An Ember in the Ashes (27 page)

O
n the morning of the Trial of Strength, a bone-shaking rumble of thunder jerks me from sleep, and I lay in the darkness of my quarters for a long time, listening to the rain drub the barracks roof. Someone slips a parchment marked with the Augurs’ diamond seal beneath my door. I rip it open.

Fatigues only. Battle armor is forbidden. Remain in your room. I will come for you.

—Cain

A quiet scratching comes at the door as I crumple the note. A terrified-looking slave-boy stands outside, offering a tray of lumpy gruel and hard flatbread. I force myself to shovel down every bite. As disgusting as it is, I need all the fuel I can get if I’m going to win in combat.

I strap on my weapons: both Teluman scims across my back, a brace of daggers across my chest, and one knife tucked into each boot. Then I wait.

The hours inch by, slower than a graveyard shift on the watchtowers. Outside, the wind rages, sending branches and leaves tumbling past my window. I wonder if Helene is in her room. Has Cain come for her already?

Finally, in the late afternoon, a knock comes at my door. I’m so charged I want to rip down the walls with my bare hands.

“Aspirant Veturius,” Cain says when I open the door. “It is time.”

Outside, the cold takes my breath away, cutting through my thin clothes like an icy scythe. It feels as if I’m wearing nothing at all. Serra is never this cold in the summer. It’s hardly ever this cold in the winter. I look sideways at
Cain. The weather must be his doing—his and his ilk. The thought darkens my mood. Is there anything they can’t do?

“Yes, Elias,” Cain answers my question. “We cannot die.”

The hilts of my scims knock against my neck, cold as ice, and despite the all-weather boots, my feet are numb. I follow Cain closely, unable to make heads or tails of our direction until the high, arched walls of the amphitheater rise up in front of us.

We duck into the amphitheater’s armory, which is packed with men in red leather practice armor.

I wipe the rain from my eyes and stare in disbelief. “Red Platoon?” Dex and Faris are there, along with the other twenty-seven men in my battle platoon, including Cyril, a barrel-shaped boy who hates taking orders but accepts mine readily, and Darien, who has fists like hammers. I should find comfort in knowing these men will back me up in the Trial, but instead, I’m jumpy. What does Cain have planned for us?

Cyril holds out my practice armor.

“All present and accounted for, Commander,” Dex says. He looks straight ahead, but his voice betrays his nerves. As I buckle on the armor, I take in the mood of the platoon. Tension radiates off them, but that’s understandable. They know the details of the first two Trials. They must be wondering what Augur-conjured horror they’ll have to face.

“In a few moments,” Cain says, “you will exit this armory and find yourself on the amphitheater field. There, you will engage in a battle to the death. Battle armor is forbidden and has already been taken from you. Your goal is simple: You are to kill as many of the enemy as you can. The battle will end when you, Aspirant Veturius, defeat—or are defeated by—the leader of the
enemy. I warn you now, if you show mercy, if you hesitate to kill, there will be consequences.”

Right. Like having our throats ripped open by whatever is waiting for us out there.

“Are you ready?” Cain asks.

A battle to the death. That means some of my men—my friends—might die today. Dex meets my eyes briefly. He has the look of a trapped man, a man with a gnawing secret. He flicks a fearful glance at Cain and lowers his gaze.

That’s when I notice Faris’s hands trembling. Beside him, Cyril toys anxiously with a dagger, rubbing its edge against his finger. Darien stares at me strangely. What is that in his eyes? Sadness? Fear?

Some dark knowledge haunts my men, something they aren’t willing to tell me.

Has Cain given them cause to doubt victory? I glare at the Augur. Doubt and fear are treacherous emotions before a fight. Together, they can infiltrate the minds of good men and decide a battle before it’s begun.

I eye the door to the theater’s field. Whatever’s waiting for us out there, we’ll have to be equal to it, or we’ll die.

“We’re ready.”

The door opens, and at Cain’s nod, I lead the platoon out. The rain is mixed with sleet, and my hands tingle and grow stiff. The bellow of thunder and slap of rain on mud muffles the sound of our passage. The enemy won’t hear us coming—but we won’t hear them either.

“Split!” I shout to Dex, knowing he’ll barely be able to make out my words over the storm. “You cover left flank. If you find the enemy, report back to me. Do not engage.”

But for the first time since he became my lieutenant, Dex doesn’t acknowledge my orders. He doesn’t move. He stares over my shoulder into the mist obscuring the battlefield.

I follow his gaze, and movement catches my eye.

Leather armor. The flash of a scim.

Has one of my men slipped ahead for recon? No—I do a quick head count, and they are all arrayed behind me, awaiting orders.

Lightning splits the sky, illuminating the battlefield for a tantalizing moment.

Then the mist descends, thick as a blanket. But not before I see whom we’re fighting. Not before shock turns my blood to ice and my body to stone.

I find Dex’s eyes. The truth is there, in his pale, haunted gaze. And in Faris’s and Cyril’s. In every man’s. They know.

At that moment, a blue-clad figure flies with familiar grace out of the mists, silver braid shining, descending upon Red Platoon like a falling star.

Then she sees me and falters, eyes widening.

“Elias?”

Strength of arms and mind and heart.
For this? To kill my best friend? To kill her platoon?

“Commander.” Dex grabs me. “Orders?”

Helene’s men emerge from the mist, scims out and ready.
Demetrius. Leander. Tristas. Ennis.
I know these men. I grew to adulthood with them, suffered with them, sweated with them. I won’t give the order to kill them.

Dex shakes me. “Orders, Veturius. We need orders.”

Orders. Of course. I’m Red Platoon’s commander. It’s up to me to decide.

If you show mercy, if you do not kill your enemy, there will be consequences
.

“Strike to injure only!” I shout. Damn the consequences. “Do not kill. Do
not
kill.”

I barely have time to give the order before Blue Platoon is on us, fighting as viciously as if we’re a tribe of border raiders. I hear Helene scream something, but I can’t make it out in the cacophony of pounding rain and clashing swords. She disappears, lost in the chaos.

I turn to look for her and spot Tristas cutting through the melee, coming straight for me. He flings a saw-toothed dagger at my chest, and I only just deflect it with my scim. He reaches for his own scim and rushes me. I drop, letting him roll over me before bringing the blunt end of my blade to the back of his legs. He loses his footing and slips in the thickening mud, landing on his back with throat exposed.

Open for the kill.

I turn away, waiting to disarm my next foe. But as I do, Faris, who has gained the upper hand in a fight with another of Helene’s men, starts to shake. His eyes bulge, the spear he holds falls from his nerveless fingers, and his face turns blue. His opponent, a quiet boy named Fortis, wipes sleet from his eyes and stares, open-mouthed, as Faris collapses to his knees, clawing at an enemy no one else can see.

What is happening to him? I rush forward, my mind screaming at me to do something. But as soon as I get within a foot of him, my body is flung back as if by an unseen hand. My vision goes black for a moment, but I scrabble to my feet anyway, hoping none of my foes will choose this moment to attack.
What is this? What’s happening to Faris?

Tristas staggers up from where I left him, his face lit with frightening intensity as he finds me. He means to end my life.

Faris’s chokes fade. He’s dying.

Consequences. There will be consequences.

Time shifts. The seconds stretch, each as long as an hour as I gaze at the mayhem of the battlefield. Red Platoon follows my orders to injure only—and we are suffering for it. Cyril is down. So is Darien. Every time one of my men shows mercy to the enemy, one of their comrades falls, their life wrung out of them by Augur devilry.

Consequences.

I look between Faris and Tristas. They came to Blackcliff when Helene and I did. Tristas, dark-haired and wide-eyed, covered in bruises from the brutality of initiation. Faris, starved and peaked, no hint of the humor and brawn he’d possess later in life. Helene and I befriended them in our first week, all of us defending each other as best as we could against our predatory classmates.

And now one of them will die. No matter what I do.

Tristas comes for me, tears streaking his mask. His black hair is covered in mud, and his eyes burn with the panic of a cornered animal as he looks between Faris and me.

“I’m sorry, Elias.”

He takes a step toward me, and suddenly, his body stiffens. The scim in his hand tips into the mud as he peers down at the blade emerging from his chest. Then he slides to the wet ground, his gaze fixed on me.

Dex stands behind him, revulsion bursting from his eyes as he watches one of his best friends die by his hand.

No. Not Tristas.
Tristas, who’s been engaged to his childhood sweetheart since he was seventeen, who helped me understand Helene, who has four sisters who adore him. I stare at his body, at the tattoo on his arm.
Aelia.

Tristas, dead.
Dead
.

Faris stops struggling. He coughs and stands shakily, then looks down at Tristas’s body with dawning shock. But he has as little time to grieve as I do. One of Helene’s men sends a mace whistling toward his head, and he is soon locked in another battle, jabbing and lunging as if he hadn’t been perched on the edge of the abyss a minute before.

Dex is in my face then, his eyes wild. “We have to kill them! Give the order!”

My mind won’t think the words. My lips won’t speak them. I know these men. And Helene—I can’t let them kill Helene. I think of the nightmare battlefield—Demetrius and Leander and Ennis.
No. No. No.

Around me, my men drop, suffocating as they refuse to kill their friends, or falling beneath the merciless blades of Blue Platoon.

“Darien’s dead, Elias!” Dex shakes me again. “Cyril too. Aquilla gave the order already. You have to give it too, or we’re done for.”

“Elias.” He forces me to meet his eyes. “Please.”

Unable to speak, I raise my hands and give the signal, my skin crawling as word passes down the battlefield from soldier to soldier.

Red Commander’s orders. Fight to kill. No quarter.

»»»

T
here is no cursing, no yelling, no bluffing. We are, all of us, trapped in a pocket of unending violence. Swords grinding and friends dying and the sleet knifing down on us.

I’ve given the order, and so I take the lead. I show no hesitation, because if I do, my men will falter. And if they falter, we all die.

So I kill. Blood taints everything. My armor, my skin, my mask, my hair.
The hilt of my scim drips with it, making it slippery beneath my hand. I’m Death himself, presiding over this butchery. Some of my victims die with merciful swiftness, gone before their bodies touch the ground.

Others take longer.

A wretched part of me wants to do it stealthily. Just slip up behind them and slide my scim in so I don’t have to see their eyes. But the battle is uglier than that. Harder. Crueler. I stare into the faces of the men I kill, and though the storm muffles the groans, every death carves its way into my memory, each one a wound that will never heal.

Death supplants everything. Friendship, love, loyalty. The good memories I have of these men—of helpless laughter, of bets won and pranks hatched—they are stolen away. All I can remember are the worst things, the darkest things.

Ennis, sobbing like a child in Helene’s arms when his mother died six months back. His neck snaps in my hands like a twig.

Leander and his never-to-be-requited love for Helene. My scim slides into his neck like a bird through a clear sky. Easily. Effortlessly.

Demetrius, who screamed in futile rage after he watched his ten-year-old brother whipped to death by the Commandant for desertion. He smiles when he sees me coming, drops his weapon and waits as if the edge of my blade is a gift. What does Demetrius see as the light leaves his eyes? His little brother waiting for him? An infinity of darkness?

On goes the slaughter, and all the while, lurking in the back of my head is Cain’s ultimatum.
The battle will end when you, Aspirant Veturius, defeat—or are defeated by—the leader of the enemy.

I’ve tried to seek out Helene and end this quickly, but she’s elusive. When
she finally finds me, I feel as if I’ve been battling for days, though in truth, it has been no more than half an hour.

“Elias.” She shouts my name, but her voice is weak with reluctance. The battle slows to a halt as our men stop attacking each other, as the mist clears enough for them to turn and watch Helene and me. Slowly, they gather around us, forming a half circle pocked by empty spaces where living men should stand.

Hel and I face each other, and I wish for the Augurs’ power to know her mind. Her blonde hair is a tangle of blood, mud, and ice, her braid unpinned and hanging limply down her back. Her chest rises and falls heavily.

I wonder how many of my men she’s killed.

Her fist tightens around the hilt of her scim—a warning she knows I won’t miss.

Then she attacks. Though I pivot and bring up my scim to parry, my insides are paralyzed. I am staggered at her vehemence. Another part of me understands. She wants this madness done.

At first, I try to deflect her, unwilling to go on the offensive. But a decade of ruthlessly honed instinct rebels at such passivity. Soon, I’m fighting in earnest, using every trick I know to survive her onslaught.

My mind flickers to the attack poses Grandfather taught me, the ones the Blackcliff Centurions don’t know. The ones Helene won’t be able to defend against.