An Ember in the Ashes (15 page)

Exhaustion is temporary. Pain is temporary. But Helene dying because I didn’t find a way to get her back on time—that’s permanent.

I spot a smoking wooden beam half in the water, half out. It will do. I kick, shove, and roll the blasted thing to the river, where it bobs beneath the water threateningly before floating to the surface. Carefully, I lay Helene on the beam and lash her into place. Then I sling an arm around it and make for the closest boat as if all the jinn of air and sea are on my tail.

The river’s waters run freely at this time, mostly empty of the barges and canoes that choke it in the morning. I angle toward a Mercator craft bobbing mid-river, its oars at rest. The sailors don’t notice me approaching, and when I’m right alongside the rope ladder leading to the boat’s deck, I cut Hel from the beam. She sinks into the water almost immediately. I grab the slick rope with one hand and Helene with the other, eventually working her body over my shoulder and clambering up the ladder to the deck.

A silver-haired Martial with a soldier’s build—the captain, I assume—is overseeing a group of Plebeians and Scholar slaves stacking boxes of cargo.

“I am Aspirant Elias Veturius of Blackcliff.” I level my voice until it is as flat as the deck I stand on. “And I am commandeering this vessel.”

The man blinks, taking in the sight before him: two Masks, one so covered in blood it appears that she’s been tortured, and the other practically naked with a week’s worth of beard, wild hair, and a mad look in his eyes.

But the merchant has clearly done his time in the Martial army because after only a moment, he nods.

“I am at your disposal, Lord Veturius.”

“Get this boat docked in Serra. Now.”

The captain shouts orders at his men, a whip much in evidence. In under a minute, the boat is chugging toward Serra’s docks. I look balefully at the sinking sun, willing it to at least slow down. I have no more than a half hour left, and I still have to get through the dock traffic and up to Blackcliff.

I’m cutting it close. Too close.

Helene moans, and I place her on the deck gently. She is sweating despite the cool river air, and her skin is deathly pale. She opens her eyes for a moment.

“Do I look that bad?” she whispers, seeing the expression on my face.

“Actually, it’s an improvement. The filthy woodswoman thing suits you.”

She smiles, a rare, sweet smile, but it fades quickly.

“Elias—you can’t let me die. If I die, then you—”

“Don’t talk, Hel. Rest.”

“Can’t die. Augur said—he said if I lived, then—”

“Shhh . . . ”

Her eyes flutter closed, and impatiently, I eye Serra’s docks, still a half mile away and crowded with sailors, soldiers, horses, and wagons. I want to urge the boat faster, but the slaves are already rowing furiously, the captain’s whip at their backs.

Before the boat docks, the captain lowers the gangplank, hails a legionnaire patrolling nearby, and relieves him of his horse. For once, I’m thankful for the severity of Martial discipline.

“Luck to you, Lord Veturius,” the captain says. I thank him and load Hel onto the waiting horse. She sags forward, but I don’t have time to adjust her. I vault onto the beast and put heel to flank, my eyes on the sun hovering just above the horizon.

The city passes in a blur of gaping Plebeians, muttering auxes, and a riot
of merchants and their stalls. I race past all of them, down Serra’s main thoroughfare, through the dwindling crowds of Execution Square, and up the cobbled streets of the Illustrian Quarter. The horse surges on recklessly, and I’m too crazed to even feel guilty when I knock over a peddler and his cart. Helene’s head bobs back and forth like a slack marionette’s.

“Hang on, Helene,” I whisper. “Almost there.”

We enter an Illustrian market, scattering slaves in our wake before turning a corner. Blackcliff looms before us as suddenly as if it has sprung fully formed from the earth. The faces of the gate guards blur as we gallop past them.

The sun sinks lower.
Not yet
,
I tell it.
Not yet.

“Come on.” I dig my heels in deeper. “Faster!”

Then we are across the training field, up the hill, and inside the central courtyard. The belltower rises in front of me, a few precious yards away. I jerk the horse to a halt and leap off it.

The Commandant stands at the base of the tower, her face stiff—from anger or nerves, I can’t tell. Beside her, Cain waits with two other Augurs, both women. They look at me with mute interest, as if I am a mildly entertaining side act at a circus.

A scream tears through the air. The courtyard is lined with hundreds of people: students, Centurions, and families—including Helene’s. Her mother falls to her knees, hysterical at the sight of her blood-covered daughter. Hel’s sisters, Hannah and Livia, drop beside her as Pater Aquillus remains stone-faced.

Next to him, Grandfather stands in full battle dress. He looks like a bull about to charge, and his gray eyes blaze with pride.

I pull Helene into my arms and stride to the belltower. It’s never seemed
so long, this courtyard, not even when I’ve run a hundred sprints across it in the dead of summer.

My body drags. All I want is to collapse onto the ground and sleep for a week. But I take those last few steps, laying Helene down against the tower and reaching out a hand to touch the stone. A moment after my skin meets the rock, the sunset drums boom out.

The crowd erupts. I’m not sure who starts the cheer. Faris? Dex? Maybe even Grandfather. The whole square echoes with it. They must hear it down in the city.

“
Veturius! Veturius! Veturius!”

“Get the physician,” I roar at a nearby Cadet who cheers with all the others. His hands freeze mid-clap, and he gapes at me. “Now! Move!”

“Helene,” I whisper. “Hold on.”

She’s as waxen as a doll. I put a hand against her cold cheek, rubbing a circle over the skin with my thumb. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t draw breath. And when I put my fingers to her throat, to where her pulse should be, I feel nothing.

S
ana and Mazen disappear up an interior staircase as Keenan walks me out of the basement. I expect him to beg off as quickly as possible. Instead, he beckons me to follow him to a weed-choked backstreet nearby. The street is empty but for a band of urchins crouching over some small treasure, and they scatter at our approach.

I sidle a glance at the red-haired fighter, to find his attention fixed on me with an intensity that sends an unexpected flutter through my chest.

“They’ve been hurting you.”

“I’m fine,” I say. I won’t let him think I’m weak. I’m on thin ice as it is. “Darin’s all that matters. The rest is just . . . ” I shrug. Keenan cocks his head and brushes a thumb across the now-faint bruises on my neck. Then he takes my wrist and turns it over to reveal the angry welts the Commandant left there. His hands are slow and gentle as candle flame, and the warmth in my chest spreads up through my collarbone and down to my fingertips. My pulse skitters, and I shake his hand away, unnerved at my own reaction.

“Was it all the Commandant?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” I say more sharply than I intend. His eyes go cold at the bite in my voice, and I soften. “I can do this, all right? It’s Darin’s life at stake here. I just wish I knew . . . ”
If he is nearby. If he is all right. If he is in pain.

“Darin’s still in Serra. I heard the spy who gave the report.” Keenan walks me further down the street. “But he’s not . . . well. They’ve been at him.”

A punch to the stomach would have been gentler. I don’t have to ask who “they” are, I already know.
Interrogators. Masks.

“Look,” Keenan says. “You don’t know the first thing about spying. That’s clear. Here are some basics: Gossip with the other slaves—you’ll be surprised at what you learn. Keep your hands busy—sewing, scrubbing, fetching. The busier you are, the less likely it is that anyone will question your presence, wherever you might be. If you see a chance to get your hands on real information, take it. But always have an exit plan. The cloak you’re wearing is good—it helps you blend in. But you walk and act like a freewoman. If I noticed it, others will too. Shuffle, hunch. Act beaten. Act broken.”

“Why are you trying to help me?” I ask. “You didn’t want to risk the men to save my brother.”

He is suddenly very interested in the moldering bricks of a nearby building. “My parents are dead too,” he says. “My whole family, actually. A long time ago now.” He gives me a quick, almost angry glance, and for a second, I see them in his eyes, this lost family, flashes of fiery hair and freckles. Did he have brothers? Sisters? Was he the oldest? The youngest? I want to ask, but his face is shuttered.

“I still think the mission is a terrible idea,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand why you’re doing it. And it doesn’t mean I want you to fail.” He touches his fist to his heart and holds out his hand to me. “Death before tyranny,” he murmurs.

“Death before tyranny.” I take his hand, aware of every muscle in his fingers.

No one has touched me for the past ten days except to hurt me. How I miss being touched—Nan stroking my hair, Darin arm-wrestling me and pretending to lose, Pop squeezing my shoulder good night.

I don’t want Keenan to let go. As if he understands, he holds on a moment
longer. But then he turns and walks away, leaving me alone on an empty street with fingers still tingling.

«««

A
fter delivering the Commandant’s first letter to the couriers’ office, I head to the smoke-choked streets near the river docks. Serran summers are always blistering, but the heat in the Weapons Quarter takes on an animal esurience.

The district is a hive of movement and sound, busier on a regular day than most markets are on festival days. Sparks fly from hammers as big as my head, forge fires glow a red deeper than blood, and cottony plumes of steam erupt every few feet from freshly quenched swords. Blacksmiths shout orders as apprentices jostle to follow them. And above it all, the strain and pump of hundreds of bellows, creaking like a fleet of ships in a storm.

Within seconds of entering the district, I am stopped by a platoon of legionnaires demanding to know my business. I offer them the Commandant’s remaining letter only to find myself arguing with them over its authenticity for ten minutes. Finally, grudgingly, they send me on my way.

It makes me wonder yet again how Darin managed to get into the district not just once, but day after day.

They’ve been at him
,
Keenan said.
How long can Darin hold out against his torturers? Longer than me, certainly
.
When Darin was fifteen, he fell from a tree while trying to draw Scholars working a Martial orchard. He arrived home with bone jutting out of his wrist, and I screamed and nearly fainted at the sight.
It’s all right
,
he said to me.
Pop will set it. Find him and
then go back for my sketchbook. I dropped it, and I don’t want someone to take it.

My brother has Mother’s iron will. If anyone can survive a Martial interrogation, it’s him.

As I walk, I feel a tug on my skirt and glance down, expecting to find it caught beneath someone’s boot. Instead, I catch a glimpse of a slit-eyed shadow slipping quickly across the cobbles. A tingle runs up my spine at the sight, and I hear a low, cruel cackle. My skin prickles—that laugh was directed at me. I’m certain of it.

Unsettled, I quicken my pace, eventually persuading an elderly Plebeian man to direct me to Teluman’s forge. I find it just off the main street, marked only by an ornate iron
T
hammered into the door.

Unlike the other forges, this one is utterly silent. I knock, but no one answers. Now what? Do I open the door and risk angering the smith by barging in, or do I go back to the Commandant without a response when she specifically demanded one?

It’s not a difficult choice.

The front door opens to an antechamber. A dust-coated counter splits the room, backed by dozens of glass display cases and another, narrower door. The forge itself sits in a larger room to my right, cold and empty, its bellows still. A hammer lies on an anvil, but the other tools hang neatly from pegs on the walls. Something strikes me about the room. It reminds me of another I’ve seen, but I can’t place it.

Light filters in weakly through a bank of high windows, illuminating the dust I kicked up when entering. The place has an abandoned feel to it, and I feel my frustration building. How am I supposed to take back a response if the smith isn’t here?

Sunlight glints off the row of glass cases, and my gaze is drawn to the weapons within. They are gracefully wrought, each one worked with the same intricate, almost obsessive detail, from hilt to crossbar to minutely etched blade. Intrigued by their beauty, I move closer. The blades remind me of something, as the whole shop does—something important, something I should be able to put my finger on.

And then I understand. The Commandant’s letter falls from my suddenly numb hand, and I
know.
Darin drew
these
weapons. He drew
this
forge. He drew that hammer and that anvil. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out how to save my brother that I’d nearly forgotten the drawings that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. And here is their source, before my eyes.

“Something the matter, girl?”

A Martial man comes through the narrow back door, looking more like a river pirate than a blacksmith. His head is shaved, and he drips with piercings—six through each ear, one in his nose, his eyebrows, his lips. Multicolored tattoos—of eight-pointed stars, lush-leafed vines, a hammer and anvil, a bird, a woman’s eyes, scales—run from his wrists up his arms and into a black leather jerkin. He can’t be more than fifteen years older than me. Like most Martials, he’s tall and muscled, but lanky, without the brawn I’d expect of a blacksmith.

Is
this
the man Darin was spying on?

“Who are you?” I’m so thrown off that I forget he’s a Martial.

The man lifts his eyebrows as if to say,
Me? Who in the ten hells are you?
“This is my shop,” he says. “I’m Spiro Teluman.”

Of course he is, Laia, you idiot.
I scramble for the note from the Commandant, hoping the smith thinks my comment is the result of being a dim-witted Scholar rat. He reads the note but says nothing.

“She—she requested a response. Sir.”

“Not interested.” He looks up. “Tell her I’m not interested.” Then he returns to the back room.

I stare after Teluman uncertainly. Does he know my brother was taken to prison for spying on his shop? Has the smith seen what Darin drew? Is his shop always abandoned? Is that how Darin got so close? I’m still trying to piece it all together when an unsettling feeling creeps up my neck, like the greedy touch of a ghost’s fingers.

“Laia.”

A clump of shadows is gathered at the foot of the door, black as spilled ink. The shadows take shape, eyes glinting, and I begin to sweat.
Why here? Why now?
How can creatures of my own mind not be controllable by me? Why can I not will them away?

“Laia.”
The shadows rise, morphing into a manlike shape. They take on form and color, and the voice is as familiar and true as if my brother is standing in front of me.

“Why did you leave me, Laia?”

“Darin?” I forget that this is a hallucination, that I’m in a Martial forge with a murderous-looking blacksmith yards away.

The simulacrum tilts its head, just like Darin used to.
“They’re hurting me, Laia.”

It’s not Darin. My mind is slipping. This is guilt, fear. The voice changes, twisting and layering as if there are three Darins all talking at once. The light in the fake-Darin’s eyes goes out as quickly as a sun in a storm, and his irises darken into black pits, as if his entire body is filled with shadow.

“I won’t survive it, Laia. It hurts.
”

The simulacrum’s hand shoots out to grab my arm, and a bone-deep cold jolts through me. I scream before I can stop myself, and a second later, the creature’s hand drops away. I feel a presence behind me and turn to find Spiro Teluman wielding the most beautiful scim I’ve ever seen. He pushes me casually to the side, holding the scim to the simulacrum.

As if he can see the creatures. As if he can hear them.

“Begone,” he says.

The simulacrum swells, titters, and then falls into a pile of laughing shadows, their cackles falling against my ears like slivers of ice.

“We have the boy now. Our brothers gnaw at his soul. Soon he will be mad and ripe. Then we shall feast.”

Spiro brings the scim down. The shadows scream, and the sound is like nails on wood. They squeeze under the door, a mass of rats escaping a flood. Seconds later, they’re gone.

“You—you can see them,”
I say. “I thought they were all in my head. I thought I was going mad.”

“They’re called ghuls,” Teluman says.

“But . . . ” Seventeen years of Scholar pragmatism protest the existence of creatures that are supposed to be nothing but legend. “But ghuls aren’t real.”

“They are as real as you or I. They left our world for a time. But they’ve returned. Not everyone can see them. They feed off sorrow and sadness and the stink of blood.” He looks around his forge. “They like this place.”

His pale green eyes meet mine, careful and wary. “I’ve changed my mind. Tell the Commandant I’ll consider her request. Tell her to send me some specs. Tell her to send them with you.”

»»»

M
y mind whirls with questions when I leave the smithy. Why did Darin draw Teluman’s shop? How did he get in? Why can Teluman see the ghuls? Did he see the shadow-Darin too? Is Darin dying? If ghuls are real, then are jinn real too?

When I arrive back at Blackcliff, I attack my tasks with a single-minded focus, losing myself in the polishing of floors and scrubbing of baths so that I might escape the cyclone of thoughts in my head.

By late evening, the Commandant still has not returned. I head to the kitchen smelling of polish, my head aching with the indecipherable echo of Blackcliff’s drums, which have been pounding all day.

Izzi risks a glance in my direction while she folds a stack of towels. When I smile, she offers a tentative twitch of her lips in return. Cook wipes down the counters for the night, ignoring me, as usual. I think back to Keenan’s advice: to gossip, to keep myself busy. Quietly, I take up a basket of mending and sit at the worktable. As I watch Cook and Izzi, I suddenly wonder if they are related. They tilt their heads in the same way, they are both small and fair-haired. And there’s a quiet companionship between them that makes my heart ache for Nan.

Eventually, Cook turns in for the night, and silence fills the kitchen. Somewhere in the city, my brother suffers in a Martial prison.
You have to get information, Laia. You have to get the Resistance something. Get Izzi to talk.

“The legionnaires were in an uproar outside,” I say without looking up from my mending. Izzi makes a polite sound.

“And the students too. I wonder why.” When she doesn’t respond, I shift my sitting position, and she glances over her shoulder at me.

“It’s the Trials.” She stops her folding for a moment. “The Farrar brothers came back this morning. Aquilla and Veturius barely made it on time. They’d have been killed if they’d showed up even seconds later.”

This is the most she’s said to me at once, and I have to remind myself not to stare. “How do you know all this?” I ask.

“The entire school’s talking about it.” Izzi lowers her voice, and I inch closer. “Even the slaves. Not much else to talk about around here, unless you want to sit around comparing bruises.”

I chuckle, and it feels strange, almost wrong, like making a joke at a funeral. But Izzi smiles, and I don’t feel as bad. The drums start up again, and though Izzi doesn’t halt her work, I can tell she’s listening.

“You understand the drums.”

“They mostly give orders.
Blue Platoon report for watch. All Cadets to the armory.
That sort of thing. Right now they’re ordering a sweep of the eastern tunnels.” She looks down at the neat stack of towels. A strand of blonde hair falls into her face, making her appear especially young. “When you’ve been here for a while, you’ll learn to understand them.”