An Ember in the Ashes

‘I’m alone, boy.’ The Mask addresses Darin with all the emotion of a corpse. ‘The rest of the men are in your house. You can run if you like.’ He moves away from the gate. ‘But I insist you leave the girl.’

Darin raises the knife.

‘Chivalrous of you,’ the Mask says.

Then he strikes, a flash of copper and silver lightning out of an empty sky. In the time it takes me to gasp, the Mask has shoved my brother’s face into the sandy ground and pinned his writhing body with a knee. Nan’s knife falls to the dirt.

A scream erupts from me, lonely in the still summer night. Seconds later, a scimpoint pricks my throat. I didn’t even see the Mask draw the weapon.

‘Quiet,’ he says. ‘Arms up. Now get inside.’

The Mask uses one hand to yank Darin up by the neck and the other to prod me on with his scim. My brother limps, face bloodied, eyes dazed. When he struggles, a fish on a hook, the Mask tightens his grip.

The back door of the house opens, and a red-caped legionnaire comes out.

‘The house is secure, Commander.’

The Mask shoves Darin at the soldier. ‘Bind him up. He’s strong.’

Then he grabs me by the hair, twisting until I cry out.

‘Mmm.’ He bends his head to my ear, and I cringe, my terror caught in my throat. ‘I’ve always loved dark-haired girls.’

I wonder if he has a sister, a wife, a woman. But it wouldn’t matter if he did. To him, I’m not someone’s family. I’m just a thing to be subdued, used, and discarded. The Mask drags me down the hallway to the front room as casually as a hunter drags his kill. Fight, I tell myself. Fight. But as if he senses my pathetic attempts at bravery, his hand squeezes, and pain lances through my skull. I sag and let him pull me along.

Legionnaires stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the front room amid upturned furniture and broken bottles of jam. Trader won’t get anything now. So many days spent over steaming kettles, my hair and skin smelling of apricot and cinnamon. So many jars, steamed and dried, filled and sealed. Useless. All useless.

The lamps are lit, and Nan and Pop kneel in the middle of the floor, their hands bound behind their backs. The soldier holding Darin shoves him to the ground beside them.

‘Shall I tie up the girl, sir?’ Another soldier fingers the rope at his belt, but the Mask leaves me between two burly legionnaires.

‘She’s not going to cause any trouble.’ He stabs at me with those eyes. ‘Are you?’ I shake my head and shrink back, hating myself for being such a coward. I reach for my mother’s tarnished armlet, wrapped around my bicep, and touch the familiar pattern for strength. I find none. Mother would have fought. She’d have died rather than face this humiliation. But I can’t make myself move. My fear has ensnared me.

A legionnaire enters the room, his face more than a little nervous. ‘It’s not here, Commander.’

The Mask looks down at my brother. ‘Where’s the sketchbook?’

Darin stares straight ahead, silent. His breath is low and steady, and he doesn’t seem dazed anymore. In fact, he’s almost composed.

The Mask gestures, a small movement. One of the legionnaires lifts Nan by her neck and slams her frail body against a wall. Nan bites her lip, her eyes sparking blue. Darin tries to rise, but another soldier forces him down.

The Mask scoops up a shard of glass from one of the broken jars. His tongue flickers out like a snake’s as he tastes the jam.

‘Shame it’s all gone to waste.’ He caresses Nan’s face with the edge of the shard. ‘You must have been beautiful once. Such eyes.’ He turns to Darin. ‘Shall I carve them out of her?’

‘It’s outside the small bedroom window. In the hedge.’ I can’t manage more than a whisper, but the soldiers hear. The Mask nods, and one of the legionnaires disappears into the hallway. Darin doesn’t look at me, but I feel his dismay. Why did you tell me to hide it, I want to cry out. Why did you bring the cursed thing home?

The legionnaire returns with the book. For unending seconds, the only sound in the room is the rustling of pages as the Mask flips through the sketches. If the rest of the book is anything like the page I found, I know what the Mask will see: Martial knives, swords, scabbards, forges, formulas, instructions – things no Scholar should know of, let alone re-create on paper.

‘How did you get into the Weapons Quarter, boy?’ The Mask looks up from the book. ‘Has the Resistance been bribing some Plebeian drudge to sneak you in?’

I stifle a sob. Half of me is relieved Darin’s no traitor. The other half wants to rage at him for being such a fool. Association with the Scholars’ Resistance carries a death sentence.

‘I got myself in,’ my brother says. ‘The Resistance had nothing to do with it.’

‘You were seen entering the catacombs last night after curfew’ – the Mask almost sounds bored – ‘in the company of known Scholar rebels.’

‘Last night, he was home well before curfew,’ Pop speaks up, and it is strange to hear my grandfather lie. But it makes no difference. The Mask’s eyes are for my brother alone. The man doesn’t blink as he reads Darin’s face the way I’d read a book.

‘Those rebels were taken into custody today,’ the Mask says. ‘One of them gave up your name before he died. What were you doing with them?’

‘They followed me.’ Darin sounds so calm. Like he’s done this before. Like he’s not afraid at all. ‘I’d never met them before.’

‘And yet they knew of your book here. Told me all about it. How did they learn of it? What did they want from you?’

‘I don’t know.’

The Mask presses the shard of glass deep into the soft skin below Nan’s eye, and her nostrils flare. A trickle of blood traces a wrinkle down her face.

Darin draws a sharp breath, the only sign of strain. ‘They asked for my sketchbook,’ he says. ‘I said no. I swear it.’

‘And their hideout?’

‘I didn’t see. They blindfolded me. We were in the catacombs.’

‘Where in the catacombs?’

‘I didn’t see. They blindfolded me.’

The Mask eyes my brother for a long moment. I don’t know how Darin can remain unruffled beneath that gaze.

‘You’re prepared for this.’ The smallest bit of surprise creeps into the Mask’s voice. ‘Straight back. Deep breathing. Same answers to different questions. Who trained you, boy?’

When Darin doesn’t answer, the Mask shrugs. ‘A few weeks in prison will loosen your tongue.’ Nan and I exchange a frightened glance. If Darin ends up in a Martial prison, we’ll never see him again. He’ll spend weeks in interrogation, and after that they’ll either sell him as a slave or kill him.

‘He’s just a boy,’ Pop speaks slowly, as if to an angry patient. ‘Please—’

Steel flashes, and Pop drops like a stone. The Mask moves so swiftly that I don’t understand what he has done. Not until Nan rushes forward. Not until she lets out a shrill keen, a shaft of pure pain that brings me to my knees.

Pop. Skies, not Pop. A dozen vows sear themselves into my mind. I’ll never disobey again, I’ll never do anything wrong, I’ll never complain about my work, if only Pop lives.

But Nan tears her hair and screams, and if Pop was alive, he’d never let her go on like that. He wouldn’t have been able to bear it. Darin’s calm is sheared away as if by a scythe, his face blanched with a horror I feel down to my bones.

Nan stumbles to her feet and takes one tottering step towards the Mask. He reaches out to her, as if to put his hand on her shoulder. The last thing I see in my grandmother’s eyes is terror. Then the Mask’s gauntleted wrist flashes once, leaving a thin red line across Nan’s throat, a line that grows wider and redder as she falls.

Her body hits the floor with a thud, her eyes still open and shining with tears as blood pours from her neck and into the rug we knotted together last winter.

‘Sir,’ one of the legionnaires says. ‘An hour until dawn.’

‘Get the boy out of here.’ The Mask doesn’t give Nan a second glance. ‘And burn this place down.’

He turns to me then, and I wish I could fade like a shadow into the wall behind me. I wish for it harder than I’ve ever wished for anything, knowing all the while how foolish it is. The soldiers flanking me grin at each other as the Mask takes a slow step in my direction. He holds my gaze as if he can smell my fear, a cobra enthralling its prey.

No, please, no. Disappear, I want to disappear.

The Mask blinks, some foreign emotion flickering across his eyes – surprise or shock, I can’t tell. It doesn’t matter. Because in that moment, Darin leaps up from the floor. While I cowered, he loosened his bindings. His hands stretch out like claws as he lunges for the Mask’s throat. His rage lends him a lion’s strength, and for a second he is every inch our mother, honey hair glowing, eyes blazing, mouth twisted in a feral snarl.

The Mask backs into the blood pooled near Nan’s head, and Darin is on him, knocking him to the ground, raining down blows. The legionnaires stand frozen in disbelief and then come to their senses, surging forward, shouting and swearing. Darin pulls a dagger free from the Mask’s belt before the legionnaires tackle him.

‘Laia!’ my brother shouts. ‘Run—’

Don’t run, Laia. Help him. Fight.

But I think of the Mask’s cold regard, of the violence in his eyes. I’ve always loved dark-haired girls. He will rape me. Then he will kill me.

I shudder and back into the hallway. No one stops me. No one notices.

‘Laia!’ Darin cries out, sounding like I’ve never heard him. Frantic. Trapped. He told me to run, but if I screamed like that, he would come. He would never leave me. I stop.

Help him, Laia, a voice orders in my head. Move.

And another voice, more insistent, more powerful.

You can’t save him. Do what he says. Run.

Flame flickers at the edge of my vision, and I smell smoke. One of the legionnaires has started torching the house. In minutes, fire will consume it.

‘Bind him properly this time and get him into an interrogation cell.’ The Mask removes himself from the fray, rubbing his jaw. When he sees me backing down the hallway, he goes strangely still. Reluctantly, I meet his eyes, and he tilts his head.

‘Run, little girl,’ he says.

My brother is still fighting, and his screams slice right through me. I know then that I will hear them over and over again, echoing in every hour of every day until I am dead or I make it right. I know it.

And still, I run.

* * *

The cramped streets and dusty markets of the Scholars’ Quarter blur past me like the landscape of a nightmare. With each step, part of my brain shouts at me to turn around, to go back, to help Darin. With each step, it becomes less likely, until it isn’t a possibility at all, until the only word I can think is run.

The soldiers come after me, but I’ve grown up among the squat, mud-brick houses of the Quarter, and I lose my pursuers quickly.

Dawn breaks, and my panicked run turns to a stumble as I wander from alley to alley. Where do I go? What do I do? I need a plan, but I don’t know where to start. Who can offer me help or comfort? My neighbours will turn me away, fearing for their own lives. My family is dead or imprisoned. My best friend, Zara, disappeared in a raid last year, and my other friends have their own troubles.

I’m alone.

As the sun rises, I find myself in an empty building deep in the oldest part of the Quarter. The gutted structure crouches like a wounded animal amid a labyrinth of crumbling dwellings. The stench of refuse taints the air.

I huddle in the corner of the room. My hair has slipped free of its braid and lays in hopeless tangles. The red stitches along the hem of my shift are ripped, the bright yarn limp. Nan sewed those hems for my seventeenth year-fall, to brighten up my otherwise drab clothing. It was one of the few gifts she could afford.

Now she’s dead. Like Pop. Like my parents and sister, long ago.

And Darin. Taken. Dragged to an interrogation cell where the Martials will do who-knows-what to him.

Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after. The moment Darin called out – that was such a moment. It was a test of courage, of strength. And I failed it.

Laia! Run!

Why did I listen to him? I should have stayed. I should have done something. I moan and grasp my head. I keep hearing him. Where is he now? Have they begun the interrogation? He’ll wonder what happened to me. He’ll wonder how his sister could have left him.

A flicker of furtive movement in the shadows catches my attention, and the hair on my nape rises. A rat? A crow? The shadows shift, and within them, two malevolent eyes flash. More sets of eyes join the first, baleful and slitted.

Hallucinations, I hear Pop in my head, making a diagnosis. A symptom of shock.

Hallucinations or not, the shadows look real. Their eyes glow with the fire of miniature suns, and they circle me like hyenas, growing bolder with each pass.

‘We saw,’ they hiss. ‘We know your weakness. He’ll die because of you.’

‘No,’ I whisper. But they are right, these shadows. I left Darin. I abandoned him. The fact that he told me to go doesn’t matter. How could I have been so cowardly?

I grasp my mother’s armlet, but touching it makes me feel worse. Mother would have outfoxed the Mask. Somehow, she’d have saved Darin and Nan and Pop.

Even Nan was braver than me. Nan, with her frail body and burning eyes. Her backbone of steel. Mother inherited Nan’s fire, and after her, Darin.

But not me.

Run, little girl.

The shadows inch closer, and I close my eyes against them, hoping they’ll disappear. I grasp at the thoughts ricocheting through my mind, trying to corral them.

Distantly, I hear shouts and the thud of boots. If the soldiers are still looking for me, I’m not safe here.

Maybe I should let them find me and do what they will. I abandoned my blood. I deserve punishment.

But the same instinct that urged me to escape the Mask in the first place drives me to my feet. I head into the streets, losing myself in the thickening morning crowds. A few of my fellow Scholars look twice at me, some with wariness, others with sympathy. But most don’t look at all. It makes me wonder how many times I walked right past someone in these streets who was running, someone who had just had their whole world ripped from them.

I stop to rest in an alley slick with sewage. Thick black smoke curls up from the other side of the Quarter, paling as it rises into the hot sky. My home, burning. Nan’s jams, Pop’s medicines, Darin’s drawings, my books, gone. Everything I am. Gone.

Not everything, Laia. Not Darin.

A grate squats in the centre of the alley, just a few feet away from me. Like all grates in the Quarter, it leads down into the Serra’s catacombs: home to skeletons, ghosts, rats, thieves … and possibly the Scholars’ Resistance.

Had Darin been spying for them? Had the Resistance got him into the Weapons Quarter? Despite what my brother told the Mask, it’s the only answer that makes sense. Rumour has it that the Resistance fighters have been getting bolder, recruiting not just Scholars, but Mariners, from the free country of Marinn, to the north, and Tribesmen, whose desert-territory is an Empire protectorate.

Pop and Nan never spoke of the Resistance in front of me. But late at night, I heard them murmuring of how the rebels freed Scholar prisoners while striking out at the Martials. Of how fighters raided the caravans of the Martial merchant class, the Mercators, and assassinated members of their upper class, the Illustrians. Only the rebels stand up to the Martials. Elusive as they are, they are the only weapon the Scholars have. If anyone can get near the forges, it’s them.

The Resistance, I realize, might help me. My home was raided and burned to the ground, my family killed because two of the rebels gave Darin’s name to the Empire. If I can find the Resistance and explain what happened, maybe they can help me break Darin free from prison – not just because they owe me, but because they live by Izzat, a code of honour as old as the Scholar people. The rebel leaders are the best of the Scholars, the bravest. My parents taught me that before the Empire killed them. If I ask for aid, the Resistance won’t turn me away.

I step towards the grate.

I’ve never been in Serra’s catacombs. They snake beneath the entire city, hundreds of miles of tunnels and caverns, some packed with centuries’ worth of bones. No one uses the crypts for burial anymore, and even the Empire hasn’t mapped out the catacombs entirely. If the Empire, with all its might, can’t hunt out the rebels, then how will I find them?

You won’t stop until you do. I lift the grate and stare into the black hole below. I have to go down there. I have to find the Resistance. Because if I don’t, my brother doesn’t stand a chance. If I don’t find the fighters and get them to help, I’ll never see Darin again.

CHAPTER FOUR

Elias

By the time Helene and I reach Blackcliff’s belltower, nearly all of the school’s three thousand students have formed up. Dawn’s an hour away, but I don’t see a single sleepy eye. Instead, an eager buzz runs through the crowd. The last time someone deserted, the courtyard was covered in frost.

Every student knows what’s coming. I clench and unclench my fists. I don’t want to watch this. Like all Blackcliff students, I came to the school at the age of six, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve witnessed punishments thousands of times. My own back is a map of the school’s brutality. But deserters are always the worst.

My body is tight as a spring, but I flatten my gaze and keep my expression emotionless. Blackcliff’s subject masters, the Centurions, will be watching. Drawing their ire when I’m so close to escaping would be unforgivably stupid.

Helene and I walk past the youngest students, four classes of maskless Yearlings, who will have the clearest view of the carnage. The smallest are barely seven. The biggest, nearly eleven.

The Yearlings look down as we pass; we are upperclassmen, and they are forbidden from even addressing us. They stand poker-straight, scims hanging at precise 45-degree angles on their backs, boots spit-shined, faces blank as stone. By now, even the youngest Yearlings have learned Blackcliff’s most essential lessons: Obey, conform, and keep your mouth shut.

Behind the Yearlings sits an empty space in honour of Blackcliff’s second tier of students, called Fivers because so many die in their fifth year. At age eleven, the Centurions throw us out of Blackcliff and into the wilds of the Empire without clothes, food, or weaponry, to survive as best as we can for four years. The remaining Fivers return to Blackcliff, receive their masks, and spend another four years as Cadets and then two more years as Skulls. Hel and I are Senior Skulls – just completing our last year of training.

The Centurions monitor us from beneath the arches that line the courtyard, hands on their whips as they await the arrival of Blackcliff’s commandant. They stand as still as statues, their masks long since melded to their features, any semblance of emotion a distant memory.

I put a hand to my own mask, wishing I could rip it off, even for a minute. Like my classmates, I received the mask on my first day as a Cadet, when I was fourteen. Unlike the rest of the students – and much to Helene’s dismay – the smooth liquid silver hasn’t dissolved into my skin like it’s supposed to. Probably because I take the damned thing off whenever I’m alone.

I’ve hated the mask since the day an Augur – an Empire holy man – handed it to me in a velvet-lined box. I hate the way it gloms on to me like some kind of parasite. I hate the way it presses into my face, moulding itself to my skin.

I’m the only student whose mask hasn’t melded to him yet – something my enemies enjoy pointing out. But lately, the mask has started fighting back, forcing the melding process by digging tiny filaments into the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl, makes me feel like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ll never be myself again.

‘Veturius.’ Hel’s lanky, sandy-haired platoon lieutenant, Demetrius, calls out to me as we take our spots with the other Senior Skulls. ‘Who is it? Who’s the deserter?’

‘I don’t know. Dex and the auxes brought him in.’ I look around for my lieutenant, but he hasn’t arrived yet.

‘I hear it’s a Yearling.’ Demetrius stares at a hunk of wood poking out of the blood-browned cobbles at the base of the belltower. The whipping post. ‘An older one. A fourth-year.’

Helene and I exchange a look. Demetrius’s little brother also tried to desert in his fourth year at Blackcliff, when he was only ten. He lasted three hours outside the gates before the legionnaires brought him in to face the Commandant – longer than most.

‘Maybe it was a Skull.’ Helene scans the ranks of older students, trying to see if anyone is missing.

‘Maybe it was Marcus,’ Faris, a member of my battle platoon who towers over the rest of us, says, grinning, his blond hair popping up in an unruly cowlick. ‘Or Zak.’

No such luck. Marcus, dark-skinned and yellow-eyed, stands at the front of our ranks with his twin, Zak: second-born, shorter and lighter, but just as evil. The Snake and the Toad, Hel calls them.

Zak’s mask has yet to attach fully around his eyes, but Marcus’s clings tightly, having joined with him so completely that all of his features – even the thick slant of his eyebrows – are clearly visible beneath it. If Marcus tried to remove his mask now, he’d take off half his face with it. Which would be an improvement.

As if he senses her glance, Marcus turns and looks Helene over with a predatory gaze of ownership that makes my hands itch to strangle him.

Nothing out of the ordinary, I remind myself. Nothing to make you stand out.

I force myself to look away. Attacking Marcus in front of the entire school would definitely qualify as out of the ordinary.

Helene notices Marcus’s leer. Her hands ball into fists at her sides, but before she can teach the Snake a lesson, the sergeant-at-arms marches into the courtyard.

‘ATTENTION.’

Three thousand bodies swing forward, three thousand pairs of boots snap together, three thousand backs jerk as if yanked straight by a puppeteer’s hand. In the ensuing silence, you could hear a tear drop.

But we don’t hear the Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy approach; we feel her, the way you feel a storm coming. She moves silently, emerging from the arches like a fair-haired jungle cat from the underbrush. She wears all black, from her tight-fitting uniform jacket to her steel-toed boots. Her blonde hair is pulled, as always, into a stiff knot at her neck.

She’s the only living female Mask – or will be until Helene graduates tomorrow. But unlike Helene, the Commandant exudes a deathly chill, as if her grey eyes and cut-glass features were carved from the underbelly of a glacier.

‘Bring the accused,’ she says.

A pair of legionnaires march out from behind the belltower, dragging a small, limp form. Beside me, Demetrius tenses. The rumours were right – the deserter’s a Fourth-Yearling, no older than ten. Blood drips down his face, blending into the collar of his black fatigues. When the soldiers dump him before the Commandant, he doesn’t move.

The Commandant’s silver face reveals nothing as she looks down at the Yearling. But her hand strays towards the spiked riding crop at her belt, fashioned out of bruise-black ironwood. She doesn’t remove it. Not yet.