An Ember in the Ashes

My battle rage rushes through me, shoving all other thoughts aside. Suddenly, she isn’t Helene. She is an enemy who wants me dead. An enemy I must survive.

I fling my scim to the sky, watching with mercenary satisfaction as Helene’s eyes flick up to follow the weapon’s path. Then I strike, coming down on her like an executioner. My knee drives into her chest, and even through the storm, I hear the crack of a rib and the surprised whoosh of her breath leaving her.
She is beneath me, her ocean eyes terrified as I pin her scim arm down.
Our bodies are entangled, entwined, but Helene is foreign to me suddenly, unknowable as the heavens. I tear a dagger from my chest, and my blood roars as my fingers touch the cold hilt. She knees me and grabs her scim, determined to finish me before I can finish her. I’m too fast. I lift the dagger high, my rage peaking, holding like the highest note of a mountain storm.
And then I bring the blade down.
XXXIX: Laia
In the predawn darkness, the storm churning above Serra strikes with the wrath of a conquering army. The servants’ corridor swims in a half foot of rain, and Cook and I sweep out the water with rush brooms while Izzi tirelessly stacks sandbags. Rain lashes my face like the icy fingers of a ghost.
“Nasty day for a Trial!” Izzi calls to me over the downpour.
I don’t know what the Third Trial will be, and I don’t care, except to hope that it serves as a distraction for the rest of the school while I look for a secret entrance into Blackcliff.
No one else seems to share my indifference. In Serra, bets over who will win border on the obscene. The odds, Izzi tells me, have shifted to favor Marcus instead of Veturius.
Elias. I whisper his name to myself. I think of his face without the mask and the low, thrilling timbre of his voice when he whispered in my ear at the Moon Festival. I think of how he moved when he fought with Aquilla, that sensual beauty that took my breath away. I think of his implacable anger when Marcus nearly killed me.
Stop, Laia. Stop. He’s a Mask and I’m a slave, and thinking of him in this way is so wrong that I wonder for a second if the beating Marcus gave me has muddled my brain.
“Inside, Slave-Girl.” Cook takes my broom, her hair a wild halo in the storm. “Commandant’s calling.”
I rush upstairs, soaked through and shivering, to find the Commandant pacing her room with a violent energy, her blonde tresses unbound.
“My hair,” the woman says when I dart into her chambers. “Quickly, girl, or I’ll have it out of your hide.”
The second I finish, she leaves the room, snatching her weapons from the wall, not bothering to give me her usual litany of orders.
“Shot out of here like a wolf on the hunt,” Izzi says when I enter the kitchen. “Went straight for the amphitheater. That must be where the Trial is. I wonder—”
“You and the rest of the school, girl,” Cook says. “We’ll find out soon enough. We’re stuck inside today. Commandant said any slave out on the grounds will be killed on sight.”
Izzi and I exchange a glance. Cook kept us up preparing for the storm until past midnight last night, and I’d been planning to look for a secret entrance today.
“It’s not worth the risk, Laia,” Izzi warns me when Cook turns away. “You still have tomorrow. Rest your mind for a day, and a solution might present itself.” A rumble of thunder greets her comment. I sigh and nod. I hope she’s right.
“Get to work, you two.” Cook shoves a rag in Izzi’s hand. “Kitchen-Girl, you finish the silver, polish the banister, scrub the—”
Izzi rolls her eye and throws down the cloth. “Dust the furniture, finish the laundry, I know. Let it wait, Cook. The Commandant’s gone for an entire day. Can’t we appreciate that, even for a minute?” Cook presses her lips together in disapproval, but Izzi assumes a wheedling tone. “Tell us a story. Something scary.” She shivers in anticipation, and Cook makes a strange sound that could be a laugh or a groan.
“Life isn’t scary enough for you, girl?”
Quietly, I slip to the back of the kitchen worktable to press the seemingly endless stack of the Commandant’s uniforms. It’s been ages since I’ve heard a good tale, and I long to get lost in one. But if Cook knows that, she’ll probably keep silent on principle.
The old woman appears to ignore us. Her hands, small and fine, sift through jars of spices as she prepares lunch.
“You won’t give up, will you?” I think at first that Cook is speaking to Izzi, only to look up and find her regarding me. “You mean to see this mission to save your brother through to the end. No matter what the cost.”
“I have to.” I wait for her to launch into another of her rants against the Resistance. But instead, she nods, unsurprised. “I have a story for you, then,” she says. “It has no hero or heroine. It has no happy ending. But it’s a story you need to hear.”
Izzi raises an eyebrow and takes up her polishing cloth. Cook shuts one spice jar and opens another. Then she begins.
“Long ago,” she says, “when man knew not greed, malice, tribe, nor clan, jinn walked the earth.”
Cook’s voice is nothing like a Tribal Kehanni’s: It is stern where a talespinner’s would be gentle, all edges where a talespinner’s would be mellow and curved. But the old woman’s cadence reminds me of the Tribespeople anyway, and I’m pulled into the tale.
“Immortal the jinn were.” Cook’s eyes are quiet, as if she’s lost in an inner musing. “Created of sinless, smokeless fire. They rode the winds and read the stars, and their beauty was the beauty of the wild places.