A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)

by Sabaa Tahir

When the fear takes over, use the only thing more powerful, more indestructible, to fight it: your spirit. Your heart.

“In the shed, with Keenan,” he finally says. “Did you kiss him? Or did he kiss you?” I spit out my apricot, coughing, and Elias rises from the creek to pat me on the back. I had wondered if I should tell him about the kiss. In the end, I decided that with my life dependent on him, it was best to hold nothing back. “I tell you my life story and that’s your first question?

“I’m the Reaper, girl. And I go to collect what is mine.”

At this, I dare to look into the man’s face. A mistake, for in place of eyes he has stars blazing out like the fires of the hells. As he meets my gaze, a bolt of loneliness rolls through me. And yet to call it loneliness is not enough. I feel bereft. Destroyed. As if everyone and everything I care about has been ripped from my arms and cast into the ether. The creature’s gaze is a writhing abyss, and as my sight goes red and I stagger back into the wall, I realize I am not staring into his eyes. I am staring into my future. I see it for a moment. Pain. Suffering. Horror. All that I love, all that matters to me, awash in blood.

I take Laia’s hands in mine. Cool. Strong. I would keep them here, kiss every callus on her palms, nibble the inside of her wrist so she gasped. I would pull her closer and see if she too wished to give in to the fire that burns between us.

“This is what it means to have faith, to believe in something greater than yourself.”

Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters.”

Pop used to say that standing by someone during their darkest times creates a bond. A sense of obligation that is less a weight and more a gift.

Few people want witnesses to their pain, and grief is the worst pain of all.

“As long as there is life”—I can hear Nan’s warm voice as I say it—“there is hope.”

“You are my temple,” I murmur as I kneel beside her. “You are my priest. You are my prayer. You are my release.” Grandfather would scowl at me for sullying his beloved mantra so. But I prefer it this way.

❤️❤️❤️

“Elias sees people as they should be,” I say. “Not as they are. He laughs at himself. He gives of himself—in everything he does.

The Empire must come first—above your desires, your friendships, your wants. My father spoke so adamantly when I last saw him. I know what he’d say now. We are Aquilla, daughter. Loyal to the end.

Damn the Empire. I will burn it down for this. I will destroy it.

How is a Mask made?” My anger sparks, and I yank it back like I would the reins of an impatient horse. “I don’t understand what you want,” I say. “We’re made through pain. Suffering. Through torment, blood, and tears.” Cain sighs. “It’s a trick question, Aquilla. A Mask is not made. She is remade. First, she is destroyed. Stripped down to the trembling child that lives at her core. It doesn’t matter how strong she thinks she is. Blackcliff diminishes, humiliates, and humbles her. “But if she survives, she is reborn. She rises from the shadow world of failure and despair so that she might become as fearful as that which destroyed her. So that she might know darkness and use it as her scim and shield in her mission to serve the Empire.” Cain lifts a hand to my face like a father caressing a newborn, his papery fingers cold against my skin. “You are a Mask, yes,” he whispers. “But you are not finished. You are my masterpiece, Helene Aquilla, but I have just begun. If you survive, you shall be a force to be reckoned with in this world. But first you will be unmade. First, you will be broken.”

“Most people,” Cain says, “are nothing but glimmers in the great darkness of time. But you, Helene Aquilla, are no swift-burning spark. You are a torch against the night—if you dare to let yourself burn.”

Killing Elias will destroy me. I sense that truth in my bones. Killing Elias is my unmaking.

Your emotions make you human, Elias said to me weeks ago in the Serran Range. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.

I miss that girl. That Laia. That version of myself that burned brightest when Elias Veturius was near. The Laia who made mistakes. The Laia whose mistakes led to needless death.

Shadows gather, Elias, and their gathering cannot be stopped. Cain spoke those words—and worse—to me just months ago, in Blackcliff. “What darkness?” “The Nightbringer,”

“You always think everyone is your responsibility, Elias. But we’re not. We’re our own people, and we deserve to make our own decisions.”

“Sometimes, Elias,” she says, “loneliness is a choice.”

She had a strange song, this girl, with a fey beauty that raised the hair on the back of my neck. So different from Elias’s song. But not discordant. Livia and Hannah took singing lessons—what would they call it? Countermelody. Laia and Elias are each other’s countermelodies.

“There was no Keenan, Laia of Serra,” the Nightbringer says. “There was only ever me.”

An explosion of pure silver—a Star, the Scholars’ weapon—used to imprison the jinn. I expect it to disintegrate—I know the story. But it does not. Instead, it shatters into hundreds of shards flung across the land. Shards that are picked up by Mariners and Scholars, Martials and Tribesmen. Fashioned into necklaces and armlets, spearheads and blades. The Nightbringer’s rage steals my breath. For he cannot simply take back these pieces. Each time he finds one, he must ensure that it is offered freely, in absolute love and trust. For that is the only way he can reassemble the weapon that imprisoned his people, so he might set them free again.

“What in the skies are you?” he hisses. The words trigger a memory: the efrit back in Serra, asking me the same thing. You say what am I, but what are you?

“The Star is bound by unbreakable laws. The knowledge that led to its creation was given in love—in trust.”

Failure doesn’t define you. It’s what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.”

It takes only a split second for life to go horribly wrong. To fix the mess, I need a thousand things to go right. The distance from one bit of luck to the next feels as great as the distance across oceans. But, I decide in this moment, I will bridge that distance, again and again, until I win. I will not fail.

“Because sane plans never work, girl,” she says. “Only the mad ones do.”

“The Waiting Place is sentient, Elias. The oldest magic there is. And”—she grimaces apologetically—“it likes you. Already, it has begun to whisper its secrets to you.”

“It is glorious to witness your unmaking, Blood Shrike,” she whispers. “To watch as you break.” My whole body shakes as she throws Cain’s words back at my face. First you will be unmade. First, you will be broken. Bleeding skies, I thought he meant when I killed Elias. But he knew. All that time while I agonized over my friend, he and his brethren knew what it was that would truly break me.

Laia of Serra. The ember waiting to burn down the Empire.”

“From what Shaeva told me, the armlet wouldn’t pass to him unless he loved you truly. The magic isn’t one-sided.”