Memories of Ash (The Sunbolt Chronicles Book 2) (29 page)

“There’s an uplifting topic,” Kenta mutters. “What would you like to know? The sultan died of a debilitating illness some months ago. Blackflame kindly helped appoint a regent until the heir can be located. Until he came here, Blackflame was at the palace every other day to provide his own counsel as well.”

A debilitating illness — as my father had, wasting away no matter what cures my mother brought him. Wasting away because it wasn’t an illness he suffered from, but poison. I clear my throat, try to focus. “Didn’t the sultan have an heir? Some prince or the other?”

“Of course. The crown prince. You’ve forgotten his name, haven’t you? No matter; he’s disappeared. Gone into hiding, if you ask the Ghost.”

“Not like the other people who disappear?”

Kenta smirks. “No. Blackflame was desperate to find him, and our informants were clear he didn’t know where the prince went.”

“There have been other changes as well,” he goes on. “Blackflame has almost completely replaced his guard with northmen. The new tax laws favor northern traders, which means we have more of them coming through every day to the detriment of some of our own traders.”

I’d forgotten these people, forgotten that Blackflame was more than a name that haunts my dreams, a voice that took my mother from me. All this time that I’ve been living safely in the mountains, he has tightened his hold over Karolene. And people are suffering.

“You said you wanted nuts?” Kenta nods toward an elderly woman roasting nuts alongside the next building.

“In their shells.” It might look a little too odd if we offered to buy empty shells.

“Right.” He darts ahead to speak with the woman. By the time I catch up, he’s handing over a copper in exchange for an old, worn pouch of nuts.

“That enough?” he asks, handing it to me.

“Plenty.”

“Then let’s go.”

Kenta leads the way through a few more narrow alleyways to a stairwell built along the side of a building. We reach the roof as I pop the last of my roll into my mouth. Kenta comes to a stop toward the back, blocked from view by multiple lines of washing strung from poles. “This look all right?”

I nod. It’s empty and quiet, and not too near any major streets. A few rooftops away, a half dozen brightly colored kites swoop through the air, riding the salty breeze, their ribbon tails fluttering behind them. A scarlet kite suddenly jerks free, swooping erratically before disappearing below the rooftops. A faint cheer rises from the kite fliers. “What are they doing?”

“Kite fighting,” Kenta explains, half-eaten sandwich in one hand. “They try to bring down the other kites, or break them free from their owner. Last kite left is the winner.”

Nothing to worry about, then. I sit down and work off my boot. The feather I scrape from the inside sole is mashed and ratty, but still holds a gleam of gold.

Seeing it in my hand, Kenta asks, “What exactly will you owe this friend of yours?”

“Nothing I don’t owe him already,” I admit. “I’ll merely owe it sooner.” It helps to think of it in those terms.

“You’re sure about this?”

I consider the feather, the glint of gold. No, I’m not sure. Burning this feather means that after I help Stormwind, I return to the Burnt Lands. It means that I must make an attempt at breaking apart ancient enchantments I know nothing about, spells that could very well kill me in their unraveling.

Stormwind wouldn’t want this. She didn’t want me to come here and she would never want such a future for me. No more than I want a prison for hers.

“It’s all right if you don’t do this.”

It’s a relief to look away from the feather, to Kenta. “There’s no other way past the guards. She can’t just walk out of there. They’ll follow her trail, her scent. Garlic and onions might mask her passing for a few moments, but she’s not going to be able to walk out of the Mekteb.”

“What about you? Or is this friend of yours going to fly you both out?”

“He’ll fly me out if he wants me to help him,” I reply grimly. Although the phoenix making two trips is hardly a good idea. I sigh. “Or I can walk out, wearing mages robes. There will be enough mages combing the campus that they might not realize who I am until I’m gone.” That strategy has worked well enough so far.

Kenta shakes his head. “The campus will be closed off. No one will be going through the gates.”

I nod, look out to the kites fluttering through the air. Beyond them, a flock of birds rises and falls, a smudge of black trailing over the far rooftops. Would that I could shift myself into bird form, as Talon must be able to. But that’s far beyond anything I can master in the next hour or two. “Then I wait them out, dressed as a servant.”

So many uncertainties.

Kenta shifts. “As far as I can tell, Stormwind went to her trial willingly. She chose her path. Make sure you want to choose this future for yourself, before you call whomever that feather will bring. Let me know when you decide.” He ducks beneath the clotheslines, continuing on until he’s lost from view on the other side of the roof.

I
want
him to tell me not to do this, to be the one who points out that it’s suicide, or just plain stupid. Hearing the words is different from knowing them, and as long as I’m only telling myself these things, I can brush them aside. But Kenta is relying on me to consider the risks, choose wisely.

Wisdom tells me that only sorrow lies down this path. I cannot see a way for both Stormwind and I to escape unscathed. I close my eyes, clutching the feather tightly. I remember Stormwind standing in the doorway of her cottage, bidding me farewell, not knowing how to hug me back. She realized, then, that her life was finished. That she would never return — to the cottage, to teaching me, to the companionship we shared this last year as mentor and student. As friends.

I open my eyes and glare down at the feather. She sheltered me, protected me, and trained me, in part because of what Blackflame did to me. I will not let her go without a fight. If I am caught and lose my magic, so be it. And if we escape and I must face the Burnt Lands, then I will face them.

Huda’s words echo in my mind, whispering on the wind that blows across the rooftop.
When you have chosen a path, you must walk it with courage.

Lifting the feather high, I call on the fire that lies dormant in my bones, sending a single spark through my fingertips.

The feather catches as if it were a torch, flaring up in a scorching ball of yellow and blue. I snatch my hand away with a yelp. It remains floating in the air, burning and burning and burning.

“Kenta,” I call. The clotheslines rustle as he moves toward me.

At the sight of the floating fire, he lets out a low whistle. “Some feather.”

The fire drifts downward, lessening as it descends until it touches the floor and goes out. All that remains is a single thread of ash. I nudge it with a fingertip and it disintegrates against my nail.

Kenta kneels before me, his kimono accenting the line of his thighs, the wiry strength of his shoulders. I don’t even know this man. His ease with me, the certainty with which he chose to help, tells me we were friends once, knew each other well. But the person that I am now he knows no better than I can claim to know him.

“When we were betrayed,” I say, my voice rough, awkward. “In that building. You and the Ghost hid. I remember that.”

His eyes narrow slightly, his jaw tightening.

“Do you remember how?” I ask.

 
“You hid us. The soldiers walked up to us, looked up at the burnt-out stairwell, and left. They never saw us.”

“Shadows.” The word is almost a whisper, as if I dare not speak this truth aloud even here, with just the wind and sun and a dozen lines of clean laundry to witness it.

“Yes.”

Relief rushes through me. “Then you know.”

“I would have guessed regardless. Even the Degaths know. You killed Kol with a magic so strong that the High Council found its traces months afterward. By all accounts, only you and the breather escaped. Breathers don’t have magic — not the kind that can cast spells.”

“I … see,” I manage. For the first time, burning myself to a cinder actually seems like it was a good idea. The High Council didn’t look any further for me, assuming I was dead.

“I’m glad you know,” I tell Kenta. “It makes things easier now.” I wave toward my bag with its assortment of onions and garlic and empty shells. “I’m going to make some charms to distract the lycan guard. I’ll need that ash you said you had
,
too.”

“Are you sure it’s safe to practice your magic here?” Kenta asks.

I shrug. “It’s unlikely that there are mages living in this part of town — it’s too poor. And on a day like this, they’d have no reason to come here. I’ll shield myself. With the number of charms in use, no one should notice. I won’t be using much magic.”

He makes no answer.

“We still need to figure out how to get her the key and charm,” I say to distract him. We’ve already discussed this once at the Degaths’ home, but part of me is hoping that Kenta lit on an idea on the walk here.

He grins, that light returning to his eyes. “You figured out someone cleans Talon’s rooms,” he teases.

“The lycans will hardly allow an unknown servant in to clean Stormwind’s cell,” I point out. “Especially not when most of the servants have the afternoon off for the Festival.”

“No,” Kenta agrees, still grinning. He lifts what’s left of his sandwich in the air. “But surely they must feed her.”

Kenta fetches me a bowl of ash from his rooms below, then departs once more to see to our preparations, cat’s head key and the look-away charm in his pocket. I set to work on the remaining charms I must make. They’re easy enough, adaptations of ones I’ve made before, and I work through them quickly. Barely half an hour later, as I finish the last of them, I squint against the brightening sunlight.

Brightening?

I leap to my feet, dumping my new charms onto the rooftop as I shield my eyes from the glare of a second sun. A ball of golden flame shoots across the sky, trailing an afterimage of shadow behind it. In the space of a breath, it covers the remaining distance to my rooftop, hurtling downward at an impossible speed.

I clench my teeth around a shout and squeeze my eyes shut. My back brushes the shield wall created by my string of wards. I hold still, knowing it will protect me. Ropes snap in rapid succession, a whiff of burnt things teasing my nostrils, and the light goes out.

“Well,” the phoenix says, “I am happy to see you are not in immediate danger.”

I lower my arms from my face, blinking to dispel the dark spots floating across my vision. The phoenix stands a few paces away, completely unruffled. Behind him, the laundry lines lie in a tangled, half-burnt mess, steam and smoke rising from them in equal measure. At least half the clothes are scorched past saving.

A dull commotion rumbles up from the streets below.

“There is something you need, is there not?” the phoenix says.

If his tone had been smug, his words gloating, I might have pulled back, at least for a moment. But his tone is detached, professional, as if we were discussing bartering animals. The thought sends a shudder through my body, a memory I cannot quite place.

I kneel to unclasp my ward string and look the phoenix in the eye. “I have a question for you. A deal. If you agree, then I’ll come with you as soon as this is over.”

The phoenix bobs his head. “Tell me.”

We spend a full half hour discussing Stormwind and the escape plan. The phoenix isn’t altogether pleased, and he probably wouldn’t have been fully swayed had I not mentioned Jabir’s complicity. It’s ironic, really, because the Mekteb’s guardian let me enter — and offered me a way out — in large part because of the phoenix feather I carried. But eventually, the phoenix agrees.

The High Council seems to matter to him only in as much as it keeps another Burning at bay. His willingness to do what I ask to get me back to the Burnt Lands immediately makes me wonder how fleeting our lives feel to him.

“And you will stay a season,” he says after he has heard me out.

“I cannot stay in any one place that long.”