An Ember in the Ashes (Ember Quartet #1)(117)

Despite his calm expression, there’s no mistaking the urgency in his voice. It fans my own unease. I nod my thanks, wondering at the strangeness of the last few minutes, and go.

???

As the Augur predicted, the back door to the house’s basement is unlocked. I take two steps down the stairs before a scimpoint meets my neck.

“Laia?” The scim drops, and Keenan moves into the light. His red hair sticks up at odd angles, and a bandage wrapped haphazardly around his bicep is stained with blood. His freckles stand out jarringly against the sick paleness of his skin. “How did you find us? You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe for you. Quick”—he glances over his shoulder—“before Mazen sees—go!”

“I discovered an entrance to Blackcliff. I have to tell him. And there’s something else—a spy—”

“No, Laia,” Keenan says. “You can’t—”

“Who’s there, Keenan?” Footsteps clump toward us, and a second later, Mazen sticks his head in the stairwell.

“Ah. Laia. You tracked us down.” The older man shoots a look at Keenan, as if he must be responsible for this development. “Bring her.”

The tone of his voice raises the hair on my neck, and I reach through the slit in my skirt pocket for the dagger Elias gave me.

“Laia, listen to me,” Keenan whispers as he ushers me down the stairs. “No matter what he says, I—”

“Come now,” Mazen cuts Keenan off as we enter the basement. “I haven’t got all day.” The basement is small, with crates of goods in one corner and a round table in the center. Two men sit at the table? unsmiling and cold-eyed—Eran and Haider.

I wonder if one of them is the Commandant’s spy.

Mazen kicks a rickety chair in my direction, the invitation to sit obvious. Keenan stands just behind me, shifting from foot to foot, an animal ill at ease. I try not to look at him.

“Well now, Laia,” Mazen says as I take a seat. “Any information for us? Other than the fact that the Emperor is dead.”

“How did you—”

“Because I’m the one who killed him. Tell me, have they named a new Emperor yet?”

“Yes.” Mazen killed the Emperor? I want him to tell me more, but I sense his impatience. “They named Marcus. The coronation is tomorrow.”

Mazen exchanges glances with his men and stands. “Eran, send out the runners. Haider, get the men ready. Keenan, deal with the girl.”

“Wait!” I stand as they do. “I have more—an entrance into Blackcliff. That’s the reason I came. So that you can get Darin out. And there’s something else you should know—” I mean to tell him about the spy, but he doesn’t let me.

“There’s no secret entrance into Blackcliff, Laia. Even if there was, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to attack a school of Masks.”

“Then how—”

“How?” he muses. “A good question. How do you get rid of a girl who blunders into your hideout at the most inopportune moment, claiming to be the long-lost daughter of the Lioness? How do you appease an essential faction in the Resistance when they stupidly insist you help her save her brother? How do you make it look like you’re helping her when in fact you don’t have the time or the men to do so?”

My mouth goes dry.

“I’ll tell you how,” Mazen says. “You give the girl a mission she won’t come back from. You send her to Blackcliff, home of her parents’ killer. You give her impossible tasks, like spying on the most dangerous woman in the Empire, like learning about the Trials before they even occur.”

“You—you knew that the Commandant killed—”

“It’s nothing personal, girl. Sana threatened to pull her men from the Resistance over you. She’d been looking for an excuse, and when you walked in, she had it. But I needed her and her men more than ever. I’ve spent years building up what the Empire destroyed when they killed your mother. I couldn’t let you ruin all of that.

“I expected that the Commandant would be rid of you in days, if not hours. But you survived. When you brought me information—real information—at the Moon Festival, my men warned me that Sana and her faction would consider the bargain met. She’d demand your brother be broken out of Central. Only problem was, you’d just told me the very thing that made it impossible for me to put up the men to do so.”

I think back. “The Emperor’s arrival in Serra.”

“When you told me of it, I knew we’d need every last Resistance fighter we had if we wanted to assassinate him. A much worthier cause than rescuing your brother, don’t you think?”

I remember then what the Commandant told me. Those Scholar rats know only what I want them to know. What were they up to the last time you met them? Were they planning something significant?

Realization strikes me like a blow. The Resistance doesn’t even know they’ve played into the Commandant’s hands. Keris Veturia wanted the Emperor dead. The Resistance killed the Emperor and the most important members of his house, Marcus stepped into his place, and now there will be no civil war, no struggle between Gens Taia and Blackcliff.

You fool! I want to scream. You walked right into her trap!

“I needed to keep Sana’s faction happy,” Mazen says. “And I needed to keep you away from them. So I sent you to Blackcliff with an even more impossible task: Find me a secret entrance into the most well-guarded, heavily fortified Martial fort outside of Kauf Prison. I told Sana that your brother’s escape depended on it—and that giving any more details could imperil the jailbreak. Then I gave her and every other fighter a mission greater than one foolish girl and her brother: a revolution.”