SEVEN DAYS EARLIER
The Great Wastes. That’s where the Augurs have left me, in this salt-white flatness that stretches for hundreds of miles, marked by nothing but angry black cracks and the occasional gnarled Jack tree.
The pale outline of the moon sits above me like something forgotten. It’s more than half-full, as it had been yesterday—which means that somehow the Augurs have moved me three hundred miles from Serra in one night. At this time yesterday, I was in Grandfather’s carriage, on my way to Blackcliff.
My dagger is driven through a limp piece of parchment and into the scorched ground beside the tree. I tuck the weapon into my belt—it’s the difference between life and death out here. The parchment is written in an unfamiliar hand.
The Trial of Courage:
The belltower. Sunset on the seventh day.
That’s clear enough. If today counts as the first day, I have six full days to reach the belltower or the Augurs will kill me for failing the Trial.
The air’s so dry that breathing burns my nostrils. I lick my lips, already thirsty, and hunch beneath the paltry shade of the Jack tree to consider my predicament.
The stink in the air tells me that the glittering patch of blue to the west of me is Lake Vitan. Its sulfurous stench is legendary, and it’s the only source of water in this wasteland. It’s also pure salt and so completely useless to me. In any case, my path lies east through the Serran Mountain Range.
Two days to get to the mountains. Two more to get to Walker’s Gap, the only way through. A day to get through the Gap and a day to get down to Serra. Six full days exactly, if everything goes as planned.
It’s too easy.
I think back to the foretelling I read in the Commandant’s office. Courage to face their darkest fears. Some people might fear the desert. I’m not one of them.
Which means there’s something else out here. Something that hasn’t revealed itself.
I tear strips of cloth off my shirt and wrap my feet. I have only what I fell asleep with—my fatigues and my dagger. I’m suddenly, fervently grateful that I was too exhausted from combat training to strip before sleeping. Traveling the Great Wastes naked—that would be its own special sort of hell.
Soon the sun sinks into the wild sky of the west, and I stand in the rapidly cooling air. Time to run. I set out at a steady jog, my eyes roving ahead. After a mile, a breeze meanders past, and for a second, I think I smell smoke and death. The smell fades, but it leaves me uneasy.
What are my fears? I rack my brain, but I can’t think of anything. Most of Blackcliff’s students fear something, though never for long. When we were Yearlings, the Commandant ordered Helene to rappel down the cliffs again and again until she could drop with nothing but a clenched jaw to betray her terror. That same year, the Commandant forced Faris to keep a bird-eating desert tarantula as a pet, telling him that if the spider died, he would too.
There must be something I fear. Enclosed spaces? The dark? If I don’t know my fears, I won’t be prepared for them.
Midnight comes and goes, and still the desert around me is quiet and empty. I’ve traveled nearly twenty miles, and my throat is dry as dirt. I lick at the sweat on my arms, knowing that my need for salt will be as great as my need for water. The moisture helps, but only for a moment. I force myself to focus on the ache in my feet and legs. Pain I can handle. But thirst can drive a man insane.
Soon after, I crest a rise and spot something strange ahead: glimmers of light, like moonlight shining down on a lake. Only there’s no lake around here. Dagger in hand, I slow to a walk.
Then I hear it. A voice.
It starts quietly enough, a whisper I can pass off as the wind, a scrape that sounds like the echo of my footsteps on the cracked ground. But the voice gets closer, clearer.
Eliassss.
Eliassss.
A low hill rises before me, and when I reach the top, the night breeze curdles, bringing with it the unmistakable smells of war—blood and dung and rot. Below me sits a battlefield—a killing field, actually, for no battle rages here. Everyone’s dead. Moonlight glints off the armor of fallen men. This is what I saw earlier, from the rise.
It’s a strange battlefield, unlike any I’ve encountered. No one moans or pleads for aid. Barbarians from the borderlands lay beside Martial soldiers. I spot what looks like a Tribal trader and beside him, smaller bodies—his family. What is this place? Why would a Tribesman battle against Martials and Barbarians out in the middle of nowhere?
“Elias.”
I practically leap from my skin at the sound of my name spoken in such silence, and my dagger is at the throat of the speaker before I can think. He is a Barbarian boy, no more than thirteen. His face is painted with blue woad, and his body is dark with the geometric tattoos unique to his people. Even in the light of the half-moon, I know him. I’d know him anywhere.
He is my first kill.
My eyes drop to the gaping wound in his stomach, a wound I put there nine years ago. A wound he doesn’t seem to notice.
I drop my arm and back away. Impossible.
The boy’s dead. Which means that all this—the battlefield, the smell, the Wastes—must be a nightmare. I pinch my arm to wake myself up. The boy tilts his head. I pinch myself again. I take my dagger and cut my hand with it. Blood drips to the ground.
The boy doesn’t budge. I can’t wake up.
Courage to face their darkest fears.
“My mother screamed and tore at her hair for three days after I died,” my first kill says. “She didn’t speak again for five years.” He talks quietly in the just-deepened voice of a teenaged boy. “I was her only child,” he adds, as if in explanation.
“I’m—I’m sorry—”
The boy shrugs and walks away, gesturing for me to follow him onto the battlefield. I don’t want to go, but he clamps a chill hand on my arm and pulls me behind him with surprising force. As we wind through the first of the bodies, I look down. A sick feeling seeps through me.
I recognize these faces. I killed every one of these people.
As I pass them, their voices murmur secrets in my head—
My wife was pregnant—
I was sure I’d kill you first—
My father swore revenge, but died before taking it—
I clap my hands over my ears. But the boy sees, and his clammy fingers pull mine away from my head with inexorable force.
“Come,” he says. “There are more.”
I shake my head. I know exactly how many people I’ve killed, when they died, how, where. There are far more than twenty-one men on this battlefield. I can’t have killed them all.
But we keep walking, and now there are faces I don’t know. And it’s a kind of relief, because these faces must be someone else’s sins, someone else’s darkness.
“Your kills,” the boy interrupts my thoughts. “They’re all yours. The past. The future. All here. All by your hand.”
My hands sweat, and I feel lightheaded. “I—I don’t—” There are scores of people on this battlefield. Well over five hundred. How could I be responsible for the deaths of so many? I look down. There’s a lanky, fair-haired Mask on my left, and my stomach sinks because I know this Mask. Demetrius.
“No.” I bend down to shake him. “Demetrius. Wake up. Get up.”
“He can’t hear you,” my first kill says. “He’s gone.”
Beside Demetrius lies Leander, blood staining his halo of curly hair, trickling down his crooked nose and off his chin. And a few feet away, Ennis—another member of Helene’s battle platoon. Further ahead, I spot a mane of white hair, a powerful body. Grandfather?
“No. No.” There isn’t another word for what I’m seeing, because something so terrible shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I bend next to another body—the gold-eyed slave-girl I’ve only just met. A raw red line cuts across her throat. Her hair is a mess, snaking out every which way. Her eyes are open, their brilliant gold faded to the color of a dead sun. I think of her intoxicating smell, like fruit and sugar and warmth. I turn on my first kill.
“These are my friends, my family. People I know. I wouldn’t hurt them.”
“Your kills,” the boy insists, and the terror inside me grows at the sureness with which he speaks. Is this what I will be? A mass murderer?
Wake up, Elias. Wake up. But I cannot wake, because I’m not asleep. The Augurs have somehow brought my nightmare to life, unrolled it before my eyes.
“How do I make it stop? I have to make it stop.”
“It’s already done,” the boy says. “This is your destiny—it is written.”
“No.” I push past him. The battlefield has to end eventually. I’ll get by it, keep going through the desert, get out of here.
But when I reach the edge of the carnage, the ground lurches and the battlefield stretches out ahead of me again in its entirety. Beyond the battlefield, the landscape has changed—I’m still moving east through the desert.
“You can keep walking,” the disembodied whisper of my first kill brushes across my ear, and I start violently. “You may even reach the mountains. But until you conquer your fear, the dead will remain with you.”
This is an illusion, Elias. Augur sorcery. Keep walking until you find your way out.
I force myself toward the shadow of the Serran Range, but every time I reach the end of the battlefield, I feel the lurch and see the bodies spread out before me yet again. Every time it happens, it gets harder to ignore the carnage at my feet. My pace slows, and I struggle to stumble on. I pass by the same people over and over, until their faces are burned into my memory.
The sky lightens and dawn breaks. Second day, I think. Go east, Elias.
The battlefield grows hot and fetid. Clouds of flies and scavengers descend. I shout and attack them with my dagger, but I can’t keep them away. I want to die of thirst or hunger, but I feel neither in this place. I count 539 bodies.
I won’t kill so many. I tell myself. I won’t. An insidious voice in my head chuckles when I try to convince myself of this. You’re a Mask, the voice says. Of course you’ll kill so many. You’ll kill more. I run from the thought, willing with my entire mind to break free of the battlefield. But I cannot.
The sky darkens, the moon rises. I cannot leave. Daylight again. It’s the third day. The thought appears in my head, but I hardly know what it means. I was supposed to do something by now. Be somewhere. I look to my right, at the mountains. There. I’m supposed to go there. I force my body to turn.
Sometimes, I talk to those I’ve killed. In my head, I hear them whisper back—not accusations, but their hopes, their wants. I wish they would curse me instead. It’s worse, somehow, to hear all that would have been had I not killed them.
East. Elias, go east. It’s the only logical thing I can think. But sometimes, lost in the horror of my future, I forget about going east. Instead, I wander from body to body, begging those I’ve killed for forgiveness.
Darkness. Daylight. The fourth day. And soon after, the fifth. But why am I counting the days? The days don’t matter. I’m in hell. A hell I’ve made myself, because I am evil. As evil as my mother. As evil as any Mask who spends a lifetime relishing the blood and tears of his victims.
To the mountains, Elias, a faint voice whispers in my head, the last shred of sanity I have. To the mountains.
My feet bleed, and my face cracks from the wind. The sky is below me. The ground above. Old memories flit through my head—Mamie Rila teaching me to write my tribal name; the pain of a Centurion’s whip tearing into my back that first time; sitting with Helene in the wilds of the north, watching as the sky swirled with impossible ribbons of light.
I trip over a body and crash to the ground. The impact shakes something loose in my mind.
Mountains. East. Trial. This is a Trial.
Thinking those words is like pulling myself from a pool of quicksand. This is a Trial, and I must survive it. Most of the people on the battlefield aren’t dead yet—I just saw them. This is a test—of my mettle, my strength—which means there must be something specific I’m supposed to do to get out of here.
“Until you conquer your fear, the dead will remain with you.”
I hear a sound. The first sound I’ve heard in days, it feels like. There, shimmering like a mirage at the edge of the battlefield, is a figure. My first kill again? I stagger toward him but fall to my knees when I’m just a few feet away. Because it is not my first kill. It’s Helene, and she is covered in blood and scratches, her silver hair tangled as she gazes at me with empty eyes.
“No,” I rasp. “Not Helene. Not Helene. Not Helene.”
I chant it like a madman with only two words left in his mind. Helene’s ghost comes closer.
“Elias.” Skies, her voice. Cracked and haunted. So real. “Elias, it’s me. It’s Helene.”
Helene, on my nightmare battlefield? Helene, another victim?
No. I will not kill my oldest, best friend. This is a fact, not a wish. I will not kill her.
I realize in that moment that I cannot be afraid of something if there’s no chance it could ever occur. The knowledge releases me, finally, from the fear that has consumed me for days.
“I won’t kill you,” I say. “I swear it. By blood and by bone, I swear it. And I won’t kill any of the others, either. I won’t.”
The battlefield fades, the smell fades, the dead fade, as if they had never been real. As if they had only ever been in my mind. Ahead, close enough to touch, sit the mountains I’ve been staggering toward for five days, their rocky trails curving and swooping like Tribal calligraphy.
“Elias?”
Helene’s ghost is still here.
For a moment, I don’t understand. She reaches for my face, and I flinch from her, expecting the cold caress of a spirit.
But her skin is warm.
“Helene?”
Then she’s pulling me close, cradling my head, whispering that I’m alive, that she is alive, that we are both all right, that she’s found me. I wrap my arms around her waist and bury my face in her stomach. And for the first time in nine years, I start to cry.
«««
“We only have two days to get back.” These are the first words Hel’s spoken since she half-dragged me out of the foothills and into a mountain cave.
I say nothing. I’m not ready for words yet. A fox roasts over a fire, and my mouth waters at the smell. Night has fallen, and outside the cave, thunder reverberates. Black clouds roll out from the Wastes, and the heavens break open, rain cascading through lightning-edged cracks in the sky.
“I saw you around noon.” She adds a few more branches to the fire. “But it took me a couple of hours to come down the mountain to you. Thought you were an animal at first. Then the sun hit your mask.” She stares out at the sheeting rain. “You looked bad.”
“How did you know I wasn’t Marcus?” I croak. My throat is dry, and I take another sip of water from the reed canteen she’s made. “Or Zak?”
“I can tell the difference between you and a couple of reptiles. Besides, Marcus fears water. The Augurs wouldn’t leave him in a desert. And Zak hates tight spaces, so he’s probably underground somewhere. Here. Eat.”
I eat slowly, watching Helene all the while. Her usually sleek hair is matted, its silver sheen faded. She’s covered in scratches and dried blood.
“What did you see, Elias? You were coming for the mountains, but you kept falling, clawing at the air. You talked about . . . about killing me.”
I shake my head. The Trial’s not over, and I have to forget what I saw if I want to survive the rest of it.
“Where did they leave you?” I ask.
She wraps her arms around herself and hunches down, her eyes barely visible. “Northwest. In the mountains. In a spire vulture’s nest.”
I put down my fox. Spire vultures are massive birds with five-inch talons and wingspans that clear twenty feet. Their eggs are the size of a man’s head, their hatchlings notoriously bloodthirsty. But worst of all for Helene, the vultures build their nests above the clouds, atop the most unassailable peaks.
She doesn’t have to explain the catch in her voice. She used to shake for hours after the Commandant made her scale the cliffs. The Augurs know all this, of course. They’ve picked it from her mind the way a thief picks a plum off a tree.
“How did you get down?”
“Luck. The mother vulture was gone, and the hatchlings were just breaking through their shells. But they were dangerous enough, even half-hatched.”
She pulls up her shirt to expose the pale, taut skin of her stomach, marred by a tangle of gouges.
“I jumped over the side of the nest and landed on a ledge ten feet down. I didn’t—I didn’t realize how high I was. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I kept seeing . . . ” She stops, and I realize that the Augurs must have forced her to face some foul hallucination, something equal to my nightmare battlefield. What darkness had she borne, thousands of feet up, with nothing between her and death but a few inches of rock?
“The Augurs are sick,” I say. “I can’t believe they’d—”
“They’re doing what they have to, Elias. They’re making us face our fears. They need to find the strongest, remember? The bravest. We have to trust them.”
She closes her eyes, shivering. I cross the space between us and put my hands on her arms to still her. When she lifts her lashes, I realize I can feel the heat of her body, that mere inches separate our faces. She has beautiful lips, I notice distractedly, the top one fuller than the bottom. I meet her gaze for one intimate, infinite moment. She leans toward me, those lips parting. A violent throb of desire tugs at me, followed by a frantic alarm bell. Bad idea. Terrible idea. She’s your best friend. Stop.
I drop my arms and back away hastily, trying not to notice the flush on her neck. Helene’s eyes flash—anger or embarrassment, I can’t tell.
“Anyway,” she says. “I got down last night and figured I’d take the rim trail to Walker’s Gap. Fastest way back. There’s a guard station at the other end. We can get a boat to cross the river and supplies—clothes and boots, at least.” She gestures to her ragged, bloodstained fatigues. “Not that I’m complaining.”
She looks up at me, a question in her eyes. “They left you in the Wastes, but . . . ” But you don’t fear the desert. You grew up there.
“No use thinking about it,” I say.
After that, we are silent, and when the fire burns down, Helene tells me she’s turning in. But though she rolls over into a pile of leaves, I know sleep won’t come to her. She’s still clinging to the side of her mountain, just like I’m still wandering lost in my battlefield.
«««
Helene and I are bleary-eyed and exhausted the next morning, but we start out well before dawn. We need to reach Walker’s Gap today if we want to get back to Blackcliff by sunset tomorrow.
We don’t speak—we don’t have to. Traveling with Helene is like pulling on a favorite shirt. We spent all of our time as Fivers together, and we fall instinctively back into the pattern of those days, with me taking point and Helene the rear guard.
The storm rolls away north to reveal a blue sky and a land clean and glistening. But the crisp beauty conceals fallen trees and washed-out trails, hillsides treacherous with mud and debris. There’s an unmistakable tension in the air. Just like before, I have the sense that something lies in wait. Something unknown.
Helene and I don’t stop to rest. Our eyes are peeled for bears, lynxes, wayward hunters—any creature that might call the mountains home.
In the afternoon, we climb the rise that leads to the Gap, a fifteen-mile-long river of forest amid the blue-speckled peaks of the Serran Range. The Gap appears almost gentle, carpeted with trees, rolling hills, and the occasional gold burst of a wildflower meadow. Helene and I exchange a glance. We both feel it. Whatever’s coming, it’s going to be soon.
As we move into the forest, the sense of danger increases, and I catch sight of a furtive movement at the edge of my vision. Helene looks back at me. She’s seen it too.
We alter our route frequently and stay off the trails, which slows our pace but makes an ambush more difficult. As dusk approaches, we haven’t made it out of the pass and are forced to move back to the trail so we can pick our way forward by moonlight.
The sun has just set when the forest falls silent. I shout Helene a warning and have barely enough time to bring my knife up before a dark shape hurtles out of the trees.
I don’t know what I’m expecting. An army of those I killed, coming for revenge? A nightmare creature conjured by the Augurs?
Something that will strike fear into my very bones. Something to test my courage.
I don’t expect the mask. I don’t expect the cold, flat eyes of Zak glaring out at me.
Behind me, Helene screams, and I hear the crash of two bodies hitting the ground. I turn to see Marcus attacking her. Her face is frozen in terror at the sight of him, and she makes no move to defend herself as he pins down her arms, laughing like he did when he kissed her.
“Helene!” At my shout, she snaps out of her daze and strikes out at Marcus, twisting away from him.
Then Zak is on me, raining blows down on my head, my neck. He fights recklessly, almost frenziedly, and I easily evade his assault. I come around behind him, sweeping my dagger in an arc. He spins back to dodge the attack and lunges at me, teeth bared like a dog’s. I duck beneath his arm and sink my dagger into his side. Hot blood sprays across my hand. I wrench the dagger out, and Zak groans and staggers back. Hand on his side, he stumbles into the trees, shouting for his twin.
Marcus, serpent that he is, darts into the forest after Zak. Blood shines on Marcus’s thigh, and I feel a burst of satisfaction. Hel marked him. I give chase, the battle rage rising, blinding me to anything else. Distantly, Helene calls my name. Ahead of me, the Snake’s shadow joins with Zak’s, and they barrel ahead, unaware of how close I am.
“Ten burning hells, Zak!” Marcus says. “The Commandant told us to finish them off before they left the Gap, and you go running into the woods like a scared little girl—”
“He stabbed me, all right?” Zak’s voice is breathless. “And she didn’t tell us we’d be dealing with both of them at once, did she?”
“Elias!”
Helene’s shout barely registers. Marcus and Zak’s conversation leaves me dumbstruck. It’s no surprise that my mother’s in league with the Snake and Toad. What I don’t understand is how she knew that Hel and I would be coming through the Gap.
“We have to finish them.” Marcus’s shadow turns, and I bring my dagger up. Then Zak grabs him.
“We have to get out of here,” he says. “Or we won’t make it back on time. Leave them. Come on.”
Part of me wants to chase after Marcus and Zak and take the answers to my questions out of their hides. But Helene cries out again, her voice faint. She might be hurt.
When I get back to the clearing, Hel is slumped on the ground, her head tilted to the side. One arm is splayed out uselessly while she paws at her shoulder with the other, trying to stanch the sluggish pulse of blood draining out of her.
I close the distance between us in two strides, tearing off what remains of my shirt, wadding it and pressing down on the wound. She bucks her head, her knotted blonde hair whipping at her back as she cries out, a keening, animal wail.
“It’s all right, Hel,” I say. My hands shake, and a voice in my head screams that it’s not all right, that my best friend is going to die. I keep talking. “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to fix you right up.” I grab the canteen. I need to clean the wound and bind it. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
“Surprised me. Couldn’t move. I—I saw him on the mountain. He was—he and I—” She shudders, and I understand now. In the desert, I saw images of war and death. Helene saw Marcus. “His hands—everywhere.” She squeezes her eyes shut and draws her legs up protectively.
I’ll kill him, I think calmly, making the decision as easily as I’d choose my boots in the morning. If she dies—so will he.
“Can’t let them win. If they win . . . ” Helene’s words spill from her mouth. “Fight, Elias. You have to fight. You have to win.”
I cut open her shirt with my dagger, jolted for a moment by the delicacy of her skin. Dark has settled in, and I can barely see the wound, but I can feel the warmth of the blood as it oozes into my hand.
Helene grabs my arm with her good hand as I pour water over the injury. I bind her up using what’s left of my shirt and some strips from her fatigues. After a few moments, her hand goes slack—she’s fallen unconscious.
My body aches in exhaustion, but I begin pulling vines down from the trees to make a sling. Hel can’t walk, so I’ll have to carry her to Blackcliff. As I work, my mind whirls. The Farrars ambushed us on the Commandant’s orders. No wonder she couldn’t contain her smugness before the Trials began. She was planning this attack. But how did she learn where we’d be?
It wouldn’t take a genius, I suppose. If she knew the Augurs would leave me in the Great Wastes and Helene in spire vulture territory, she would also know the only way for us to get back to Serra was through the Gap. But if she told Marcus and Zak, then that means they cheated and sabotaged us, which the Augurs pointedly forbade.
The Augurs must know what happened. Why haven’t they done anything about it?
When the sling is finished, I carefully load Helene into it. Her skin is blanched bone-white, and she shakes with cold. She feels light. Too light.
Again, the Augurs have preyed on the unexpected fear, the one I didn’t realize I had. Helene is dying. I didn’t know how terrifying it would be because she’s never come so close to it before.
My doubts crowd in—I won’t make it back to Blackcliff by sunset; the physician won’t be able to save her; she’ll die before I get to the school. Stop, Elias. Move.
After years of the Commandant’s forced marches through the desert, carrying Helene is no burden. Though it’s deep night, I move quickly. I still have to hike out of the mountains, get a boat from the river guardhouse, and row to Serra. I’ve already lost hours making the sling, and Marcus and Zak will be well ahead of me. Even if I don’t stop from here until Serra, I’ll be hard-pressed to reach the belltower before sunset.
The sky pales, casting the jagged peaks of the mountains around me in shadow. The day is well under way when I emerge from the Gap. The Rei River stretches out below, slow and curving like a well-sated python. Barges and boats dot the water, and just beyond the eastern banks sits the city of Serra, its dun-colored walls imposing even from a distance of miles.
Smoke taints the air. A column of black rises into the sky, and though I can’t see the guardhouse from this spot on the trail, I know with sinking certainty that the Farrars got there before me. That they burned it along with the boathouse attached to it.
I sprint down the mountain, but by the time I reach the guardhouse, it’s nothing but a stinking, sooty hulk. The attached boathouse is a pile of smoldering logs, and the legionnaires manning it have cleared out—probably under orders from the Farrars.
I unlash Helene from my back. The jarring trip down the mountain has reopened her wound. My back is coated in her blood.
“Helene?” I sink to my knees and pat her face softly. “Helene!” Not even a flick of the eyelids. She is lost inside herself, and the skin around her wound is red and fevered. She’s getting an infection.
I stare flintily at the guard shack, willing a boat to appear. Any boat. A raft. A dinghy. A bleeding, hollowed-out log, I don’t care. Anything. But of course, there’s nothing. Sunset is, at most, an hour away. If I don’t get us across this river, we’re dead.
Strangely, it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head, cold and pitiless. Nothing is impossible. It’s something she’s said to her students a hundred times—when we were exhausted from back-to-back training battles or we hadn’t slept in days. She always demanded more. More than we thought we had to give. Either find a way to complete the tasks I have set before you, she would tell us, or die in the attempt. Your choice.
Exhaustion is temporary. Pain is temporary. But Helene dying because I didn’t find a way to get her back on time—that’s permanent.
I spot a smoking wooden beam half in the water, half out. It will do. I kick, shove, and roll the blasted thing to the river, where it bobs beneath the water threateningly before floating to the surface. Carefully, I lay Helene on the beam and lash her into place. Then I sling an arm around it and make for the closest boat as if all the jinn of air and sea are on my tail.
The river’s waters run freely at this time, mostly empty of the barges and canoes that choke it in the morning. I angle toward a Mercator craft bobbing mid-river, its oars at rest. The sailors don’t notice me approaching, and when I’m right alongside the rope ladder leading to the boat’s deck, I cut Hel from the beam. She sinks into the water almost immediately. I grab the slick rope with one hand and Helene with the other, eventually working her body over my shoulder and clambering up the ladder to the deck.
A silver-haired Martial with a soldier’s build—the captain, I assume—is overseeing a group of Plebeians and Scholar slaves stacking boxes of cargo.
“I am Aspirant Elias Veturius of Blackcliff.” I level my voice until it is as flat as the deck I stand on. “And I am commandeering this vessel.”
The man blinks, taking in the sight before him: two Masks, one so covered in blood it appears that she’s been tortured, and the other practically naked with a week’s worth of beard, wild hair, and a mad look in his eyes.
But the merchant has clearly done his time in the Martial army because after only a moment, he nods.
“I am at your disposal, Lord Veturius.”
“Get this boat docked in Serra. Now.”
The captain shouts orders at his men, a whip much in evidence. In under a minute, the boat is chugging toward Serra’s docks. I look balefully at the sinking sun, willing it to at least slow down. I have no more than a half hour left, and I still have to get through the dock traffic and up to Blackcliff.
I’m cutting it close. Too close.
Helene moans, and I place her on the deck gently. She is sweating despite the cool river air, and her skin is deathly pale. She opens her eyes for a moment.
“Do I look that bad?” she whispers, seeing the expression on my face.
“Actually, it’s an improvement. The filthy woodswoman thing suits you.”
She smiles, a rare, sweet smile, but it fades quickly.
“Elias—you can’t let me die. If I die, then you—”
“Don’t talk, Hel. Rest.”
“Can’t die. Augur said—he said if I lived, then—”
“Shhh . . . ”
Her eyes flutter closed, and impatiently, I eye Serra’s docks, still a half mile away and crowded with sailors, soldiers, horses, and wagons. I want to urge the boat faster, but the slaves are already rowing furiously, the captain’s whip at their backs.
Before the boat docks, the captain lowers the gangplank, hails a legionnaire patrolling nearby, and relieves him of his horse. For once, I’m thankful for the severity of Martial discipline.
“Luck to you, Lord Veturius,” the captain says. I thank him and load Hel onto the waiting horse. She sags forward, but I don’t have time to adjust her. I vault onto the beast and put heel to flank, my eyes on the sun hovering just above the horizon.
The city passes in a blur of gaping Plebeians, muttering auxes, and a riot of merchants and their stalls. I race past all of them, down Serra’s main thoroughfare, through the dwindling crowds of Execution Square, and up the cobbled streets of the Illustrian Quarter. The horse surges on recklessly, and I’m too crazed to even feel guilty when I knock over a peddler and his cart. Helene’s head bobs back and forth like a slack marionette’s.
“Hang on, Helene,” I whisper. “Almost there.”
We enter an Illustrian market, scattering slaves in our wake before turning a corner. Blackcliff looms before us as suddenly as if it has sprung fully formed from the earth. The faces of the gate guards blur as we gallop past them.
The sun sinks lower. Not yet, I tell it. Not yet.
“Come on.” I dig my heels in deeper. “Faster!”
Then we are across the training field, up the hill, and inside the central courtyard. The belltower rises in front of me, a few precious yards away. I jerk the horse to a halt and leap off it.
The Commandant stands at the base of the tower, her face stiff—from anger or nerves, I can’t tell. Beside her, Cain waits with two other Augurs, both women. They look at me with mute interest, as if I am a mildly entertaining side act at a circus.
A scream tears through the air. The courtyard is lined with hundreds of people: students, Centurions, and families—including Helene’s. Her mother falls to her knees, hysterical at the sight of her blood-covered daughter. Hel’s sisters, Hannah and Livia, drop beside her as Pater Aquillus remains stone-faced.
Next to him, Grandfather stands in full battle dress. He looks like a bull about to charge, and his gray eyes blaze with pride.
I pull Helene into my arms and stride to the belltower. It’s never seemed so long, this courtyard, not even when I’ve run a hundred sprints across it in the dead of summer.
My body drags. All I want is to collapse onto the ground and sleep for a week. But I take those last few steps, laying Helene down against the tower and reaching out a hand to touch the stone. A moment after my skin meets the rock, the sunset drums boom out.
The crowd erupts. I’m not sure who starts the cheer. Faris? Dex? Maybe even Grandfather. The whole square echoes with it. They must hear it down in the city.
“Veturius! Veturius! Veturius!”
“Get the physician,” I roar at a nearby Cadet who cheers with all the others. His hands freeze mid-clap, and he gapes at me. “Now! Move!”
“Helene,” I whisper. “Hold on.”
She’s as waxen as a doll. I put a hand against her cold cheek, rubbing a circle over the skin with my thumb. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t draw breath. And when I put my fingers to her throat, to where her pulse should be, I feel nothing.