An Ember in the Ashes (32 page)

“I
f you wish to live, girl, then let them think you dead.”

Above the sudden din of the crowd, I barely hear the Augur’s panting whisper. Mystified by the fact that a Martial holy woman wants, for some reason, to help me, I’m stunned into silence. As her weight crushes me to the dais, the dagger Marcus has flung into her side is jarred loose. Blood seeps across the platform, and I shudder, chillingly reminded of how Nan died, in a pool of blood just like this one.

“Don’t move,” the Augur says. “No matter what happens.”

I do what she says, even as Elias shouts my name and tries to pull her off me. The messenger announces the Emperor’s assassination; Elias is sentenced to death and chained. Throughout, I remain still. But when the Augur named Cain announces the coronation, I stifle a gasp. After the coronation, the death cell prisoners will be executed—which means that unless the Resistance gets him out of prison, Darin will die tomorrow.

Or will he? Mazen says Darin’s in Bekkar’s death cells. Elias says Bekkar doesn’t have death cells.

I want to scream with frustration. I need clarity. The only one who can give it to me is Mazen, and the only way I’m going to find him is if I get out of here. But I can’t exactly stand up and stroll out. Everyone thinks I’m dead. Even if I could leave, Elias just sacrificed his life for mine. I can’t abandon him.

I lay uselessly, unsure of what to do, when the Augur decides for me. “You move now, you die,” she warns, pulling herself off me. When all eyes are on the tableaux beside us, she lifts me up and staggers toward the amphitheater door.

Dead. Dead.
I can practically hear the woman in my head.
Pretend you’re dead.
My limbs flop, and my head lolls. I keep my eyes closed, but when the Augur misses a step and nearly falls, they fly open of their own accord. No one notices, but for a brief moment, as Aquilla swears her fealty, I catch a glimpse of Elias’s face. And though I’ve seen my brother taken and my grandparents killed, though I’ve suffered beatings and scarrings and visited the night shores of Death’s realm, I know I’ve never felt the type of desolation and hopelessness I see in Elias’s eyes at that moment.

The Augur rights herself. Two of her fellows close around her, the way brothers flank a little sister in a rough crowd. Her blood soaks my clothes, blending into the black silk. She’s lost so much that I don’t understand how she can muster the strength to walk.

“Augurs cannot die,” she says through gritted teeth. “But we can bleed.”

We reach the amphitheater gates, and once through, the woman sets me on my feet in an alcove. I expect her to explain why she chose to take that dagger for me, but she just limps away, her brethren supporting her.

I look back through the amphitheater gates to where Elias kneels, chained. My head tells me I can do nothing for him, that if I try to help him, I’ll die. But I can’t bring myself to walk away.

“You are unhurt.” Cain has slipped away from the still-packed amphitheater, unnoticed by the jabbering crowd. “Good. Follow me.” He catches the look I cast at Elias and shakes his head.

“He is beyond your aid right now,” Cain says. “He has sealed his fate.”

“So that’s it for him?” I’m appalled at Cain’s callousness. “Elias refuses to kill me, and he dies for it? You’re going to punish him for showing mercy?”

“The Trials have rules,” Cain says. “Aspirant Veturius broke them.”

“Your rules are twisted. Besides, Elias wasn’t the only one who violated
your instructions. Marcus was supposed to kill me, and he didn’t. You still made him Emperor.”

“He
thinks
he killed you,” Cain says. “And he revels in the knowledge. That is what matters. Come, you must leave the school. If the Commandant knows you survived, your life is forfeit.”

I tell myself the Augur is right, that I can’t do anything for Elias. But I’m uneasy. I’ve done this before. I’ve left someone behind and lived to regret it every moment after.

“If you do not come with me, your brother
will
die.” The Augur senses my conflict and presses. “Is that what you want?”

He heads toward the gates, and after a dreadful few moments of indecision, I turn away from Veturius and follow him. Elias is resourceful—he might still find a way to avoid death.
But I won’t, Laia
.
I hear Darin.
Not unless you help me.

The legionnaires manning Blackcliff’s gates seem not to see us as we pass out of the school, and I wonder if Cain has used Augur sorcery on them. Why is he helping me? What does he want in exchange?

If he can read my suspicions, he doesn’t let on, instead leading me rapidly through the Illustrian Quarter and deep into the sweltering streets of Serra. His route is so convoluted that it seems for a time as if he has no destination in mind. No one looks twice at us, and no one speaks of the Emperor’s death or of Marcus’s coronation. The news hasn’t yet leaked out.

The silence between Cain and me stretches until I think it will fall and shatter on the ground. How will I get away from him and find the Resistance? I dash the thought from my head, lest the Augur pick it out—but then, I’ve already thought it, so it must be too late. I look askance at him. Is he reading all of this? Can he hear every thought?

“It’s not really mind-reading,” Cain murmurs, and I wrap my arms around myself and lean away, though I know doing so won’t shield my thoughts any better.

“Thoughts are complex,” he explains. “Messy. They are tangled as a jungle of vines, layered like the sediment in a canyon. We must weave through the vines, trace the sediment. We must translate and decipher.”

Ten hells. What does he know about me? Everything? Nothing?

“Where to begin, Laia? I know your every sinew is turned toward finding and saving your brother. I know your parents were the most powerful leaders the Resistance ever had. I know you’re falling for a Resistance fighter named Keenan but that you don’t trust him to love you back. I know you’re a Resistance spy.”

“But if you know I’m a spy—”

“I know,” Cain says, “but it matters not.” Ancient sadness flares in his eyes, as if he’s remembering someone long dead. “Other thoughts speak more clearly of who you are, what you are, in your deepest heart. In the night, your loneliness crushes you, as if the sky itself has swooped down to smother you in its cold arms—”

“That’s not—I—”

But Cain ignores me, his red eyes unfocused, his voice jagged, as if he is speaking his own innermost secrets instead of mine.

“You fear you will never have your mother’s courage. You fear your cowardice will spell the doom of your brother. You yearn to understand why your parents chose the Resistance over their children. Your heart wants Keenan, and yet your body is alight when Elias Veturius is near. You—”

“Stop.” It’s unbearable, this knowledge of me from someone who isn’t me.

“You are full, Laia. Full of life and dark and strength and spirit. You are
in our dreams. You will burn, for you are an ember in the ashes. That is your destiny. Being a Resistance spy—that is the smallest part of you. That is nothing.”

I scramble for words but find none. It is wrong that he knows so much of me and I know nothing of him in return.

“There’s nothing to me that is worth anything, Laia,” the Augur says. “I am an error, a mistake. I am failure and malice, greed and hatred. I am guilty. We are, all of us Augurs, guilty.” At my confusion, he sighs. His black eyes meet mine, and his description of himself and his kindred fades from my mind like a dream upon waking.

“We are here,” he says.

I look around uncertainly. A quiet street stretches in front of me with a row of identical houses on each side. The Mercator Quarter? Or perhaps the Foreign Quarter? I can’t tell. The few people on the streets are too far away to recognize.

“What—what are we doing here?”

“If you wish to save your brother, you need to speak with the Resistance,” he says. “I have brought you to them.” He nods to the street before me. “Seventh house on the right. In the basement. The door’s unlocked.”

“Why are you helping me?” I ask him. “What trick—”

“No trick, Laia. I cannot answer your questions except to say that for now, our interests align. I vow to you by blood and by bone that I do not deceive you in this. Go now, quickly. Time will not wait, and I fear you have little enough as it is.”

Despite his calm expression, there’s no mistaking the urgency in his voice. It fans my own unease. I nod my thanks, wondering at the strangeness of the last few minutes, and go.

«««

A
s the Augur predicted, the back door to the house’s basement is unlocked. I take two steps down the stairs before a scimpoint meets my neck.

“Laia?” The scim drops, and Keenan moves into the light. His red hair sticks up at odd angles, and a bandage wrapped haphazardly around his bicep is stained with blood. His freckles stand out jarringly against the sick paleness of his skin. “How did you find us? You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe for you. Quick”—he glances over his shoulder—“before Mazen sees—go!”

“I discovered an entrance to Blackcliff. I have to tell him. And there’s something else—a spy—”

“No, Laia,” Keenan says. “You can’t—”

“Who’s there, Keenan?” Footsteps clump toward us, and a second later, Mazen sticks his head in the stairwell.

“Ah. Laia. You tracked us down.” The older man shoots a look at Keenan, as if he must be responsible for this development. “Bring her.”

The tone of his voice raises the hair on my neck, and I reach through the slit in my skirt pocket for the dagger Elias gave me.

“Laia, listen to me,” Keenan whispers as he ushers me down the stairs. “No matter what he says, I—”

“Come now,” Mazen cuts Keenan off as we enter the basement. “I haven’t got all day.” The basement is small, with crates of goods in one corner and a round table in the center. Two men sit at the table‚ unsmiling and cold-eyed—Eran and Haider.

I wonder if one of them is the Commandant’s spy.

Mazen kicks a rickety chair in my direction, the invitation to sit obvious.
Keenan stands just behind me, shifting from foot to foot, an animal ill at ease. I try not to look at him.

“Well now, Laia,” Mazen says as I take a seat. “Any information for us? Other than the fact that the Emperor is dead.”

“How did you—”

“Because I’m the one who killed him. Tell me, have they named a new Emperor yet?”

“Yes.”
Mazen killed the Emperor?
I want him to tell me more, but I sense his impatience. “They named Marcus. The coronation is tomorrow.”

Mazen exchanges glances with his men and stands. “Eran, send out the runners. Haider, get the men ready. Keenan, deal with the girl.”

“Wait!” I stand as they do. “I have more—an entrance into Blackcliff. That’s the reason I came. So that you can get Darin out. And there’s something else you should know—” I mean to tell him about the spy, but he doesn’t let me.

“There’s no secret entrance into Blackcliff, Laia. Even if there was, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to attack a school of Masks.”

“Then how—”

“How?” he muses. “A good question. How do you get rid of a girl who blunders into your hideout at the most inopportune moment, claiming to be the long-lost daughter of the Lioness? How do you appease an essential faction in the Resistance when they stupidly insist you help her save her brother? How do you make it look like you’re helping her when in fact you don’t have the time or the men to do so?”

My mouth goes dry.

“I’ll tell you how,” Mazen says. “You give the girl a mission she won’t come back from. You send her to Blackcliff, home of her parents’ killer. You
give her impossible tasks, like spying on the most dangerous woman in the Empire, like learning about the Trials before they even occur.”

“You—you knew that the Commandant killed—”

“It’s nothing personal, girl. Sana threatened to pull her men from the Resistance over you. She’d been looking for an excuse, and when you walked in, she had it. But I needed her and her men more than ever. I’ve spent years building up what the Empire destroyed when they killed your mother. I couldn’t let you ruin all of that.

“I expected that the Commandant would be rid of you in days, if not hours. But you survived. When you brought me information—real information—at the Moon Festival, my men warned me that Sana and her faction would consider the bargain met. She’d demand your brother be broken out of Central. Only problem was, you’d just told me the very thing that made it impossible for me to put up the men to do so.”

I think back. “The Emperor’s arrival in Serra.”

“When you told me of it, I knew we’d need every last Resistance fighter we had if we wanted to assassinate him. A much worthier cause than rescuing your brother, don’t you think?”

I remember then what the Commandant told me.
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?

Realization strikes me like a blow. The Resistance doesn’t even know they’ve played into the Commandant’s hands. Keris Veturia
wanted
the Emperor dead. The Resistance killed the Emperor and the most important members of his house, Marcus stepped into his place, and now there will be no civil war, no struggle between Gens Taia and Blackcliff.

You fool!
I want to scream.
You walked right into her trap!

“I needed to keep Sana’s faction happy,” Mazen says. “And I needed to keep you away from them. So I sent you to Blackcliff with an even more impossible task: Find me a secret entrance into the most well-guarded, heavily fortified Martial fort outside of Kauf Prison. I told Sana that your brother’s escape depended on it—and that giving any more details could imperil the jailbreak. Then I gave her and every other fighter a mission greater than one foolish girl and her brother: a revolution.”

He leans forward, his eyes glowing with fervor. “It’s only a matter of time before word gets out that Taius is dead. When it does—chaos, unrest. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. I only wish your mother was here to see it.”