An Ember in the Ashes. Sabaa Tahir
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of Blackcliff’s commandant. They stand as still as statues, their masks long since melded to their features, any semblance of emotion a distant memory.
I put a hand to my own mask, wishing I could rip it off, even for a minute. Like my classmates, I received the mask on my first day as a Cadet, when I was fourteen. Unlike the rest of the students – and much to Helene’s dismay – the smooth liquid silver hasn’t dissolved into my skin like it’s supposed to. Probably because I take the damned thing off whenever I’m alone.
I’ve hated the mask since the day an Augur – an Empire holy man – handed it to me in a velvet-lined box. I hate the way it gloms on to me like some kind of parasite. I hate the way it presses into my face, moulding itself to my skin.
I’m the only student whose mask hasn’t melded to him yet – something my enemies enjoy pointing out. But lately, the mask has started fighting back, forcing the melding process by digging tiny filaments into the back of my neck. It makes my skin crawl, makes me feel like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ll never be myself again.
‘Veturius.’ Hel’s lanky, sandy-haired platoon lieutenant, Demetrius, calls out to me as we take our spots with the other Senior Skulls. ‘Who is it? Who’s the deserter?’
‘I don’t know. Dex and the auxes brought him in.’ I look around for my lieutenant, but he hasn’t arrived yet.
‘I hear it’s a Yearling.’ Demetrius stares at a hunk of wood poking out of the blood-browned cobbles at the base of the belltower. The whipping post. ‘An older one. A fourth-year.’
Helene and I exchange a look. Demetrius’s little brother also tried to desert in his fourth year at Blackcliff, when he was only ten. He lasted three hours outside the gates before the legionnaires brought him in to face the Commandant – longer than most.
‘Maybe it was a Skull.’ Helene scans the ranks of older students, trying to see if anyone is missing.
‘Maybe it was Marcus,’ Faris, a member of my battle platoon who towers over the rest of us, says, grinning, his blond hair popping up in an unruly cowlick. ‘Or Zak.’
No such luck. Marcus, dark-skinned and yellow-eyed, stands at the front of our ranks with his twin, Zak: second-born, shorter and lighter, but just as evil. The Snake and the Toad, Hel calls them.
Zak’s mask has yet to attach fully around his eyes, but Marcus’s clings tightly, having joined with him so completely that all of his features – even the thick slant of his eyebrows – are clearly visible beneath it. If Marcus tried to remove his mask now, he’d take off half his face with it. Which would be an improvement.
As if he senses her glance, Marcus turns and looks Helene over with a predatory gaze of ownership that makes my hands itch to strangle him.
Nothing out of the ordinary,
I force myself to look away. Attacking Marcus in front of the entire school would definitely qualify as out of the ordinary.
Helene notices Marcus’s leer. Her hands ball into fists at her sides, but before she can teach the Snake a lesson, the sergeant-at-arms marches into the courtyard.
‘ATTENTION.’
Three thousand bodies swing forward, three thousand pairs of boots snap together, three thousand backs jerk as if yanked straight by a puppeteer’s hand. In the ensuing silence, you could hear a tear drop.
But we don’t hear the Commandant of Blackcliff Military Academy approach; we feel her, the way you feel a storm coming. She moves silently, emerging from the arches like a fair-haired jungle cat from the underbrush. She wears all black, from her tight-fitting uniform jacket to her steel-toed boots. Her blonde hair is pulled, as always, into a stiff knot at her neck.
She’s the only living female Mask – or will be until Helene graduates tomorrow. But unlike Helene, the Commandant exudes a deathly chill, as if her grey eyes and cut-glass features were carved from the underbelly of a glacier.
‘Bring the accused,’ she says.
A pair of legionnaires march out from behind the belltower, dragging a small, limp form. Beside me, Demetrius tenses. The rumours were right – the deserter’s a Fourth-Yearling, no older than ten. Blood drips down his face, blending into the collar of his black fatigues. When the soldiers dump him before the Commandant, he doesn’t move.
The Commandant’s silver face reveals nothing as she looks down at the Yearling. But her hand strays towards the spiked riding crop at her belt, fashioned out of bruise-black ironwood. She doesn’t remove it. Not yet.
‘Fourth-Yearling Falconius Barrius.’ Her voice carries, though it’s soft, almost gentle. ‘You abandoned your post at Blackcliff with no intention of returning. Explain yourself.’
‘No explanation, Commandant, sir.’ He mouths the words we’ve all said to the Commandant a hundred times, the only words you can say at Blackcliff when you’ve screwed up utterly.
It’s a trial to keep my face blank, to drive emotion from my eyes. Barrius is about to be punished for the crime I’ll be committing in less than thirty-six hours. It could be me up there in two days. Bloodied. Broken.
‘Let us ask your peers their opinion.’ The Commandant turns her gaze on us, and it’s like being blasted by a frigid mountain wind. ‘Is Yearling Barrius guilty of treason?’
‘Yes, sir!’ The shout shakes the flagstones, rabid in its ferocity.
‘Legionnaires,’ the Commandant says. ‘Take him to the post.’
The resulting roar from the students jerks Barrius out of his stupor, and as the legionnaires tie him to the whipping post, he writhes and bucks.
His fellow Fourth-Yearlings, the same boys he fought and sweated and suffered with for years, thump the flagstones with their boots and pump their fists in the air. In the row of Senior Skulls in front of me, Marcus shouts his approval, his eyes lit with unholy joy. He stares at the Commandant with a reverence reserved for deities.
I feel eyes on me. To my left, one of the Centurions is watching. Nothing out of the ordinary. I lift my fist and cheer with the rest of them, hating myself.
The Commandant draws her crop, caressing it like a lover. Then she brings it whistling down onto Barrius’s back. His gasp echoes through the courtyard, and every student falls silent, united in a shared, if brief, moment of pity. Blackcliff’s rules are so numerous that it’s impossible not to break them at least a few times. We’ve all been tied to that post before. We’ve all felt the bite of the Commandant’s crop.
The quiet doesn’t last. Barrius screams, and the students howl in response, flinging jeers at him. Marcus is loudest of all, leaning forward, practically spitting in excitement. Faris rumbles his approval. Even Demetrius manages a shout or two, his green eyes flat and distant as if he is somewhere else entirely. Beside me, Helene cheers, but there’s no joy in her expression, only a stern sadness. The rules of Blackcliff demand that she voice her anger at the deserter’s betrayal. So she does.
The Commandant seems indifferent to the clamour, fixated as she is on her work. Her arm rises and falls with a dancer’s grace. She circles Barrius as his skinny limbs begin to seize, pausing between each lash, no doubt pondering how she can make the next one more painful than the last.
After twenty-five lashes, she takes him by his limp stalk of a neck and turns him around. ‘Face them,’ she says. ‘Face the men you’ve betrayed.’
Barrius’s eyes beseech the courtyard, seeking out anyone willing to offer him a shred of pity. He should have known better. His gaze collapses to the flagstones.
The cheers continue, and the crop comes down again. And again. Barrius falls to the white stones, the pool of blood around him spreading rapidly. His eyes flutter. I hope his mind is gone. I hope he can’t feel it anymore.
I make myself watch. This is why you’re