Twenty-Two
Ash
IN THE CENTER of Igna, there was a well.
Char would sometimes stop at it, take a coin out of her pocket, and pluck handfuls of the short, spiky grass that grew at the well’s base.
“Make a wish,” she would say as she wove the grass around the coin. A flick of her fingers, and she set the grass aflame. “If the fire stays lit all the way to the water, your wish will come true.”
Ash had laid out her wishes carefully when she was very small. Creamy custard-filled pastries from the market; a hoop and stick game she had seen other children playing.
But there was one day, when she had been about eleven or twelve years old, that Char had wrapped the coin and lit it on fire and held it out over the well.
A week earlier, Ash had watched her mother spend three days fighting Ignitus’s new recruits in training exercises. It was routine,but this particular round of exercises had come when Char had been so ill she’d spent every break heaving in the corner. What should have been quick training matches turned to bloody scrambles as the new recruits saw the opening to dethrone Ignitus’s champion.
But Char had bested them all, and afterward, Tor had had to carry her out of the training arena. Delirious with fever and pain, Char had mumbled into Tor’s shoulder, “But she’s safe. Ash is safe? Don’t let him fight her—”
Ash had been next to Tor. She’d heard her mother’s question, seen the wince in Tor’s eyes.
At the well, Ash had stared at the flaming coin in her mother’s palm. “I wish,” Ash started, “I wish I wasn’t Fire Divine.”
Char had cocked her head.
“I wish I was ordinary,” Ash whispered. “So you wouldn’t have to worry about me, Mama.”
She hadn’t truly wanted to be ordinary. She loved igneia, the sizzle it left in her heart, the heat that felt like the very essence of life. She loved that it connected her to Char in a visceral, scorching way. They were both made of embers and passion, and no matter what Ignitus did to them, they would always have that connection.
But Ash knew that her Fire Divine abilities were one of the biggest sources of strain in her mother’s life—the fear that if Char failed, Ignitus would turn his attention to Ash.
The flame snuffed out in her mother’s hand and the coin sank, unlit, into the vast black abyss of the well.
Char had snatched Ash into a hug. “Never wish that. Don’t let my concerns worry you. You are perfect as you are.Perfect.”
Ash had become that well now.
She was a long, endless chasm, cold and desolate and echoing with the sluggishthump-thumpof her heartbeats like the distantdrip-dripof water on stone.
She was that coin too. A soot-streaked wish plummeting down, down, down.
The air stank of mildew, straw, animal dung. Hands released her and she dropped face first onto a straw-covered stone floor. Horses whinnied; a hoof stomped.
She was in the arena’s stables.
“Ready a prisoner transport!” ordered one of the Deiman guards. Others were around her, more than the two centurions who had hauled her out of the preparation chamber.
“We sent the last metal carriage off with that Metaxa boy. All we’ve got are these wooden ones—”
“Wood is fine.”
“But she’sKulan, sir.”
“The Father God said she’s been drugged. She won’t give us any trouble.”
Ash tried to push herself upright, but her arms wouldn’t support her, the muscles rigid with cold.
She was so cold.
Mama.Her throat scratched with whimpers.Mama—
