“I’m not going to kill her. If you want to, then hurry. We’re out of time.”
I turn away from her to scan the gloom behind us again. Whoever was watching us is gone. We have to assume the worst: that it was a soldier and that he’ll sound the alarm.
No troops patrol the top of Serra’s ramparts. Finally, some luck. The vine-covered door opens after a few sturdy pulls, its hinges creaking loudly. In seconds, we are through the thick city wall. For a moment, my vision doubles. That damned blow to the head.
Laia and I creep through an immense apricot grove, the horse clopping beside us. She leads the beast, and I walk ahead of her, my scims out.
The Commandant chose to face me alone. Perhaps it was her pride—her desire to prove to herself and me that she could destroy me single-handedly. Whatever the reason, she’d station at least a few squads of soldiers out here to catch us if we broke through. If there’s one thing I know about my mother, it’s that she always has a backup plan.
I’m thankful for the inky night. If the moon were out, a skilled bowman could pick us off easily from the walls. As it is, we blend in with the trees. Still, I don’t trust the darkness. I wait for the crickets and night creatures to go quiet, for my skin to go cold, for the scrape of boot or creak of leather.
But as we make our way through the orchard, there is no sign of the Empire.
I slow our pace as we approach the tree line. A tributary of the Rei rushes nearby. The only points of light in the desert are two garrisons, miles from us and from each other. Drum messages echo between them, referring to troop movements within Serra. Distantly, horses’ hooves pound, and I tense—but the sound moves away from us.
“Something’s not right,” I tell Laia. “My mother should have put patrols out here.”
“Maybe she thought that she wouldn’t need them.” Laia’s whisper is uncertain. “That she would kill us.”
“No,” I say. “The Commandant always has a backup plan.” I wish, suddenly, that Helene were here. I can practically see her silver brows furrowed, her mind carefully, patiently untangling the facts.
Laia cocks her head at me. “The Commandant makes mistakes, Elias,” she says. “She underestimated both of us.”
True, and yet the niggling feeling in my gut won’t go away. Hells, my head aches. I feel like retching. Like sleeping. Think, Elias. What was that in my mother’s eyes just before I knocked her out? An emotion. Something she wouldn’t normally express.
After a moment, it hits me. Satisfaction. The Commandant was pleased.
But why would she be satisfied that I’d knocked her senseless after she tried to kill me?
“She didn’t make a mistake, Laia.” We step out into the open land beyond the orchard, and I survey the storm building over the Serran Mountain Range, a hundred miles away. “She let us go.”
What I don’t understand is why.
CHAPTER FIVE
Helene
Loyal to the end.
The motto of Gens Aquilla, whispered into my ear by my father moments after I was born. I’ve spoken those words a thousand times. I’ve never questioned. Never doubted.
I think of those words now, as I sag between two legionnaires in the dungeons below Blackcliff. Loyal to the end.
Loyal to whom? My family? The Empire? My own heart?
Damn my heart to the hells. My heart is what landed me here in the first place.
“How did Elias Veturius escape?”
My interrogator cuts through my thoughts. His voice is as unfeeling as it was hours ago, when the Commandant threw me into this pit with him. She cornered me outside Blackcliff’s barracks, backed by a squad of Masks. I surrendered quietly; she knocked me unconscious anyway. And somehow between then and now, she stripped me of the silver shirt gifted to me by the Empire’s holy men, the Augurs. A shirt that made me near invincible after it sunk into my skin.
Perhaps I should be surprised that she managed to get it off me. But I’m not. Unlike the rest of the bleeding Empire, I’ve never made the mistake of underestimating the Commandant.
“How did he escape?” The interrogator is back at it. I suppress a sigh. I’ve answered the question a hundred times.
“I don’t know. One moment I was supposed to be chopping his head off, and the next, all I could hear was my ears ringing. When I looked on the execution dais, he was gone.”
The interrogator nods to the two legionnaires holding me. I gird myself.
Tell them nothing. No matter what. When Elias escaped, I promised I’d cover for him one last time. If the Empire learns that he got away through the tunnels, or that he’s traveling with a Scholar, or that he gave me his mask, the soldiers will track him more easily. He’ll never leave the city alive.
The legionnaires shove my head back into a bucket of foul water. I seal my lips, close my eyes, and keep my body loose, though every part of me wants to fight off my captors. I hold on to one image, the way the Commandant taught us during interrogation training.
Elias escaping. Smiling in some distant, sun-drenched land. Finding the freedom he’d sought for so long.
My lungs strain and burn. Elias escaping. Elias free. I drown, die. Elias escaping. Elias free.
The legionnaires yank my head from the bucket, and I draw a deep gulp of air.
The interrogator tips my face up with a firm hand, forcing me to look into green eyes that glimmer pale and unfeeling against the silver of his mask. I expect to see a hint of anger—frustration, at least, after hours of asking the same questions and hearing the same answers. But he is calm. Almost placid.
In my head, I call him the Northman for his brown skin, hollow cheeks, and angular eyes. He is a few years out of Blackcliff, young to be in the Black Guard, let alone as an interrogator.
“How did he escape?”
“I just told you—”
“Why were you in the Skulls’ barracks after the explosion?”
“Thought I saw him. But I lost him.” A version of the truth. I did lose him, in the end.
“How did he set the charges in the explosives?” The Northman releases my face and paces around me slowly, blending into the shadows but for the red patch on his fatigues—a screaming bird. It is the symbol of the Black Guard, the Empire’s internal enforcers. “When did you help him?”
“I didn’t help him.”
“He was your ally. Your friend.” The Northman pulls something from his pocket. It clinks, but I can’t see what it is. “The moment he was to be executed, a series of explosions nearly leveled the school. Do you expect anyone to believe that was a coincidence?”
At my silence, the Northman motions for the legionnaires to dunk me again. I breathe deep, locking everything else out of my mind but that image of him free.
And then, just as I go under, I think of her.
The Scholar girl. All that dark hair and those curves and her damned gold eyes. How he held her hand as they fled through the courtyard. The way she said his name and how, on her lips, it sounded like a song.
I swallow a mouthful of water. It tastes of death and piss. I kick out and fight the legionnaires holding me. Calm down. This is how interrogators destroy their prisoners. One crack, and he’ll drive a wedge into it and hammer until I split open.
Elias escaping. Elias free. I try to see it in my mind, but the image is replaced by the two of them together, entwined.
Maybe drowning wouldn’t be so horrible.
The legionnaires pull me up as my world goes dark. I spit out a mouthful of water. Shore up, Aquilla. This is when he breaks you.
“Who’s the girl?”
The question is so unexpected that for one damning moment, I’m unable to wipe the shock—or the recognition—from my face.