An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes 1)

“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 labor 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 colored 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.

Tribesman 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.