Rise Up from the Embers

by Sara Raasch

But now Ash crossed the space to the throne and stood before it, looking down at the seat that had only ever held the god of fire.

  The receiving room hung silent. Or maybe that was her own pulse deafening her, the rush and surge of blood through her veins making her want to run.

  She turned and sat, hands on the armrests, back rigid.

  Goddess.

  Part of her reveled in the title, but part of her wanted to be exactly what she had been when Madoc had prayed to her.

  Just Ash. Just a girl.

  Sitting on Ignitus’s throne, she couldn’t help but wonder if the other gods ever wished for that. Mortals certainly dreamed of being godly; did gods dream of being ordinary?

  Could she ever go back to being ordinary again?

  The door at the far end opened. Tor rushed in, walking fast without quite running, Taro close behind him. The two of them pulled up short when they saw Ash on Ignitus’s throne.

  They said nothing.

  A trickle of water cascaded down one of the obsidian pillars on the edge of the room, and Hydra materialized, leaning one shoulder against the glassy rock. She eyed Ash, her jaw tight.

  Ash’s fingers dug into the armrests. Tor, Hydra, Taro—they were all forced to look up at her on this raised dais. Forced to remember who she was now, as though they could forget. A god in a mortal body. A warrior who would save the world. An angry, violent girl.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice cracking.

  The servants and warriors must have felt the tension, because they dissolved into the shadows, giving her privacy.

  Hydra pushed herself off the pillar, scowl shifting into surprise. “Are you?”

  “I have become capable of more than I ever thought possible, but I was wrong to think that meant I was invincible.” Ash could only look at Hydra as she spoke. Her chest ached with Tor’s focus on her, and his final words to her still cored her out.

  Your mother would be ashamed of the way you’re behaving.

  She swallowed and leaned forward. “I’m sorry I haven’t been listening. That I’ve acted rashly. I don’t—” She dropped her focus to her hands. The backs of her eyes burned. “I don’t know how to do the things I have to do, but I’m trying. And I need your help.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Ash—” Tor started, but Ash snapped her eyes up to him.

  “Madoc prayed to me,” she said. “I heard him through the stone in Deimos. He said he wants me to protect Elias and Ilena—from him.”

  “What?” Taro’s voice pitched. “What does that even mean?”

  “Anathrasa is overtaking his mind,” Hydra whispered.

  Ash nodded. She knew her eyes were glassy with tears, but she was angry, too, and she let that anger build. “He wouldn’t have asked me to intervene unless it was urgent. I think that prayer was his last attempt to contact me before she—” She couldn’t finish. Her words fell and her eyes dropped too, landing on the floor. “We need to move. Now. Anathrasa is confident enough in her army that she sent them to attack Kula. She has Madoc under her control. We need to go to Crixion now.”

  There was a long moment of silence. When Ash looked up, Tor was watching her, frowning.

  “Why didn’t you go to Crixion yourself?” he asked.

  Ash bristled. “I’m trying to think of the greater effects my actions have on this war.”

  Tor took a step toward her. “I meant it as a compliment. Thank you for coming to us first.”

  Ash ground her jaw.

  “My people have barely started to disembark,” Hydra said. “We can easily load back up and make for Crixion.”

  “Your Water Divine won’t be too exhausted to accelerate the trip?” Ash asked.

  Hydra gave a grim smile. “Who said they’ll be giving us the fast trip? You and I will be traveling with them, and goddesses don’t tire. Do we?”

  Ash couldn’t help but return Hydra’s grin. “No. We don’t.”

  “We’ll get to Crixion and confront Anathrasa’s army,” Tor said, down to business. “If Madoc is under her control, how will we defeat her? We can’t wage war indefinitely.”

  Ash pushed herself up off the throne. “Maybe we don’t aim to defeat her with this attack.”

  Tor’s brow furrowed.

  “Maybe we just salvage what we can,” Ash continued. “We save Madoc’s family, and Florus too. We get as many innocents out as possible and we regroup. We take away her leverage.”

  Planning to do this without Madoc felt wrong. As though he was already lost.

  But no—Ash would figure out some way to save him, too, once she got his family to safety.

  “We’ll need time to search for everyone.” Hydra folded her arms. “Anathrasa could have Florus imprisoned anywhere—he might not even be in Crixion anymore. And I’m not leaving without my brother.”

  “We need a distraction,” Taro offered.

  “Something to keep Anathrasa diverted while we get Florus and the Metaxas out of Crixion,” Ash said.

  “And other innocents,” Tor clarified.

  “And other innocents.” Ash worried her lip.

  What would most distract Anathrasa? What would she have to respond to, for her own honor, for her own protection?

  Ash paused. How had the gods been causing distractions for centuries? By using their arenas.

  “I know I can’t defeat Anathrasa yet,” Ash breathed. “But she doesn’t know that.”

  She looked up, catching Hydra’s eyes as a new thought formed.

  “What if I appear in Crixion’s grand arena and challenge Anathrasa?” Ash formed the words slowly. “We let Anathrasa think that Madoc already got me aereia and bioseia, and that I have everything I need to defeat her. We keep her occupied there while our armies free anyone still fighting her, and then we fall back to Kula. For now—”

  “This is victory enough.” Tor’s face was a mask.

  A wave of nausea surged through Ash’s body. She nodded once. Again.

  “Let’s go to war,” she said, the words tasting of dust and decay.

  Hydra vanished, presumably to pass on orders to the Apuitian and Itzan ships. Taro whispered something to Tor before walking toward the door.

  But Tor remained, hands at his back, staring up at Ash.

  “You’re not pleased with this plan?” she asked.

  He flinched. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you’re still here. So you must disapprove of something I’ve done.”

  A sigh, and Tor’s shoulders deflated. He looked as if he might disagree before he shook his head. “Do you remember when we first met?”

  The question threw her. She eased back to sit on the edge of the throne and shook her head.

  Tor shrugged. “Not surprising. You were about four, maybe five. Char and I had been together for a few weeks. Her mother had just died in an arena.”

  Ash shivered, not from cold, but from the mention of the grandmother she couldn’t remember. Char hadn’t spoken much of her mother after she’d taken her place as Ignitus’s champion, carrying the name of Nikau into arenas, fighting for him.

  Char had hated it and did everything she could to keep Ash from the same fate.

  A lot of good that did.

  Ash shivered again.

  “She brought you to my house the day after Ignitus declared she would be his next champion,” Tor said. His voice wavered, warmer than Ash had heard from him in a long time. “You tried to pull a ball of flames from the fireplace and nearly set fire to my kitchen table.”

  Ash felt her lips twitch. “That sounds like me.”

  Tor smiled, his eyes gentle. “I showed you some toys I’d gotten for you, and while you were playing, Char asked me to take care of you if anything happened to her.”

  “What? She never told me that.”

  Tor took a step forward. “I have sworn many oaths in my life. Most to Ignitus, so they meant little. But what I promised your mother that day is the beacon I have lived by. To be someone
worthy of being trusted with such a precious gift. It’s an honor I would rather die than break, taking care of Char’s little girl. I shouldn’t have brought her into our argument when you heard Igna was in trouble. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not that little girl anymore.” Ash’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “No.” His smile fell. “No, you aren’t. I’ve been trying to come to terms with that for years.”

  Ash couldn’t hold Tor’s gaze. She looked at the obsidian floor, but it blurred in the tears rimming her eyes.

  “I’ve been trying to do right by your mother,” Tor continued. He was closer to her. She still didn’t look up. “Trying to do right by you, not just as Char’s daughter, but as”—his voice caught—“as my daughter.”

  Ash squeezed her eyes shut, but tears still fell. She stood and closed the space between them, throwing her arms around Tor’s shoulders, burying her face into his neck. He caught her with a startled huff and wrapped his thick arms around her, holding her in Ignitus’s empty receiving room.

  Igneia burned in a chandelier high above them, and Ash wondered if, somewhere, Char could see them.

  If she knew that Ash still had Tor to lean on.

  If she had known, all those years ago, what an unshakable foundation she was leaving for Ash when she brought Tor into their lives.

  Twenty-One

  MADOC

  “VERY GOOD.” THE Mother Goddess examined the woman before them, staring into her vacant brown eyes. The woman was empty. Soulless. Brought to this state by Anathrasa’s command and by his own power. But even though anathreia swelled inside him, he was only vaguely aware of it. A fly buzzing in the corner of a room he occupied.

  “You’re getting the hang of it. She barely struggled,” Anathrasa noted, pride in her voice.

  He couldn’t remember the woman struggling at all. He couldn’t remember anything before this moment. If there’d been others. If he’d hurt them. If they’d suffered.

  He felt nothing.

  He saw only what his goddess wanted him to see. The four dusty stone walls of this room. The centurions with their dull eyes. A vaguely familiar woman in white standing at the back of the room holding a tray.

  He did not know how long he’d been here, or where he was.

  It didn’t matter.

  With a smile, Anathrasa sent the girl into the hall, and immediately another Deiman was brought in. A man with a gray beard and tears in his eyes.

  “Please,” he was saying. “Please. Not this.”

  The Mother Goddess sighed. “It’s difficult to see their pain, isn’t it? How wrong we were to give them such a wide expanse of emotions. Their soft minds clearly couldn’t handle it.”

  “Please!” the man begged.

  “You’ll make an excellent soldier,” Anathrasa said slowly, loudly, as if the man would otherwise fail to comprehend. “Find solace in the fact that you will soon do your part to take back my world from the selfish gods who would put you in this kind of anguish.” As he trembled, she slapped his cheek lightly. “Your fear will be over soon. You’ll be in my care, as you were always meant to be.”

  “I’ll do anything,” he begged.

  “Yes. You will.” Anathrasa waved a hand. “Now, if you don’t mind, hold still. My son must tithe to stay strong, as he did with Florus. Hydra will be here soon, and there is much work left to do. Isn’t that right, Madoc?” She grinned at him.

  Madoc.

  The name was familiar. He knew it, the way he knew water would ease a parched throat, and a gray sky meant rain. But he didn’t know how he knew it, or why he was called it, or what kind of man this Madoc was.

  His hands lifted. Again, his anathreia swelled. Fed. But he felt no relief as the man went still in the grip of the soldiers.

  The man walked from the room of his own accord. His hands loose at his sides. His stare dull.

  “I need some air,” Anathrasa said, stretching her arms out to the sides. “Shall we see how the training is progressing, my love?”

  He followed her out of the room, down a dark hall lined with cells filled with Deiman men and women. They called out in anger. In fear. Some cried.

  He felt nothing.

  Sunlight cut a sharp line across their path, and he followed the Mother Goddess through the stone archway onto the yellow sand. An arena stretched before him, an oval as deep as the palace, surrounded by empty stands.

  Before them, lines of Deimans stared straight ahead, set in place like chess pieces by centurions in silver and black.

  “One!” a centurion commander called from the front of the arena.

  As one, hundreds of men and women lunged forward, extending their right hand in a thrusting punch.

  “Two!” Their left hands followed.

  “Three!” A hard kick.

  An old woman in the front fell but continued to kick from the ground in silent compliance. A centurion righted her, but her hips buckled, and when she fell again, the soldiers dragged her off to the side. She continued to kick while they moved her.

  “Four!” The lines returned to a ready formation in a cloud of dust.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Anathrasa asked. “Did you ever think you’d be capable of such great things?” She laughed as he stared forward.

  “I did. To think that Ilena would have had you moving stones in the quarry, like some kind of Undivine animal.”

  At the name Ilena, he twitched, a reaction he didn’t understand.

  Anathrasa took his hand in hers and pet it gently.

  “You are so much more than anything she could have seen.”

  A light flickered inside him, a tiny spark in the gloom. A question, outside the silence of his mind.

  “What am I?” he asked.

  Anathrasa looked up at him, her eyes gleaming, her mouth tilted in a smile.

  “You are my servant,” she said. “And that is all you need to be.”

  Twenty-Two

  ASH

  THEY LEFT IGNA before sunset.

  Ash took one of the lead ships while Hydra captained the other, and together, they launched their fleet across the Hontori Sea. A journey that would normally take a week sped by in mere days, and their ship thrashed at the edge of Crixion’s waters just as the sun was coming up behind them two days later.

  She wasn’t tired, but Ash panted all the same, sweat dampening her skin and sea spray sticking her hair to her cheeks. She was already wearing Kulan reed armor, the kind made for battle, not ceremony, and as the water stilled, she was grateful that she didn’t have to worry about getting ready. If she paused, she might not do what she needed to do. She might just find Madoc and whisk him away and do something to force Anathrasa out of his head. Instead, she had to be steady, and patient, and careful.

  The water around their ships solidified. Not ice, just Hydra holding them steady while they took stock of Crixion, spread out before them in the rising pink-gold dawn.

  Anathrasa was ready for them.

  All of Crixion’s ships sat in a blockade before their harbor, waiting, laden with centurions and soldiers. Beyond, who knew what the city would be like?

  A cold hand slid into Ash’s. She met the water goddess’s blue eyes.

  Before they’d left Igna, Ash and Hydra had talked about how goddesses could fight differently than Divine mortals.

  This was one large way.

  Ash closed her eyes as Hydra did. Together, on the deck of their ship, as their people adjusted to being here and moments from battle, their two goddess leaders looked in on Crixion.

  Hydra would take every waiting vessel of water—ponds and wells and pools. Ash would jump through fire. Together, they could make a feeble map of the city, who was where and what obstacles they might face.

  Ash exhaled, let her shoulders relax, and widened her awareness. No one in Crixion was praying to her, unsurprisingly; a few Kulans on the ships were saying idle prayers for safety, but Ash pressed on, peeking through every flame in the city, every fireplace, e
very simmering coal.

  There weren’t many. Few houses had flames lit, few storefronts nursed fires.

  Ash pulled back into herself, heart thudding.

  “It’s quiet,” Hydra said beside her.

  Ash nodded. “I didn’t sense Madoc or his family. Or Florus. Did you?”

  Hydra shook her head.

  Worry made Ash go slack. Madoc’s final plea had been to keep his family safe. What if she was too late?

  “That doesn’t mean anything, though,” Hydra tried. “We knew Anathrasa would prepare for us. They’re probably hidden somewhere—”

  “Wait.” Tor came up to them, hands slack on the jars of combustibles around his hips, things he could light with igneia and use in the attack. His eyes were on the line of Deiman ships, and he squinted in confusion. “What is that?”

  Hydra and Ash turned. The lead ship in the Deiman blockade was in the process of raising something into the air. Two tall wooden poles, with a flag between them—

  Ash retched, hand to her mouth.

  Not a flag. A body.

  A body with a gaping hole in its chest, rib cage torn open, gore and blood on display.

  “Who is that?” Hydra asked the question that Ash couldn’t bear. A hundred possibilities surged through her mind as Tor took a spyglass from a nearby sailor and lifted it.

  He frowned. “A boy?”

  Hydra snatched the spyglass.

  The moment it touched her eye, she swayed.

  “No,” she said, and a wave arched out of the water in front of their ship. “No,” she cried, and the wave rose, rushing for the Deimans. “NO,” she screamed, and the wave blocked the ships and the city from view.

  Ash grabbed Hydra’s arms. “Stop! Who is—”

  Hydra whirled on her, blue eyes feral, fury and agony ripe on her face. “Florus. It’s Florus.”

  Ash went still. Her fingers turned to vises on Hydra’s thin arms and she couldn’t move as Hydra dropped the spyglass to the deck. It shattered at their feet, and Hydra screamed.

  The wave slammed into the lead Deiman ship. Distantly, Ash heard centurions shouting, their cries buried in drowning garbles, but she found she couldn’t care.

  “Anathrasa killed the god of plants,” Ash said, because she needed to see how that fact fit into this world now.