Embers of Empire

by Michaela Strauther

  He glanced over at her and nodded. “That doesn’t solve anything, though.” His hands slid through his hair again. “I still don’t know if they were Arrows or guards. And how did they know I was here?”

  “Quiet,” Sathryn said as his voice got louder. The wind was picking up now, swaying the trees back and forth like giant green pendulums and carrying the smells of the street through their canopies. She feared it would carry his voice too. “You don’t know who could be watching.” It was too dark to see much of anything far away, obscured by trees and shadows.

  Which was why it was so startling when a figure stepped out of the woods from behind and grabbed her.

  She screamed, but the figure clamped a steel hand over her mouth and muted the sound.

  Julian whipped his head around just as another figure emerged and grabbed him, yanking his arms behind his back. He tried to wrench himself from the man’s tight grip, but the man stood as if a mere mouse were poking him in his side. Though Sathryn could not be sure, the man resembled one of the men she’d seen on horseback outside of her cave at the mountainside.

  Sathryn squirmed against her own man until she saw yet another emerge from the dark trees. The man, the one named Taz she’d seen before, wearing the same black attire he’d had at the mountain, was also holding someone, though their face was covered by a black sack as it had been before. The person being held wasn’t flailing and struggling like Sathryn was. They had to be held up, feet dragging in the dirt, as their body was too limp.

  Whomever it was, she hoped the person wasn’t dead.

  Taz smiled down at her and Julian. His face looked like a porcelain doll’s in the eerie light of the moon. “I see we have caught both prizes in one go.” He dropped the limp figure to the ground.

  Julian was still jerking from the man’s grasp, and it annoyed Taz. Storming toward Julian, he closed his eyes and brought a porcelain hand to his porcelain face while his other hand drew a sword from his belt and rested it against Julian’s neck. Sathryn gasped as he pressed it just hard enough to draw blood. Julian no longer squirmed.

  Taz sighed. “It is very hard to revel in my success when you are squirming like that.” He ripped the sword away and meandered back where he could see them both, dragging the sword behind him. “Anyway, as I was saying, the kings are always thrilled to see their adversaries’ heads on pikes, their own personal prizes. Of course, I get quite a bit of gold to compensate for my troubles in capturing you two.” Then, he turned to Julian with a harsh glare. “You were the bonus, but you—” his head whipped around to face Sathryn, those piercing-gray, beady eyes carving themselves into her memory “—you were the objective. The kings have been searching for you a long time. Did you know that?”

  Sathryn thought back to the Beastmen and her mother’s explanation of the letter and her father’s trial. But the way Taz was looking at her—like he could control her, persuade her—made her say nothing, even after the man behind her uncovered her mouth.

  Taz was flustered. “I know you know it, little mouse. And I want you to know that I let you and that abomination of a boy—” he pointed at Julian “—get away at the mountain. I could’ve taken you both right then. But I wanted to draw you in,” Taz said with a chilling grin. “I wanted to make you think you had it set. And traveling with two struggling passengers makes the journey much longer, so having you right here, in the heart of where you need to be, makes it all easier.”

  Then, he whirled to glare at Julian again. “You don’t think the guard at the gate knew who you were? Your mother’s death was the most famous public burning we’ve had in a while—the burning of a great Ajasek—and no one here doesn’t know about you.” Taz drew his sword through the ground. The shiny metal reflected white moonlight into Sathryn’s eyes. “You thought you two could sneak in here, avenge your mothers, your families, and then sneak back out? You thought it would be that easy to—”

  “My mother isn’t dead,” Sathryn piped up, although as soon as she saw Taz’s expression, she wished she’d not said a word, and cursed herself for being so thoughtless.

  Taz wandered over to the limp body on the ground.

  He ripped off the black sack.

  The body was her mother.

  n the hard, winter-bruised ground, cold air freezing her features, lay her mother, unmoving, eyes closed.

  Sathryn screamed out, but the man behind her clapped his hand back over her mouth. She wrestled against him again—a tiger bound to a pole by a foot-long rope, a caged bird—and didn’t stop when the man squeezed tighter at her wrists.

  Taz watched her for a second, smiling as if watching a comedic play, then he interjected, “Calm down, Mouse, she isn’t dead. Yet, at least.”

  Sathryn slowed her struggling to look down at her mother. He was right. If she looked close enough, her mother’s chest rose and fell in soft, shallow breaths.

  “It was quite a challenge trying to take her from the Beastmen the first time, so we waited until the creatures were asleep and slipped her away.”

  “Why isn’t she awake?” Sathryn asked.

  “Because we gave her something to make her sleep,” Taz explained with a delicate shrug of his shoulders. “Couldn’t have her squirming and screaming like you two.”

  He knelt and held her mother’s loose, limp body up and shook her like a rag doll. The man’s grip behind her loosened, as she was no longer screaming, but that gave her enough room to wrench herself away, lunge out, and scrape her nails across Taz’s pale face. Blood trailed along his skin like a red river in the snow. He shouted, called for the guard to grab her again, and then held that same silver sword to her mother’s throat.

  Sathryn screamed again. When the man tried covering her mouth, she bit him as hard as she could—hard enough to take off a sizable chunk—making him draw back. He yelped and clutched at his now reddened and dripping hand.

  At his belt was a sword, the handle the only part of the weapon sticking out. Before she could overthink it, she leapt for the sword and slid it from its sheath. It was heavy, but the adrenaline now coursing through her veins lifted much of the weight, enough to help her slice the sword across the man’s tree-trunk legs.

  When she turned to face Taz, he was gone, and the man holding Julian, though he was looking wide eyed at the man’s detached, bloody legs, turned to run after Taz. Julian struggled against him, but it didn’t stop the man from running.

  Sathryn followed him. With Julian dragging his feet, the man was a lot slower than he could’ve been.

  Brandishing the sword high in the air, she brought the weapon down across his knees. He crumpled to the ground and grabbed at his legs just like the man a few feet away. Taz was long gone. And with him was her mother.

  Sathryn quietly followed Julian through the region’s side streets. Julian had told her they weren’t going back to Myrna’s home—it was too risky for her to keep him in her home when everyone already knew he was here—but he didn’t tell her where they were going instead. She followed him anyway.

  Julian brought her to a large and abandoned home illuminated by the moon and a torch Julian had smuggled from a bookstore. It was his old home.

  Only after he’d led her to the only bedroom that didn’t evoke his own uncomfortable memories did Sathryn feel something more substantial than shock. Without Julian’s bag, which was still in Myrna’s home, the sword Sathryn had stolen from the guard was their only weapon. She’d wandered through the streets with the blade weighing almost as much as the memories she struggled to recount of the previous events.

  The more she recounted, the more she forgot. Had Taz ever sliced her mother’s throat? Or had he run off beforehand, meaning her mother was still alive—unconscious, but alive, which was better than the unspeakable alternative. Sathryn paced the floor with these thoughts whisking like a whirlwind in her mind until she gave up and sat on the bed, which despite the house being abandoned, didn’t seem old. Julian, sitting on the bed opposite hers, handed her a blanket
from his bed and watched her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Sathryn shook her head. There were yet to be tears—what in the world was wrong with her? She wiped at dry eyes.

  “Get some rest,” Julian said. “We can work it out in the morning.” He hooked his torch on the wall of the room, then lay down under his thick, warm, woolen blanket. He was facing her, watching her—probably to make sure she didn’t flare into a tantrum.

  She lay down and closed her eyes.

  When she woke up, it was in a desperate attempt to rid her mind of the nightmares plaguing her sleep. Even when her eyes opened to the pulsing glow of the torch and the warped walls around her, all she could see was her mother, dead, lying in a pool of frost-bitten blood with a look of horror and loneliness etched on her face. It was morning. The window streaked bright sunlight through its morphed-glass face, and only then did Sathryn cry.

  Her sobs woke Julian, who tripped over himself trying to rush to her bedside. He wrapped his arms about her shoulders and let her sink against him as her cries echoed around the room.

  “She isn’t dead, Sathryn.” His voice was calm and soothing.

  She felt no better. “Yet. That man had her and I just let him get away.”

  After about half an hour, Julian left to snag his bag from Myrna’s home and some food for them both, which left Sathryn alone until he came back. She lay back on the bed and wiped at wet eyes, soothing herself back to sleep by blanking her mind. Julian came back too soon and shook her awake.

  He set the bag on the floor and a little bundle of food on her bed. It was full of fruit and warm bread slices, save the two sticks of meat chunks cooled by the outside air, but Sathryn had no desire for food. How could she eat when the very thought of her mother debilitated her so she could hardly lift a finger?

  By the next day, she’d eaten nothing still, had lain on the same bed for as long as they had been in Julian’s old home, and had slept for most of that time. The only time she didn’t sleep was when she cried, and those tears eventually lulled her back to sleep every time.

  Julian, midday the next day, sat on her bed and waited. He was staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  He shrugged and picked at her blanket. “I just know how you feel.”

  He took her a moment to realize that he was referring to his own mother, whom he’d watched get killed rather than just assumed it. She sat up and stared back, waiting for him to say more.

  “I’ll be honest—I think your mother is gone.”

  She hated him for a second. “Why would you say that to me? How would you even know? They must have needed her for something—”

  “I don’t want you to have false hopes. Losing my mom was the worst thing in the world for me, and I hate that you might go through that, but false hope won’t do you any good. The kings would hold a public execution, but the Red Arrows are unorthodox—they won’t follow the kings’ rules. They see your mother as nothing more than a prize.”

  Sathryn said nothing. He’d brought more food earlier—he handed her a plum, a cup of water, and a loaf of bread. “Eat. You need to eat.”

  Eating made her feel better than she expected. When she was done, she drew her hands to her knees and waited in silence until she asked him, “What was it like losing your mother?”

  Julian sat at the foot of her bed with his legs drawn up on the blanket. He glanced at her, slipped his shoes back on, and stood. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  As they walked through the halls of a wing—Julian said it was the guest wing—he explained that for a while until Myrna could afford her own home, she’d lived in his old house, which was why it didn’t look as abandoned as it should have. Looking around the house now, far after its peak in grandeur, was a bit of a disappointment. The walls that Julian called “shined with silver polish and lined with torches during winter” were cold, bare, and worn by weather, plants, and animals. The floors, “long, winding paths of red-velvet carpeting,” were wet and dirty with mud—and . . . feces?—and the artifacts and noble weapons that once hung on the walls were long gone, stolen by looters or taken by Myrna, Julian’s father, or Julian himself.

  When they exited the guest wing, they entered a large room, with not much else. She hadn’t noticed the night before—too distracted by her own thoughts to notice—but the only things left in the room were the fireplace, a shelf, which didn’t count as it was part of the wall, and on the shelf, a row of items and a painting.

  Julian walked to the shelf, Sathryn following after. He grabbed a little golden box and handed it to Sathryn, holding a statuette of a harp for himself. “It isn’t much, but it’s something. The kings didn’t take all her belongings to burn, and my father, Myrna, and I didn’t take everything either. We wanted something to stay in the house as a memorial to her. Especially the picture.” He glanced up at the painting, a framed portrait of a woman whose blue eyes and light smile reminded Sathryn of the boy beside her.

  “She’s beautiful.” She looked down at the box Julian handed her, a name, Anya, carved into the front and surrounded by sapphire dragons and emerald horses. When she opened the box, however, nothing was inside.

  “It was a jewelry box,” Julian explained.

  She sat the box back on the shelf. “What did you do to recover from it?” Was there a way to recover from it? “What did you do to lessen the pain? Or does it just go away over time?”

  He glanced at her, one eyebrow raised. Up close in the brighter light, she saw dark circles around his eyes. “A very smart young woman once told me that time does not make pain disappear, only easier to bear.”

  That made Sathryn smile, even though she hadn’t in a while. “My father said that, not me.”

  He shrugged, placing the little harp back on the shelf. “You said it to me. That’s all that matters. Anyway, I couldn’t just cry all day—I was washing myself out. So I read. And I learned how to play the harp, my mother’s favorite instrument. And I built myself up—training with the weapons she had and mastering them as best I could. It helped,” he added.

  Sathryn sat on the hard ground below her, avoiding the brown, reeking puddles of sludge, and hugged her knees again. “My mother didn’t—doesn’t—play the harp.”

  Julian somehow understood what she meant to say. He crouched down beside her and rested a hand on her arm, making her glance up. “Training helps more than you would think,” he said. “Pretending the walls that I was shooting arrows or throwing knives at were the kings let out all the anger, all the sadness. It might help. And if you want to go to Kings’ Castle with me, you’re going to have to learn how to use some weapons.”

  Sathryn perked up. “You’re going to let me?”

  “It seems so.”

  He helped her up and left her alone for a second to grab his bag and the sword she’d taken from the guard. They stayed in the same room, the one with the shelf, because it was such a wide, open space, which meant a lot of breathing room, and three of the four walls were bare and soft from weathering and blankets of plants. “It will make our throwing knives stick,” Julian said.

  He opened his large bag and pulled out at least a dozen different types of weapons, laying them all on the ground in a line. “Which do you want to start with first?” he asked as his hand indicated the long row. “Perhaps something simple, like a sword. You don’t want to start with anything too hard, like a bow and arrow or knife throwing or something like that.”

  He was being serious, but Sathryn could afford to distract herself with jokes. “How do you know I don’t have a natural gift for said ‘hard’ weapons? What if I’m a skilled knife thrower, or the world’s finest archer?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “That would not be possible, because I myself am the best archer this place, or anywhere else for that matter, has to offer.” He handed her a pair of black gloves—to block out the venom, he said—then gave her four darts. They were long and narrow, flared at the very end, and dyed bl
ood red at their tips. Then, he walked over to one of the walls and constructed a bull’s-eye out of little pebbles.

  “Stand right here,” he said and moved her closer to the wall, “and aim for the center.”

  She arced her arm back, preparing to throw, but before the dart could even leave her hand, Julian stopped her.

  “Your stance isn’t right. Your legs should be spread a bit farther than that—yes, like that. And don’t pull your arm back so much. Keep your hand steady and in front of your face—you want to be able to see where you throw. Ready—”

  She threw the dart. It fell on the ground in front of the wall. Julian laughed and went to pick up the dart. “Not quite.” He moved toward her.

  “Are you going to demonstrate?”

  Julian nodded. He held the dart in his hands as if he were holding a baby bird and aimed carefully at the other end of the wall. When the dart left his hands, it was at the speed of a bolt of lightning, and it struck the wall in the dead center of the bull’s-eye, making it fall to the floor.

  She clapped, glad once again for the distraction. “That was good,” she said.

  Bowing dramatically, he grabbed the dart from the floor and handed it back to her.

  They trained for the rest of the day until the sunlight outside became too dim to see in. Throughout the hours, he trained her with all the weapons he had in his archive: a sword, a bow-and-arrow set, poison darts, daggers, and a few long knives. The sword wasn’t as easy as he let on. He instructed her on balancing it in her hands so the weight was evenly distributed, but every time she held it that way, it clattered to the ground, and she leapt back to avoid stabbing herself in the foot. It was also too heavy, especially after Julian had her, weighted sword in hand, run back and forth across the room to “build her lacking endurance.”

  After the sword, he handed Sathryn the bow and arrow. The arrows were easier than the darts by far considering the bow itself did all the work for her, but she still found some way to mess it up. According to Julian—whose laughter told her all she needed to know—her distance and speed were good, but her aim was off. The arc of the arrow in flight was a bit confusing. Right before the light from outside was too dim, he handed her a pair of twin knives, the blades of which were clear crystal, but the hilt faded into a blood red.