An Ember in the Ashes (10 page)

“All right, bleeding skies. It was just a joke. Of course I’ll fight to win. I’m not planning to die, that’s for sure. But what about you? Don’t you want to become Empress?”

She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m better suited to being Blood Shrike. And I don’t want to compete with you, Elias. The moment we start working against each other is the moment we let Marcus and Zak win.”

“Hel . . . ” I think to ask her what’s wrong again, hoping that all this talk of sticking together will make her want to confide in me. She doesn’t give me the chance.

“Veturius!” Her eyes widen when she catches sight of the scabbards on my back. “Are those Teluman blades?”

I show her the scims, and she is appropriately envious. We are quiet for a while after, content to contemplate the stars above us, to find music in the distant sounds that drift up from the forges.

I take in her slim body, her lean profile. What would Helene have been if not a Mask? It’s impossible to imagine her as a typical Illustrian girl, angling for a good match, attending fetes and allowing herself to be seduced by fittingly highborn men.

I guess it doesn’t matter. Whatever we might have been—healers or politicians, jurists or builders—was trained out of us, spun up and away into the funnel of darkness that is Blackcliff.

“What’s going on with you, Hel?” I say. “Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m just nervous about the Trials.” She doesn’t pause or stutter. She looks right into my eyes, her blue irises clear and mild, her head tilted slightly. Anyone else would believe her without question. But I know Helene, and I know instantly, down in my bones, that she’s lying. In another flash of insight, born of the awareness that only makes itself known deep in the night, when the mind opens strange doors, I realize something else. This is not a quiet lie. It is violent and shattering.

She sighs at my expression. “Leave it alone, Elias.”

“So there
is
something—”

“Fine.” She cuts me off. “I’ll tell you what’s bothering me if you tell me what you were really doing in the tunnels yesterday morning.”

The comment is so unexpected that I have to look away from her. “I told you, I—”

“Yes. You said were looking for the deserter. And I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with me. Now it’s all clear and in the open.” There is a bite to her voice I’m not used to. “And there’s nothing else to talk about.”

She meets my gaze, an unfamiliar wariness in her eyes.
What are you hiding, Elias
?
her expression asks.

Hel’s a master at ferreting out secrets. Something about the combination of her loyalty and patience creates an uncanny urge to confide. She knows, for instance, that I smuggle sheets to the Yearlings so they don’t get whipped for wetting their beds. She knows I write to Mamie Rila and my foster brother, Shan, every month. She knows I once dumped a bucket of cow dung on Marcus’s bed. She chuckled for days over that one.

But there’s so much now that she doesn’t know. My loathing of the Empire. How desperately I want to be free of it.

We aren’t kids anymore, laughing over shared confidences. We never will be again.

In the end, I don’t answer her question. She doesn’t answer mine. Instead, we sit without words, watching the city, the river, the desert beyond, our secrets heavy between us.

D
espite the slaver’s warning to keep my head down, I gaze at the school with sick wonder. Night blends into the gray of the stone until I can’t tell where the shadows end and the buildings of Blackcliff begin. Blue-fire lamps make even the bare, sand training fields of the school seem ghostly. In the distance, moonlight glimmers off the columns and arches of a dizzyingly high amphitheater.

Blackcliff’s students are on leave, and the scrape of my sandals is the only sound to break the sinister quiet of the place. Every hedge is squared as if by a plane, every path is neatly paved without a crack in sight. There are no flowers or blooming vines crawling up the buildings, no benches where students can relax.

“Face forward,” the slaver barks. “Eyes down.”

We head for a structure crouching on the lip of the southern cliffs like a black toad. It’s built of the same brooding granite as the rest of the school. The Commandant’s house. A sea of sand dunes stretches below the cliffs, lifeless and unforgiving. Far beyond the dunes, the blue jags of the Serran Range cut into the horizon.

A diminutive slave-girl opens the front door of the house. The first thing I notice is her eyepatch.
She’ll disfigure you in the first few weeks
,
the slaver had said
.
Will the Commandant take my eye too?

Doesn’t matter
.
I reach for my armlet.
It’s for Darin. All for Darin.

The inside of the house is as gloomy as a dungeon, the smattering of candles providing little illumination against the dark stone walls. I look around, glimpsing the simple, almost monkish furnishings of a dining room and
sitting room before the slaver grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls on it so hard I think my neck will break. A knife appears in his hand, its tip caressing my eyelashes. The slave-girl winces.

“You look up one more time,” the slaver says, his hot breath foul in my face, “I’ll carve out your eyes. Understand?”

My eyes water, and at my rapid nod, he releases me.

“Stop blubbering,” he says as the slave leads us upstairs. “Commandant would rather put a scim through you than deal with tears, and I didn’t spend one hundred eighty marks just to throw your corpse to the vultures.”

The slave-girl leads us to a door at the end of a hallway, straightening her already perfectly pressed black dress before knocking softly. A voice orders us to enter.

As the slaver pushes the door open, I get a glimpse of a heavily curtained window, a desk, and a wall of hand-drawn faces. Then I remember the slaver’s knife and pin my eyes to the floor.

“It took you long enough,” a soft voice greets us.

“Forgive me, Commandant,” the slaver says. “My supplier—”

“Silence.”

The slaver swallows. His hands rasp like a snake’s coils as he rubs them together. I stand perfectly still. Is the Commandant looking at me? Examining me? I try to look beaten and obedient, the way I know Martials like Scholars to look.

A second later, she is before me, and I jump, surprised at how silently she’s come around her desk. She’s smaller than I expect—shorter than me and reed-slim. Almost delicate. If not for the mask, I might mistake her for a child. Her uniform is pressed to perfection, and her pants are tucked into mirror-bright black boots. Every button of her ebony shirt gleams with the shimmer of a serpent’s eyes.

“Look at me,” she says. I force myself to obey, instantly paralyzed as I meet her gaze. Looking into her face is like looking at the flat, smooth surface of a gravestone. There isn’t a shred of humanity in her gray eyes, nor any evidence of kindness in the planes of her masked features. A spiral of faded blue ink curls up the left side of her neck—a tattoo of some kind.

“What is your name, girl?”

“Laia.”

My head is jerked to one side, my cheek on fire before I even realize she’s struck me. Tears spring to my eyes at the sharpness of the slap, and I dig my nails into my thigh to keep from running.

“Wrong,” the Commandant informs me. “You have no name. No identity. You are a slave. That is all you are. That is all you will ever be.” She turns to the slaver to discuss payment. My face is still smarting when the slaver unhooks my collar. Before walking out, he pauses.

“May I offer you my congratulations, Commandant?”

“On what?”

“On the naming of the Aspirants. It’s all over the city. Your son—”

“Get out,” the Commandant says. She turns her back on the startled slaver, who quickly retreats, and settles her gaze on me. This
thing
actually spawned? What kind of demon had she whelped? I shudder, hoping I never find out.

The silence lengthens, and I remain still as a post, too afraid to even blink. Two minutes with the Commandant and she’s already cowed me.

“Slave,” she says. “Look behind me.”

I look up, and the peculiar impression of faces I’d gotten when I first walked in resolves itself. The wall behind the Commandant is covered with
wood-framed posters of men and women, old and young. There are dozens, row after row.

WANTED:

REBEL SPY . . . SCHOLAR THIEVES . . . RESISTANCE HENCHMAN . . .

REWARD: 250 MARKS . . . 1,000 MARKS.

“These are the faces of every Resistance fighter I’ve hunted down, every Scholar I’ve jailed and executed, most before my tenure as Commandant. Some after.”

A paper cemetery. The woman is sick. I look away.

“I will tell you the same thing I tell every slave brought into Blackcliff. The Resistance has tried to penetrate this school countless times. I have discovered it every time. If you are working with the Resistance, if you contact them, if you think of contacting them, I will know and I will destroy you.
Look
.”

I do as she asks, trying to ignore the faces and letting the images and words fade into a blur.

But then I see two faces that will not fade. Two faces that, however poorly rendered, I could never ignore. Shock courses through me slowly, as if my body is fighting it. As if I don’t want to believe what I see.

MIRRA AND JAHAN OF SERRA

RESISTANCE LEADERS

TOP PRIORITY

DEAD OR ALIVE

REWARD: 10,000 MARKS

Nan and Pop never told me who destroyed my family.
A Mask
,
they said.
Does it matter which one?
And here she is. This is the woman who crushed my parents under her steel-bottomed boot, who brought the Resistance to its knees by killing the greatest leaders it ever had.

How did she do it? How, when my parents were such masters of concealment that few knew what they looked like, let alone how to find them?

The traitor.
Someone swore allegiance to the Commandant. Someone my parents trusted.

Did Mazen know he was sending me into the lair of my parents’ murderer? He’s a stern man, but he doesn’t seem like a willfully cruel one.

“If you cross me”—the Commandant holds my eyes relentlessly—“you’ll join the faces on that wall. Do you understand?”

Ripping my gaze from my parents, I nod, trembling in my struggle not to allow my body to betray my shock. My words are a strangled whisper.

“I understand.”

“Good.” She goes to the door and pulls on a cord. Moments later, the one-eyed girl appears to escort me downstairs. The Commandant closes the door behind me, and anger rises in me like a sickness. I want to turn around and attack the woman. I want to scream at her.
You killed my mother, who had a lion’s heart, and my sister, who laughed like the rain, and my father, who captured truth with a few strokes of a pen. You took them from me. You took them from this world.

But I don’t turn back. Darin’s voice comes to me again.
Save me, Laia. Remember why you’re here. To spy.

Skies. I didn’t notice anything in the Commandant’s office except for her wall of death. The next time I go in, I have to pay closer attention. She
doesn’t know I can read. I might learn something just by glancing at the papers on her desk.

My mind occupied, I barely hear the feather-light whisper of the girl as it drifts past my ear.

“Are you all right?”

Though she is only a few inches smaller than me, she seems tiny somehow, her stick-thin body swimming in her dress, her face pinched and frightened, like that of a starved mouse. A morbid part of me wants to ask her how she lost her eye.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t think I got on her good side, though.”

“She doesn’t have a good side.”

That’s clear enough. “What’s your name?”

“I—I don’t have a name,” the girl says. “None of us do.”

Her hand strays to her eyepatch, and I suddenly feel sick. Is that what happened to this girl? She told someone her name and she had her eye gouged out?

“Be careful,” she says softly. “The Commandant sees things. Knows things she shouldn’t.” The girl hurries ahead of me, as if wishing to physically escape the words she’s just spoken. “Come, I’m supposed to take you to Cook.”

We make our way to the kitchen, and as soon as I walk in, I feel better. The space is wide, warm, and well lit, with a giant hearth and stove squatting in one corner and a wooden worktable sprawled in the center. The roof drips with strings of shriveled red peppers and paper-skinned onions. A spice-laden shelf runs along one wall, and the scent of lemon and cardamom permeates the air. If not for the largeness of the place, I could be back in Nan’s kitchen.

A stack of dirty pots rises from a sink, and a kettle of water boils on the
stove. Someone has laid out a tray with biscuits and jam. A small, white-haired woman in a diamond-patterned dress identical to mine stands at the worktable, chopping an onion with her back to us. Beyond her is a screened door that leads outside.

“Cook,” the girl says. “This is—”

“Kitchen-Girl,” the woman addresses her without turning. Her voice is strange—raspy, as if she’s ill. “Didn’t I ask you to wash those pots hours ago?” Kitchen-Girl doesn’t get a chance to protest. “Stop your dawdling and get to it,” the woman snaps. “Or you’ll be sleeping with an empty belly, and I’ll not feel a shred of guilt.”

When the girl grabs her apron, Cook turns from her onion, and I stifle a gasp, trying not to gawp at the ruin of her face. Ropy, vivid red scars run from her forehead down across her cheeks, lips, and chin, all the way into the high neck of her black dress. It looks as though a wild animal clawed her to shreds and she had the misfortune of surviving. Only her eyes, a dark, agate blue, remain whole.

“Who—” She takes me in, standing unnaturally still. Then, without explanation, she turns and limps out the back door.

I look at Kitchen-Girl for aid. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

“Cook?” Kitchen-Girl moves timidly to the door, opening it a crack. “Cook?”

When no response comes, Kitchen-Girl glances between me and the door. The kettle on the stove whistles shrilly.

“It’s nearly ninth bell.” She twists her hands together. “That’s when the Commandant has evening tea. You’re to take it up, but if you’re late . . . the Commandant . . . she’ll—”

“She’ll what?”

“She—she’ll be angry.” Terror—true, animal terror—fills the girl’s face.

“Right,” I say. Kitchen-Girl’s fear is contagious, and I hurriedly pour water from the kettle into the mug on the tray. “How does she take it? Sugar? Cream?”

“She takes cream.” The girl rushes to a cupboard and pulls out a covered pail, spilling some of the milk. “Oh!”

“Here.” I take the pail from her and spoon out the cream, trying to stay calm. “See? All done, I’ll just clean up—”

“There’s no time.” The girl shoves the tray into my arms and pushes me toward the hall. “Please—hurry. It’s almost—”

The bells begin to toll.

“Go,” the girl says. “Get up there before the last bell!”

The stairs are steep, and I’m walking too fast. The tray lists, and I barely have a chance to grab the cream pot before the teaspoon clatters to the ground. The bell tolls for a ninth time and falls silent.

Calm down, Laia. This is ridiculous.
The Commandant probably won’t even notice if I’m five seconds late, but she will notice if the tray is in disarray. I balance the tray in one hand and sweep up the spoon, taking a moment to neaten the crockery before approaching the door.

It swings open as I raise my hand to knock. The tray is out of my arms, the cup of hot tea sailing past my head and exploding against the wall behind me.

I’m still gaping when the Commandant pulls me into her office.

“Turn around.”

My whole body shakes as I turn to face the closed door. I don’t register the zing of wood cutting through the air until the Commandant’s riding crop
slices into my back. The shock of it drops me to my knees. It comes down thrice more before I feel her hands in my hair. I yelp as she brings my face close to hers, the silver of her mask nearly touching my cheeks. I clench my teeth shut against the pain, forcing back tears as I think of the slaver’s words
. The Commandant would rather put a scim in you than deal with tears.

“I don’t tolerate tardiness,” she says, her eyes eerily calm. “It won’t happen again.”

“Y-yes, Commandant.” My whisper is no louder than Kitchen-Girl’s had been. It hurts too much to speak any louder. The woman releases me.

“Clean up the mess in the hall. Report to me tomorrow morning at sixth bell.”

The Commandant steps around me, and moments later, the front door slams shut.

The silverware rattles as I pick up the tray. Only four lashes and I feel as if my skin has been torn open and drenched in salt. Blood drips down the back of my shirt.

I want to be logical, practical, the way Pop taught me to be when dealing with injuries.
Cut the shirt off, my girl. Clean the wounds with witch hazel and pack them with turmeric. Then bandage them and change the dressings twice a day.

But where will I get a new shirt? Witch hazel? How will I bandage the wounds with no one to help me?

For Darin. For Darin. For Darin.

But what if he’s dead?
a voice whispers in my head.
What if the Resistance doesn’t find him? What if I’m about to put myself through hell for nothing?