An Ember in the Ashes(52)

Izzi toys with her eye patch. “I was five, I think. It was more than ten years ago now. The Commandant smelled the poison—Masks are trained in such things. She didn’t lay a finger on Cook—just came at me with a hot poker and made Cook watch. Right before, I remember wishing for someone. My mother? My father? Someone to stop her. Someone to take me away. After, I remember wanting to die.”
Five years old. For the first time, it sinks in that Izzi has been a slave nearly her whole life. What I’ve gone through for eleven days she has suffered for years.
“Cook kept me alive, after. She’s good at remedies. She wanted to bandage you up last night, but...well, you wouldn’t let either of us near you.”
I remember, then, the legionnaires throwing my numb body into the kitchen. Gentle hands, soft voices. I fought them with whatever I had left, thinking they meant me harm.
Our silence is broken by the echo of the dawn drums. A moment later, Cook’s raspy voice echoes down the corridor, asking Izzi if I’m up yet.

“The Commandant wants you to bring her sand from the dunes for a scrub,” Izzi says. “Then she wants you to take a file to Spiro Teluman. But you should let Cook tend to you first.”
“No.” My vehemence startles Izzi to her feet. I lower my voice. So many years around the Commandant would make me jumpy too. “The Commandant will want the scrub for her morning bath. I don’t want to be punished for being late.”
Izzi nods, then offers me a basket for the sand and hurries away. When I stand, my vision swoops. I wrap a scarf around my neck to cover the K and lurch from my room.
Every step is pain, every ounce of weight pulls at the wound, making me lightheaded and nauseous. Unwillingly, my mind flashes back to the single-minded concentration on the Commandant’s face as she cut into me. She is a connoisseur of pain the way others are connoisseurs of wine. She took her time with me—and that made it so much worse.
I move to the back of the house with excruciating slowness. By the time I reach the cliff path that leads down to the dunes, my whole body shakes.
Hopelessness steals over me. How can I help Darin if I can’t even walk? How can I spy if my every attempt is punished like this?
You can’t save him because you won’t survive the Commandant much longer.
My doubts rise insidiously from the soil of my mind like creeping, choking vines. That will be the end of you and your family. Crushed from existence like so many others.
The trail twists and turns back on itself, treacherous as the shifting dunes.
A hot wind blows into my face, forcing tears from my eyes before I can stop them, until I can hardly see where I am going. At the base of the cliffs, I fall to the sand. My sobs echo in this empty place, but I don’t care. There is no one to hear me.
My life in the Scholar’s Quarter was never easy—sometimes it was horrible, like when my friend Zara was taken, or when Darin and I rose and slept with the ache of hunger in our bellies. Like all Scholars, I learned to lower my eyes before the Martials, but at least I never had to bow and scrape before them.
At least my life was free of this torment, this waiting, always, for more pain. I had Nan and Pop, who protected me from far more than I ever realized. I had Darin, who loomed so large in my life that I thought him immortal as the stars.
Gone now. All of them. Lis with her laughing eyes, so vivid in my mind that it seems impossible that she’s been dead twelve years. My parents, who wanted so badly to free the Scholars but who only managed to get themselves killed.
Gone, like everyone else. Leaving me here, alone.
Shadows emerge from the sand, circling me. Ghuls. They feed off sorrow and sadness and the stink of blood.
One of them screams, startling me into dropping the basket. The sound is eerily familiar.
“Mercy!” They mock in a multilayered, high-pitched voice. “Please, have mercy!”
I clap my hands over my ears, recognizing my own voice in theirs, my pleas to the Commandant. How did they know? How did they hear?
The shadows titter and circle. One, braver than the rest, nips at my leg, teeth flashing. A chill pierces my skin, and I cry out.
“Stop!”
The ghuls cackle and parrot my plea. “Stop! Stop!”
If only I had a scim, a knife—something to scare them off, the way Spiro Teluman did. But I have nothing, so I try instead to stagger away, only to run straight into a wall.
At least that’s what it feels like. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s not a wall, but a person. A tall person, broad-shouldered and muscled like a mountain cat.
I flinch back, losing my balance, and two big hands steady me. I look up and freeze when I find myself staring into familiar, pale gray eyes.
XX: Elias
The morning after the Trial, I wake before dawn, groggy from the sleeping draught I realize I’ve been doused with. My face is shaven, I’m clean, and someone’s changed me into fresh fatigues.
“Elias.” Cain emerges from the shadows of my room. His face is drawn, as if he’s been up all night. He holds up his hand at my instant barrage of questions.
“Aspirant Aquilla is in the very capable hands of Blackcliff’s physician,” he says. “If she’s meant to live, she will. The Augurs will not interfere, for we found nothing to indicate that the Farrars cheated. We have declared Marcus the winner of the First Trial. He has been given a prize of a dagger and—”
“What?”
“He returned first—”
“Because he cheated—”
The door opens, and Zak limps in. I reach for the blade Grandfather left at my bedside. Before I can fling it at the Toad, Cain is between us. I get up and quickly stuff my feet into my boots—I won’t be caught lounging on a bed while this filth is within ten feet of me.