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

Something that will strike fear into my very bones. Something to test my courage.

I don’t expect the mask. I don’t expect the cold, flat eyes of Zak glaring out at me.

Behind me, Helene screams, and I hear the crash of two bodies hitting the ground. I turn to see Marcus attacking her. Her face is frozen in terror at the sight of him, and she makes no move to defend herself as he pins down her arms, laughing like he did when he kissed her.

“Helene!” At my shout, she snaps out of her daze and strikes out at Marcus, twisting away from him.

Then Zak is on me, raining blows down on my head, my neck. He fights recklessly, almost frenziedly, and I easily evade his assault. I come around behind him, sweeping my dagger in an arc. He spins back to dodge the attack and lunges at me, teeth bared like a dog’s. I duck beneath his arm and sink my dagger into his side. Hot blood sprays across my hand. I wrench the dagger out, and Zak groans and staggers back. Hand on his side, he stumbles into the trees, shouting for his twin.

Marcus, serpent that he is, darts into the forest after Zak. Blood shines on Marcus’s thigh, and I feel a burst of satisfaction. Hel marked him. I give chase, the battle rage rising, blinding me to anything else. Distantly, Helene calls my name. Ahead of me, the Snake’s shadow joins with Zak’s, and they barrel ahead, unaware of how close I am.

“Ten burning hells, Zak!” Marcus says. “The Commandant told us to finish them off before they left the Gap, and you go running into the woods like a scared little girl—”

“He stabbed me, all right?” Zak’s voice is breathless. “And she didn’t tell us we’d be dealing with both of them at once, did she?”

“Elias!”

Helene’s shout barely registers. Marcus and Zak’s conversation leaves me dumbstruck. It’s no surprise that my mother’s in league with the Snake and Toad. What I don’t understand is how she knew that Hel and I would be coming through the Gap.

“We have to finish them. ” Marcus’s shadow turns, and I bring my dagger up. Then Zak grabs him.

“We have to get out of here,” he says. “Or we won’t make it back on time. Leave them. Come on. ”

Part of me wants to chase after Marcus and Zak and take the answers to my questions out of their hides. But Helene cries out again, her voice faint.

She might be hurt.

When I get back to the clearing, Hel is slumped on the ground, her head tilted to the side. One arm is splayed out uselessly while she paws at her shoulder with the other, trying to stanch the sluggish pulse of blood draining out of her.

I close the distance between us in two strides, tearing off what remains of my shirt, wadding it and pressing down on the wound. She bucks her head, her knotted blonde hair whipping at her back as she cries out, a keening, animal wail.

“It’s all right, Hel,” I say. My hands shake, and a voice in my head screams that it’s not all right, that my best friend is going to die. I keep talking. “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to fix you right up. ” I grab the canteen. I need to clean the wound and bind it. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened. ”

“Surprised me. Couldn’t move. I—I saw him on the mountain. He was—he and I—” She shudders, and I understand now. In the desert, I saw images of war and death. Helene saw Marcus. “His hands—everywhere. ” She squeezes her eyes shut and draws her legs up protectively.

I’ll kill him, I think calmly, making the decision as easily as I’d choose my boots in the morning. If she dies—so will he.

“Can’t let them win. If they win. . . ” Helene’s words spill from her mouth.

“Fight, Elias. You have to fight. You have to win. ”

I cut open her shirt with my dagger, jolted for a moment by the delicacy of her skin. Dark has settled in, and I can barely see the wound, but I can feel the warmth of the blood as it oozes into my hand.

Helene grabs my arm with her good hand as I pour water over the injury.

I bind her up using what’s left of my shirt and some strips from her fatigues.

After a few moments, her hand goes slack—she’s fallen unconscious.

My body aches in exhaustion, but I begin pulling vines down from the trees to make a sling. Hel can’t walk, so I’ll have to carry her to Blackcliff. As I work, my mind whirls. The Farrars ambushed us on the Commandant’s orders. No wonder she couldn’t contain her smugness before the Trials began.

She was planning this attack. But how did she learn where we’d be?

It wouldn’t take a genius, I suppose. If she knew the Augurs would leave me in the Great Wastes and Helene in spire vulture territory, she would also know the only way for us to get back to Serra was through the Gap. But if she told Marcus and Zak, then that means they cheated and sabotaged us, which the Augurs pointedly forbade.

The Augurs must know what happened. Why haven’t they done anything about it?

When the sling is finished, I carefully load Helene into it. Her skin is blanched bone-white, and she shakes with cold. She feels light. Too light.

Again, the Augurs have preyed on the unexpected fear, the one I didn’t realize I had. Helene is dying. I didn’t know how terrifying it would be because she’s never come so close to it before.

My doubts crowd in—I won’t make it back to Blackcliff by sunset; the physician won’t be able to save her; she’ll die before I get to the school. Stop, Elias. Move.

After years of the Commandant’s forced marches through the desert, carrying Helene is no burden. Though it’s deep night, I move quickly. I still have to hike out of the mountains, get a boat from the river guardhouse, and row to Serra. I’ve already lost hours making the sling, and Marcus and Zak will be well ahead of me. Even if I don’t stop from here until Serra, I’ll be hard-pressed to reach the belltower before sunset.

The sky pales, casting the jagged peaks of the mountains around me in shadow. The day is well under way when I emerge from the Gap. The Rei River stretches out below, slow and curving like a well-sated python. Barges and boats dot the water, and just beyond the eastern banks sits the city of Serra, its dun-colored walls imposing even from a distance of miles.

Smoke taints the air. A column of black rises into the sky, and though I can’t see the guardhouse from this spot on the trail, I know with sinking certainty that the Farrars got there before me. That they burned it along with the boathouse attached to it.

I sprint down the mountain, but by the time I reach the guardhouse, it’s nothing but a stinking, sooty hulk. The attached boathouse is a pile of smoldering logs, and the legionnaires manning it have cleared out—probably under orders from the Farrars.

I unlash Helene from my back. The jarring trip down the mountain has reopened her wound. My back is coated in her blood.

“Helene?” I sink to my knees and pat her face softly. “Helene!” Not even a flick of the eyelids. She is lost inside herself, and the skin around her wound is red and fevered. She’s getting an infection.

I stare flintily at the guard shack, willing a boat to appear. Any boat. A raft.

A dinghy. A bleeding, hollowed-out log, I don’t care. Anything. But of course, there’s nothing. Sunset is, at most, an hour away. If I don’t get us across this river, we’re dead.

Strangely, it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head, cold and pitiless.