A Torch Against the Night (7 page)

“Where did you go, Elias? Can you remember? Because I’ve seen seizures before. They can knock someone out for a few minutes, even an hour. But you were unconscious for far longer.”

“Strange place. A for-forest—”

“Don’t you dare fade out on me again, Elias Veturius.” Laia spins and shakes my shoulders, and I snap my eyes open. “I can’t do this without you. Look at the horizon. What do you see?”

I force myself to look up. “C-clouds. Storm coming. Big one. We need shelter.”

Laia nods. “I could smell it. The storm.” She glances back. “Reminds me of you.”

I try to work out whether this is a compliment or not but then give up. Ten hells, I’m so tired.

“Elias.” She puts a hand against my face and forces me to meet her gold eyes, as hypnotizing as a lioness’s. “Stay with me. You had a foster brother—tell me about him.”

Voices call me—the Waiting Place pulling me back with hungry claws.

“Shan,” I gasp out. “His—his name is Shan. Bossy, just like Mamie Rila. He’s nineteen—a year younger.” I blather on, trying to force away the cold grasp of the Waiting Place. As I speak, Laia shoves water into my hands, urging me to drink.

“Stay.” She keeps saying it, and I hold on to the word like it’s driftwood in an open ocean. “Don’t go back. I need you.”

Hours later, the storm hits, and though riding in it is miserable, the wet forces me further awake. I guide the horse to a low-lying ravine littered with boulders. The storm is too heavy for us to see more than a few feet—which means that the Empire’s men will be just as blind.

I dismount and spend long minutes trying to tend to the stallion, but my hands refuse to function properly. An unfamiliar emotion grips me: fear. I crush it.
You’ll fight the poison, Elias. If it were going to kill you, you’d already be dead.

“Elias?” Laia is beside me, concern etched on her face. She’s strung a tarp between two boulders, and when I finish with the horse, she guides me there and makes me sit.

“She told me I hurt people,” I blurt out as we huddle together. “I let them get hurt.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m going to hurt you,” I say. “I hurt everyone.”

“Stop, Elias.” Laia takes my hands. “I freed you because you
didn’t
hurt me.” She pauses, and the rain is a chilly curtain around us. “Try to stay, Elias. You were gone for so long last time, and I need you to stay.”

We’re so close that I can see the indent in the center of her lower lip. A ringlet of hair has come loose from her bun and spills down her long, golden neck. I’d give so much to be this close to her and not be poisoned or hunted, injured or haunted.

“Tell me another story,” she murmurs. “I hear the Fivers see the southern islands. Are they beautiful?” At my nod, she prods me. “What do they look like? Is the water clear?”

“Water’s blue.” I try to fight the slur in my voice, because she’s right: I need to stay. I need to get us to the Roost. I need to get the Tellis.

“But not—not dark blue. It’s a thousand blues. And greens. Like—like someone took Hel’s eyes and turned them into the ocean.”

My body trembles.
No—not again.
Laia takes my cheeks in her hands, her touch sending a bolt of desire through me.

“Stay with me,” she says. Her fingers are cool on my fevered skin. Lightning cracks, illuminating her face, making her gold eyes darker, giving her an otherworldly feel. “Tell me another memory,” she demands. “Something good.”

“You,” I say. “The—the first time I saw you. You’re beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful girls, and—”
Find the words. Make yourself stay.
“That’s not why you stood out. You’re like me …”

“Stay with me, Elias. Stay here.”

My mouth won’t work. The blackness creeping at the edge of my vision draws closer.

“I can’t stay …”

“Try, Elias. Try!”

Her voice fades. The world goes dark.

«««

T
his time, I find myself sitting on the Forest floor, warmth from a fire driving the chill from my bones. The Soul Catcher sits across from me, patiently feeding logs to the blaze.

“The wails of the dead don’t bother you,” she says.

“I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine,” I retort. When she nods, I continue.

“It doesn’t sound like wailing to me. More like whispers.” I expect a response from her, but there is none. “My turn. These seizures—they shouldn’t be knocking me out for hours at a time. Are you doing this? Are you keeping me here?”

“I told you: I’ve been watching you. I wanted a chance to speak.”

“Let me go back.”

“Soon,” she says. “You have more questions?”

My frustration rises, and I want to shout at her—but I need answers. “What did you mean when you said I was dead? I know I’m not. I’m alive.”

“Not for much longer.”

“Can you see the future, like the Augurs?”

Her head comes up, and the feral snarl on her lips is unquestionably inhuman.

“Do not invoke those creatures here,” she says. “This is a sacred world, a place the dead come to find peace. The Augurs are anathema to death.” She settles back. “I’m the Soul Catcher, Elias. I deal with the dead. And death has claimed you—there.” She taps my arm, exactly where the Commandant’s star cut me.

“The poison won’t kill me,” I say. “And if Laia and I get the Tellis extract, neither will the seizures.”

“Laia. The Scholar girl. Another ember waiting to burn the world down,” she says. “Will you hurt her too?”

“Never.”

The Soul Catcher shakes her head. “You grow close to her. Don’t you see what you are doing? The Commandant poisoned you. You, in turn,
are
a poison. You will poison Laia’s joy, her hope, her life, like you have poisoned all the rest. If you care for her, then do not let her care for you. Like the poison that rages within you, you have no antidote.”

“I’m not going to die.”

“Willpower alone cannot change one’s fate. Think on it, Elias, and you will see.” Her smile is sad as she pokes the fire. “Perhaps I will call you here again. I have many questions …”

I slam back into the real world with a harshness that makes my teeth ache. The night is cloaked in mist. I must have blacked out for hours. Our horse trots ahead steadily, but I feel its legs tremble. We’ll need to stop soon.

Laia rides on, oblivious to the fact that I’ve woken. My mind isn’t nearly as clear as it was in the Waiting Place, but I remember the Soul Catcher’s words.
Think on it, Elias, and you will see.

I sift through the poisons I know, cursing myself for not paying closer attention to the Blackcliff Centurion who instructed us on toxins.

Nightweed.
Barely mentioned because it is illegal in the Empire, even for Masks. It was outlawed a century ago, after it was used to assassinate an Emperor.
Always deadly, though in higher doses, it kills swiftly. In lower doses, the only symptoms are severe seizures.

Three to six months of seizures, I remember. Then death. There is no cure. No antidote.

Finally, I understand why the Commandant let us escape from Serra, why she didn’t bother slitting my throat. She didn’t have to.

Because she’d already killed me.

“S
ix broken ribs, twenty-eight lacerations, thirteen fractures, four torn tendons, and bruised kidneys.”

Morning sun pours through the windows of my childhood bedroom, glinting off my mother’s silver-blonde hair as she relays the physician’s assessment. I watch her in the ornate silver mirror in front of us—a gift she gave me when I was a girl. Its unmottled surface is the specialty of a city far to the south, an island of glassblowers my father once visited.

I shouldn’t be here. I should be in the Black Guard barracks preparing for my audience with Emperor Marcus Farrar, to take place in less than an hour. Instead, I sit amid the silken rugs and lavender drapes of Villa Aquilla, with my mother and sisters tending to me instead of a military medic.
You were in interrogation for five days and they’ve been worried sick
,
Father insisted.
They want to see you.
I didn’t have the energy to refuse him.

“Thirteen fractures is nothing.” My voice is a rasp. I tried not to scream during the interrogation. My throat is raw with the times I failed. Mother stitches a wound, and I hide a wince as she ties it off.

“She’s right, Mother.” Livia, who at eighteen is the youngest Aquilla, gives me a dark smile. “Could have been worse. They could have cut her hair.”

I snort—it hurts too much to laugh, and even Mother smiles as she dabs ointment onto one of my wounds. Only Hannah remains expressionless.

I glance at her, and she looks away, jaw clenched. She’s never learned to quench her hatred for me, my middle sister. Though after the first time I pulled a scim on her, she at least learned to hide it.

“It’s your own damned fault.” Hannah’s voice is low, poisonous, and wholly expected. I’m surprised it took her this long. “It’s disgusting. They shouldn’t have had to torture you for information about that—that monster.”
Elias.
I’m thankful she doesn’t say his name. “You should have given it to them—”

“Hannah!” Mother snaps. Livia, her back rigid, glares at our sister.

“My friend Aelia was to be married in a week,” Hannah snarls. “Her fiancé is dead because of your
friend
.
And you refuse to help find him.”

“I don’t know where he—”

“Liar!” Hannah’s voice trembles with more than a decade of rage. For fourteen years my schooling took precedence over anything she or Livvy did. Fourteen years where my father was more concerned with me than his other daughters. Her hate is as familiar as my own skin. That doesn’t make it sting less. She looks at me and sees a rival. I look at her and see the wide-eyed, tow-headed sister who used to be my best friend.

Until Blackcliff, anyway.

Ignore her
,
I tell myself. I can’t have her accusations ringing in my ears when I meet with the Snake.

“You should have stayed in prison,” Hannah says. “You’re not worth Father going to the Emperor and begging—
begging
on hands and knees.”

Bleeding skies, Father. No.
He shouldn’t have lowered himself—not on my behalf. I look down at my hands, enraged when I feel my eyes burn with tears. Bleeding hells, I’m about to face off with Marcus. I don’t have time for guilt or tears.

“Hannah.” My mother’s voice is steel, so unlike her usual gentle self. “Leave.”

My sister lifts her chin in challenge before turning and ambling out, as if it’s her idea to go.
You’d have made an excellent Mask, sister.

“Livvy,” Mother says after a minute. “Make sure she doesn’t take her anger out on the slaves.”

“Probably too late for that,” Livvy mutters as she walks out. As I try to rise, Mother puts a hand on my shoulder and pushes me down into the seat with surprising force.

She dabs at a wicked, deep cut in my scalp with a stinging ointment. Her cool fingers turn my face one way and then another, her eyes sad mirrors of my own.

“Oh, my girl,” she whispers. I feel shaky, suddenly, like I want to collapse into her arms and never leave their safety.

Instead I push her hands away.

“Enough.” Better she think me impatient than too soft. I cannot show her the wounded parts of me. I cannot show anyone those parts. Not when my strength is the only thing that will serve me now. And not when I’m minutes away from meeting with the Snake.

I have a mission for you
,
he’d said
.
What will he have me do? Quell the revolution? Punish the Scholars for their insurrection?
Too easy.
Worse possibilities come to mind. I try not to think about them.

Beside me, Mother sighs. Her eyes fill, and I stiffen. I’m about as good with tears as I am with declarations of love. But her tears don’t spill over. She hardens herself—something she has been forced to learn as the mother of a Mask—and reaches for my armor. Silently, she helps me pull it on.

“Blood Shrike.” Father appears in the doorway a few minutes later. “It’s time.”

«««

E
mperor Marcus has taken up residence in Villa Veturia.

In Elias’s home.

“At the Commandant’s urging, no doubt,” my father says, as guards wearing Veturia colors open the villa’s gate to us. “She’ll want to keep him close.”

I wish he’d picked anywhere else. Memory assails me as we pass through the courtyard. Elias is everywhere, his presence so strong that I know if I just turn my head, he’ll be inches away, shoulders thrown back in careless grace, a quip on his lips.

But of course he’s not here, and neither is his grandfather, Quin. In their places are dozens of Gens Veturia soldiers watching the walls and roofs. The pride and disdain that were the Veturia hallmark under Quin are gone. Instead, an undercurrent of sullen fear ripples through the courtyard. A whipping post is haphazardly erected in one corner. Fresh blood spatters the cobblestones around it.

I wonder where Quin is now. Somewhere safe, I hope. Before I helped him escape into the desert north of Serra, he gave me a warning.
You watch your back, girl. You’re strong, and she’ll kill you for it. Not outright. Your family is too important for that. But she’ll find a way.
I didn’t have to ask him whom he was talking about.

My father and I enter the villa. Here’s the foyer where Elias greeted me after our graduation. The marble staircase we raced down as children, the drawing room where Quin entertained, the butler’s pantry at its back, where Elias and I spied on him.

By the time Father and I are escorted to Quin’s library, I am scrambling for control over my thoughts. It’s bad enough that Marcus, as Emperor, can order me to do his bidding. I cannot also allow him to see me mourning Elias. He’ll use such weakness to his advantage—I know it.

You’re a Mask, Aquilla. Act like one.

“Blood Shrike.” Marcus looks up at my entry, my title somehow insulting on his lips. “Pater Aquillus. Welcome.”

I’m not sure what to expect when we enter. Marcus lounging among a harem of bruised and beaten women, perhaps.