An Ember in the Ashes(31)

My awkward conversation with Grandfather comes sharply to mind, and a thorny silence descends. Helene and I don’t discuss girls. She teases Faris and Dex and the others about their dalliances, but not me. Never me.
“I—uh—”
“Would you believe Lavinia Tanalia had the nerve to ask me if you’d ever spoken of her? I about shoved a kabob skewer through that bursting bodice of hers.” The barest frisson of tension tinges Helene’s voice, and I clear my throat.
“What’d you say to her?”
“I told her you called out her name every time you visited the dock girls. Shut her right up.”
I burst into laughter, understanding now the horrified look on Lavinia’s face. Helene smiles, but her eyes are sad. She seems lonely, suddenly. When I tilt my head to capture her gaze, she looks away. Whatever is wrong, she’s not ready to tell me.
“What will you do if you become Empress?” I ask. “What will you change?”
“You’re going to win, Elias. And I’ll be your Blood Shrike.” She speaks with such conviction that for a second, it’s like she’s speaking some old truth, like she is telling me the color of the sky. But then she shrugs and looks away.

“But if I won, I’d change everything. Expand trade south, bring women into the army, open up relations with the Mariners. And I’d—I’d do something about the Scholars.”
“You mean the Resistance?”
“No. What happens in the Quarter. The raids. The killing. It’s not...” I know she wants to say that it’s not right. But that would be sedition. “Things could be better,” she says. There’s a challenge in her face when she looks at me, and I lift my eyebrows. Helene never struck me as a Scholar sympathizer.
I like her more for it.
“What about you?” she asks. “What would you do?”
“Same as you, I guess.” I can’t tell her that I have no interest in ruling and never will. She won’t understand. “Maybe I’d just let you run things while I lounged in my harem.”
“Be serious.”
“I’m very serious.” I grin at her. “The Emperor does have a harem, right? Because that’s the only reason I took the oath—” She shoves me—practically off the roof—and I beg for mercy.
“It’s not funny.” She sounds like a Centurion, and I try to arrange my face in an appropriately sober manner. “Our lives are on the line here,” she says.
“Promise me you’ll fight to win. Promise me you’ll give the Trials everything you’ve got.” She grabs a strap on my armor. “Promise!”
“All right, bleeding skies. It was just a joke. Of course I’ll fight to win. I’m not planning to die, that’s for sure. But what about you? Don’t you want to become Empress?”
She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m better suited to being Blood Shrike. And I don’t want to compete with you, Elias. The moment we start working against each other is the moment we let Marcus and Zak win.”
“Hel...” I think to ask her what’s wrong again, hoping that all this talk of sticking together will make her want to confide in me. She doesn’t give me the chance.
“Veturius!” Her eyes widen when she catches sight of the scabbards on my back. “Are those Teluman blades?”
I show her the scims, and she is appropriately envious. We are quiet for a while after, content to contemplate the stars above us, to find music in the distant sounds that drift up from the forges.
I take in her slim body, her lean profile. What would Helene have been if not a Mask? It’s impossible to imagine her as a typical Illustrian girl, angling for a good match, attending fetes and allowing herself to be seduced by fittingly highborn men.
I guess it doesn’t matter. Whatever we might have been—healers or politicians, jurists or builders—was trained out of us, spun up and away into the funnel of darkness that is Blackcliff.
“What’s going on with you, Hel?” I say. “Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m just nervous about the Trials.” She doesn’t pause or stutter. She looks right into my eyes, her blue irises clear and mild, her head tilted slightly.
Anyone else would believe her without question. But I know Helene, and I know instantly, down in my bones, that she’s lying. In another flash of insight, born of the awareness that only makes itself known deep in the night, when the mind opens strange doors, I realize something else. This is not a quiet lie.
It is violent and shattering.
She sighs at my expression. “Leave it alone, Elias.”
“So there is something—”
“Fine,” she cuts me off. “I’ll tell you what’s bothering me if you tell me what you were really doing in the tunnels yesterday morning.”
The comment is so unexpected that I have to look away from her. “I told you, I—”
“Yes. You said were looking for the deserter. And I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with me. Now it’s all clear and in the open.” There is a bite to her voice I’m not used to. “And there’s nothing else to talk about.”
She meets my gaze, an unfamiliar wariness in her eyes. What are you hiding, Elias? her expression asks.
Hel’s a master at ferreting out secrets. Something about the combination of her loyalty and patience creates an uncanny urge to confide. She knows, for instance, that I smuggle sheets to the Yearlings so they don’t get whipped for wetting their beds. She knows I write to Mamie Rila and my foster brother Shan every month. She knows I once dumped a bucket of cow dung on Marcus’s bed. She chuckled for days over that one.