Set Fire to the Gods

by Sara Raasch

  And if Anathrasa was truly dead, then it meant it was still possible to kill a god.

  Tor bobbed his head in thought. “We can look into it. Maybe press Ignitus for—”

  “I’m not descended from a soul goddess.” Madoc whirled on Tor. “Why do you even care what I am? Why not turn me in and reap the reward?”

  Ash stepped closer. She had laid Madoc’s secret bare; it was only fair she reveal hers too.

  Her fingers trembled. She had never told anyone this before, outside her little group. It was such a nourishing sensation, the truth of her motives waiting on her tongue, ready to spill free.

  “We want to kill Ignitus,” she said before Tor could stop her. “We want to stop him from hurting Kula any more.”

  She felt giddy. She felt light. She even managed to ignore the look of confused horror on Madoc’s face, too high on saying these things out loud.

  This is who I am. This is what I want.

  She had never been more raw.

  “We think Ignitus fears a gladiator for some reason—that he fears you,” Ash said. “And it makes sense, if you can control souls.”

  Ilena and Seneca stared at Ash, and she felt Tor’s disapproving glare.

  “You bring dangerous ideas here.” Seneca’s glassy blue eyes were narrow.

  “I’m not part of any plot,” Madoc croaked. “I can’t help you. I can’t control souls.”

  “Are you sure?”

  A new voice came from the door. Someone had opened it. Ash spun around to see Elias stagger past Taro and Spark.

  Elias ignored Ilena’s cry of relief. His dark hair barely covered a bruise on his temple and another, fresher one on his cheekbone.

  Madoc surged toward him.

  “You can control souls?” Elias pressed.

  Madoc ignored the question. “Are you all right? Where were you?”

  “I’m fine.” Elias yanked out of his mother’s grasping hands. The abruptness of it sank into Ash’s heart, making her aware of how he wasn’t fine. “Stop—I said I’m fine. Petros’s guards grabbed me. They wanted to make sure I was occupied during your fight.” He gave Madoc a heavy look. Ash remembered—Elias had geoeia. Was he the reason Deimos thought Madoc was Earth Divine? Was he using his power to assist in Madoc’s fights? “It seems like Petros thinks you can control souls too. He wanted to see what you could really do.”

  Madoc’s face paled. “I don’t—”

  Seneca grunted in impatience. “I’ve watched you grow up, Madoc. You’ve always been far more sensitive to other people than most. If this is what you are, you could take down all your opponents like you did with Jann. Drive them mad by playing with their emotions, or weaken their geoeia until they were ordinary, or just pull their souls out like draining the milk from a coconut. You helped that girl without even thinking about it.” Seneca waved at Ash. “Imagine what you could do if you tried. You could take out any mortal. Or even, maybe, a bigger target.”

  A bigger target? Ash felt her body grow light.

  Could Madoc even affect a god’s soul? Was that why Ignitus feared him—not only because he was descended from a goddess who should be dead, but because Madoc could hurt him?

  Ash’s mind spun with a mix of excitement and terror.

  Madoc threw up his hands, cornered. “What happened with Jann was an accident, all right? The same with what I did for Ash. It was a fluke.” He looked at Elias, imploring. “Petros shouldn’t have touched you. That wasn’t the deal—”

  He stopped, eyes closing on a wince.

  “Deal?” Ilena twisted to Madoc, cutting in front of Tor and Ash as if they could have this conversation in private. “You made a deal with Petros?”

  “Petros changed the cost of Cassia’s indenture,” Elias said. His bloodshot eyes never left Madoc. “He won’t accept coin now—the only way he’ll give us back Cassia is if Madoc wins the war. That’s what Petros’s men told me. When were you going to let us know about that, Madoc?”

  “I had it handled,” Madoc bit through a clenched jaw.

  Elias’s shoulders slumped. His eyes slid to Tor, then Ash. “Is that what you’re doing here? You want to make a deal with him too?”

  “No,” Madoc said. “I won’t—”

  But Elias grabbed Madoc’s arm. “Would you just shut up for a second and listen to them? Whatever they want can’t make things worse. If you stay in this war, you’re going to die. Petros already took Cassia. We can’t lose you.”

  “Elias,” Ilena hissed, but Ash noticed how she looked from her son to the Kulan champions, waiting. She wanted to hear what they said too.

  Tor stepped forward. “Earth Divine and Fire Divine together could easily free a servant. We’ll rescue your sister—if you try to use your powers on Ignitus.”

  Ash gaped at Tor. She had never heard him say anything like that before, willingly putting himself—and Ash—in a dangerous situation for enemies.

  But he returned her stare with a firm nod, resolution straightening some of the worry lines around his face. Seeing that change in Tor made all of this suddenly, shatteringly real to Ash.

  Madoc had energeia they had never seen before. He could be the person Ignitus feared.

  He could be the very thing she had been looking for to save Kula and bring down a god.

  Madoc’s nose curled, disgusted, horrified. “You want me to try to affect a god? Do you have any idea what would happen to my family if I got caught doing something like that?”

  “Madoc.” His name slipped between Ash’s lips. “Geoxus is just like Ignitus, only he hides it behind wealth and prestige. He has a list of my country’s resources, and he checks them off every time he wins one, as if he’s collecting them. We aren’t even asking you to turn against your god. Just ours. We have no idea if your powers can affect gods, but—we’d ask that you try.”

  Madoc was silent long enough that hope welled in Ash’s throat. But when he shook his head, the flurry of it dissolving stabbed her like knives.

  “And get my whole family killed in the process? What do you think Ignitus will do to them if I fail? This conversation—” He swept his eyes over the room, waving his hands wide. “This conversation never happened.”

  Madoc pushed past Elias and Ilena. He yanked open the door and shouldered around Taro and Spark, the slapping of his sandals echoing up the hall.

  Ash bit her lips together so she wouldn’t call after him. The way he had looked at her seared her mind like hot iron, the repulsion she had feared since she’d revealed his secret. Since she’d revealed her own.

  He hated her. She had laid everything bare, and he hated her.

  Ilena started to go after him when Seneca put her hand on her arm. “Take me home, Ilena,” she said. “This is too much excitement for my old bones. Let the boy sulk. He’ll come around.”

  Ash stiffened. “He doesn’t have to come around,” she said, and she realized no one had said anything like that through all of this. “He has a choice.”

  Even if he chose not to help Kula. Even if Ash ended up back where she started, with no leads on how to destroy Ignitus or how to keep her country from slipping away into starvation.

  Tor glared at her. Ilena shot her a look of surprise before it darkened into suspicion.

  Ash continued, mouth dry. “I’ll speak to him. I can . . . I’ll make sure he knows that he has a choice.”

  In truth, she wanted to see what he thought of her now. Maybe she had been right to always hide her true feelings about Ignitus. Maybe she had been right to sulk in loneliness rather than show her true self and hope that someday, someone would see her and understand.

  “There. The girl will get through to him,” Seneca declared as though it was her idea.

  Elias grunted, exasperated, and mumbled something about having to load Madoc’s armor. He left, stomping away.

  Ilena gave Ash a weighted stare. “He’s scared,” she said. “Be patient. Please.”

  That narrowed her focus. She could help Madoc. He
didn’t deserve to deal with this immense burden alone. He didn’t deserve to feel like some plaything of the gods when all he wanted was a soft life, safe with those he loved.

  Ash’s throat swelled.

  Char, singing her old Kulan songs as they cooked supper. Tor, rustling her awake so the two of them could watch the sun rise. Rook, Taro, Spark—and even Madoc, looking at her the way he had when they’d been standing side by side after they’d found Stavos’s body. As if her presence was comforting.

  She shot out the door, racing through the dusty arena after Madoc.

  Fifteen

  Madoc

  WHEN MADOC HAD left the preparation chamber, he’d wanted to go home to the quarter. To sleep off his thunderous headache in his own tiny bunk, and wake a stonemason again—a pigstock nobody whose only concerns were mixing mortar and ranking the chariots driven in by the master architects. But when he’d reached the main exit of the arena, a crowd had gathered to celebrate his victory, so he’d stolen a guard cloak near the weapons depository and gone out a side exit.

  He hadn’t intended to come to the temple, but it wasn’t the first time he’d ended up here when he’d been lost.

  Soul energy. Anathreia.

  Each thought kicked against the base of his skull as he climbed the stone steps past the beggars in their worn tunics. He kept replaying what he’d done to Jann in the arena—the swell of his own veins, the rightness of Jann’s surrender. Madoc still couldn’t remember fully what had happened, and it worried him, but not nearly as much as having his skin sanded off by Geoxus if he learned Madoc had used an energeia not sanctioned by the rules of war.

  Madoc pulled the hood of his cloak lower as a group of children raced by, fighting with wooden swords and handfuls of pebbles.

  Cassia. Petros. Elias. Ash.

  They were all pulling him in different directions. A month ago, no one had cared who he was or what he did. Now it seemed like the whole city knew his name, and most of them wanted him to kill someone.

  He didn’t know if he was capable of that.

  He didn’t want to find out.

  The temple was open to the air, two dozen pillars hoisting up a sloped stone roof. The east side made up the closed sanctuary, the walls the priests lived within separated from the arena by a single road that transported gladiators and their training entourages to a private entrance that led to the facility’s preparation chambers. Madoc walked that road now, skirting the edge of the sanctuary, until he reached the steps that led into the temple’s main atrium, and the door that held the offering box.

  This was where he’d come as a child when Petros had kicked him out. Where his frantic prayers to Geoxus had led him. Where he’d eventually met Cassia. How many times had he prayed here since then? The location had hardly been necessary—Geoxus was part of the earth, this city’s foundation, and he heard Madoc’s words wherever there was stone. But Madoc had come to the temple again and again, drawn by the quiet, and the sense of safety that always put his mind at ease.

  How little he’d prayed since this war had begun. It was different now, harder. Seeing Geoxus up close had made him real in a way Madoc hadn’t previously been able to fathom. And the Father God’s blindness to Petros’s deceit had been a bitter disappointment. It had made the god of earth seem almost human, and if Madoc had learned anything from Petros, it was not to worship mortals. Sooner or later they would always let you down.

  Not that it mattered anymore. Geoxus might not even be his god.

  People milled about inside the atrium, lighting incense and placing their hands on the sacred stones in the walls. Some carted baskets from Market Square, on the west side of the temple. Others begged for food or coin, shooed away by the centurions posted at each corner. But it was movement near the three-story statue of Geoxus that caught Madoc’s attention. A woman stood near a pillar, her long cloak dark against the stark white marble. He should have kept walking to the offering box—the purse was heavy on his belt, and it was foolish to think he wouldn’t be recognized if he stayed too long. But when she stepped forward, the light slanting through the open atrium caught her face and a wild curl that escaped her cloak’s hood.

  A knot formed in his throat, but he swallowed it down, searching for the Kulan guards who surely would be nearby. He didn’t see them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close.

  “Do you want to be alone?” Ash asked as he finished climbing the steps to meet her under the shelter.

  Yes. No.

  “Did you follow me all this way to ask me that?” His tone was gruffer than he’d intended. As he moved closer, he gripped the satchel of coins against his side to keep it from jingling. Again, he looked for her guards, but either they were well disguised among the other patrons or she’d lost them between here and the arena.

  It wouldn’t be the first time she’d snuck away unattended.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He laughed dryly. He’d just been told he wasn’t fully Deiman, but instead might belong to the dead seventh goddess who’d been killed by her six children hundreds of years ago. Seneca thought that he could drain souls like a coconut. And his own brother was convinced he’d die before the war was over.

  “I’m great.”

  Her lips pulled to the side, as if trying to hide a smile, and when she knotted her fists in the long fabric of her cloak, she looked younger, more girl than gladiator.

  “Me too,” she said, her gaze flicking to the nearest centurion, standing on the steps that led to the market. She turned her back to him, and Madoc did the same.

  “Are you here to pray?” she asked. The breeze teased a loose strand of hair across her forehead. He waited for her to tuck it inside her hood, behind the half-heart-shaped shell of her ear, but she didn’t.

  He shrugged. Could he pray here if Geoxus wasn’t his god? He didn’t know where to start to pray to Anathrasa. “To think. Maybe to hide.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said, scowling up at the giant statue before them. “What are you going to do? About Cassia, I mean. Are you really going to try to win this war?”

  Her questions filled the space between them, filled his lungs until he felt like he would choke.

  He didn’t know how to answer. He’d barely known how he beat Jann; he had no idea how he was supposed to face a seasoned opponent trying to kill him with fire.

  Especially if his opponent was her.

  “I can’t help you,” he said instead. If she’d come here to change his mind, she’d made a needless trip. “I don’t know how I do what I do . . . it just happens.”

  She didn’t move.

  Neither did he.

  “My mother . . .” She hesitated. “My mother used to say energeia listens to the heart, not the mind.”

  He wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, but he knew power didn’t come from will alone—if it did, it would have manifested when Petros had tried to force it out of him as a child.

  As it had in the tunnel, her grief misted around her, palpable and familiar. This time, though, he did not try to take it. Instead, he pictured Stavos and Ash’s mother in the arena—him cheating, Ash rushing to help—and rage spiked on her behalf. Madoc would have interfered in that fight too if Ilena, or Cassia—any of the Metaxas—had been in danger. Even if it had started a war.

  It struck him just how brave Ash actually was. She hadn’t just defended her mother, she was defending her people. Facing a god’s wrath if her intentions were discovered. Somehow, amid the lies and bloodshed, she had found honor, and it made any war their gods fought feel small and petty.

  “Do you miss her?” He didn’t know why he asked. They were opposing gladiators, both fighting their own battles. But he knew what it was like to be told your mother was dead, and even if he’d only been a child, he felt the kindling of likeness between them.

  “Yes,” she said, a small line forming between her brows. “Do you miss yours? Your birth mother, I mean.”

  “I never k
new her.” He sighed. “It would be nice to talk to her. Petros is Earth Divine, so this . . . anathreia must have come from her side. Maybe she could tell me how it works.”

  She watched him, all long black lashes and deep-brown eyes.

  “My mother taught me how to use igneia. At home, before I started training.” She kicked at the bench in front of her. “She never wanted me to fight.”

  Her words cut off, as if she suddenly remembered who she was talking to.

  He didn’t want her to stop.

  “Ilena doesn’t like me fighting either.” He’d felt her fear and desperation in the preparation room after the fight. Whether she admitted it or not, what he’d done to Jann had scared her, and that made it so much worse.

  Ash nodded. “My family has been gladiators for generations. It’s in our blood, according to Ignitus.” Her jaw clenched over his name, but softened with a small smile. “My mother pushed me to do other things.”

  “Fire dancing?” Madoc asked.

  A flush blossomed on her cheeks. “Yes. I loved it, but I was still born to fight and had to train for the arena. It was just a matter of time before the dance was real.”

  Her pain shifted to a softer kind of grief, and he felt his own regret mingle with it. Dancing made her happy. He would have liked to see her that way.

  “If what I saw at the ball is any indication, you must be pretty good.”

  “Well, I don’t usually dance like that at ceremonies.” She snorted. “Fire dancing isn’t quite so forward.”

  Madoc shrugged. “I didn’t mind.”

  She smiled.

  He did too.

  “What’s it like then?” he asked. “Fire dancing, I mean.”

  A light filled her eyes. “It’s heat and hunger and life. It’s a celebration of everything good about igneia.”

  Longing pulled at him. Elias had once told him geoeia was a necessary part of himself, like his lungs or his heart. Madoc had never imagined energeia feeling so crucial, but hearing the passion in Ash’s voice gave him a strange hope that anathreia wasn’t all force and power. That it might have an upside.

  “It must take a lot of practice,” he said, realizing how much control she employed to use igneia. In the arena with Jann, Madoc hadn’t even felt like himself.