An Ember in the Ashes (31 page)

W
hen I enter the Commandant’s kitchen, Izzi rushes me. Her eye is shadowed, and her blonde hair is a bird’s nest, as if she hasn’t slept all night.

“You’re alive! You’re . . . you’re
here
! We thought . . . ”

“Did they harm you, girl?” Cook comes up behind Izzi, and I’m shocked to see that she too is disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed. She takes my cloak, and when she sees my dress, she tells Izzi to bring me another. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” What else can I say? I am still trying to make sense of what has just transpired. At the same time, I’m remembering what Elias said about Bekkar Prison, and one thing becomes clear: I have to get out of here and find the Resistance. I have to figure out where Darin is and what’s really going on.

“Where did they take you, Laia?” Izzi is back with the dress, and I change into it quickly, hiding the dagger at my thigh as best as I can. I’m reluctant to tell them what’s happened, but I won’t lie to them, not when it’s clear that they’ve spent the entire night fearing for my life.

“They gave me to Veturius as a prize for winning the Third Trial.” At the twin looks of horror on their faces, I add, in a rush, “But he didn’t hurt me. Nothing happened.”

“Indeed?” The Commandant’s voice chills my blood, and as one, Izzi, Cook, and I turn to the kitchen door.

“Nothing happened, you say.” She cocks her head. “How very interesting. Come with me.”

I follow her to her study, my feet leaden. Once inside, my eyes dart to the wall of dead fighters. It’s like being in a room of ghosts.

The Commandant closes the study door and circles me.

“You spent the night with Aspirant Veturius,” she says.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did he rape you?”

So easily she asks such an abhorrent question. As if asking my age or my name.

“No, sir.”

“Why would that be, when the other night he seemed so very interested in you? He couldn’t keep his hands off you.”

She is, I realize, talking about the night of the Moon Festival. As if she can smell my fear, she steps toward me.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Could it be that the boy actually
cares
about you? I know he’s aided you—the day he carried you up from the dunes, and a few nights ago with Marcus.” She takes another step. “But the night I found you two in the servants’ corridor—that’s the night I’ve been wondering about. What were you doing together? Is he in league with you? Has he turned?”

“I—I’m not sure what you—”

“Did you think you could fool me? Did you think I didn’t know?”

Oh skies. It can’t be.

“I have spies too, slave
.
Among the Mariners, the Tribesmen.” Now she’s inches away, and her smile is like a thin garrote around my throat. “Even in the Resistance. You’d be surprised where I have eyes. Those Scholar rats know only what I want them to know. What were they up to the last time you met them? Were they planning something significant? Something involving
a great many men? Perhaps you’re wondering what it was. You’ll find out soon enough.”

Her hand is around my neck before I can think to dodge her. I kick out, and she tightens her grip. The muscles of her arms bulge, but her eyes are as flat and dead as ever.

“Do you know what I do to spies?”

“I—not—don’t—” I can’t breathe. I can’t think.

“I teach them a lesson. Them and anyone in league with them. Kitchen-Girl, for instance.”
No, not Izzi, not Izzi
. Just as spots begin exploding at the edge of my vision, a knock comes at the door. She releases me, letting me fall to the floor in a heap. Casually, as if she hadn’t just nearly murdered a slave, she opens the door.

“Commandant.” An Augur waits outside—a woman this time—small and ethereal. I expect to see legionnaires behind her like before, but she is alone. “I’m here for the girl.”

“You can’t have her,” the Commandant says. “She is a criminal and—”

“I’m here for the girl.” The Augur’s face hardens, and she and the Commandant lock eyes, a silent and fierce battle of wills. “Give her to me and come. We are needed in the amphitheater.”

“She’s a spy—”

“And she will be appropriately punished.” The Augur turns to me, and I can’t look away from her. For an instant, I see myself in the dark pool of her eyes—my heart stopped, my face lifeless. As if the knowledge has been planted in my head, I realize that the Augur is taking me to the Reaper, that my death is close—closer than during the raid, closer than when Marcus beat me.

“Don’t give me to her,” I find myself begging the Commandant. “Please, don’t—”

The Augur doesn’t let me finish. “Do not set your will against the Augurs, Keris Veturia. You will fail. You can come willingly to the amphitheater, or I can compel you. Which shall it be?”

The Commandant hesitates, and the Augur waits like a rock in a river, patient, unmovable. Finally, the Commandant nods and sweeps out the door. For the second time in a day, I’m gagged and bound. Then the Augur follows in the Commandant’s wake, dragging me after.

“I
’ll go quietly,” I say as the soldiers restrain and blindfold Helene and me. “But get your damned hands off me.” In response, one of them shoves a gag in my mouth and takes my scims.

The legionnaires haul us up the cliffs and through the school. Bootsteps shuffle and thump around me, Centurions shout orders, and I hear
amphitheater
and
Fourth Trial.
My whole body tenses. I don’t want to go back to the place where I killed my friends. I never want to set foot there again.

Cain is a pocket of silence ahead of me. Is he reading me right now? Is he reading Helene?
Doesn’t matter.
I try to forget him, to think as I would if he wasn’t here.

Loyalty to break the soul.
The words are too close to what Laia said.
You have a soul. Don’t let them take it from you.
That, I sense, is exactly what the Augurs will try to do. So I draw that line Laia spoke of, a deep runnel in the earth of my mind.
I won’t cross it. No matter the cost. I won’t.

I feel Helene beside me, fear radiating off her, chilling the air around us and setting my nerves on edge.

“Elias.” The legionnaires didn’t gag her, probably because she had the sense not to be mouthy. “Listen to me. Whatever the Augurs ask you to do, you must do it, understand? Whoever wins this Trial is Emperor—the Augurs said there would be no tie. Be strong, Elias. If you don’t win this, everything is lost.”

There is an urgency to her that unsettles me, a warning in her words beyond the obvious. I wait for her to say something else, but either she’s been gagged or Cain has silenced her. Moments later, hundreds of voices reverberate around me, filling me crown to toe. We’ve reached the amphitheater.

The legionnaires pull me up a set of steps before forcing me to my knees. Helene comes down beside me, and the bindings, blindfolds, and gag come off.

“I see they muzzled you, bastard. Pity they didn’t make it permanent.”

Marcus, kneeling on the other side of Helene, glares at me, hatred spilling from every pore. His body is bunched, a snake ready to strike. He wears no weapon save a dagger at his belt. All his gravitas from the Third Trial has morphed into a poisonous vitriol. Zak always seemed like the weaker twin, but at least he tried to check the Snake. Without his quiet-voiced brother at his back, Marcus seems almost feral.

I ignore him and attempt to steel myself for whatever is coming next. The legionnaires have left us on a raised dais behind Cain, who stares fixedly at the amphitheater’s entrance as if awaiting something. A dozen other Augurs are arrayed around the dais, tattered shadows who darken the stadium with their very presence. I count them again—thirteen, including Cain. Which means one is missing.

The rest of the amphitheater is packed. I spot the governor, the rest of the city councilors. Grandfather sits a few rows behind the Commandant’s pavilion with a group of his personal guard, his eyes on me.

“The Commandant’s late.” Hel nods to my mother’s empty seat.

“Wrong, Aquilla,” Marcus says. “She’s right on time.” As he speaks, my mother walks through the gates of the amphitheater. The fourteenth Augur follows her, managing, despite her seeming frailty, to pull a bound and gagged girl behind her. I see a mane of heavy black hair come loose, and my heart seizes—it’s Laia. What’s she doing here? Why is she tied up?

The Commandant takes her seat while the Augur deposits Laia on the dais beside Cain. The slave-girl tries to speak through her gag, but it’s knotted too tightly.

“Aspirants.” As soon as Cain speaks, the stadium falls silent. A flock of seabirds wheels overhead, screeching. Down in the city, a merchant peddles his wares, the singsong strains of his voice reaching even here.

“The final Trial is the Trial of Loyalty. The Empire has decreed that this slave-girl is to die.” Cain gestures to Laia, and my stomach drops as if I’ve jumped from a great height.
No. She’s innocent. She’s done nothing wrong.

Laia’s eyes go wide. She tries to back away on her knees. The same Augur who delivered her to the dais kneels behind her and holds her still with an iron grip, like a butcher holding a lamb for slaughter
.

“When I tell you to proceed,” Cain goes on calmly, as if he’s not talking about the death of a seventeen-year-old girl, “you will all simultaneously attempt to execute her. Whoever carries out the order will be declared victor of the Trial.”

“This is wrong, Cain,” I burst out. “The Empire has no reason to kill her.”

“Reason does not matter, Aspirant Veturius. Only loyalty. If you defy the order, you fail the Trial. The punishment for failure is death.”

I think of the nightmare battlefield, and my blood goes leaden at the memory. Leander, Demetrius, Ennis—they had all been on that field. I’d killed them all.

Laia had been there too, throat cut, eyes dim, hair a sodden cloud around her head.

But I haven’t done it yet
,
I think desperately.
I haven’t killed her.

The Augur looks at each of us in turn before taking a scim from the legionnaires—one of mine—and laying it on the dais equidistant from Marcus, Helene, and me.

“Proceed.”

My body knows what to do before my mind, and I dive in front of Laia. If I can place myself between her and the others, she might have a chance.

Because I don’t care what I saw on that nightmare battlefield. I won’t kill her. And I won’t let anyone else kill her either.

I get to her before Helene or Marcus and spin into a crouch, expecting an attack from one or both of them. But instead of coming for Laia, Helene leaps for Marcus, knocking her fist against his temple. He drops like a stone, clearly not expecting her attack, and she shoves him off the dais, then kicks my scim toward me.

“Do it, Elias!” she says. “Before Marcus comes to!”

Then she sees that I’m guarding the girl instead of killing her, and she makes a strange, choked sound. The crowd is silent, holding its breath.

“Don’t do this, Elias,” she says. “Not now. We’re almost there. You’ll be Emperor. Foretold. Please, Elias, think of what you could do for—for the Empire—”

“I told you there’s a line I’m not crossing.” I feel strangely calm as I say it, calmer than I’ve felt in weeks. Laia’s eyes shift from Helene to me rapidly. “This is that line. I won’t kill her.”

Helene picks up the scim. “Then step aside,” she says. “I’ll do it. I’ll make it quick.” She moves toward me slowly, her eyes never leaving my face.

“Elias,” she says. “She’s going to die no matter what you do. The Empire’s decreed it. If you or I don’t do it, Marcus will—he’ll wake up eventually. We can end this before he does. If she has to die, at least something good will come of it. I’ll be Empress. You’ll be Blood Shrike.” She takes another step.

“I know you don’t want rulership,” she says softly. “Or lordship over the Black Guard. I didn’t understand before. But I—I do now. So if you let me
take care of this, I vow, by blood and by bone, that the second I’m named Empress, I’ll release you from your oaths to the Empire. You can go wherever you want. Do whatever you want. You’ll be beholden to no one. You’ll be free.”

I’ve been watching her body, waiting for her muscles to tense in preparation for the attack, but now my eyes snap to hers.
You’ll be free.
The only thing I’ve ever wanted and she’s handing it to me on a silver platter with a vow I know she’d never break.

For a brief, terrible moment, I consider it. I want it more than anything I’ve wanted in my life. I see myself sailing out of port at Navium, leaving for the southern kingdoms, where no one and nothing have a claim over my body or my soul.

Well, my body, anyway. Because if I allow Helene to kill Laia, I won’t have a soul.

“If you want to kill her,” I say to Helene, “you’ll have to kill me first.”

A tear snakes down her face, and for a second, I see through her eyes. She wants this so badly, and it’s no enemy keeping it from her. It’s me.

We are everything to each other. And I’m betraying her. Again.

Then I hear a thud—the unmistakable sound of steel sinking into flesh. Behind me, Laia pitches forward so suddenly that the Augur falls with her, her hands still pinning the girl’s limp arms. Laia’s hair is a storm around her, but I can’t see her face, her eyes.

“No! Laia!” I’m down beside her, shaking her, trying to turn her over. But I can’t get the damned Augur off her, because the woman is shaking in terror, her robes tangled with Laia’s skirts. Laia is silent, her body limp as a rag doll’s.

I spot the hilt of a dagger that’s fallen to the dais, the rapidly widening pool of blood spilling out of her. No one can lose that much blood and live.

Marcus.

Too late I see him standing at the back of the stage. Too late I realize that Helene and I should have killed him, that we shouldn’t have risked him waking up.

The explosion of sound that follows Laia’s death staggers me. Thousands of voices yell at once. Grandfather bellows louder than a gored bull.

Marcus jumps onto the dais, and I know he’s coming for me. I want him to come. I want to crush the life out of him for what he’s done.

I feel Cain’s hand on my arm, restraining me. Then the gates to the amphitheater burst open. Marcus jerks his head around, shocked into stillness as a foam-coated stallion gallops through the doors of the stadium. The legionnaire riding him slides to the ground, landing on his feet as the beast rears beside him.

“The Emperor,” the legionnaire says. “The Emperor is dead! Gens Taia has fallen!”

“When?” The Commandant cuts in. There’s not an ounce of shock on her face. “How?”

“A Resistance attack, sir. He was killed en route to Serra, only a day from the city. He and all who were with him. Even—even children.”

Waiting vines circle and strangle the oak. The way is made clear, just before the end.
That was the foretelling the Commandant spoke of in her office weeks ago, and now it suddenly makes sense. The vines are the Resistance. The oak is the Emperor.

“Bear witness, men and women of the Empire, students of Blackcliff, Aspirants.” Cain releases my arm and his voice booms out, shaking the foundations of the amphitheater and silencing the panic setting in. “Thus do the
Augurs’ visions bear fruit. The Emperor is dead, and a new power must rise, lest the Empire be destroyed.

“Aspirant Veturius,” Cain says. “You were given the chance to prove your loyalty. But instead of killing the girl, you defended her. Instead of following my order, you defied it.”

“Of course I defied it!” This isn’t happening. “This wasn’t a Trial of Loyalty for anyone but me. I’m the only one who cared about her. This Trial was a joke—”

“This Trial told us what we needed to know: You are not fit to be Emperor. You are stripped of name and rank. You will die tomorrow at dawn by beheading before the Blackcliff belltower. Those who were your peers will bear witness to your shame.”

Two Augurs fasten chains around my hands and wrists. I hadn’t noticed the chains before. Did they conjure them from thin air? I’m too dazed to fight. The Augur who restrained Laia lifts the girl’s body with difficulty and staggers off the dais.

“Aspirant Aquilla,” Cain says. “You were prepared to strike down the enemy. But you faltered when faced with Veturius, deferring to his wishes. Such loyalty to a peer is admirable. But not in an Emperor. Out of all three Aspirants, only Aspirant Farrar attempted to carry out my order without question, with unflinching loyalty to the Empire. Thus, I name him victor of the Fourth Trial.”

Helene’s face is white as bone, her mind, like mine, unable to take in the travesty occurring in front of our eyes.

“Aspirant Aquilla.” Cain pulls Hel’s scim from his robes. “Do you remember your vow?”

“But you can’t mean—”

“I will keep my vows, Aspirant Aquilla. Will you keep yours?”

She eyes the Augur as one would a traitorous lover, taking the scim when he offers it. “I will.”

“Then kneel now and swear fealty, for we, the Augurs, name Marcus Antonius Farrar Emperor, he who was Foretold, High Commander of the Martial Army, Imperator Invictus, Overlord of the Realm. And you, Aspirant Aquilla, are named his Blood Shrike, his second-in-command, and the sword that executes his will. Your allegiance cannot be broken, unless by death. Swear it.”

“No!” I roar. “Helene, don’t do it!”

She turns to me, and the look in her eyes is a knife twisting inside me.
You chose, Elias
,
her pale eyes say.
You chose her.

“Tomorrow,” Cain says, “after Veturius’s execution, we will crown the Foretold.” He looks at the Snake. “The Empire is yours, Marcus.”

Marcus glances over his shoulder with a smile, and I realize with a jolt that it’s something I’ve seen him do hundreds of times. It’s the look he would throw his brother when he’d insulted an enemy, or won a battle, or otherwise wished to gloat. But his smile fades. Because Zak’s not there.

His face goes blank, and he looks down at Helene without conceit or triumph. His utter lack of feeling chills my blood.

“Your fealty, Aquilla,” he says flatly. “I’m waiting.”

“Cain,” I say. “He’s not fit. You know he’s not. He’s mad. He’ll destroy the Empire.”

No one hears me. Not Cain. Not Helene. Not even Marcus.

When Helene speaks, she is everything a Mask should be: calm, collected, impassive.

“I swear fealty to Marcus Antonius Farrar,” she says. “Emperor, he who was Foretold, High Commander of the Martial Army, Imperator Invictus, Overlord of the Realm. I will be his Blood Shrike, his second-in-command, the sword that executes his will, until death. I swear it.”

Then she bows her head and offers the Snake her
sword.