An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1)

by Sabaa Tahir

Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after. The moment Darin called out—that was such a moment. It was a test of courage, of strength. And I failed it.

Sometimes I whisper the words. Mostly I chant them in my head. They keep me moving, a charm to ward off the fear nipping at my mind.

Barrius’s screams blister my brain for hours.

Why can’t I just be like her—like everyone else? Because my mother abandoned me? Because I spent the first six years of my life with Tribesmen who taught me mercy and compassion instead of brutality and hatred? Because my playfellows were Tribeschildren, Mariners, and Scholars instead of other Illustrians?

Above, the heavens glow, the sky pale with starlight. Some long-buried part of me understands that this is beauty, but I am unable to wonder at it, the way I did when I was a boy.

Keenan moves toward me until he’s standing uncomfortably close. He smells of lemon and wind and something smoky, like cedar. He takes me in from head to toe, and the look would be shameless if it wasn’t for the slight puzzlement in his face, like he’s seeing something he doesn’t

quite understand. His eyes are a dark secret, black or brown or blue—I can’t tell. It feels as if they can see right through me to my weak, cowardly soul.

“That’s an unusual armlet.” He reaches out a hand to touch it. The tip of his finger grazes my arm, sending a spark skittering across my skin, and I jerk away. He doesn’t react. “So tarnished, I might not have noticed it. It’s silver, isn’t it?” “I didn’t steal it, all right?” My body aches and my head spins, but I bunch my fists, afraid and angry all at once. “And if you want it, you’ll—you’ll have to kill me to get it.” He meets my eyes coolly, and I hope he doesn’t call my bluff. He and I both know that killing me wouldn’t be particularly difficult.

Impossible, my logical mind insists. Shut it, logical mind. If this man can read minds, then immortality seems like the next reasonable step.

I have stories of my own. She wanted to leave us. She wanted to abandon her children for the Resistance, but Father wouldn’t let her. When they fought, Lis took me and Darin into the forest and sang so we wouldn’t hear them. That’s my first memory—Lis singing me a song while the Lioness raged a few yards away. After my parents left us with Nan and Pop, it took weeks for me to stop feeling jumpy, to get used to living with two people who actually seemed to love each other.

So my choices are to stay and be evil or to run and be evil. Wonderful.

Amid the noise, silence descends in my head. It’s a strange silence, infinitely small, infinitely large, and I’m locked inside it, pacing, circling the question. Do I run? Do I desert?

You’re noticing his eyes, Laia. Which means you’re staring into them. Which means you need to stop.

He goes still, a sudden stillness that draws my eyes up and into his. My breath hitches at what I see laid bare in his gaze: a wrenching knowledge, a bitter understanding of pain that I know well. Here’s someone who has walked paths as dark as mine. Darker, maybe.

“I wish I could do something.” “Try looking a little braver.” “What, like you?” I arrange my face so it’s blank as slate, slump against the wall, and look off into the distance. Keenan actually smiles for a fraction of a second. It takes years off his face.

At the time, I’d wondered how he knew so much. Only now do I understand—Darin always listened more than he spoke, watching, learning.

“You’ll never forget them, not even after years. But one day, you’ll go a whole minute without feeling the pain. Then an hour. A day. That’s all you can ask for, really.” His voice drops. “You’ll heal. I promise.”

The Tribesman’s mouth drops open, and the slaver regards me as if I’m a rat who has begun juggling.

how I miss my brother. His jokes and drawings and how he seems to know everything. Life without him isn’t just empty, it’s scary. He’s been my guide, my protector, my best friend for so long that I don’t know what to do without him.

This thing actually spawned? What kind of demon had she whelped?

I stare at her, realize I’m staring, tell myself to stop staring, and then keep staring.

Which voice do I listen to? The spy or the slave? The fighter or the coward? I thought the answers to such questions would be easy. That was before I learned what real fear was.

Traveling the Great Wastes naked—that would be its own special sort of hell.

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.

Traveling with Helene is like pulling on a favorite shirt.

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.

The part of me that is still a child, the part of me that I didn’t know still existed until this moment, howls in rage.

Through the curtain strung across my doorway, I catch a glimpse of a sky that looks as if it’s still undecided as to whether it’s night or morning.

Because the woman who’d done such evil shares my blood. She is half of me. My own reaction—that ravenous lust for violence—is proof.

Her eyes soften, and the steely, Blackcliff-trained part of me shakes its head. She can’t turn into a girl on me now.

Cautious, yes. Not afraid. I never saw your brother afraid. He felt fear—I’m sure he did. But he never seemed to focus on what could turn out wrong. He only ever thought about how things could turn out right.”

She’ll whip you. My fear pleads with me. She’ll take an eye. A hand. But I’ve been whipped and beaten and strangled, and I’ve survived. I’ve been carved up with a hot knife, and I’ve survived.

The voice is deep and soft, not a sound so much as a feeling. It is storm and wind and leaves twisting in the night. It is roots sucking deep at the earth, and the pale, sightless creatures that live below the ground. But there’s something wrong with this voice, something diseased at its core.

“All of the rebels have lost someone. It’s why they fight. But you and me? We’re the ones who’ve lost everyone. Everything. We’re alike, Laia. So you can trust me when I say that you’re strong, whether you know it or not.

A pleasant peacefulness steals over me. No one looks at me with loathing or fear. I don’t have to watch my back or keep up the granite exterior. I feel free.

And here you are, Elias, staring at her again. You twit.

Her anger at me is from a deep place. A dark place. A place she doesn’t admit she has. The day I looked at her so thoughtlessly, I made her think that maybe I had that place too. That maybe she wasn’t alone in that place.

“I live with my sins every day.” He throws down the tongs and turns to me. “I live with the guilt. But there are two kinds of guilt, girl: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.

Is our friendship ruined? If I don’t love her back, will she hate me? How am I supposed to get her on my side for the Trials if I can’t give her what she wants? So many bleeding, stupid questions. Do girls think like this all the time? No wonder they’re so confusing.

Life is hard enough without having to avoid entire rooms in my own head.

And, after all, if ghuls and jinn walk our world, then why not forces of good too? Why not a girl who can heal with a song?

“Tomorrow I’ll be a slave and you’ll be a Mask, and we can hate each other like we’re supposed to. But for now . . . ”

“Dawn,” he says. “Time to start hating each other again.”

“There are two kinds of guilt,” I say softly. “The kind that’s a burden and the kind that gives you purpose. Let your guilt be your fuel. Let it remind you of who you want to be. Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It’s damaged, but it’s there. Don’t let them take it from you, Elias.”

It seems profane somehow—the world clean, the air warm—when scores of young men lay cold in their coffins, waiting to return to the earth.

“What about our destinies? Our souls?” “They took our souls a long time ago, Elias.”

“You are full, Laia. Full of life and dark and strength and spirit. You are in our dreams. You will burn, for you are an ember in the ashes. That is your destiny. Being a Resistance spy—that is the smallest part of you. That is nothing.”

“There’s nothing to me that is worth anything, Laia,” the Augur says. “I am an error, a mistake. I am failure and malice, greed and hatred. I am guilty. We are, all of us Augurs, guilty.”

You and I, Laia. We’re the same. For the first time since I can remember, I don’t feel alone. Because of you.

Once, I’d have wanted that. I’d have wanted someone to tell me what to do, to fix everything. Once, I’d have wanted to be saved. But what has that gotten me? Betrayal. Failure.