An Ember in the Ashes

My dagger is driven through a limp piece of parchment and into the scorched ground beside the tree. I tuck the weapon into my belt—it’s the difference between life and death out here. The parchment is written in an unfamiliar hand.

The Trial of Courage
The belltower. Sunset on the seventh day.
That’s clear enough. If today counts as the first day, I have six full days to reach the belltower or the Augurs will kill me for failing the Trial.
The air’s so dry that breathing burns my nostrils. I lick my lips, already thirsty, and hunch beneath the paltry shade of the Jack tree to consider my predicament.
The stink in the air tells me that the glittering patch of blue to the west of me is Lake Vitan. Its sulfurous stench is legendary, and it’s the only source of water in this wasteland. It’s also pure salt and so completely useless to me. In any case, my path lies east through the Serran Mountain Range.
Two days to get to the mountains. Two more to get to Walker’s Gap, the only way through. A day to get through the Gap and a day to get down to Serra. Six full days exactly, if everything goes as planned.
It’s too easy.
I think back to the foretelling I read in the Commandant’s office. Courage to face their darkest fears. Some people might fear the desert. I’m not one of them.
Which means there’s something else out here. Something that hasn’t revealed itself.
I tear strips of cloth off my shirt and wrap my feet. I have only what I fell asleep with—my fatigues and my dagger. I’m suddenly, fervently grateful that I was too exhausted from combat training to strip before sleeping. Traveling the Great Wastes naked—that would be its own special sort of hell.
Soon the sun sinks into the wild sky of the west, and I stand in the rapidly cooling air. Time to run. I set out at a steady jog, my eyes roving ahead. After a mile, a breeze meanders past, and for a second, I think I smell smoke and death. The smell fades, but it leaves me uneasy.
What are my fears? I rack my brain, but I can’t think of anything. Most of Blackcliff’s students fear something, though never for long. When we were Yearlings, the Commandant ordered Helene to rappel down the cliffs again and again until she could drop with nothing but a clenched jaw to betray her terror. That same year, the Commandant forced Faris to keep a bird-eating desert tarantula as a pet, telling him that if the spider died, he would too.
There must be something I fear. Enclosed spaces? The dark? If I don’t know my fears, I won’t be prepared for them.
Midnight comes and goes, and still the desert around me is quiet and empty. I’ve traveled nearly twenty miles, and my throat is dry as dirt. I lick at the sweat on my arms, knowing that my need for salt will be as great as my need for water. The moisture helps, but only for a moment. I force myself to focus on the ache in my feet and legs. Pain I can handle. But thirst can drive a man insane.
Soon after, I crest a rise and spot something strange ahead: glimmers of light, like moonlight shining down on a lake. Only there’s no lake around here. Dagger in hand, I slow to a walk.
Then I hear it. A voice.
It starts quietly enough, a whisper I can pass off as the wind, a scrape that sounds like the echo of my footsteps on the cracked ground. But the voice get closer, clearer.
Eliassss.
Eliassss.
A low hill rises before me, and when I reach the top, the night breeze curdles, bringing with it the unmistakable smells of war—blood and dung and rot. Below me sits a battlefield—a killing field, actually, for no battle rages here. Everyone’s dead. Moonlight glints off the armor of fallen men.
This is what I saw earlier, from the rise.
It’s a strange battlefield, unlike any I’ve encountered. No one moans or pleads for aid. Barbarians from the borderlands lay beside Martial soldiers. I spot what looks like a Tribal trader and beside him, smaller bodies—his family. What is this place? Why would a Tribesman battle against Martials and Barbarians out in the middle of nowhere?
“Elias.”
I practically leap from my skin at the sound of my name spoken in such silence, and my dagger is at the throat of the speaker before I can think. He is a Barbarian boy, no more than thirteen. His face is painted with blue woad, and his body is dark with the geometric tattoos unique to his people. Even in the light of the half-moon, I know him. I’d know him anywhere.
He is my first kill.
My eyes drop to the gaping wound in his stomach, a wound I put there nine years ago. A wound he doesn’t seem to notice.
I drop my arm and back away. Impossible.
The boy’s dead. Which means that all this—the battlefield, the smell, the Wastes—must be a nightmare. I pinch my arm to wake myself up. The boy tilts his head. I pinch myself again. I take my dagger and cut my hand with it. Blood drips to the ground.
The boy doesn’t budge. I can’t wake up.
Courage to face their darkest fears.
“My mother screamed and tore at her hair for three days after I died,” my first kill says. “She didn’t speak again for five years.” He talks quietly in the just-deepened voice of a teenaged boy. “I was her only child,” he adds, as if in explanation.
“I’m—I’m sorry—”
The boy shrugs and walks away, gesturing for me to follow him onto the battlefield. I don’t want to go, but he clamps a chill hand on my arm and pulls me behind him with surprising force. As we wind through the first of the bodies, I look down. A sick feeling seeps through me.
I recognize these faces. I killed every one of these people.
As I pass them, their voices murmur secrets in my head—
My wife was pregnant—
I was sure I’d kill you first—
My father swore revenge, but died before taking it—I clap my hands over my ears. But the boy sees, and his clammy fingers pull mine away from my head with inexorable force.
“Come,” he says. “There are more.”
I shake my head. I know exactly how many people I’ve killed, when they died, how, where. There are far more than twenty-one men on this battlefield.
I can’t have killed them all.