Ember

by Anna Holmes

  The remaining two guards eye each other warily. At length, they bow, hands to their chests. "Sergeant Nuthatch, you're in charge," Caelin tells Tressa, going to look at the workers below. "In the meantime…"

  The flamefolk woman stands, brushing her orange hair away from her face. She reaches to her belt and produces the largest ring of keys I have ever seen.

  Caelin reaches out to take hold of the key ring. "Thank you."

  Before the keys are fully in Caelin’s grasp, the younger office makes a lunge. I fling out my hands to stun him, but he repeals me with the force of his own will, readier than mine. The sickening overripe-fruit sound of a blade breaking flesh rends the quiet, and the flamefolk woman sags. The senior officer shouts, but the young man sets the bloodied blade to his superior’s throat, and the cry dies at its point. "I’ll have those keys back now, please," he intones, his voice low. Tressa lifts her bow and takes but he holds up his other hand. "I wouldn't, if I were you."

  In his palm sits a glass jar, a blue flame flickering inside. I recognize it all too well. Jori’s classified project. Only in the last stages of planning the siege was I made aware of what this fire could do. "Don't," I shout, pulling Tressa's arm away.

  The man's mouth curls up unpleasantly. "You know what this is, don't you, prince." He holds the jar out over the railing. "I'll drop it."

  "Don't push him," I squeeze through my clenched jaw. "Just give him the damn keys, Caelin. Please."

  "The lad's got brains. Do as he says, highness." Her eyes dart to the entryway, and he shakes his head. "Don't bother. They won't help you." He points down at the scene on the ground with his dagger as though the bodies at our feet are only props. "If they run in and see their captain and their mates on the ground, who do you think they'll believe?"

  I've got to get that flame away from him. I watched an entire abandoned barn go up in flames in a matter of seconds. How this Rebel guard came to be in possession of it, I can only assume. Jori won't be far behind. "She doesn't love you," I blurt. "The woman who gave you that jar."

  The man's lower lip pulls taut, and he holds the flame over the rail again. He demands, "What sort of man do you take me for?"

  "The sort that would threaten to incinerate hundreds of slaves over a set of keys. Just her type, I think."

  I look more closely at him, and it’s not hard to see it in his posture. Legion trained. He scoffs and brandishes the dripping knife again. "Any time you feel like handing those keys over would be excellent."

  Caelin catches my eye as she steps forward. She makes a subtle gesture, the slightest tilt of her head toward the guardrail. I frown. What are you doing? Of course, she can’t answer. I can only force air in and out of my lungs in the instant before we all move. Caelin throws the keys over the side. The man lunges for them, giving Tressa the perfect opening to sink an arrow, two, three into his back. His hand falls slack, and down goes the jar. I run for the railing and jump, praying and pleading with magic. My leg weights me, but my outstretched fingers brush the string tied around the lid.

  My damned slippery hands miss. I have but one recourse left. I can slow the jar's fall, but not forever. I can't call it to me. I tell the air around it to thicken, to grasp onto it longer than it normally would. At the same time, I yell, "MOVE!"

  The people below look up. The guards move first, mostly abandoning the workers. Only a few move to unbind the slaves. The still-bound jump and run, shouting and screaming, as far as their chains will let them. I can't concentrate on both the jar and the people. I let the jar fall a little faster and use some of my concentration to summon the metal pins holding their chains a little ways out of the ground. I have to turn back to the jar to give them more time and hope that they can break the chains loose.

  I hear the clank as one group pulls together. The others catch on, and they retreat into the hallways, piling together, guard and prisoner alike. I finally have to let the jar drop and move to pull Caelin and Tressa away from the side. Below, a clink, a shatter, and then a burst of flame straight up into the air.

  Caelin yells to me, "What the hells was that?"

  "A Class One Conflagration," I breathe, my lungs burning from the effort. For one of the few times in my life, I feel cold after the immense flash of heat. I smell singed hair but not flesh—part of Tressa’s tail has been burnt away. If we’d been any closer… "Jori's brainchild."

  "Of course it was," she spits. She scrambles to her feet and a moment later I hear the sound of boots from the hallway. Guards alerted by the blast.

  I summon the last faint gasps of energy I have remaining and wait for my targets to emerge. The first of them, however, immediately moves for the flamefolk guard instead of for his sword, and I drop my hands. "What’s happened, Sergeant?" He asks, helping Caelin in pressing cloth to her weeping wound.

  The sergeant lifts a shaking hand, indicating the man Tressa’s turned into a pincushion. He still writhes on the ground. "Rett’s Legion," she manages.

  The guards edge in around us in a wide ring, and in the space of a moment, they break their formation and surge toward the man she indicates. Caelin moves to the ledge and forces herself to peer down. I lean over to do the same. Amongst the thinning smoke, the workbenches and the sparse trees in the courtyard below are reduced to ash and embers. I can just make out the beginnings of movement at the edges of the smoke. "Secure the prisoners," she tells the guards. "Put them somewhere safe. Harm none of them. Go! Tressa, keep an eye on them."

  They move quickly enough. My stomach drops as well over half of them advance on us instead. Tressa fits an arrow to her bowstring, beginning to retreat down the ramp.

  Caelin throws the Sergeant’s arm over her shoulder and transfers her to one of the loyal guards. The others shake off their surprise and surge in, spears readied, building us a path to the ramp. The two waves of guards crash into each other in a roar of screams and curses and the clashes of metal. It’s hard to tell as they all wear the same color, but as usual, it seems the Legion swells around Elyssia, threatening to choke it.

  Poor Maribelle bolts down the ramp, Navigator rearing and following. The rogue guards don't pursue them, instead chasing after us. There must be ten, and I don't know how many more coming. I give the air another push, and my knees wobble. "I don't have much more of this," I gasp to Caelin.

  She gives a brief nod. "Where does this go?" she wonders aloud.

  "The battlements, probably," I answer.

  "All right. That's where we're going."

  The nagging feeling tugging at my gut protests that up is the wrong way to go. She trains her sharpened gaze on every nook and cranny as we run. I inevitably stumble over my magic-rent leg, and she grabs my elbow and urges me on. I force a breath. "Caelin, what are we doing?"

  "Running," she answers.

  "To where?"

  "I’ll let you know if I figure it out." She glances over her shoulder. "Ten on two is pretty poor odds. Or do you think we can take them?"

  "You are joking, right?"

  A trap door in front of us bursts open, two more guards piling out. We don’t wait to see whose side they’re on. Caelin pulls me up to the wall, casts a leery glance over the side, and asks, "Well?"

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Caelin

  Oh, gods, oh, gods, I hate heights. Probably thirty feet below me is the gray unforgiving ocean. If I'm pushed a few inches to my right, I'll end up dashed against the rocks. They’re still advancing steadily, at least five for each of us to take on. I need to jump if I don’t want to wind up carrion for the rock gulls. Terror grabs my throat, locks my knees, and stretches the building two, three times taller in my sight than it is in reality. I catch Alain’s eye, and the brief smile I can give, the flicker of adoration he sends me in reply, help drive back the fear. I let myself fall back.

  I hear him yell my name, and I close my eyes. I feel as though my stomach is falling faster than the rest of me. The roar of the wind smothers the rest of my senses. I bite down on the urge
to scream and manage to put the sword into its sheath before I hit the water.

  Ramming into the water with my body is like an enormous slap, the freezing water sending reverberating shocks through every limb. The salt stings my eyes so badly that I can't keep them open to see where I'm going. And I'm sinking.

  Of course I'm sinking. I'm wearing armor. This was possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I can’t move except in inches, and no matter how far I strain my head and neck upward, the surface never gets nearer. I fumble for the lower clasp of my gorget with rapidly numbing fingers. It eases open, and I'm about to undo the other one when I feel the water swell all around me. Something else has dropped into the water. I force my eyes open in time to see a dark shape move towards me. In the light of my skin, I see Alain's face, pale and nearly blending into the water itself.

  He swims up close to me. Swim isn't the right word. He glides effortlessly through the water, moves as I might through the air. Alain’s arm wraps around my solar plexus and hoists me up. His hand braces the back of my head, pulls me in, and his mouth finds mine.

  Now? I'm drowning and he wants to do this now?

  You can breathe, he says, his mouth still pressed to mine, my nose flat against my face to block it off.

  My lungs are seconds away from popping, my throat clenched. I try, but my body doesn’t want to cooperate. I’m not even kicking to stay afloat. I hear his voice again, alarmed now. You need to breathe, Caelin.

  The fight goes out of my limbs. We sink. He grabs me tighter.

  Breathe, damn it!

  Before everything goes completely dark, in a spasm of pure desperation, my chest rises.

  I can breathe.

  I stare, too close to his face to actually make eye contact. It's the strangest feeling, being breathed for. With each breath, life buzzes back into my veins, into my fingers, toes. He takes one hand from my back to push us up faster, and a few breaths later, we surface.

  I remove my face from his and gasp unfiltered air for a moment. He rests my head on his shoulder, and he breathes, too, holding me tightly.

  I pull back for a moment. His eyes dart over my face, looking frantically for something. I reach up for his cheek, cradle it in my hand, and press my mouth to his again.

  So this is a kiss. It’s awkward and visceral and electric. It’s not exactly as otherworldly as the stories say, but the closeness of it is rather brilliant.

  He goes lax, and we start to sink. I butt his shoulder gently with my forehead as my chin dips back into the cold sea. He treads water for us once more. I move away again for a moment, and he lets me breathe before coming in for another kiss. And another, and one more after that. When he's done, I give him two more.

  At last, he backs up, still holding onto me. "Now?" He asks.

  "If not, when?"I lean my forehead against his. "Just for a moment."

  It really only can be a moment. We have to get back in, somehow. Have to make sure Tressa is safe, ensure the slaves aren’t hurt or worse, check on the Sergeant. I can tell Alain is thinking about all this, too. As much as he clings to here, to my freezing self, his head tilts toward the prison.

  He starts paddling with one arm for shore even though we’re both still facing each other here out in the middle of it. We want to linger.

  "I can swim, you know," I say.

  "Did a marvelous job, but typically the goal is to go up."

  "If I could have gotten the damn armor off, I would have been fine."

  "If you hadn't jumped in the ocean in the first place…"

  "I love you, too," I say. My face burns once I realize what I’ve said, and my head whips up. He’s probably horrified. I’m horrified.

  He just smiles.

  We arrive on the rocks. He helps haul me out first and sets me up on the lowest stone before pulling himself out. He looks my way and his eyes widen. "Your arm."

  I glance down at the steam curling away from the spot where I was burned. Between shivers, I inform him, "Oh. It does that."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "No," I say, prodding the skin around it. "Just warm."

  "Ah."

  "Ah?"

  "Far be it from me to question." He drags his leg a little closer.

  A whirling gust of blessedly warm air kicks up, encircling us. It flows in through my loosened gorget and lightly heats my skin. My last shiver is considerably smaller. "Did you do that?"

  He laughs. "What do you think?"

  I don't think I've seen him this at ease ever. I feel it, too. Something that’s been pulled tight in me for too long has released. I stand and reach out to help him up. He wobbles precariously and looks up. "You've climbed taller," I remind him.

  He nods and rubs at his jaw. "Let's get started, then."

  The stones of the wall have cracks every few feet that make suitable handholds. It may have been built hastily, or perhaps this was deliberate. It's not a difficult climb, but we're both tired, the cold stone is roughly cut, and my hands are already raw and still numbed by the air. Alain is doing his best to conserve his energy, it seems. I stop a few times to wait for him to catch up. "I don't understand," I say. "Why would the Legion want to keep their people in this camp? Why would they fight to keep them here?"

  He grits his teeth and starts on ahead. I let him gain a few stones before I start, too. "They don't have to feed them and they still get the results of their work," he says, disgusted. "I'm not surprised."

  "That blue fire—do you think they're trying to make that?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised by that, either."

  My gut churns as I think about the column of flame, the incredible heat, how little it left behind. "I’ve never seen anything like it."

  "I wish I hadn't."

  "I guess we're fortunate that the war ended when it did."

  Except that it seems it hasn't. Not entirely.

  When we get up high enough, I hear clashing metal and shouting voices and smell the acrid smoke of the devastated courtyard. I see a little plume curling from the wall. I motion to Alain. "I think we don't have to climb all the way up."

  "Thank gods," he sighs.

  The hole in the wall is barely big enough to squeeze through, about four stones to our left. I wedge myself in, then wriggle until I’m all the way through. Alain, naturally slippery, manages more gracefully.

  The courtyard beyond is a wasteland. Broken glass is scattered amongst charred tangles of former trees and thin shards of iron. Small pockets of flame still flicker here and there, but for the most part, everything has gone to hot, nostril-stinging dust. The dry warmth is jarring after the dankness of the shore.

  On the bottom floor, prisoners and guards alike scuffle with yet more false guards. In the fray, I can make out Tressa leading some of the prisoners under cover. And somehow in the middle of all this and a little ways up is Gavroth, bellowing and throwing people around as though they weigh nothing. The traitors around him don’t know what they bargained for. "Princess!" He roars, flinging aside two more men to make room for August, who sticks close to his side. "Rye met us on the road. Thought we’d take our chances with you."

  "Shit," I shout back, rushing up the ramp to meet Gavroth. I place my back to him and turn my sword threateningly to the guards advancing on him. "How long?"

  Somewhere, a horn sounds, followed by a mighty crash and an eruption of ash and dust. It's a strange thing. In a matter of moments, the scuffle fades away, and everybody turns to see who's arrived through the cloud and over a drawbridge set deep in the western wall.

  Rye arrives in state with what looks like the majority of the able-bodied adults of his camp. He strides over the planks of the drawbridge, his uniform in pristine shape, his boots polished to a keen shine as though he has been living in a proper Legion encampment all this time. He kicks aside debris to clear his path. His troops follow close behind, lined up a shoulders’ width apart, weapons drawn. My guards—those loyal to Elyssia, anyway—shirk at the sight of the green jackets marching for
us. It’s too sharp a memory to those of us who spent any time on a battlefield. Fifty some pairs of boots stomp to a halt in the direct center of the courtyard. A stifling silence follows.

  I duck down and slink along. I do so hurriedly, my breaths much louder in my head than I’m sure they are to everyone else. The silence persists, Rye sizing up the camp, the guards uncertain of their orders. Of course they are. We put their captain to sleep.

  Gavroth gives me a wary glance. "Go," I mouth to him, indicating the hole in the wall. There’s still enough movement among those who haven’t realized we’ve been invaded yet. August stares at me as though he’s face to face with some mythical creature, and I smile a little, catching his brother’s eye and nodding toward August. Gavroth’s jaw sets, and he gives me a curt nod in return. He grasps August by the shoulder and guides him through the brief pauses in the slowing melee.

  I peek up over the edge of the railing. What’s left of the false guards move to form ranks with the newcomers, and my guards stand, pikes leveled. Alain steps through, holding a fistful of raw magic to his side. I’ve seen this a few times before, but never like this. The blue energy crackles like lightning between his fingertips, lights up the webbing, travels up the veins of his hand and arm. A faint hum drives back the dull echo of quiet, the held breaths. When he finally speaks, it’s like a thunderclap. "Why?" He demands, fingers clawing at the air as the magic pulses for release. "Our own people, Rye."

  Slowly, I start moving down the ramp again. Any minute, the tenuous barrier is going to snap. Rye glances down at Alain’s spell, still restrained, but barely.

  And then it gets worse. From behind Rye saunters Jori. She’s sharper in the uniform, her chin held high. Her attention flicks to the ball of light in his hand that seems to surge with each passing moment. She tilts her head and smiles, never lifting her gaze. If she is half as powerful as Alain seems to think, I have seconds before the chaos starts. I need to provide a distraction, give my guards time to regroup. I jump back down to the ground level.