An Ember in the Ashes

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 labour 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.

* * *

Hours 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 coloured 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 prises 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.

We’re escorted through the gates, and moments later, the slaver is circling me, sweating in the heat. He’s as tall as the Tribesman but twice as broad, with a paunch that strains the buttons of his gold brocade shirt.

‘Not bad.’ The slaver snaps his fingers, and a slave-girl appears from the recesses of his mansion bearing a tray of drinks. The slaver slurps one down, pointedly not offering anything to the Tribesman. ‘The brothels will pay well for her.’

‘As a whore, she won’t fetch more than a hundred marks,’ the Tribesman says in his hypnotic lilt. ‘I need two hundred.’

The slaver snorts, and I want to strangle him for it. The shaded streets of his neighbourhood are littered with sparkling fountains and bow-backed Scholar slaves. The man’s house is a bloated hodgepodge of arches and columns and courtyards. Two hundred silvers is a drop in the bucket for him. He probably paid more for the plaster lions flanking his front door.

‘I hoped to sell her as a house slave,’ the Tribesman continues. ‘I heard you were looking for one.’

‘I am,’ the slaver admits. ‘Commandant’s been on my back for days. Hag keeps killing off her girls. Temper like a viper.’ The slaver eyes me the way a rancher eyes a heifer, and I hold my breath. Then he shakes his head.

‘She’s too small, too young, too pretty. She won’t last a week in Blackcliff, and I don’t want the bother of replacing her. I’ll give you one hundred for her and sell her to Madam Moh over dockside.’

A bead of sweat trickles down the Tribesman’s otherwise serene face. Mazen ordered him to do whatever it took to get me into Blackcliff. But if he drops his price suddenly, the slaver will be suspicious. If he sells me as a whore, the Resistance will have to get me out – and there is no guarantee they can do so quickly. If he doesn’t sell me at all, my attempt to save Darin will fail.

Do something, Laia. Darin again, fanning my courage. Or I’m dead.

‘I press clothes well, Master.’ The words are out before I can reconsider. The Tribesman’s mouth drops open, and the slaver regards me as if I’m a rat who has begun juggling.

‘And, um … I can cook. And clean and dress hair,’ I trail off into a whisper. ‘I’d – I’d make a good maid.’

The slaver stares me down, and I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Then his eyes grow shrewd, almost amused.

‘Afraid of whoring, girl? Don’t see why, it’s an honest enough trade.’ He circles me again, then jerks my chin up until I am looking into his reptilian green eyes. ‘You said you can dress hair and press clothes? Can you barter and handle yourself in the market?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You can’t read, of course. Can you count?’

Of course I can count. And I can read too, you double-chinned pig.

‘Yes, sir. I can count.’

‘She’ll have to learn to keep her mouth shut,’ the slaver says. ‘I’ve got to eat the cost of cleanup. Can’t send her to Blackcliff looking like a chimney sweep.’ He considers. ‘I’ll take her for one hundred and fifty silver marks.’

‘I can always take her to one of the Illustrian houses,’ the Tribesman suggests. ‘Underneath all that dirt, she’s a fine-looking girl. I’m sure they’d pay well for her.’

The slaver narrows his eyes. I wonder if Mazen’s man has erred, trying to bargain higher. Come on, you miser, I think at the slaver. Cough up a little extra.

The slaver pulls out a sack of coins. I fight to hide my relief.

‘A hundred and eighty marks then. Not a copper more. Take off her chains.’

Less than an hour later, I’m locked inside a ghost wagon that is heading for Blackcliff. Wide silver bands that mark me as a slave adorn each wrist. A chain leads from the collar around my neck to a steel rail inside the wagon. My skin still smarts from the scrubbing I got from two slave-girls, and my head aches from the tight bun they tamed my hair into. My dress, black silk with a corset-tight bodice and diamond-patterned skirt, is the finest thing I’ve ever worn. I hate it on sight.

The minutes crawl by. The inside of the wagon is so dark that I feel as if I’ve gone blind. The Empire throws Scholar children into these wagons, some as young as two or three, ripped screaming from their parents. After that, who knows what happens to them. The ghost wagons are so named because those who disappear into them are never seen again.

Don’t think of such things, Darin whispers to me. Focus on the mission. On how you’ll save me.

As I go over Keenan’s instructions again in my head, the wagon begins to climb, moving achingly slow. The heat seeps into me, and when I feel as if I’ll faint from it, I think up a memory to distract myself – Pop sticking his finger in a fresh jam pot three days ago and laughing while Nan whacked him with a spoon.

Their absence is a wound in my chest. I miss Pop’s growling laugh and Nan’s stories. And Darin – how I miss my brother. His jokes and drawings and how he seems to know everything. Life without him isn’t just empty, it’s scary. He’s been my guide, my protector, my best friend for so long that I don’t know what to do without him. The thought of him suffering torments me. Is he in a cell right now? Is he being tortured?

In the corner of the ghost wagon, something flickers, dark and creeping.

I want it to be an animal – a mouse or, skies, even a rat. But then the creature’s eyes are on me, bright and ravenous. It is one of the things. One of the shadows from the night of the raid. I’m going crazy. Bleeding, bat crazy.

I close my eyes, willing the thing to disappear. When it doesn’t, I swat at it with trembling hands.

‘Laia …’

‘Go away. You’re not real.’

The thing inches close. Don’t scream, Laia, I tell myself, biting down hard on my lip. Don’t scream.

‘Your brother suffers, Laia.’ Each of the creature’s words is deliberate, as if it wants to make sure I don’t miss a single one. ‘The Martials pull pain from him slowly and with relish.’

‘No. You’re in my head.’

The creature’s laugh is like breaking glass. ‘I’m real as death, little Laia. Real as shattered bones and traitorous sisters and hateful Masks.’

‘You’re an illusion. You’re my … my guilt.’ I grab Mother’s armlet.

The shadow flashes its predator’s grin, and now it’s only a foot away. But then the wagon comes to a stop, and the creature gives me a last malevolent look before disappearing with a dissatisfied hiss. Seconds later, the wagon door swings open, and the forbidding walls of Blackcliff are before me, their oppressive weight driving the hallucination from my mind.

‘Eyes down.’ The slaver unchains me from the rail, and I force my gaze to the cobbled street. ‘Only speak to the Commandant if she speaks to you. Don’t look her in the eyes – she’s flogged slaves for less. When she gives you a task, carry it out quickly and well. She’ll disfigure you in the first few weeks, but you’ll thank her for it eventually – if the scarring’s bad enough, it’ll keep the older students from raping you too often.

‘The last slave lasted two weeks,’ the slaver continues, oblivious to my growing terror. ‘Commandant wasn’t happy about it. My fault, of course – I should have given the girl some fair warning. Went batty when the Commandant branded her, apparently. Threw herself off the cliffs. Don’t you do the same.’ He gives me a hard look, like a father warning an errant child not to wander off. ‘Or the Commandant will think I’m supplying her with inferior goods.’

The slaver nods a greeting to the guards stationed at the gates and pulls my chain as if I’m a dog. I shuffle after him. Rape … disfigurement … branding. I can’t do it, Darin. I can’t.

A visceral urge to flee sweeps through me, so powerful that I slow, stop, pull away from the slaver. My stomach roils, and I think I’ll be sick. But the slaver yanks the chain hard, and I stumble forward.

There’s nowhere to run, I realize as we pass beneath Blackcliff’s iron-spiked portcullis and into the fabled grounds. There’s nowhere to go. There’s no other way to save Darin.

I’m in now. And there is no going back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Elias

Hours after I’m named an Aspirant, I dutifully stand beside Grandfather in his cavernous foyer to greet guests arriving for my graduation party. Though Quin Veturius is seventy-seven years old, women blush when he looks them in the eye, and men wince when he deigns to shake their hands. The lamplight paints his thick mane of white hair gold, and the way he towers over everyone else, the way he nods at those entering his home, makes me imagine a falcon watching the world from an updraught.

By eighth bell, the mansion is packed with the finest Illustrian families, along with a few of the wealthiest Mercators. The only Plebeians are the stable hands.

My mother wasn’t invited.

‘Congratulations, Aspirant Veturius,’ a moustached man who might be a cousin says as he shakes my hand in both of his, using the title the Augurs bestowed on me during graduation. ‘Or should I say, your Imperial Majesty.’ The man dares to meet Grandfather’s gaze with an obsequious grin. Grandfather ignores him.

It’s been like this all night. People whose names I don’t know are treating me as if I’m their long-lost son or brother or cousin. Half of them probably are related to me, but they’ve never bothered acknowledging my existence before this.

The bootlickers are interspersed with friends – Faris, Dex, Tristas, Leander – but the person I wait most impatiently for is Helene. After I took the oath, the families of the graduates flooded the field, and she was swept away in a tide of Gens Aquilla before I had a chance to speak to her.

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