An Ember in the Ashes (17 page)

I
t’s the Commandant’s son. Veturius.

Where did he come from?
I push at him violently, then immediately regret doing so. A normal Blackcliff student would beat me for touching him without permission—and this is no student, but an Aspirant and the Commandant’s spawn. I have to get out of here. I have to get back to the house. But the weakness that has plagued me all morning takes firm hold, and I fall to the sand a few feet away, sweating and nauseous.

Infection.
I know the signs. I should have let Cook dress the wound last night.

“Who were you talking to?” Veturius asks.

“N-no-no one, Aspirant, sir.”
Not everyone can see them
,
Teluman had said of the ghuls. It’s clear Veturius can’t.

“You look terrible,” he says. “Come into the shade.”

“The sand. I have to take it up or she’ll—she’ll—”

“Sit.” It’s not a request. He picks up my basket and takes my hand, leading me to the shade of the cliffs and setting me down on a small boulder.

When I chance a look at him, he is gazing out at the horizon, his mask catching the dawn light like water catching the sun. Even at a distance of a few feet, everything about him screams violence, from the short black hair to the big hands to the fact that each muscle is honed to deadly perfection. The bandages that encircle his forearms and the scratches that mar his hands and face only make him look more vicious.

He has just one weapon, a dagger at his belt. But then, he’s a Mask. He doesn’t need weapons because he is one, particularly when faced with a slave
who barely comes up to his shoulder. I try to scoot away further, but my body is too heavy.

“What’s your name? You never said.” He fills my basket with sand, not looking at me.

I think of when the Commandant asked me this question and the blow I received for answering honestly. “S-Slave-Girl.”

He is quiet for a moment. “Tell me your real name.”

Though calmly spoken, the words are a command. “Laia.”

“Laia,” he says. “What did she do to you?”

How strange, that a Mask can sound so kind, that the deep thrum of his baritone can offer comfort. I could close my eyes and not know I was speaking to a Mask at all.

But I can’t trust his voice. He’s
her
son
.
If he is showing concern, there is a reason for it—and not one that favors me.

Slowly, I push back my scarf. When he sees the
K
, his eyes go hard behind the mask, and for a moment, sadness and fury burn in his gaze. I’m startled when he speaks again.

“May I?” He lifts a hand, and I barely feel it when his fingers brush the skin near my wound.

“Your skin’s hot.” He lifts the basket of sand. “The wound is bad. It needs attention.”

“I know that,” I say. “Commandant wanted sand, and I didn’t have time to—to—” Veturius’s face swims for a moment, and I feel strangely weightless. He’s close then, close enough for me to feel the heat of his body. The scent of cloves and rain drifts over me. I close my eyes to stop everything from lurching, but it doesn’t help. His arms are around me, hard and gentle all at once, and he lifts me up.

“Let me go!” My strength peaks, and I shove at his chest. What is he doing? Where is he taking me?

“How else do you plan to get back up the cliffs?” he asks. His broad strides carry us easily up the winding switchbacks. “You can barely stand.”

Does he actually think I’m stupid enough to accept his “help”? This is a trick he’s plotted with his mother. Some further punishment awaits. I have to escape him.

But as he walks, another wave of dizziness hits me, and I clutch his neck until it passes. If I hold on tight enough
,
he won’t be able to throw me to the dunes. Not without getting dragged down himself.

My eyes fall on his bandaged arms, and I remember that the First Trial ended yesterday.

Veturius catches me looking. “Just scratches,” he says. “Augurs left me in the middle of the Great Wastes for the First Trial. After a few days without water, I started falling down a lot.”

“They left you in the Wastes?” I shudder. Everyone’s heard of that place. It makes the Tribal lands look almost habitable. “And you survived? Did they at least warn you?”

“They like surprises.”

Even through my sickness, the impact of what he’s said isn’t lost on me. If the Aspirants don’t know what will happen in the Trials, how can I possibly find out?

“Doesn’t the Commandant know what you’ll be up against?” Why am I asking him so many questions? It’s not my place. My head must be addled from the wound. But if my curiosity bothers Veturius, he doesn’t say so.

“She might. Doesn’t matter. Even if she knows, she wouldn’t tell me.”

His mother doesn’t want him to win? Part of me wonders at their bizarre
relationship. But then I remind myself that they’re Martials. Martials are different.

Veturius crests the cliff and ducks beneath the clothes fluttering on the line, heading down the slaves’ corridor. When he carries me into the kitchen and sets me down on a bench beside the worktable, Izzi, scrubbing the floor, drops her brush and stares open-mouthed. Cook’s glance falls to my wound, and she shakes her head.

“Kitchen-Girl,” Cook says. “Take the sand upstairs. If the Commandant asks about Slave-Girl, tell her she’s taken ill and that I’m tending to her so she can get back to work.”

Izzi picks up the basket of sand without a sound and disappears. A wave of nausea breaks over me, and I’m forced to drop my head between my legs for a few moments.

“Laia’s wound’s infected,” Veturius says when Izzi leaves. “Do you have bloodroot serum?”

If Cook is surprised that the Commandant’s son is using my given name, she doesn’t show it. “Bloodroot’s too valuable for the likes of us. I’ve tanroot and wildwood tea.”

Veturius frowns and gives Cook the same instructions Pop would have. Wildwood tea three times a day, tanroot to clean the wound, and no bandage. He turns to me. “I’ll find some bloodroot and bring it to you tomorrow. I promise. You’ll be all right. Cook knows her remedies.”

I nod, unsure if I should thank him, still waiting for him to reveal his true purpose for helping me. But he doesn’t say anything else, apparently satisfied with my response. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks out the back door.

Cook rustles around the cabinets, and a few minutes later, a mug of
steaming tea is in my hands. After I drink it down, she sits in front of me, her scars inches from my face. I gaze at them, but they no longer seem grotesque. Is it because I’ve gotten used to seeing them? Or because I have a disfigurement of my own?

“Who’s Darin?” Cook asks. Her sapphire eyes glint, and for a moment, they are hauntingly familiar. “You called for him in the night.”

The tea takes the edge off my dizziness, and I sit up. “He’s my brother.”

“I see.” Cook drips tanroot oil on a square of gauze and dabs it onto the wound. I wince in pain and grip the seat. “And is he in the Resistance too?”

“How could you—”
How could you know that?
I almost say, but then I recover my wits and press my lips together.

Cook catches the slip and pounces. “It’s not hard to tell. I’ve seen a hundred slaves come and go. Resistance fighters are always different. Never broken. At least not when they first arrive. They have . . . hope.” She curls her lip, as if she’s speaking of a colony of diseased criminals instead of her own people.

“I’m not with the rebels.” I wish I hadn’t spoken. Darin says my voice goes high when I lie, and Cook seems like the type to notice. Sure enough, her eyes narrow.

“I’m not a fool, girl. Do you have any idea what you’re doing? The Commandant will find you out. She’ll torture you, kill you. Then she’ll punish anyone she thinks you were friends with. That means Iz—Kitchen-Girl.”

“I’m not doing anything wro—”

“There was a woman once,” she interrupts me abruptly. “Joined the Resistance. Learned to mix powders and potions so that the very air would turn to fire and stones to sand. But she got in over her head. Did things for the
rebels—horrible things—that she never dreamt she’d do. Commandant caught her like she’d caught so many others. Carved her up good and ruined her face. Made her swallow hot coals and ruined her voice. Then she made the woman a slave in her house. But not before killing everyone the woman knew. Everyone she loved.”

Oh no.
The source of Cook’s scars becomes sickeningly clear. She nods, grimly acknowledging the dawning horror on my face.

“I lost everything—my family, my freedom—all for a cause that never had any hope to begin with.”

“But—”

“Before you came here, the Resistance sent a boy. Zain. He was supposed to be a gardener. Did they tell you about him?”

I almost shake my head but stop, crossing my arms instead. She doesn’t acknowledge my silence. She’s not guessing about me. She knows.

“It was two years ago. Commandant caught him. Tortured him in the school’s dungeon for days. Some nights we could hear him. Screaming. When she was done with Zain, she gathered every last slave in Blackcliff. She wanted to know who’d been friends with him. Wanted to teach us a lesson for not turning in a traitor.” Cook’s eyes are fixed on me, unrelenting. “Killed three slaves before she was satisfied that the message had sunk in. Lucky I’d warned Izzi away from the boy. Lucky she listened.”

Cook gathers her supplies and shoves them back into a cabinet. She picks up a cleaver and hacks at a bloody slab of meat waiting on the worktable.

“I don’t know why you ran away from your family to join those rebel bastards.” She flings the words at me like stones. “I don’t care. Tell them you quit. Ask for another mission, somewhere where you won’t hurt anyone.
Because if you don’t, you’ll die, and skies only knows what will happen to the rest of us.” She points the cleaver at me, and I shift back in my chair, watching the knife. “Is that what you want?” she says. “Death? Izzi tortured?” She leans forward, spittle flying from her mouth. The knife is inches from my face. “Is it?”

“I didn’t run away,” I burst out. Pop’s body, Nan’s glazed irises, Darin’s flailing limbs all flash before my eyes. “I didn’t even want to join. My grandparents—a Mask came—”

I bite my tongue.
Shut it, Laia.
I scowl at the old woman, unsurprised to see her glaring back.

“Tell me the truth about why you joined the rebels,” she says, “and I’ll keep my mouth shut about your dirty little secret. Ignore me, and I’ll tell that ice-hearted vulture upstairs exactly what you are.” She drives the cleaver into the worktable and drops into the seat next to me, waiting.

Damn her. If I tell her about the raid and what came after, she might still rat me out. But if I say nothing, I’ve no doubt that she’ll march to the Commandant’s room this instant. She’s just insane enough to do it.

I have no choice.

As I speak of what happened that night, she remains silent and unmoved. When I finish, my eyes are swollen, but Cook’s mangled face reveals nothing.

I wipe my face on my sleeve. “Darin’s stuck in prison. It’s only a matter of time before they torture him to death or sell him as a slave. I have to get him out before then. But I can’t do it alone. The rebels said if I spied for them, they’d help me.” I stand shakily. “You could threaten to turn my soul over to the Nightbringer himself. Doesn’t matter. Darin’s my only family. I have to save him.”

Cook says nothing, and after a minute passes, I assume she’s chosen to ignore me. Then, as I move to the door, she speaks.

“Your mother. Mirra.” At the sound of Mother’s name, I jerk my head around. Cook is examining me. “You don’t look like her.”

I’m so surprised I don’t bother to deny it. Cook has to be in her seventies. She’d have been in her sixties when my parents controlled the Resistance. What was her real name? What had her role been? “You knew my mother?”

“Knew her? Yes, I knew her. Always liked y-y-your father better.” She clears her throat and shakes her head in irritation. Strange. I’ve never heard her stutter. “Kind man. Sm-smart man. Not—not like your m-m-mother.”

“My mother was the Lioness—”

“Your mother—isn’t—worth your words.” Cook’s voice drops into a snarl. “Never—never listened to anything but her own selfishness. The
Lioness
.” Her mouth twists around the name. “She’s the reason—the reason—I’m here.” Her breath heaves now, as if she’s having some sort of fit, but she barrels on, determined to get out whatever it is she wishes to say. “The Lioness, the Resistance, and their grand plans. Traitors. Liars. F-fools.” She stands and reaches for her cleaver. “Don’t trust them.”

“I don’t have a choice,” I say. “I have to.”

“They’ll use you.” Her hands shake, and she grips the counter. She gasps out the last few words. “They take—take—take. And then—then—they’ll throw you to the wolves. I warned you. Remember. I warned you.”

A
t exactly midnight, I return to Blackcliff in full battle armor, dripping with weaponry. After the Trial of Courage, I’m not about to be caught shoeless with only a dagger for defense.

Though I’m desperate to know if Hel is all right, I resist the urge to go to the infirmary. Cain’s orders to stay away didn’t leave room for argument.

As I stalk past the gate guards, I fervently hope not to run into my mother. I think I’d snap at the sight of her, especially knowing that her scheming nearly killed Helene. And especially after seeing what she’d done to the slave-girl this morning.

When I’d seen the
K
carved into the girl—
Laia—
I’d flexed my fists, imagining, for one glorious moment, the feel of inflicting such pain on the Commandant.
See how she likes it, the hag.
At the same time, I wanted to back away from Laia in shame. Because the woman who’d done such evil shares my blood. She is half of me. My own reaction—that ravenous lust for violence—is proof.

I’m not like her.

Or am I? I think back to the nightmare battlefield. Five hundred thirty-nine bodies. Even the Commandant would be hard-pressed to take so many lives. If the Augurs are right, I’m not like my mother. I’m worse.

You will become everything you hate
,
Cain had said when I’d considered deserting
.
But how could leaving my mask behind make me any worse of a person than the one I saw on that battlefield?

Lost in my thoughts, I don’t notice anything unusual about Skulls’ quarters when I arrive at my room. But after a moment, it sinks in. Leander’s not
snoring, and Demetrius isn’t mumbling his brother’s name. Faris’s door isn’t open, as it almost always is.

The barracks are abandoned.

I draw my scims. The only sound is the occasional pop of the oil lamps flickering against the black brick.

Then, one by one, the lamps go out. Gray smoke seeps beneath the door at one end of the hall, expanding like a roiling bank of storm cloud. In an instant, I realize what’s happening.

The Second Trial, the Trial of Cunning, has begun.

“Watch out!” a voice shouts from behind me. Helene—
alive
—shoves through the doors at my back, fully armed and without a hair out of place. I want to tackle her in a hug, but instead I drop to the floor as a volley of razor-edged throwing stars hurtles through the space where my neck was.

The stars are followed by a trio of attackers who spring from the smoke like coiled snakes. They are lithe and quick, their bodies and faces wrapped in funereal strips of black cloth. Almost before I’m on my feet, one of the assassins has a scim at my throat. I spin back and kick his feet out from under him, but my leg meets only air.

Strange, he was there—just now—

At my side, Helene’s scim flashes swift as quicksilver as an assassin presses her toward the smoke. “Evening, Elias,” she calls over the clash of scims. She catches my eye, an irrepressible grin spreading across her face. “Miss me?”

I don’t have the breath to answer. The other two assassins come at me fast, and though I fight with both scims, I can’t get the upper hand. My left scim finally hits its mark, sinking into the chest of my opponent. Bloodthirsty triumph surges through me.

Then the attacker flickers and disappears.

I freeze, doubting what I’ve seen. The other assassin takes advantage of my hesitation and shoves me back into the smoke.

It’s as if I’ve been dropped into the darkest, blackest cave in the Empire. I try to feel my way forward, but my limbs are leaden, and in moments I slip to the floor, my body a deadweight. A throwing star cuts through the air, and I barely register the fact that it has grazed my arm. My scims hit the stone of the hallway, and Helene screams. The sounds are muted, as if I’m hearing them through water.

Poison.
The word brings me out of my senselessness.
The smoke is poisonous.

With my last shreds of consciousness, I scour the ground for my scims and crawl out of the darkness. A few breaths of clean air help me reclaim my wits, and I notice that Helene has disappeared. As I search the smoke for any sign of her, an assassin emerges.

I duck beneath his scim, intending to wrap my arms around his chest and slam him to the floor. But when my skin meets his, cold lances through me, and I gasp and jerk away. It feels as if I’ve dipped my arm into a bucket of snow. The assassin flickers and disappears, reappearing a few yards away.

They’re not human
,
I realize. Zak’s warning echoes in my head.
The old creatures are real. They’re coming for us.
Ten burning hells. And I thought he had cracked. How is it possible? How could the Augurs have—

The assassin circles me, and I shelve my questions. How this thing got here doesn’t matter. How to kill it—that’s a question worth answering.

A flash of silver catches my eye—Helene’s gauntleted hand, clawing the floor as she tries to pull herself out of the smoke. I drag her out, but she’s too bleary to stand, so I throw her over my shoulder and flee down the hall. When I’m well away, I dump her to the ground and turn to face the enemy.

The three of them are on me at once, moving too fast for me to counter. Within half a minute, I have nicks all over my face and a gash in my left arm.

“Aquilla!” I holler. She staggers to her feet. “A little help, yeah?”

She draws her scim and plunges into the fight, forcing two of the attackers to engage.

“They’re wraiths, Elias,” she shouts. “Bleeding, burning wraiths.”

Ten hells.
Masks train with scims and staffs and our bare hands, on horses and boats, blindfolded and chained, with no sleep, with no food. But we’ve never trained against something that isn’t supposed to exist.

What did that damn foretelling say?
Cunning to outwit their foes.
There’s a way to kill these things. They must have a weakness. I just have to figure out what it is.

Lemokles offense.
Grandfather created the offense himself.
A series of full-body attacks allowing one to identify a combatant’s deficiencies.

I attack head, then legs, arms, and torso. A dagger I fling at the wraith’s chest goes right through him, falling to the floor with a clatter. But he doesn’t try to block the dagger. Instead, his hand flashes up to protect his throat.

Behind me, Helene shouts for aid as the other two wraiths press the attack. One lifts a dagger high above her heart, but before it comes down, I whip my scim around and through his neck.

The wraith’s head plunges to the ground, and I grimace as an unearthly scream echoes in the hall. Seconds later, the head—and the body it goes with—disappears.

“Watch your left,” Hel shouts. I sweep my scim in an arc to my left without looking. A hand closes on my wrist, and piercing cold numbs my arm to
the shoulder. But then my scim strikes home, the hand is gone, and another eldritch scream pierces the air.

The assault slows as the last wraith circles us.

“You really should run,” Helene says to the creature. “You’re just going to die.”

The wraith looks between us and sets upon Helene.
They always underestimate me.
Even wraiths, apparently. She ducks beneath his arm, light-footed as a dancer, and takes off his head with one clean stroke. The wraith vanishes, the smoke dissipates, and the barracks go still, as if the last fifteen minutes never happened.

“Well, that was—” Helene’s eyes go wide, and I lunge to one side without needing to be told, turning just in time to see a knife hurtling through the air. It misses me—barely—and Helene is past me in a blur of blonde and silver.

“Marcus,” she says. “I’m on him.”

“Wait, you idiot! It might be a trap!”

But the door is already swinging shut behind her, and I hear the crash of scim striking scim, followed by the crunch of bone beneath fist.

I burst from the barracks to see Helene advancing on Marcus, who has a hand to his bloodied nose. Helene’s eyes are ferocious slits, and for the first time, I see her as others must—deadly, remorseless. A Mask.

Though I want to help her, I hold back, scanning the darkened grounds around us. If Marcus is here, Zak won’t be far.

“All healed up, Aquilla?” Marcus feints left with his scim, and when Helene counters, he grins. “You and I have some unfinished business.” His eyes inch over her form. “You know what I’ve always wondered? If raping you will be like fighting you. All those lean muscles, that pent-up energy—”

Helene delivers a roundhouse that leaves Marcus on his back with blood pouring from his mouth. She stamps on his sword arm and presses her scimpoint to his throat.

“You filthy son of a whore,” she spits at him. “Just because you got one lucky swipe in the forest doesn’t mean I can’t still gut you with my eyes closed.”

But Marcus gives her a vicious smile, unfazed by the steel digging into his throat. “You’re mine, Aquilla. You belong to me, and we both know it. The Augurs told me. Save yourself the trouble and join me now.”

The blood drains from Helene’s face. There’s black, hopeless rage in her eyes, the type of anger you feel when your hands are tied and there’s a knife at your jugular.

Only Helene is the one holding the blade. What in the skies is wrong with her?

“Never.” The tone of her voice doesn’t match the strength of the scim in her fist, and, as if she knows it, her hand shakes. “Never, Marcus.”

A flicker in the shadows beyond the barracks catches my eyes. I’m halfway there when I see Zak’s light brown hair and the flash of an arrow cutting through the air.

“Drop, Hel!”

She plunges to the ground, the arrow sailing harmlessly over her shoulder. I know instantly that she was never in any danger, at least not from Zak. Not even a one-eyed Yearling with a lame arm would miss a shot that easy.

The brief distraction is all Marcus needs. I expect him to attack Hel, but he rolls away and flees into the night, still grinning, Zak close behind.

“What the hell was that?” I bellow at Helene. “You could have cut him open and you
choke
? What was that rubbish he was spouting—”

“Now’s not the time.” Helene’s voice is tight. “We need to get out of the open. The Augurs are trying to kill us.”

“Tell me something I don’t know—”

“No,
that’s
the Second Trial, Elias, them actively trying to assassinate us.
Cain told me after he healed me. The Trial will last until dawn. We have to be clever enough to avoid our murderers—whoever or whatever they might be.”

“Then we need a base,” I say. “Out here, anyone can pick us off with an arrow. There’s no visibility in the catacombs, and the barracks are too cramped.”

“There.” Hel points to the eastern watchtower, which overlooks the dunes. “The legionnaires manning it can set a guard at the entrance, and it’s a good fighting space.”

We make for the tower, sticking close to the walls and the shadows. At this hour, there isn’t a single student or Centurion out. Silence hangs over Blackcliff, and my voice seems inordinately loud. I lower it to a whisper. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Worried, were you?”

“Of course I was worried. I thought you were dead. If something had happened to you . . . ” It doesn’t bear thinking about. I look Helene square in the face, but she only meets my gaze for a second before flicking her eyes away.

“Yes, well, you should have been worried. I heard you dragged me to the belltower covered in blood.”

“I did. Wasn’t pleasant. You stank, for one.”

“I owe you, Veturius.” Her eyes soften, and the steely, Blackcliff-trained part of me shakes its head. She can’t turn into a girl on me now. “Cain told me everything you did for me, from the second Marcus attacked. And I want you to know—”

“You’d have done the same.” I cut her off gruffly, satisfied by the stiffening of her body, the ice in her eyes.
Better ice than warmth. Better strength than weakness.

Unspoken things have arisen between Helene and me, things that have to do with how I feel when I see her bare skin and her awkwardness when I tell her I worry for her. After so many years of straightforward friendship, I don’t know what these things mean. But I do know that now’s not the time to think about them. Not if we want to survive the Second Trial.

She must get it; she gestures for me to take point, and we don’t speak as we head to the watchtower. When we reach its base, I allow myself to relax for a second. The tower sits at the edge of the cliffs and overlooks the dunes to the east and the school to the west. Blackcliff’s watch wall extends north and south. Once we’re at the top, we’ll see any threat long before it reaches us.

But when we’re halfway up the tower’s inner stairs, Helene slows behind me.

“Elias.” The warning in her voice has me drawing both of my scims—the only thing that saves me. A shout sounds from below us, another from above, and suddenly the stairwell echoes with the ping of arrows and the shuffle of boots. A squad of legionnaires pours down the stairs, and for a second, I’m confused. Then they’re on me.

“Legionnaires,” Helene shouts. “Stand down—stand—”

I want to tell her to save her breath. No doubt the Augurs told the legionnaires that for this night, we are enemies and they are to kill us on sight.
Damn it.
Cunning to outwit their foes.
We should have realized that anyone—everyone—could be an enemy.

“Back-to-back, Hel!”

Her back is to mine in an instant. I cross scims with the soldiers coming down from the top of the tower while she battles those heading up from the base. My battle rage surges, but I rein it in, fighting to wound, not kill. I know some of these men. I can’t just butcher them.

“Damn it, Elias!” Hel screams. One of the legionnaires I’ve slashed pushes down past me and marks Hel’s sword arm. “
Fight!
They’re Martials, not turn-tail Barbarian rabble!”

Hel’s fighting off three soldiers below her and two above, with more coming. I have to clear the stairs so we can make it to the top of the tower. It’s the only way we’ll avoid death-by-skewering.