An Ember in the Ashes (14 page)

Then she’s pulling me close, cradling my head, whispering that I’m alive, that she is alive, that we are both all right, that she’s found me. I wrap my arms around her waist and bury my face in her stomach. And for the first time in nine years, I start to cry.

«««

“W
e only have two days to get back.” These are the first words Hel’s spoken since she half-dragged me out of the foothills and into a mountain cave.

I say nothing. I’m not ready for words yet. A fox roasts over a fire, and my mouth waters at the smell. Night has fallen, and outside the cave, thunder reverberates. Black clouds roll out from the Wastes, and the heavens break open, rain cascading through lightning-edged cracks in the sky.

“I saw you around noon.” She adds a few more branches to the fire. “But it took me a couple of hours to come down the mountain to you. Thought
you were an animal at first. Then the sun hit your mask.” She stares out at the sheeting rain. “You looked bad.”

“How did you know I wasn’t Marcus?” I croak. My throat is dry, and I take another sip of water from the reed canteen she’s made. “Or Zak?”

“I can tell the difference between you and a couple of reptiles. Besides, Marcus fears water. The Augurs wouldn’t leave him in a desert. And Zak hates tight spaces, so he’s probably underground somewhere. Here. Eat.”

I eat slowly, watching Helene all the while. Her usually sleek hair is matted, its silver sheen faded. She’s covered in scratches and dried blood.

“What did you see, Elias? You were coming for the mountains, but you kept falling, clawing at the air. You talked about . . . about killing me.”

I shake my head. The Trial’s not over, and I have to forget what I saw if I want to survive the rest of it.

“Where did they leave you?” I ask.

She wraps her arms around herself and hunches down, her eyes barely visible. “Northwest. In the mountains. In a spire vulture’s nest.”

I put down my fox. Spire vultures are massive birds with five-inch talons and wingspans that clear twenty feet. Their eggs are the size of a man’s head, their hatchlings notoriously bloodthirsty. But worst of all for Helene, the vultures build their nests above the clouds, atop the most unassailable peaks.

She doesn’t have to explain the catch in her voice. She used to shake for hours after the Commandant made her scale the cliffs. The Augurs know all this, of course. They’ve picked it from her mind the way a thief picks a plum off a tree.

“How did you get down?”

“Luck. The mother vulture was gone, and the hatchlings were just breaking through their shells. But they were dangerous enough, even half-hatched.”

She pulls up her shirt to expose the pale, taut skin of her stomach, marred by a tangle of gouges.

“I jumped over the side of the nest and landed on a ledge ten feet down. I didn’t—I didn’t realize how high I was. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I kept seeing . . . ” She stops, and I realize that the Augurs must have forced her to face some foul hallucination, something equal to my nightmare battlefield. What darkness had she borne, thousands of feet up, with nothing between her and death but a few inches of rock?

“The Augurs are sick,” I say. “I can’t believe they’d—”

“They’re doing what they have to, Elias. They’re making us face our fears. They need to find the strongest, remember? The bravest. We have to trust them.”

She closes her eyes, shivering. I cross the space between us and put my hands on her arms to still her. When she lifts her lashes, I realize I can feel the heat of her body, that mere inches separate our faces. She has beautiful lips, I notice distractedly, the top one fuller than the bottom. I meet her gaze for one intimate, infinite moment. She leans toward me, those lips parting. A violent throb of desire tugs at me, followed by a frantic alarm bell.
Bad idea. Terrible idea. She’s your best friend. Stop.

I drop my arms and back away hastily, trying not to notice the flush on her neck. Helene’s eyes flash—anger or embarrassment, I can’t tell.

“Anyway,” she says. “I got down last night and figured I’d take the rim trail to Walker’s Gap. Fastest way back. There’s a guard station at the other end. We can get a boat to cross the river and supplies—clothes and boots,
at least.” She gestures to her ragged, bloodstained fatigues. “Not that I’m complaining.”

She looks up at me, a question in her eyes. “They left you in the Wastes, but . . . ”
But you don’t fear the desert. You grew up there.

“No use thinking about it,” I say.

After that, we are silent, and when the fire burns down, Helene tells me she’s turning in. But though she rolls over into a pile of leaves, I know sleep won’t come to her. She’s still clinging to the side of her mountain, just like I’m still wandering lost in my battlefield.

«««

H
elene and I are bleary-eyed and exhausted the next morning, but we start out well before dawn. We need to reach Walker’s Gap today if we want to get back to Blackcliff by sunset tomorrow.

We don’t speak—we don’t have to. Traveling with Helene is like pulling on a favorite shirt. We spent all of our time as Fivers together, and we fall instinctively back into the pattern of those days, with me taking point and Helene the rear guard.

The storm rolls away north to reveal a blue sky and a land clean and glistening. But the crisp beauty conceals fallen trees and washed-out trails, hillsides treacherous with mud and debris. There’s an unmistakable tension in the air. Just like before, I have the sense that something lies in wait. Something unknown.

Helene and I don’t stop to rest. Our eyes are peeled for bears, lynxes, wayward hunters—any creature that might call the mountains home.

In the afternoon, we climb the rise that leads to the Gap, a fifteen-mile-long river of forest amid the blue-speckled peaks of the Serran Range. The Gap appears almost gentle, carpeted with trees, rolling hills, and the occasional gold burst of a wildflower meadow. Helene and I exchange a glance. We both feel it. Whatever’s coming, it’s going to be soon.

As we move into the forest, the sense of danger increases, and I catch sight of a furtive movement at the edge of my vision. Helene looks back at me. She’s seen it too.

We alter our route frequently and stay off the trails, which slows our pace but makes an ambush more difficult. As dusk approaches, we haven’t made it out of the pass and are forced to move back to the trail so we can pick our way forward by moonlight.

The sun has just set when the forest falls silent. I shout Helene a warning and have barely enough time to bring my knife up before a dark shape hurtles out of the trees.

I don’t know what I’m expecting. An army of those I killed, coming for revenge? A nightmare creature conjured by the Augurs?

Something that will strike fear into my very bones. Something to test my courage.

I don’t expect the mask. I don’t expect the cold, flat eyes of Zak glaring out at me.

Behind me, Helene screams, and I hear the crash of two bodies hitting the ground. I turn to see Marcus attacking her. Her face is frozen in terror at the sight of him, and she makes no move to defend herself as he pins down her arms, laughing like he did when he kissed her.

“Helene!” At my shout, she snaps out of her daze and strikes out at Marcus, twisting away from him.

Then Zak is on me, raining blows down on my head, my neck. He fights recklessly, almost frenziedly, and I easily evade his assault. I come around behind him, sweeping my dagger in an arc. He spins back to dodge the attack and lunges at me, teeth bared like a dog’s. I duck beneath his arm and sink my dagger into his side. Hot blood sprays across my hand. I wrench the dagger out, and Zak groans and staggers back. Hand on his side, he stumbles into the trees, shouting for his twin.

Marcus, serpent that he is, darts into the forest after Zak. Blood shines on Marcus’s thigh, and I feel a burst of satisfaction. Hel marked him. I give chase, the battle rage rising, blinding me to anything else. Distantly, Helene calls my name. Ahead of me, the Snake’s shadow joins with Zak’s, and they barrel ahead, unaware of how close I am.

“Ten burning hells, Zak!” Marcus says. “The Commandant told us to finish them off before they left the Gap, and you go running into the woods like a scared little girl—”

“He stabbed me, all right?” Zak’s voice is breathless. “And she didn’t tell us we’d be dealing with both of them at once, did she?”

“Elias!”

Helene’s shout barely registers. Marcus and Zak’s conversation leaves me dumbstruck. It’s no surprise that my mother’s in league with the Snake and Toad. What I don’t understand is how she knew that Hel and I would be coming through the Gap.

“We have to finish them.” Marcus’s shadow turns, and I bring my dagger up. Then Zak grabs him.

“We have to get out of here,” he says. “Or we won’t make it back on time. Leave them. Come on.”

Part of me wants to chase after Marcus and Zak and take the answers to
my questions out of their hides. But Helene cries out again, her voice faint. She might be hurt.

When I get back to the clearing, Hel is slumped on the ground, her head tilted to the side. One arm is splayed out uselessly while she paws at her shoulder with the other, trying to stanch the sluggish pulse of blood draining out of her.

I close the distance between us in two strides, tearing off what remains of my shirt, wadding it and pressing down on the wound. She bucks her head, her knotted blonde hair whipping at her back as she cries out, a keening, animal wail.

“It’s all right, Hel,” I say. My hands shake, and a voice in my head screams that it’s not all right, that my best friend is going to die. I keep talking. “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to fix you right up.” I grab the canteen. I need to clean the wound and bind it. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

“Surprised me. Couldn’t move. I—I saw him on the mountain. He was—he and I—” She shudders, and I understand now. In the desert, I saw images of war and death. Helene saw Marcus. “His hands—everywhere.” She squeezes her eyes shut and draws her legs up protectively.

I’ll kill him
,
I think calmly, making the decision as easily as I’d choose my boots in the morning.
If she dies—so will he
.

“Can’t let them win. If they win . . . ” Helene’s words spill from her mouth. “Fight, Elias. You have to fight. You have to win.”

I cut open her shirt with my dagger, jolted for a moment by the delicacy of her skin. Dark has settled in, and I can barely see the wound, but I can feel the warmth of the blood as it oozes into my hand.

Helene grabs my arm with her good hand as I pour water over the injury.
I bind her up using what’s left of my shirt and some strips from her fatigues. After a few moments, her hand goes slack—she’s fallen unconscious.

My body aches in exhaustion, but I begin pulling vines down from the trees to make a sling. Hel can’t walk, so I’ll have to carry her to Blackcliff. As I work, my mind whirls. The Farrars ambushed us on the Commandant’s orders. No wonder she couldn’t contain her smugness before the Trials began. She was planning this attack. But how did she learn where we’d be?

It wouldn’t take a genius, I suppose. If she knew the Augurs would leave me in the Great Wastes and Helene in spire vulture territory, she would also know the only way for us to get back to Serra was through the Gap. But if she told Marcus and Zak, then that means they cheated and sabotaged us, which the Augurs pointedly forbade.

The Augurs must know what happened. Why haven’t they done anything about it?

When the sling is finished, I carefully load Helene into it. Her skin is blanched bone-white, and she shakes with cold. She feels light. Too light.

Again, the Augurs have preyed on the unexpected fear, the one I didn’t realize I had. Helene is dying. I didn’t know how terrifying it would be because she’s never come so close to it before.

My doubts crowd in—I won’t make it back to Blackcliff by sunset; the physician won’t be able to save her; she’ll die before I get to the school.
Stop, Elias. Move.

After years of the Commandant’s forced marches through the desert, carrying Helene is no burden. Though it’s deep night, I move quickly. I still have to hike out of the mountains, get a boat from the river guardhouse, and row to Serra. I’ve already lost hours making the sling, and Marcus and Zak
will be well ahead of me. Even if I don’t stop from here until Serra, I’ll be hard-pressed to reach the belltower before sunset.

The sky pales, casting the jagged peaks of the mountains around me in shadow. The day is well under way when I emerge from the Gap. The Rei River stretches out below, slow and curving like a well-sated python. Barges and boats dot the water, and just beyond the eastern banks sits the city of Serra, its dun-colored walls imposing even from a distance of miles.

Smoke taints the air. A column of black rises into the sky, and though I can’t see the guardhouse from this spot on the trail, I know with sinking certainty that the Farrars got there before me. That they burned it along with the boathouse attached to it.

I sprint down the mountain, but by the time I reach the guardhouse, it’s nothing but a stinking, sooty hulk. The attached boathouse is a pile of smoldering logs, and the legionnaires manning it have cleared out—probably under orders from the Farrars.

I unlash Helene from my back. The jarring trip down the mountain has reopened her wound. My back is coated in her blood.

“Helene?” I sink to my knees and pat her face softly. “Helene!” Not even a flick of the eyelids. She is lost inside herself, and the skin around her wound is red and fevered. She’s getting an infection.

I stare flintily at the guard shack, willing a boat to appear. Any boat. A raft. A dinghy. A bleeding, hollowed-out log, I don’t care. Anything. But of course, there’s nothing. Sunset is, at most, an hour away. If I don’t get us across this river, we’re dead.

Strangely, it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head, cold and pitiless.
Nothing is impossible.
It’s something she’s said to her students a hundred times—when we were exhausted from back-to-back training battles or we
hadn’t slept in days. She always demanded more. More than we thought we had to give.
Either find a way to complete the tasks I have set before you
, she would tell us,
or die in the attempt. Your choice.