Just as he dragged himself over the edge, Ricca stepped on his hand, making him howl in pain, but he didn’t let go, knowing the one hand wouldn’t be enough to make it.
“What are you doing?” Tabi demanded, but Ricca stomped on Frost’s fingers once more, her features cold as stone.
“Don’t pretend it would be a loss. He’s a criminal. He chose Ashthorn over the gallows. He doesn’t deserve to be here.”
Her words hit Lory straight in the gut, but it didn’t matter what Ricca would think—it didn’t matter that she knew nothing about Frost other than that his name was Aiden Bellmont and he had ice magic—she couldn’t let him die.
So, when his injured hand started to slip, she threw herself to her stomach, grabbing his wrist, and tugged until, with a grunt and a gasp and a gurgling sound, Frost’s face emerged from beneath the roof.
He scrambledaway from the edge, toward the wall the facade was built against, not saying a word in his defense or raising his uninjured hand to fight. He just stood there, a few feet away from the edge, his blue eyes expressionless and his mouth set in a line that told Lory this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to kill him.
“Do you have a death wish, Vednis?” Jarek hissed as Lory stepped in front of Frost without even spending a thought on the consequences.
“Need a girl to protect you, Frost?” Ricca drawled, stalking closer. None of the others moved, either too close to the edge or wedged in between, where interfering would jeopardize their safe position at the back of the roof.
Frost didn’t respond, merely stepped to Lory’s side, a blank expression on his face.
It happened so fast, Lory couldn’t stop it.
Ricca charged, shoving Lory out of the way to get to Frost. Losing her footing, Lory stumbled and staggered into someone standing close to the edge. She tried to hold onto them, both arms flailing, blindly grabbing for their shirt, but gravity was a bitch, and the fabric slipped through her fingers the same moment a scream sounded through the yard.
Lory crouched low to peer over the side of the roof and nearly emptied her stomach at the sight of Ronan’s shattered body.
Tears shot to her eyes, her heart hammering violently against her ribs, and nothing could smother the guilt filling every last piece of her.
“Don’t look down, ashlings. Climb!” Falcrest barked at the six more students on the facade, but his eyes were on her, and if the distance and the tears didn’t make her imagine things, the cold mask had been replaced by a shade of fear she hadn’t believed the captain capable of.
They lost three more ashlings that day.
Eight
Movingon from accidentally pushing someone off the roof was a challenge Lory had no idea how to master, especially when that someone had encouraged her to manage the final steps to said roof. The image of two ashlings carrying Ronan’s body away while she’d still been up there had haunted her sleep for the past nights, as had the side-eye some of the students were giving her wherever she went and the hissed words spoken behind her back.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Thal repeated for probably the hundredth time when he caught her staring into space in Medica, the class where they were supposed to learn methods of healing and anatomical knowledge.While the others had wrapped and re-wrapped bandages on each other’s arms, practicing how to stabilize a wrist or a shoulder when injured, Lory had all but forgotten she even had a roll of gauze in her hands.
Ricca had tried to kill Frost—Frost, a criminal, according to the yellow. A criminal likeher.
How Ricca had found out, Lory couldn’t tell. Perhaps Frost had opened up to someone and was now dearly regretting it. At least, she hadn’t seen him hang out with the rest of the ashlings. With more people killed every day at breakfast for missing the second bell, it had become easier to find a lonely table in the mess hall, and Frost was definitely making use of that opportunity.
“What you should be worrying about isn’t whether Eroth and the Guardians will punish you for sending Ronan over the edge but that everyone saw you take Frost’s side.”
“We don’t know he’s a criminal. It’s Ricca’s word against Frost’s.” Wiping a film of sweat from her forehead, Lory sat back in the uncomfortable chair, leaving her arm on the table, the way half of the other ashlings were doing.
“Not that he speaks much,” Thal pointed out, looking over his handiwork where he’d wrapped Lory’s wrist tightly enough to stop her blood from flowing.
She flexed her fingers, watching the callouses on her palm. Ronan’s hand had been calloused like hers, and he’d never climb again.
“It’s not fair. Whether or not he has a criminal background, how can they just allow for such an attack to go unpunished?” The look on Falcrest’s face had haunted her fortwo nights now, and not merely because his expression had been so unlike the hard captain who would have watched her butchered without batting an eye. The genuine concern in his eyes, the fear—that had been for the ashlings on the practice roof. And yet, he hadn’t spoken a word to her since theincidentas everyone was calling it.
“And how can people actually support Ricca? I mean… Everyone in here has a secret they’d rather not come to light.” Thal’s unusually stern face made Lory pause for a moment because this was it. This was the moment he’d finally ask why she was here. Why she had been forced to become an ashling.
As she waited for the question to drop, Thal pursed his lips, dark curls shifting atop his head with every move as he unwrapped Lory’s wrist once more.
“I mean, Ricca is a first-generation ashling, just like you, Lory. Other than what her parents do for a living, there is little we know about her family.” Lory almost sighed with relief at the direction of Thal’s musing. “Brycon comes from the common military, yes, but what do we know about him? Or Eira?”
“Her family comes from a long tradition of ashmarked. Their magic is mainly connected to matter manipulation,” Tabi chimed in from the table next to theirs, her ears obviously big enough to overhear the entire conversation. “So does Jarek and Maes. Their family magic is nature. They have been in the king’s service forever.”
“Maes?” Lory prompted, the name familiar from the first morning, when they’d been sorted into colors, but she hadn’t heard it since.
