An Ember in the Ashes. Sabaa Tahir
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‘You have my word. It won’t be hard to locate him. He’s not a Resistance leader, so it’s not as if they’ll send him to Kauf.’ Mazen snorts, but mention of the infamous northern prison sends a chill across my skin. Kauf’s interrogators have one goal: to make inmates suffer as much as possible before they die.
My parents died in Kauf. My sister, only twelve at the time, died there too.
‘By the time you make your first report,’ Mazen says, ‘I’ll be able to tell you where Darin is. When your mission is complete, we’ll break him out.’
‘And after?’
‘We prise your slaves’ cuffs off and pull you out of the school. We can make it look like a suicide, so you’re not hunted. You can join us, if you like. Or we can arrange passage to Marinn for you both.’
Marinn. The free lands. What I wouldn’t give to escape there with my brother, to live in a place with no Martials, no Masks, no Empire.
But first I have to survive a spy mission. I have to survive Blackcliff.
Across the cavern, Keenan shakes his head. But the fighters around me nod. This is Izzat,
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good.’ Mazen doesn’t sound surprised, and I wonder if he knew all along that I would say yes. He raises his voice so it carries. ‘Keenan will be your handler.’
At this, the younger man’s face goes, if possible, even darker. He presses his lips together as if to keep from speaking.
‘Her hands and feet are cut up,’ Mazen says. ‘See to her injuries, Keenan, and tell her what she needs to know. She leaves for Blackcliff tonight.’
Mazen leaves, trailed by members of his faction, while Tariq claps me on the shoulder and wishes me luck. His allies pepper me with advice: Never go looking for your handler. Don’t trust anyone. They only wish to help, but it’s overwhelming, and when Keenan cuts through the crowd to retrieve me, I’m almost relieved.
Almost. He jerks his head to a table in the corner of the cavern and walks off without waiting for me.
A glint of light near the table turns out to be a small spring. Keenan fills two tubs with water and a powder I recognize as tanroot. He sets one tub on the table and one on the floor.
I scrub my hands and feet clean, wincing as the tanroot sinks into the scrapes I picked up in the catacombs. Keenan watches silently. Beneath his scrutiny, I am ashamed at how quickly the water turns black with muck – and then angry at myself for being ashamed.
When I’m done, Keenan sits at the table across from me and takes my hands. I’m expecting him to be brusque, but his hands are – not gentle, exactly, but not callous, either. As he examines my cuts, I think of a dozen questions I could ask him, none of which will make him think that I’m strong and capable instead of childish and petty. Why do you seem to hate me? What did I do to you?
‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’ He rubs a numbing ointment on one of the deeper cuts, keeping his attention fixed on my wounds. ‘This mission.’
You’ve made that clear, you jackass. ‘I won’t let Mazen down. I’ll do what I have to.’
‘You’ll try, I’m sure.’ I’m stung at his bluntness, though by now it should be clear that he has no faith in me. ‘The woman’s a savage. The last person we sent in—’
‘Do you think I want to spy on her?’ I burst out. He looks up, surprise in his eyes. ‘I don’t have a choice. Not if I want to save the only family I have left. So just—’ Shut it,
Something like embarrassment crosses his face, and he regards me with a tiny bit less scorn. ‘I’m … sorry.’ His words are reluctant, but a reluctant apology is better than none at all. I nod jerkily and realize that his eyes are not blue or green but a deep chestnut brown. You’re noticing his eyes, Laia. Which means you’re staring into them. Which means you need to stop. The smell of the salve stings my nostrils, and I wrinkle my nose.
‘Are you using twin-thistle in this salve?’ I ask. At his shrug, I pull the bottle from him and take another sniff. ‘Try ziberry next time. It doesn’t smell like goat dung, at least.’
Keenan raises a fiery eyebrow and wraps one of my hands with gauze. ‘You know your remedies. Useful skill. Your grandparents were healers?’
‘My grandfather.’ It hurts to speak of Pop, and I pause a long while before going on. ‘He started training me formally a year and a half ago. I mixed his remedies before that.’
‘Do you like it? Healing?’
‘It’s a trade.’ Most Scholars who aren’t enslaved work menial jobs – as farmhands or cleaners or stevedores – backbreaking labour for which they’re paid next to nothing. ‘I’m lucky to have one. Though, when I was little, I wanted to be a Kehanni.’
Keenan’s mouth curves into the barest smile. It is a small thing, but it transforms his entire face and lightens the weight on my chest.
‘A Tribal tale-spinner?’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me you believe in myths of jinn and efrits and wraiths that kidnap children in the night?’
‘No.’ I think of the raid. Of the Mask. My lightness melts away. ‘I don’t need to believe in the supernatural. Not when there’s worse that roams the night.’
He goes still, a sudden stillness that draws my eyes up and into his. My breath hitches at what I see laid bare in his gaze: a wrenching knowledge, a bitter understanding of pain that I know well. Here’s someone who has walked paths as dark as mine. Darker, maybe.
Then coldness descends over his face, and his hands are moving again.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Listen carefully. Today was graduation day at Blackcliff. But we’ve just learned that this year’s ceremony was different. Special.’
He tells me of the Trials and the four Aspirants. Then he gives me my mission.
‘We need three pieces of information. We need to know what each Trial is, where it’s taking place, and when. And we need to know this before each Trial begins, not after.’
I have a dozen questions, but I don’t ask, knowing he’ll just think me more foolish.
‘How long will I be in the school?’
Keenan shrugs and finishes bandaging my hands. ‘We know next to nothing about the Trials,’ he says. ‘But I can’t imagine it will take more than a few weeks – a month, at most.’
‘Do you – do you think Darin will last that long?’
Keenan doesn’t answer.
* * *
Hours later, in the early evening, I find myself in a house in the Foreign Quarter with Keenan and Sana, standing before an elderly Tribesman. He’s clad in the loose robes of his people and looks more like a kindly old uncle than a Resistance operative.
When Sana explains what she wants of him, he takes one look at me and folds his arms across his chest.
‘Absolutely not,’ he says in heavily accented Serran. ‘The Commandant will eat her alive.’
Keenan throws Sana a pointed look, as if to say, What did you expect?
‘With respect,’ Sana says to the Tribesman, ‘can we …’ She gestures to a lattice-screen doorway leading to another room. They disappear behind the lattice. Sana’s speaking too softly for me to hear, but whatever she’s saying must not be working, because even through the screen, I can see the Tribesman shaking his head.
‘He