An Ember in the Ashes (30 page)

“We celebrated into the night, but finally, everyone slept. Everyone but me. I’d had this strange sense for hours—that some darkness was closing in. I saw shadows outside the wagon, shadows circling the camp. I looked out of the wagon, where I was sleeping, and saw this . . . this man. Black clothing and red eyes and skin without any color at all. An Augur. He said my name. I remember thinking he must be part reptile, because his voice came out of him like a hiss. And that was it. I was chained to the Empire. I was chosen.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Terrified. I knew he was there to take me away. And I didn’t know where, or why. They brought me to Blackcliff. Cut off my hair, took my clothes, and put me in a pen outside with the others for a culling. Soldiers threw us moldy bread and jerky once a day, but back then, I wasn’t very big, so I never got
much. Midway through the third day, I was sure I would die. So I snuck out of the pen and stole food from the guards. I shared it with my lookout. Well . . . ” He looks up, considering. “I say
share
, but really, she ate most of it. Anyway, after seven days, the Augurs opened the pen, and those of us still alive were told that if we fought hard, we would be the guardians of the Empire, and if we didn’t, we’d be dead.”

I can see it. The small bodies of those left behind. The fear in the eyes of those who lived. Veturius as a boy, afraid and starved, determined not to die.

“You survived.”

“I wish I hadn’t. If you’d seen the Third Trial—if you knew what I did . . . ” He polishes the same spot on one of the scims over and over.

“What happened?” I ask softly. He is silent for so long that I think I’ve angered him, that I’ve crossed a line. Then he tells me. He pauses frequently, and his voice goes from broken to flat. He keeps working on the scim, shining it, then sharpening it with a whetstone until it gleams.

When he is done speaking, he hangs the scim up. The streaks running down his mask catch the firelight, and I understand, now, why he was shaking when he walked in, why his eyes are so haunted.

“So you see,” he says, “I’m just like the Mask who killed your grandparents. I’m just like Marcus. Worse, actually, because such men consider it their duty to kill. I know better. And I did it anyway.”

“The Augurs didn’t give you a choice. You couldn’t find Aquilla to end the Trial, and if you hadn’t fought, you’d have died.”

“Then I should have died.”

“Nan always said that as long as there is life, there is hope. If you’d refused to give the order, your men would be dead right now—either at the hands of
the Augurs or on the blades of Aquilla’s platoon. Don’t forget: She chose life for herself and her men. Either way, you’d have blamed yourself. Either way, people you cared about would have suffered.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“But it
does
matter. Of course it matters. Because you’re not evil.” The knowledge is a revelation and one so staggering that I badly want him to see it too. “You’re not like the others. You killed to save. You put others first. Not—not like me.”

I can’t bring myself to look at Veturius. “When the Mask came, I ran.” The words spill out of me, a tumbling river I’ve dammed up for too long. “My grandparents were dead. The Mask had Darin, my brother. Darin told me to run, even though he needed me. I should have helped him, but I couldn’t. No.” I dig my fists into my thighs. “I
didn’t
. I
chose
not to stay. I chose to run, like a coward. I still don’t understand it. I should have stayed, even if that meant dying.”

My eyes seek the floor in shame. But then his hand is on my chin, tipping my face up. His clean scent washes over me.

“As you say, Laia”—he forces me to meet his eyes—“there’s hope in life. If you hadn’t run, you’d be dead. And Darin too.” He lets me go and sits back. “Masks don’t like defiance. He’d have made you pay for it.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Veturius smiles that knife’s-edge smile. “Look at us,” he says. “Scholar slave and Mask, each trying to persuade the other that they’re not evil. The Augurs do have a sense of humor, don’t they?”

My fingers are clenched around the hilt of the dagger Veturius gave me, and a hot anger rises inside me—at the Augurs for letting me think I was to be
interrogated. At the Commandant for leaving her own child to die a torturous death, and at Blackcliff for training that child to be a killer. At my parents for dying and my brother for apprenticing himself to a Martial. At Mazen for his demands and secrets. At the Empire and its iron-fisted control over every aspect of our lives.

I want to defy all of them—the Empire, the Commandant, the Resistance. I wonder where such defiance comes from, and my armlet feels hot suddenly. Perhaps there’s more of my mother in me than I thought.

“Maybe we don’t have to be Scholar slave and Mask.” I drop the dagger. “For tonight, maybe we can just be Laia and Elias.”

Emboldened, I reach out and pull at the edge of his mask, which has never seemed like a part of him. It resists, but now I want it off. I want to see the face of the boy I’ve been speaking to all night, not the Mask I always thought he was. So I pull harder, and the mask falls into my hands with a hiss. The back is bent into sharp spikes wet with blood. The tattoo on his neck glistens with a dozen small wounds.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize . . . ”

He looks into my eyes, and something undefined burns in his gaze, a flash of emotion that brings a different sort of fire to my skin.

“I’m glad you took it off.”

I should look away. I cannot. His eyes are nothing like his mother’s. Hers are the brittle gray of broken glass, but Elias’s, with their ring of dark lashes, are a deeper hue, like the thick heart of a storm cloud. They draw me in, mesmerize me, refuse to release me. I lift tentative fingers to his skin. The stubble of his cheek is rough beneath my palm.

Keenan’s face flashes through my mind and fades as quickly. He is far
away, distant, dedicated utterly to the Resistance. Elias is here, before me, warm and beautiful and broken.

He’s a Martial. A Mask.

But not here. Not tonight, in this room. Here, now, he is just Elias and I am just Laia, and we are, both of us, drowning.

“Laia . . . ”

There is a plea in his voice, in his eyes. What does it mean? Does he want me to back away? Does he want me to come closer?

I lift myself up on my toes, and his face comes down at the same time. His lips are soft, softer than I could have imagined, but there is a hard desperation behind them, a need. The kiss speaks. It begs.
Let me forget, forget, forget.

His cloak falls away from me, and my body is against his. He pulls me to his chest, his hands running down my back, clasping my thigh, drawing me closer, closer. I arch into him, reveling in his strength, his fire, the alchemy between us twisting and burning and melding until it feels like gold.

Then he breaks away, his hands held out before him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m a Mask and you’re a slave, and I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right.” My lips burn. “I’m the one who . . . started it.”

We stare at each other, and he looks so confused, so angry at himself that I smile, sadness and embarrassment and desire coursing through me. He picks his cloak up from the floor and holds it out to me, averting his eyes.

“Will you sit?” I ask tentatively, covering myself once more. “Tomorrow I’ll be a slave and you’ll be a Mask, and we can hate each other like we’re supposed to. But for now . . . ”

He eases down next to me, keeping a careful distance between us. That
alchemy lures, beckons, burns. But his jaw is clenched, and his hands are fisted together like each is a lifeline for the other. Reluctantly, I put a few more inches between us.

“Tell me more,” I say. “What was it like as a Fiver? Were you happy to leave Blackcliff?”

He relaxes a little, and I coax the memories from him like Pop used to with frightened patients. The night passes, filled with his stories of Blackcliff and the Tribes, and my tales of patients and the Quarter. We do not speak again of the raid or the Trials. We do not speak of the kiss or the sparks still dancing between us.

Before I know it, the sky begins to lighten.

“Dawn,” he says. “Time to start hating each other again.”

He puts on his mask, his face going still as it digs into him, and then pulls me to my feet. I stare at our hands, at my slim fingers entwined in his larger ones, at the veined muscles of his forearm, the slight bones of my wrist, the warmth of our skin meeting. It seems somehow significant, my hand in his. I look up into his face, surprised at how near he is to me, at the fire in his gaze, the life, and my pulse quickens. But then he drops my hand and steps away.

I offer him back his cloak, along with the dagger, but he shakes his head.

“Keep them. You still have to walk back through the school and—” His eyes drop to my ripped dress, my bare skin, and he jerks them up again. “Keep the knife too. A Scholar girl should always carry a weapon, no matter what the rules say.” He pulls a leather strap from his bureau. “Thigh sheath. It’ll keep the blade safe and out of sight.”

I regard him anew, at last seeing him for what he is. “If you could just be who you are in here”—I place my palm over his heart—“instead of who they
made you, then you would be a great Emperor.” I feel his pulse thud against my fingers. “But they won’t let you, will they? They won’t let you have compassion or kindness. They won’t let you keep your soul.”

“My soul’s gone.” He looks away. “I killed it dead on that battlefield yesterday.”

I think of Spiro Teluman then. Of what he said to me the last time I saw him. “There are two kinds of guilt,” I say softly. “The kind that’s a burden and the kind that gives you purpose. Let your guilt be your fuel. Let it remind you of who you want to be. Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It’s damaged, but it’s there. Don’t let them take it from you, Elias.”

His eyes meet mine when I say his name, and I reach up a hand to touch his mask. It is smooth and warm, like rock polished by water and then left to heat in the sun.

I let my arm fall. Then I leave his room and walk to the doors of the barracks and out into the rising sun.

A
fter the barracks door shuts behind Laia, I still feel the feather-light touch of her fingertips on my face. I see the expression in her eyes as she reached up to me: a careful, curious look that caught my breath.

And that kiss. Burning skies, the feel of her, how she’d arched into me, wanted me. A few precious moments of freedom from who I am, what I am. I close my eyes, remembering, but other memories shove their way in. Darker memories. She’d kept them at bay. For hours, she’d fought them off, and she hadn’t even known it. But they are here now, and they won’t be ignored.

I led my men to slaughter.

I murdered my friends.

I nearly killed Helene.

Helene.
I have to go to her. I have to make things right with her. Our anger’s stood too long. Maybe, after this nightmare we’ve wrought, we can find a way forward together. She must be as horrified as I am at what happened. As sickened.

I snatch my scims from the wall. The thought of what I’d done with them makes me want to toss them to the dunes, Teluman blades or not. But I’m too used to having weapons across my back. I feel naked without them.

The sun shines as I emerge from the barracks, unfeeling in a cloudless sky. It seems profane somehow—the world clean, the air warm—when scores of young men lay cold in their coffins, waiting to return to the earth.

The dawn drums thunder out and begin listing the names of the dead. Each name summons an image in my head—a face, a voice, a form—until it feels as if my fallen comrades are rising up around me, a phalanx of ghosts.

Cyril Antonius. Silas Eburian. Tristas Equitius. Demetrius Galerius. Ennis Medalus. Darien Titius. Leander Vissan.

The drumming goes on. The families will have collected the bodies by now. Blackcliff has no graveyard. Among these walls, all that remains of the fallen is the emptiness of where they walked, the silence where their voices rang.

In the belltower courtyard, Cadets lunge and parry with staffs as a Centurion circles them. I should have known the Commandant wouldn’t cancel classes, not even to honor the deaths of dozens of her students.

The Centurion nods as I pass, and I’m confused by his lack of disgust. Doesn’t he know I’m a murderer? Wasn’t he watching yesterday?

How can you ignore it?
I want to shout.
How can you pretend it didn’t happen?

I head for the cliffs. Helene will be down in the dunes, where we have always mourned our dead. On my way there, I see Faris and Dex. Without Tristas, Demetrius, and Leander by their sides, they look bizarre, like an animal missing its legs.

I think they will pass me by. Or attack me for giving the order that took their souls. Instead, they stop before me, quiet, despondent. Their eyes are as red as mine.

Dex massages his neck, his thumb moving in ceaseless circles over the Blackcliff tattoo. “I keep seeing their faces,” he says. “Hearing them.”

For long moments, we stand together in silence. But it is selfish of me to share such grief, to take comfort in knowing that they feel the same self-hatred that I do. I’m the reason they are haunted.

“You followed orders,” I say. This burden, at least, I can take. “Orders I gave. Their deaths aren’t on you. They’re on me.”

Faris meets my eyes, a ghost of the big, joyful boy he had once been. “They’re free now,” he says. “Free of the Augurs. Of Blackcliff. Not like us.”

When Dex and Faris walk away, I rappel to the desert floor, where Helene sits cross-legged in the shade of the cliffs, her feet buried to the ankles in the hot sand. Her hair ripples in the wind, glowing gold-white like the curve of a sunlit dune. I approach her as one would an angry horse.

“You don’t need to be so cat-footed,” she says when I’m a few feet away. “I’m not armed.”

I sit beside her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m alive.”

“I’m sorry, Helene. I know you can’t forgive me, but—”

“Stop. We didn’t have a choice, Elias. If I’d gotten the upper hand, I’d have done the same thing to you. I killed Cyril. I killed Silas and Lyris. I nearly killed Dex, but he backed off, and I couldn’t find him again.” Her silver face could be carved of marble, it’s so emotionless.
Who is this person?
“If we’d refused to fight,” she says, “our friends would have died. What were we supposed to do?”

“I killed Demetrius.” I search her face for anger. She and Demetrius grew close after his brother died—she was the only one who ever knew what to say to him. “And—and Leander.”

“You did what you had to. Just as I did what I had to. Just as Faris and Dex and all the others who survived did what they had to.”

“I know they did what they had to do, but they followed an order
I
gave. An order I should have been strong enough
not
to give.”

“You’d have died, Elias.” She doesn’t look at me. She’s working so hard to convince herself that it’s all right. That what we did was necessary. “Your men would have died.”

“
The battle will end when you defeat or are defeated by the leader of the enemy.
If I’d been willing to die first, Tristas would still be alive. Leander. Demetrius. All of them, Helene. Zak knew it—he begged Marcus to kill him. I should have done the same. You’d be named Empress—”

“Or the Augurs would name Marcus, and I’d be his—his
slave
—”

“
We
told our men to kill.” Why doesn’t she understand? Why isn’t she willing to face it? “
We
gave the order. We followed it ourselves. It’s unforgiveable.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” Helene pushes herself to her feet, and I stand too. “Did you think the Trials would get easier? Didn’t you know this would come? They’ve made us live our deepest fears. They’ve thrown us at the mercy of creatures that shouldn’t exist. Then they turned us against each other.
Strength of arms and mind and heart.
You’re surprised? You’re naïve, is what you are. You’re a fool.”

“Hel, you don’t know what you’re saying. I almost killed you—”

“Thank the skies for it!” She’s in front of me, so close that strands of her long hair blow into my face. “You fought back. After losing so many training battles, I wasn’t sure you would. I was so scared—I thought you’d be dead out there—”

“You’re sick.” I back away from her. “Don’t you have any regret? Any remorse? Those were our friends we killed.”

“They were soldiers,” Helene says. “Empire soldiers who died in battle, who died with honor. I’ll celebrate them. I’ll mourn them. But I won’t regret what I did. I did it for the Empire. I did it for my people.” She paces back and forth. “Don’t you see, Elias? The Trials are bigger than you or me, bigger than our guilt, our shame. We’re the answer to a five-hundred-year-old question. When Taius’s line fails, who will lead the Empire? Who will ride
at the head of a half-million-strong army? Who will control the destinies of forty million souls?”

“What about our destinies? Our souls?”

“They took our souls a long time ago, Elias.”

“No, Hel.” Laia’s words ring in my head, words I want to believe. Words I need
to believe.
You have a soul. Don’t let them take it from you.
“You’re wrong. I can never fix what I did yesterday, but when the Fourth Trial comes, I won’t—”

“Don’t, Elias.” Helene puts her fingers over my mouth, her anger replaced with something like despair. “Don’t make vows when you can’t know their cost.”

“I crossed a line yesterday, Helene. I won’t cross it again.”

“Don’t say
that.” Her hair flies about, and her eyes are wild. “How can you become Emperor if that’s the way you think? How can you win the Trials if—”

“I don’t want
to win the Trials,” I say. “I’ve never wanted to win them. I didn’t even want to take them. I was going to desert, Helene. Right after graduation, when everyone else would be celebrating, I was going to run.”

She shakes her head, holding up her hands as if to ward off my words. But I don’t stop. She needs to hear this. She needs to know the truth of who I am.

“I didn’t run, because Cain told me the only chance I had to be truly free was to take the Trials. I want
you
to win the Trials, Hel. I want to be named Blood Shrike. And then I want you to set me free.”

“Set you free?
Set you free?
This
is
freedom, Elias! When will you understand that? We’re Masks. Our destiny is power and death and violence. It’s what we are. If you don’t own that, then how can you ever be free?”

She’s delusional.
I’m trying to comprehend this dreadful truth when I hear the sound of approaching bootsteps. Hel hears it too, and we whirl to find Cain rounding a curve in the cliffs. A squadron of eight legionnaires accompanies him. He says nothing of the fight Helene and I are having, though he must have heard at least part of it. “You will come with us.”

The legionnaires split, four taking hold of me and the other four grabbing Helene.

“What’s going on?” I try to shake them off, but they’re big brutes, bigger than me, and they don’t budge. “What is this?”

“This, Aspirant Veturius, is the Trial of Loyalty.”