother. As evil as any Mask who spends a lifetime relishing the blood and tears of his victims.

To the mountains, Elias
,
a faint voice whispers in my head, the last shred of sanity I have.
To the mountains.

My feet bleed, and my face cracks from the wind. The sky is below me. The ground above. Old memories flit through my head—Mamie Rila teaching me to write my tribal name; the pain of a Centurion’s whip tearing into my back that first time; sitting with Helene in the wilds of the north, watching as the sky swirled with impossible ribbons of light.

I trip over a body and crash to the ground. The impact shakes something loose in my mind.

Mountains. East. Trial. This is a Trial.

Thinking those words is like pulling myself from a pool of quicksand. This is a Trial, and I must survive it. Most of the people on the battlefield aren’t dead yet—I just saw them. This is a test—of my mettle, my strength—which means there must be something specific I’m supposed to do to get out of here.

“Until you conquer your fear, the dead will remain with you.”

I hear a sound. The first sound I’ve heard in days, it feels like. There, shimmering like a mirage at the edge of the battlefield, is a figure. My first kill again?
I stagger toward him but fall to my knees when I’m just a few feet away. Because it is not my first kill. It’s Helene, and she is covered in blood and scratches, her silver hair tangled as she gazes at me with empty eyes.

“No,” I rasp. “Not Helene. Not Helene. Not Helene.”

I chant it like a madman with only two words left in his mind. Helene’s ghost comes closer.

“Elias.” Skies, her voice. Cracked and haunted.
So real.
“Elias, it’s me. It’s Helene.”

Helene, on my nightmare battlefield? Helene, another victim?

No. I will not kill my oldest, best friend. This is a fact, not a wish. I will not kill her.

I realize in that moment that I cannot be afraid of something if there’s no chance it could ever occur. The knowledge releases me, finally, from the fear that has consumed me for days.

“I won’t kill you,” I say. “I swear it. By blood and by bone, I swear it. And I won’t kill any of the others, either. I won’t.”

The battlefield fades, the smell fades, the dead fade, as if they had never been real. As if they had only ever been in my mind. Ahead, close enough to touch, sit the mountains I’ve been staggering toward for five days, their rocky trails curving and swooping like Tribal calligraphy.

“Elias?”

Helene’s ghost is still here.

For a moment, I don’t understand. She reaches for my face, and I flinch from her, expecting the cold caress of a spirit.

But her skin is warm.

“Helene?”