An Ember in the Ashes (8 page)

Cain raises his hand for silence, and in seconds, the crowd goes mute. From where I sit on the field, he’s a bizarre specter, so frail and ashen. But when he speaks, his voice rings out across the amphitheater with a force that makes everyone sit up.

“From among the battle-hardened youth there shall rise the Foretold,” he says. “The Greatest Emperor, scourge of our enemies, commander of a host most devastating. And the Empire shall be made whole.”

“So the Augurs foretold five hundred years ago as we drew the stones of this school from the shuddering earth. And so the foretelling shall come to pass. The line of Emperor Taius XXI
will
fail.”

A near-mutinous buzz rolls through the crowd. If anyone but an Augur had questioned the Emperor’s line, he’d have already been struck down. The legionnaires of the honor guard bristle, hands on their weapons, but at one look from Cain, they settle back, a pack of barely cowed dogs.

“Taius XXI shall have no direct male issue,” Cain says. “Upon his death, the Empire will fall unless a new Warrior Emperor is chosen.

“Taius the First, Father of our Empire and Pater of Gens Taia, was the finest fighter of his time. He was tested, tempered, and tried before he was deemed fit to rule. The people of the Empire expect no less of their new leader.”

Bleeding, burning skies.
Behind me, Tristas elbows an open-mouthed Dex triumphantly. We all know what Cain will say next. But I still don’t believe what I’m hearing.

“Thus, the time for the Trials has come.”

The amphitheater explodes. Or at least it sounds like it’s exploded because I’ve never heard anything so loud. Tristas bellows, “I told you!” at Dex, who looks as if someone’s smashed him over the head with a hammer. Leander shouts, “Who? Who?” Marcus laughs, a smug cackle that makes me yearn to stab him. Helene has a hand clapped over her mouth, her eyes comically wide as she grasps for words.

Cain’s hand comes up again, and again, the crowd falls deathly silent.

“The Trials are upon us,” he says. “To ensure the future of the Empire, the new Emperor must be at the peak of his strength, as Taius was when he took the throne. Thus do we turn to our battle-hardened youth, our newest Masks. But not all shall vie for this great honor. Only the greatest of our graduates are worthy, the strongest. Only four. Of these four Aspirants, one will be named the Foretold. One will swear fealty and serve as the Blood Shrike. The others will be lost, as leaves on the wind. This, too, we have seen.”

My blood begins to pound in my ears
.

“Elias Veturius, Marcus Farrar, Helene Aquilla, Zacharias Farrar.” He calls our names in the order we’re ranked. “Rise and come forward.”

The amphitheater is dead quiet. Numbly, I stand, shutting out the searching looks of my classmates, the glee on Marcus’s face, the indecision on Zak’s.
The field of battle is my temple. The swordpoint is my priest . . .

Helene’s back is ramrod straight, but she looks to me, to Cain, to the Commandant. At first, I think she’s frightened. Then I notice the shine in her eyes, the spring in her step.

When Hel and I were Fivers, a Barbarian raiding party took us prisoner. I was trussed like a festival-day goat, but they tied Helene’s hands in front of her with twine and propped her on the back of a pony, assuming she was harmless.
That night, she used the twine to garrote three of our jailers and broke the necks of the other three with her bare hands.

“
They always underestimate me
,”
she said afterward, sounding puzzled. She was right, of course. It’s a mistake even I make. Hel’s not frightened, I realize. She’s euphoric. She wants this.

The walk to the stage takes too little time. In seconds, I’m standing in front of Cain with the others.

“To be chosen as an Aspirant for the Trials is to be granted the greatest honor the Empire has to offer.” Cain looks at each one of us, but it seems like his gaze lingers longest on me. “In exchange for this great gift, the Augurs require an oath: that as Aspirants, you will see the Trials through until the Emperor is named. The penalty for breaking this oath is death.

“You must not undertake this oath lightly,” Cain says. “If you wish, you may turn and leave this podium. You will remain a Mask, with all the respect and honor accorded to those of that title. Another will be chosen in your place. It is, in the end, your choice.”

Your choice.
Those two words shake me to my marrow.
Tomorrow you will have to make a choice. Between deserting and doing your duty. Between running from your destiny and facing it.

Cain doesn’t mean doing my duty as a Mask. He wants me to choose between taking the Trials and deserting.

You devious, red-eyed devil.
I want to be free
of the Empire. But how can I find freedom if I take the Trials? If I win and become Emperor, I’ll be tied
to the Empire for life. And if I swear fealty, I’ll be chained to the Emperor as the second-in-command—the Blood Shrike.

Or I’ll be a leaf lost in the wind, which is just a fancy Augur way of saying
dead
.

Reject him, Elias. Run. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be miles away.

Cain watches Marcus, and the Augur’s head is tilted as if he’s listening to something beyond our ken.

“Marcus Farrar. You are ready.” It’s not a question. Marcus kneels and draws his sword, offering it up to the Augur, his eyes glinting with a strangely exultant zeal, as if he’s already been named Emperor.

“Repeat after me,” Cain says. “I, Marcus Farrar, swear by blood and by bone, by my honor and the honor of Gens Farrar, that I will dedicate myself to the Trials, that I will see them through until the Emperor is named or my body lies cold.”

Marcus repeats the vow, his voice echoing in the breathless silence of the amphitheater. Cain closes Marcus’s hands over his blade, pressing until blood drips from his palms. A moment later, Helene kneels, offering her sword, repeating the vow, her voice singing out across the field as clearly as a bell at dawn.

The Augur turns to Zak, who looks at his brother for a long moment before nodding and taking the oath. Suddenly, I’m the only one of the four Aspirants still standing, and Cain is before me, awaiting my decision.

Like Zak, I hesitate. Cain’s words come back to me:
You are woven through our dreams. A thread of silver in a tapestry of night.
Is becoming Emperor my destiny, then? How can such a destiny lead to freedom? I have no desire to rule—the very idea of doing so is repellent to me.

But then my future as a deserter is no more appealing.
You will become everything you hate—evil, merciless, cruel.

Do I trust Cain when he says I will find freedom if I take the Trials? At Blackcliff we learn to classify people: civilian, combatant, enemy, ally, informer, defector. Based on that, we decide our next steps. But I have no understanding of the Augur. I don’t know his motivations, his desires. The only thing I have is my instinct, which tells me that in this matter, at least, Cain wasn’t lying. Whether his prediction is true or not, he trusts that it is. And since my gut tells me to trust him, albeit grudgingly, there’s only one decision that makes sense.

My eyes never leaving Cain’s, I drop to my knees, draw my sword, and run the blade across my palm. My blood falls to the dais in a rapid drip.

“I, Elias Veturius, swear, by blood and by bone . . . ”

T
he Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy.

My curiosity for the spy mission withers. The Empire trains the Masks at Blackcliff—Masks like the one who murdered my family and stole my brother. The school sprawls atop Serra’s eastern cliffs like a colossal vulture, a jumble of austere buildings enclosed by a black granite wall. No one knows what happens behind that wall, how the Masks train, how many there are, how they are chosen. Every year, a new class of Masks leaves Blackcliff, young, savage, and deadly. For a Scholar—especially a girl—Blackcliff is the most dangerous place in the city.

Mazen goes on. “She lost her personal slave—”

“The girl threw herself off the cliffs a week ago,” Keenan retorts, defying Mazen’s glare. “She’s the third slave to die in the Commandant’s service this year.”

“Quiet,” Mazen says. “I won’t lie to you, Laia. The woman’s unpleasant—”

“She’s insane,” Keenan says. “They call her the Bitch of Blackcliff. You won’t survive the Commandant. The mission will fail.”

Mazen’s fist comes down on the table. Keenan doesn’t flinch.

“If you can’t keep your mouth shut,” the Resistance leader growls, “then leave.”

Tariq’s jaw drops as he looks between the two men. Sana, meanwhile, watches Keenan with a thoughtful expression. Others in the cavern stare too, and I get the feeling that Keenan and Mazen don’t disagree very often.
Keenan scrapes his chair back and leaves the table, disappearing into the muttering crowd behind Mazen.

“You’re perfect for the job, Laia,” Mazen says. “You have all the skills the Commandant would expect from a house slave. She’ll assume you’re illiterate. And we have the means to get you in.”

“What happens if I’m caught?”

“You’re dead.” Mazen looks me straight in the eye, and I feel a bitter appreciation for his honesty. “Every spy we’ve sent to Blackcliff has been discovered and killed. This isn’t a mission for the fainthearted.”

I almost want to laugh. He couldn’t have picked a worse person for it. “You’re not doing a very good job selling it.”

“I don’t have to sell it,” Mazen says. “We can find your brother and break him out. You can be our eyes and ears in Blackcliff. A simple exchange.”

“You trust me to do this?” I ask. “You hardly know me.”

“I knew your parents. That’s enough for me.”

“Mazen.” Tariq speaks up. “She’s just a girl. Surely we don’t need to—”

“She invoked
Izzat
,” Mazen says. “But
Izzat
means more than freedom. It means more than honor. It means courage. It means proving yourself.”

“He’s right,” I say. If the Resistance is going to help me, I can’t have the fighters thinking I’m weak. A glimmer of red catches my eye, and I look across the cavern to where Keenan leans against a bunk watching me, his hair like fire in the torchlight
.
He doesn’t want me to take this mission because he doesn’t want to risk the men to save Darin. I put a hand to my armlet.
Be brave, Laia.

I turn to Mazen. “If I do this, you’ll find Darin? You’ll break him out of jail?”

“You have my word. It won’t be hard to locate him. He’s not a Resistance
leader, so it’s not as if they’ll send him to Kauf.” Mazen snorts, but mention of the infamous northern prison sends a chill across my skin. Kauf’s interrogators have one goal: to make inmates suffer as much as possible before they die.

My parents died in Kauf. My sister, only twelve at the time, died there too.

“By the time you make your first report,” Mazen says, “I’ll be able to tell you where Darin is. When your mission is complete, we’ll break him out.”

“And after?”

“We pry your slaves’ cuffs off and pull you out of the school. We can make it look like a suicide, so you’re not hunted. You can join us, if you like. Or we can arrange passage to Marinn for you both.”

Marinn. The free lands.
What I wouldn’t give to escape there with my brother, to live in a place with no Martials, no Masks, no Empire.

But first I have to survive a spy mission. I have to survive Blackcliff.

Across the cavern, Keenan shakes his head. But the fighters around me nod.
This is Izzat
,
they seem to say. I fall silent, as if considering, but my decision is made the second I realize that going to Blackcliff is the only way to get Darin back.

“I’ll do it.”

“Good.” Mazen doesn’t sound surprised, and I wonder if he knew all along that I would say yes. He raises his voice so it carries. “Keenan will be your handler.”

At this, the younger man’s face goes, if possible, even darker. He presses his lips together as if to keep from speaking.

“Her hands and feet are cut up,” Mazen says. “See to her injuries, Keenan, and tell her what she needs to know. She leaves for Blackcliff tonight.”

Mazen leaves, trailed by members of his faction, while Tariq claps me on the shoulder and wishes me luck. His allies pepper me with advice:
Never
go looking for your handler
.
Don’t trust anyone.
They only wish to help, but it’s overwhelming, and when Keenan cuts through the crowd to retrieve me, I’m almost relieved.

Almost. He jerks his head to a table in the corner of the cavern and walks off without waiting for me.

A glint of light near the table turns out to be a small spring. Keenan fills two tubs with water and a powder I recognize as tanroot. He sets one tub on the table and one on the floor.

I scrub my hands and feet clean, wincing as the tanroot sinks into the scrapes I picked up in the catacombs. Keenan watches silently. Beneath his scrutiny, I am ashamed at how quickly the water turns black with muck—and then angry at myself for being ashamed.

When I’m done, Keenan sits at the table across from me and takes my hands. I’m expecting him to be brusque, but his hands are—not gentle, exactly, but not callous, either. As he examines my cuts, I think of a dozen questions I could ask him, none of which will make him think that I’m strong and capable instead of childish and petty.
Why do you seem to hate me? What did I do to you?

“You shouldn’t be doing this.” He rubs a numbing ointment on one of the deeper cuts, keeping his attention fixed on my wounds. “This mission.”

You’ve made that clear, you jackass.
“I won’t let Mazen down. I’ll do what I have to.”

“You’ll try, I’m sure.” I’m stung at his bluntness, though by now it should be clear that he has no faith in me. “The woman’s a savage. The last person we sent in—”

“Do you think I want to spy on her?” I burst out. He looks up, surprise in his eyes. “I don’t have a choice. Not if I want to save the only family I have left. So just—”
Shut it
,
I want to say. “Just don’t make this harder.”

Something like embarrassment crosses his face, and he regards me with a tiny bit less scorn. “I’m . . . sorry.” His words are reluctant, but a reluctant apology is better than none at all. I nod jerkily and realize that his eyes are not blue or green but a deep chestnut brown.
You’re noticing his eyes, Laia. Which means you’re staring into them. Which means you need to stop.
The smell of the salve stings my nostrils, and I wrinkle my nose.

“Are you using twin-thistle in this salve?” I ask. At his shrug, I pull the bottle from him and take another sniff. “Try ziberry next time. It doesn’t smell like goat dung, at least.”

Keenan raises a fiery eyebrow and wraps one of my hands with gauze. “You know your remedies. Useful skill. Your grandparents were healers?”

“My grandfather.” It hurts to speak of Pop, and I pause a long while before going on. “He started training me formally a year and a half ago. I mixed his remedies before that.”

“Do you like it? Healing?”

“It’s a trade.” Most Scholars who aren’t enslaved work menial jobs—as farmhands or cleaners or stevedores—backbreaking labor for which they’re paid next to nothing. “I’m lucky to have one. Though, when I was little, I wanted to be a
Kehanni.
”

Keenan’s mouth curves into the barest smile. It is a small thing, but it transforms his entire face and lightens the weight on my chest.

“A Tribal tale-spinner?” he says. “Don’t tell me you believe in myths of jinn and efrits and wraiths that kidnap children in the night?”

“No.” I think of the raid. Of the Mask. My lightness melts away. “I don’t need to believe in the supernatural. Not when there’s worse that roams the night.”

He goes still, a sudden stillness that draws my eyes up and into his. My
breath hitches at what I see laid bare in his gaze: a wrenching knowledge, a bitter understanding of pain that I know well. Here’s someone who has walked paths as dark as mine. Darker, maybe.

Then coldness descends over his face, and his hands are moving again.

“Right,” he says. “Listen carefully. Today was graduation day at Blackcliff. But we’ve just learned that this year’s ceremony was different. Special.”

He tells me of the Trials and the four Aspirants. Then he gives me my mission.

“We need three pieces of information. We need to know what each Trial is, where it’s taking place, and when. And we need to know this before each Trial begins, not after.”

I have a dozen questions, but I don’t ask, knowing he’ll just think me more foolish.

“How long will I be in the school?”

Keenan shrugs and finishes bandaging my hands. “We know next to nothing about the Trials,” he says. “But I can’t imagine it will take more than a few weeks—a month, at most.”

“Do you—do you think Darin will last that long?”

Keenan doesn’t answer.

«««

H
ours later, in the early evening, I find myself in a house in the Foreign Quarter with Keenan and Sana, standing before an elderly Tribesman. He’s clad in the loose robes of his people and looks more like a kindly old uncle than a Resistance operative.

When Sana explains what she wants of him, he takes one look at me and folds his arms across his chest.

“Absolutely not,” he says in heavily accented Serran. “The Commandant will eat her alive.”

Keenan throws Sana a pointed look, as if to say,
What did you expect?

“With respect,” Sana says to the Tribesman, “can we . . . ” She gestures to a lattice-screen doorway leading to another room. They disappear behind the lattice. Sana’s speaking too softly for me to hear, but whatever she’s saying must not be working, because even through the screen, I can see the Tribesman shaking his head.

“He won’t do it,” I say.

Beside me, Keenan leans against the wall, unconcerned. “Sana can convince him. She’s not leader of her faction for nothing.”

“I wish I could do something.”

“Try looking a little braver.”

“What, like you?” I arrange my face so it’s blank as slate, slump against the wall, and look off into the distance. Keenan actually smiles for a fraction of a second. It takes years off his face.

I rub a bare foot across the hypnotic swirls of the thick Tribal rug on the floor. Pillows embroidered with tiny mirrors are strewn across it, and lamps of colored glass hang from the roof, catching the last rays of sunlight.

“Darin and I came to a house like this to sell Nan’s jams once.” I reach up to touch one of the lamps. “I asked him why Tribesmen have mirrors everywhere, and he said—” The memory is clear and sharp in my mind, and an ache for my brother, for my grandparents, pulses in my chest with such violence that I clamp my mouth shut.

Tribesmen think the mirrors ward off evil
,
Darin said that day. He took out his sketchbook while we waited for the Tribal trader and started drawing, capturing the intricacy of the lattice screens and lanterns with small, quick strokes of charcoal.
Jinn and wraiths can’t stand the sight of themselves, apparently.

After that, he’d answered a dozen more of my questions with his usual quiet confidence. At the time, I’d wondered how he knew so much. Only now do I understand—Darin always listened more than he spoke, watching, learning. In that way, he was like Pop.

The ache in my chest expands, and my eyes are suddenly hot.

“It will get better,” Keenan says. I look up to see sadness flicker across his face, almost instantly replaced by that now-familiar chill. “You’ll never forget them, not even after years. But one day, you’ll go a whole minute without feeling the pain. Then an hour. A day. That’s all you can ask for, really.” His voice drops. “You’ll heal. I promise.”

He looks away, distant again, but I’m grateful to him anyway, because for the first time since the raid, I feel less alone. A second later, Sana and the Tribesman come around the screen.

“You’re sure this is what you want?” the Tribesman asks me.

I nod, not trusting my voice.

He sighs. “Very well.” He turns to Sana and Keenan. “Say your goodbyes. If I take her now, I can still get her into the school by dark.”

“You’ll be all right.” Sana hugs me tightly, and I wonder if she’s trying to convince me or herself. “You’re the Lioness’s daughter. And the Lioness was a survivor.”

Until she wasn’t.
I lower my gaze so Sana doesn’t see my doubt. She heads
out the door, and then Keenan is before me. I cross my arms, not wanting him to think I need a hug from him too.

But he doesn’t touch me. Just cocks his head and lifts his fist to his heart—the Resistance salute.

“Death before tyranny,” he says. Then he, too, is gone.

«««

A
half hour later, dusk drops over the city of Serra, and I am following the Tribesman swiftly through the Mercator Quarter, home to the wealthiest members of the Martial merchant class. We stop before the ornate iron gate of a slaver’s home, and the Tribesman checks my manacles, his tan robes swishing softly as he moves around me. I clasp my bandaged hands together to stop them from shaking, but the Tribesman gently pries my fingers apart.

“Slavers catch lies the way spiders catch flies,” he says. “Your fear is good. It makes your story real. Remember: Do not speak.”

I nod vigorously. Even if I wanted to say something, I’m too frightened.
The slaver is Blackcliff’s sole supplier
, Keenan had explained while walking me to the Tribesman’s house.
It’s taken months for our operative to gain his trust. If he doesn’t pick you for the Commandant, your mission’s dead before it begins.