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You can’t kill Hel. You can’t.
But what choice is there? One of us has to kill the other, or the Trial won’t
end.
Let her kill you. Let her win.
As if she senses my weakness, Helene grits her teeth and drives me back, her
pale eyes glacial, daring me to challenge her.
Let her, let her, let her.
Her scim
cuts into my neck, and I counter with a quick thrust just as she’s about to take
my head off.
My battle rage rushes through me, shoving all other thoughts aside. Suddenly,
she isn’t Helene. She is an enemy who wants me dead. An enemy I must survive.
I fling my scim to the sky, watching with mercenary satisfaction as Helene’s
eyes flick up to follow the weapon’s path. Then I strike, coming down on her
like an executioner. My knee drives into her chest, and even through the storm, I
hear the crack of a rib and the surprised whoosh of her breath leaving her.
She is beneath me, her ocean eyes terrified as I pin her scim arm down. Our
bodies are entangled, entwined, but Helene is foreign to me suddenly,
unknowable as the heavens. I tear a dagger from my chest, and my blood roars
as my fingers touch the cold hilt. She knees me and grabs her scim, determined
to finish me before I can finish her. I’m too fast. I lift the dagger high, my rage
peaking, holding like the highest note of a mountain storm.
And then I bring the blade down.
249
I
XXXIX: Laia
n the predawn darkness, the storm churning above Serra strikes with the
wrath of a conquering army. The servants’ corridor swims in a half foot of
rain, and Cook and I sweep out the water with rush brooms while Izzi tirelessly
stacks sandbags. Rain lashes my face like the icy fingers of a ghost.
“Nasty day for a Trial!” Izzi calls to me over the downpour.
I don’t know what the Third Trial will be, and I don’t care, except to hope
that it serves as a distraction for the rest of the school while I look for a secret
entrance into Blackcliff.
No one else seems to share my indifference. In Serra, bets over who will win
border on the obscene. The odds, Izzi tells me, have shifted to favor Marcus
instead of Veturius.
Elias.
I whisper his name to myself. I think of his face without the mask and
the low, thrilling timbre of his voice when he whispered in my ear at the Moon
Festival. I think of how he moved when he fought with Aquilla, that sensual
beauty that took my breath away. I think of his implacable anger when Marcus
nearly killed me.
Stop, Laia. Stop
.
He’s a Mask and I’m a slave, and thinking of him in this
way is so wrong that I wonder for a second if the beating Marcus gave me has
muddled my brain.
“Inside, Slave-Girl.” Cook takes my broom, her hair a wild halo in the storm.
“Commandant’s calling.”
I rush upstairs, soaked through and shivering, to find the Commandant pacing
her room with a violent energy, her blonde tresses unbound.
“My hair,” the woman says when I dart into her chambers. “Quickly, girl, or
I’ll have it out of your hide.”
The second I finish, she leaves the room, snatching her weapons from the
wall, not bothering to give me her usual litany of orders.
“Shot out of here like a wolf on the hunt,” Izzi says when I enter the kitchen.
“Went straight for the amphitheater. That must be where the Trial is. I wonder
—”
“You and the rest of the school, girl,” Cook says. “We’ll find out soon
enough. We’re stuck inside today. Commandant said any slave out on the
grounds will be killed on sight.”
250
Izzi and I exchange a glance. Cook kept us up preparing for the storm until
past midnight last night, and I’d been planning to look for a secret entrance
today.
“It’s not worth the risk, Laia,” Izzi warns me when Cook turns away. “You
still have tomorrow. Rest your mind for a day, and a solution might present
itself.” A rumble of thunder greets her comment. I sigh and nod. I hope she’s
right.
“Get to work, you two.” Cook shoves a rag in Izzi’s hand. “Kitchen-Girl, you
finish the silver, polish the banister, scrub the—”
Izzi rolls her eye and throws down the cloth. “Dust the furniture, hang the
laundry, I know. Let it wait, Cook. The Commandant’s gone for an entire day.
Can’t we appreciate that, even for a minute?” Cook presses her lips together in
disapproval, but Izzi assumes a wheedling tone. “Tell us a story. Something
scary.” She shivers in anticipation, and Cook makes a strange sound that could
be a laugh or a groan.
“Life isn’t scary enough for you, girl?”
Quietly, I slip to the back of the kitchen worktable to press the seemingly
endless stack of the Commandant’s uniforms. It’s been ages since I’ve heard a
good tale, and I long to get lost in one. But if Cook knows that, she’ll probably
keep silent on principle.
The old woman appears to ignore us. Her hands, small and fine, sift through
jars of spices as she prepares lunch.
“You won’t give up, will you?” I think at first that Cook is speaking to Izzi,
only to look up and find her regarding me. “You mean to see this mission to save
your brother through to the end. No matter what the cost.”
“I have to.” I wait for her to launch into another of her rants against the
Resistance. But instead, she nods, unsurprised. “I have a story for you, then,” she
says. “It has no hero or heroine. It has no happy ending. But it’s a story you need
to hear.”
Izzi raises an eyebrow and takes up her polishing cloth. Cook shuts one spice
jar and opens another. Then she begins.
“Long ago,” she says, “when man knew not greed, malice, tribe, nor clan,
jinn walked the earth.”
Cook’s voice is nothing like a Tribal
Kehanni
’s: It is stern where a tale-
spinner’s would be gentle, all edges where a tale-spinner’s would be mellow and
curved. But the old woman’s cadence reminds me of the Tribespeople anyway,
and I’m pulled into the tale.
251
“Immortal the jinn were.” Cook’s eyes are quiet, as if she’s lost in an inner
musing. “Created of sinless, smokeless fire. They rode the winds and read the
stars, and their beauty was the beauty of the wild places.
“Though the jinn could manipulate the minds of lesser creatures, they were
honorable and occupied themselves with the raising of their young and the
protection of their mysteries. Some were fascinated by the untempered race of
man. But the leader of the jinn, the King-of-No-Name, who was oldest and
wisest of them, counseled his people to avoid men. So they did.
“As centuries passed, men grew strong. They befriended the race of wild
elementals, the efrits. In their innocence, the efrits showed men the paths to
greatness, granting them powers of healing and fighting, of swiftness and
fortune-telling. Villages became cities. Cities rose into kingdoms. Kingdoms fell
and were melded into empires.
“From this ever-changing world arose the Empire of the Scholars, strongest
among men, dedicated to their creed:
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