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

“We’re ready. ”

The door opens, and at Cain’s nod, I lead the platoon out. The rain is mixed with sleet, and my hands tingle and grow stiff. The bellow of thunder and slap of rain on mud muffles the sound of our passage. The enemy won’t hear us coming—but we won’t hear them either.

“Split!” I shout to Dex, knowing he’ll barely be able to make out my words over the storm. “You cover left flank. If you find the enemy, report back to me. Do not engage. ”

But for the first time since he became my lieutenant, Dex doesn’t acknowledge my orders. He doesn’t move. He stares over my shoulder into the mist obscuring the battlefield.

I follow his gaze, and movement catches my eye.

Leather armor. The flash of a scim.

Has one of my men slipped ahead for recon? No—I do a quick head count, and they are all arrayed behind me, awaiting orders.

Lightning splits the sky, illuminating the battlefield for a tantalizing moment.

Then the mist descends, thick as a blanket. But not before I see whom we’re fighting. Not before the shock turns my blood to ice and my body to stone.

I find Dex’s eyes. The truth is there, in his pale, haunted gaze. And in Faris’s and Cyril’s. In every man’s. They know.

At that moment, a blue-clad figure flies with familiar grace out of the mists, silver braid shining, descending upon Red Platoon like a falling star.

Then she sees me and falters, eyes widening.

“Elias?”

Strength of arms and mind and heart. For this? To kill my best friend? To kill her platoon?

“Commander. ” Dex grabs me. “Orders?”

Helene’s men emerge from the mists, scims out and ready. Demetrius.

Leander. Tristas. Ennis. I know these men. I grew to adulthood with them, suffered with them, sweated with them. I won’t give the order to kill them.

Dex shakes me. “Orders, Veturius. We need orders. ”

Orders. Of course. I’m Red Platoon’s commander. It’s up to me to decide.

If you show mercy, if you do not kill your enemy, there will be consequences.

“Strike to injure only!” I shout. Damn the consequences. “Do not kill. Do not kill. ”

I barely have time to give the order before Blue Platoon is on us, fighting as viciously as if we’re a tribe of border raiders. I hear Helene scream something, but I can’t make it out in the cacophony of pounding rain and clashing swords. She disappears, lost in the chaos.

I turn to look for her and spot Tristas cutting through the melee, coming straight for me. He flings a saw-toothed dagger at my chest, and I only just deflect it with my scim. He reaches for his own scim and rushes me. I drop, letting him roll over me before bringing the blunt end of my blade to the back of his legs. He loses his footing and slips in the thickening mud, landing on his back with throat exposed.

Open for the kill.

I turn away, waiting to disarm my next foe. But as I do, Faris, who has gained the upper hand in a fight with another of Helene’s men, starts to shake. His eyes bulge, the spear he holds falls from his nerveless fingers, and his face turns blue. His opponent, a quiet boy named Fortis, wipes sleet from his eyes and stares, open-mouthed, as Faris collapses to his knees, clawing at an enemy no one else can see.

What is happening to him? I rush forward, my mind screaming at me to do something. But as soon as I get within a foot of him, my body is flung back as if by an unseen hand. My vision goes black for a moment, but I scrabble to my feet anyway, hoping none of my foes will choose this moment to attack.

What is this? What’s happening to Faris?

Tristas staggers up from where I left him, his face lit with frightening intensity as he finds me. He means to end my life.

Faris’s chokes fade. He’s dying.

Consequences. There will be consequences.

Time shifts. The seconds stretch, each as long as an hour as I gaze at the mayhem of the battlefield. Red Platoon follows my orders to injure only—

and we are suffering for it. Cyril is down. So is Darien. Every time one of my men shows mercy to the enemy, one of their comrades falls, their life wrung out of them by Augur devilry.

Consequences.

I look between Faris and Tristas. They came to Blackcliff when Helene and I did. Tristas, dark-haired and wide-eyed, covered in bruises from the brutality of initiation. Faris, starved and peaked, no hint of the humor and brawn he’d possess later in life. Helene and I befriended them in our first week, all of us defending each other as best as we could against our predatory classmates.

And now one of them will die. No matter what I do.

Tristas comes for me, tears streaking his mask. His black hair is covered in mud, and his eyes burn with the panic of a cornered animal as he looks between Faris and me.

“I’m sorry, Elias. ”

He takes a step toward me, and suddenly, his body stiffens. The scim in his hand tips into the mud as he peers down at the blade emerging from his chest. Then he slides to the wet ground, his gaze fixed on me.

Dex stands behind him, revulsion bursting from his eyes as he watches one of his best friends die by his hand.

No. Not Tristas. Tristas, who’s been engaged to his childhood sweetheart since he was seventeen, who helped me understand Helene, who has four sisters who adore him. I stare at his body, at the tattoo on his arm. Aelia.

Tristas, dead. Dead.

Faris stops struggling. He coughs and stands shakily, then looks down at Tristas’s body with dawning shock. But he has as little time to grieve as I do.

One of Helene’s men sends a mace whistling toward his head, and he is soon locked in another battle, jabbing and lunging as if he hadn’t been perched on the edge of the abyss a minute before.

Dex is in my face then, his eyes wild. “We have to kill them! Give the order!”

My mind won’t think the words. My lips won’t speak them. I know these men. And Helene—I can’t let them kill Helene. I think of the nightmare battlefield—Tristas and Demetrius and Leander and Ennis. No. No. No.

Around me, my men drop, suffocating as they refuse to kill their friends, or falling beneath the merciless blades of Blue Platoon.

“Darien’s dead, Elias!” Dex shakes me again. “Cyril too. Aquilla gave the order already. You have to give it too, or we’re done for. ”

“Elias. ” He forces me to meet his eyes. “Please. ”

Unable to speak, I raise my hands and give the signal, my skin crawling as word passes down the battlefield from soldier to soldier.

Red Commander’s orders. Fight to kill. No quarter.

***

There is no cursing, no yelling, no bluffing. We are, all of us, trapped in a pocket of unending violence. Swords grinding and friends dying and the sleet knifing down on us.

I’ve given the order, and so I take the lead. I show no hesitation, because if I do, my men will falter. And if they falter, we all die.

So I kill. Blood taints everything. My armor, my skin, my mask, my hair.

The hilt of my scim drips with it, making it slippery beneath my hand. I’m Death himself, presiding over this butchery. Some of my victims die with merciful swiftness, gone before their bodies touch the ground.

Others take longer.

A wretched part of me wants to do it stealthily. Just slip up behind them and slide my scim in so I don’t have to see their eyes. But the battle is uglier than that. Harder. Crueler. I stare into the faces of the men I kill, and though the storm muffles the groans, every death carves its way into my memory, each one a wound that will never heal.