A Torch Against the Night

by Sabaa Tahir

  "I wish I didn't remember," I whisper. "I wish I didn't love her."

  He takes a breath, his eyes still on our hands. The cellar is no longer frigid, warmed by our body heat and the sun hitting the door above.

  "I know what it is to lose those you love. I taught myself not to feel anything at all. For so long that it wasn't until I met you that . . ." He holds tight to my hands but doesn't look at me. I can't bring myself to look at him either. Something fierce kindles between us, something that has perhaps been quietly burning for a long time.

  "Don't lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you'll hurt them or--or they'll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don't let yourself feel anything?"

  His hands trace a path over mine, moving like a slow flame to my waist. Ever so slowly, he tugs me closer. The emptiness inside, the guilt and failure and well of hurt, it fades in the ache of desire that throbs low in my body and propels me forward. As I slide onto his lap, his hands tighten on my waist, sending fire up my spine. He lifts his fingers to my hair, and the pins within drop to the cellar floor. His heart thuds against my chest, and he breathes against my mouth, a hair's breadth between our lips.

  I stare down at him, hypnotized. For a fleeting second, something dark passes across his face, some shadow unknown but not, perhaps, unexpected. Keenan has always had a darkness about him. I feel a flicker of unease in my stomach, swift as a beat of a hummingbird's wings. It is forgotten a moment later as his eyes shut and he closes the distance between us.

  His lips are gentle against mine, his hands less so as they roam across my back. My hands are equally hungry, flitting across the muscles of his arms, his shoulders. When I tighten my legs around his waist, his lips drop to my jaw, his teeth scrape my neck. I gasp when he tugs on my shirt to trace a torturously slow trail of heat down my bare shoulder.

  "Keenan--" I breathe. The cold of the cellar is nothing against the fire between us. I pull his shirt off and drink in the sight of his skin, tawny in the lamplight. I trace a finger along the freckles that dust his shoulders, down the hard, precise muscles of his chest and stomach, before dropping to his hip. He catches my hand, his eyes searching my face.

  "Laia." The word changes utterly when he says it in that voice, no longer a name but a plea, a prayer. "If you want me to stop--"

  If you want to keep your distance . . . if you want to remember your pain . . .

  Keenan. Keenan. Keenan. My mind is filled with him. He has guided me, fought for me, stayed with me. And in doing so, his aloofness has given way to a potent, unspoken love I feel whenever he looks at me. I silence the voice within and take his hand. Every other thought grows distant as calm settles over me, a peace I haven't felt in months. Without looking away from him, I guide his fingers to the buttons of my shirt, pulling open one, then another, leaning forward as I do so.

  "No," I whisper against his ear. "I don't want you to stop."

  XXXVI: Elias

  The unceasing whispers and moans from the cells around me burrow into my head like carnivorous worms. After only a few minutes in the interrogation block, I cannot remove my hands from my ears, and I consider ripping them off altogether.

  Torchlight from the block's hallway leaks in through three slits positioned high on the door. I have just enough light to see that the cold stone floor of my cell is bare of anything I could use to pick the locks on my manacles. I test the chains, hoping for a weak link. But they are Serric steel.

  Ten hells. My seizures will begin anew in a half day at the most. When they do, my ability to think--to move--will be severely hindered.

  A tortured keen sounds from one of the nearby cells, followed by the gibbering of some poor bastard who can barely form words.

  At least I'll put the Commandant's interrogation training to use. Nice to know all that suffering at her hands wasn't for nothing.

  After a time, I hear scuffling at the door, and the lock turns. The Warden? I tense, but it is only the Scholar boy the Warden used as leverage. The child holds a cup of water in one hand and a bowl of hard bread and mold-encrusted jerky in the other. A patchy blanket hangs from his shoulder.

  "Thank you." I swig the water in one gulp. The boy stares at the floor as he sets the food and blanket down within my reach. He is limping--something he wasn't doing before.

  "Wait," I call out. He stops but doesn't look at me. "Did the Warden punish you more after . . ." After he used you to control me.

  The Scholar might as well be a statue. He just stands there, like he's waiting for me to say something that isn't obvious.

  Or maybe, I think, he's waiting for me to stop blathering long enough to respond. Though I want to ask his name, I force myself not to speak. I count the seconds. Fifteen. Thirty. A minute passes.

  "You're not afraid," he finally whispers. "Why aren't you afraid?"

  "Fear gives him power," I say. "Like feeding oil to a lamp. It makes him burn brighter. It makes him strong."

  I wonder if Darin was afraid before he died. I only hope it was quick.

  "He hurts me." The boy's knuckles are white as he digs his hands into his legs. I wince. I know well how the Warden hurts people--and how he hurts Scholars in particular. His experiments in pain are only part of it. Scholar children handle the lowest tasks in the prison: cleaning rooms and prisoners after torture sessions, burying bodies with their bare hands, emptying slop buckets. Most of the children here are dead-eyed drudges wishing for death before they're ten.

  I cannot even imagine what this boy has experienced. What he's seen.

  Another wretched scream echoes from the same cell as before. Both the boy and I jump. Our eyes meet in shared disquiet, and I think he's going to speak. But the cell door opens again, and the Warden's loathsome shadow falls across him. The boy scurries out, squeezing against the door like a mouse trying to escape the notice of a cat, before disappearing amid the flickering torches of the block.

  The Warden doesn't spare him a glance. He's empty-handed. Or at least it looks that way. I'm certain he has some torture device tucked out of sight.

  For now, he closes the door and takes out a small ceramic bottle. The Tellis extract. It's all I can do not to lunge for it.

  "About time." I ignore the bottle. "I thought you might have lost interest in me."

  "Ah, Elias." The Warden clucks his tongue. "You served here. You know my methods. True suffering lies in the expectation of pain as much as in the pain itself."

  "Who said that?" I snort. "You?"

  "Oprian Dominicus." He paces back and forth, just out of my reach. "He was Warden here during the reign of Taius the Fourth. Required reading at Blackcliff in my day."

  The Warden holds up the Tellis extract. "Why don't we start with this?" At my silence, he sighs. "Why were you carrying it, Elias?"

  Use the truths your interrogators want, the Commandant's voice hisses in my ear. But use them sparingly.

  "A wound went bad." I tap the scar on my arm. "The blood cleanser was the only thing I could find to treat it."

  "Your right forefinger twitches ever so slightly when you lie," the Warden informs me. "Go on, try to stop doing it. You won't be able to. The body does not lie, even if the mind does."

  "I'm telling the truth." A version of it, anyway.

  The Warden shrugs and pulls on a lever beside the door. A mechanism in the wall behind me grinds, and the chains attached to my hands and feet pull tighter and tighter, until I am flush against the wall, my body yanked into a taut X.

  "Did you know," the Warden says, "that a single set of pliers can be used to break every bone in the human hand if pressure is applied in the correct manner?"

  It takes four hours, ten mangled fingernails, and skies know how many broken bones for the Warden to get the truth about the Tellis out of me. Though I know I could last longer, I eventually let him have the information. Better that he think me weak.

  "Most strange," he says when I confess that the Commandant poisoned me. "But, ah
"--understanding lights his face--"Keris wanted the little Shrike out of the way so she could whisper what she liked to whomever she liked without interference. But she didn't want to risk leaving you alive. Clever. A bit too risky for my taste, but . . ." He shrugs.

  I twist my face in pain so that he doesn't see my surprise. I've wondered for weeks why the Commandant poisoned me instead of killing me outright. I'd finally decided she simply wanted me to suffer.

  The Warden opens the cell door and pulls on the lever to loosen my chains. I thud gratefully to the floor. Moments later, the Scholar boy enters.

  "Clean the prisoner," the Warden says to the child. "I don't want infection." The old man cocks his head. "This time, Elias, I let you play your games. I found them fascinating. This invincibility syndrome you seem to have: How long will it take to break it? Under what circumstances? Will it require more physical pain, or will I be forced to delve into the weaknesses of your mind? So much to discover. I look forward to it."

  He disappears, and the boy approaches, weighed down by a clay pitcher and a crate of clinking jars. His eyes flicker to my hand and widen. He crouches beside me, his fingers as light as a butterfly as he applies various pastes to clean the wounds.

  "It's true what they say then," he whispers. "Masks don't feel pain."

  "We feel pain," I say. "We're just trained to withstand it."

  "But he--he had you for hours." The boy's brow furrows. He reminds me of a lost starling, alone in the darkness, searching for something familiar, something that makes sense. "I always cry." He dips a cloth in water and wipes away the blood on my hands. "Even when I try not to."

  Damn you, Sisellius. I think of Darin, suffering down here, tormented like this boy, like me. What horror did the Warden unleash upon Laia's brother before he finally died? My hands burn for a scim so I can separate the old man's insectile head from his body.

  "You're young," I say gruffly. "I cried too when I was your age." I offer him my good hand to shake. "My name is Elias, by the way."

  His hand is strong, if small. He lets go of me quickly.

  "The Warden says names have power." The boy's eyes flit to mine. "All of us children are Slave. Because we are all the same. Though my friend Bee--she named herself."

  "I won't call you Slave," I say. "Do--do you want your own name? In the Tribal lands, families sometimes don't name children until years after they are born. Or maybe you already have a name?"

  "I don't have a name."

  I lean against the wall, biting back a grimace as the boy splints my hand. "You're smart," I say. "Fast. What about Tas? In Sadhese, it means swift."

  "Tas." He tries the name out. There is the hint of a smile on his face. "Tas." He nods. "And you--you are not just Elias. You are Elias Veturius. The guards talk about you when they think no one is listening. They say you were a Mask once."

  "I took the mask off."

  Tas wants to ask a question--I can see him working himself up to it. But whatever it is, he chokes it back when voices sound outside the cell and Drusius enters.

  The child rises quickly, gathering his things, but he's not fast enough.

  "Hurry up, filth." Drusius closes the distance in two strides, aiming a vicious kick at Tas's stomach. The boy yelps. Drusius laughs and kicks him again.

  A roaring fills my mind, like water rushing up against a dam. I think of Blackcliff's Centurions, their casual, daily beatings that ate away at us when we were Yearlings. I think of the Skulls who terrorized us, who never saw us as human, only as victims for the sadism bred into them, layer by layer, year by year, like complexity built so slowly into wine.

  And suddenly, I am leaping for Drusius, who has, to his detriment, gotten too close. I snarl liked a crazed animal.

  "He's a child." I use my right hand to punch the Mask in the jaw, and he drops. The rage within breaks free, and I don't even feel the chains as I rain down blows. He's a child who you treat like garbage, and you think he doesn't feel it, but he does. And he'll feel it until he's dead, all because you're too sick to see what it is you do.

  Hands tear at my back. Boots thunder, and two Masks veer into the cell. I hear the whistle of a truncheon and dodge it. But a punch to the gut takes the wind out of me, and I know that any moment I'll be knocked into unconsciousness.

  "Enough." The dispassionate tone of the Warden cuts through the chaos. Immediately, the Masks back away from me. Drusius snarls and rises to his feet. My breath comes heavy, and I glare at the Warden, letting all my hate for him, for the Empire, fill my gaze.

  "The poor little boy getting vengeance for his lost youth. Pathetic, Elias." The Warden shakes his head, disappointed. "Do you not understand how irrational such thoughts are? How useless? I shall have to punish the boy now, of course. Drusius," he says crisply, "bring a parchment and a quill. I will take the child next door. You will record Veturius's responses."

  Drusius wipes the blood from his mouth, jackal eyes shining. "With pleasure, sir."

  The Warden grabs the Scholar child--Tas--cowering in the corner and pitches him out of the cell. The boy lands with a sickening thump.

  "You're a monster," I snarl at the old man.

  "Nature weeds out those who are lesser," the Warden says. "Dominicus again. A great man. Perhaps it is good that he did not live to see how sometimes the weak are left alive to totter about, sniveling and puling. I am no monster, Elias. I am Nature's assistant. A gardener of sorts. And I'm very handy with shears."

  I strain against my chains, though I know it will do no good. "Damn you to the hells!"

  But the Warden is already gone. Drusius takes his place, leering. He records my every expression while beyond the locked door, Tas screams.

  XXXVII: Laia

  The feeling in my bones when I awake in the cellar safe house cannot be regret. But it is not happiness either. I wish I could understand it. I know it will only eat at me until I do, and with so many miles yet to travel, I cannot afford for my focus to erode. Distraction leads to mistakes. And I've made enough of those.

  Though I don't want to think that what happened earlier between Keenan and me is one of those mistakes. It was heady. Intoxicating. And filled with a depth of emotion that I did not expect. Love. I love him.

  Don't I?

  When Keenan's back is turned, I swallow the concotion of herbs that Pop taught me about--one that slows a girl's moon cycle so that she cannot get with child.

  I look to Keenan, quietly changing into warmer clothing in preparation for the next leg of our journey. He senses my regard and comes over to where I'm lacing my boots. With a shy affection that's so very unlike him, he caresses my cheek. An uncertain smile lights his face.

  Are we fools? I want to ask. For finding comfort in the midst of such madness? I can't bring myself to say the words. And there's no one else to ask.

  A desire to speak to my brother sweeps over me, and I bite my lip angrily to keep my tears at bay. I'm certain Darin had sweethearts before he began apprenticing with Spiro. He would know if this unease, this confusion, was normal.

  "What's bothering you?" Keenan pulls me to my feet, holding tight to my hands. "You don't wish that we didn't--"

  "No," I say quickly. "I just . . . with everything going on, was it . . . wrong?"

  "To find an hour or two of bliss in such dark times?" Keenan says. "That's not wrong. What is there to live for if not the moments of joy? What is there to fight for?"

  "I want to believe in that," I say. "But I feel so guilty." After weeks of keeping my emotions bottled and corked, they explode forth. "You and I are here, alive, and Izzi is dead, Darin is in prison, Elias is dying--"

  Keenan wraps an arm around me and tucks my head beneath his chin. His warmth, his wood-smoke-and-lemon scent soothe me immediately.

  "Give me your guilt. I'll hold on to it for you, all right? Because you shouldn't feel this way." He pulls back just a bit and tips my face up. "Try to forget the anxiety for a bit."

  It's not that simple! "Just this morning,"
I say, "you asked me what the point was in being human if I didn't let myself feel."

  "I meant attraction. Desire." His cheeks go a bit red, and he looks away. "Not guilt and fear. Those you should try to forget. I could help you forget"--he cocks his head, and heat flashes through me--"but we should get moving."

  I muster a weak smile, and he releases me. I cast around for Darin's scim, and by the time I buckle it on, I'm frowning again. I don't need a distraction. I need to work out what in the skies is going on in my own head.

  Your emotions make you human, Elias said to me weeks ago in the Serran Range. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.

  "Keenan." We start up the cellar stairs, and Keenan unhooks the lock. "I don't regret what happened. But I can't just will away the guilt."

  "Why not?" he turns back to me. "Listen--"

  We both jump when the cellar door opens with a blistering squeal. Keenan draws, notches, and aims his bow in one motion.

  "Hold," a voice says. The figure raises a lamp. It's a young, curly-haired Scholar. He curses when he sees us.

  "I knew I saw someone down here," he says. "You need to leave. Master says there's a Martial patrol on the way and they're killing every free Scholar they find--"

  We do not hear the rest. Keenan grabs my hand and drags me up the steps and out into the night. "That way." He nods at the tree line to the east of us, beyond the slaves' quarters, and I fall into a jog as I follow him, my pulse frantic.

  We pass through the woods and turn north again, cutting through long, fallow fields. When Keenan spots a stable, he leaves me and disappears. A dog barks, but the sound is suddenly cut off. A few minutes later, Keenan returns, a horse in tow.

  I'm about to ask about the dog, but at the grim look on his face, I keep silent.

  "There's a trail through those woods up ahead," he says. "Doesn't look heavily traveled, and the snow's falling hard enough that our tracks will be covered within an hour or two."

  He pulls me in front of him, and when I keep my body apart, he sighs.

  "I don't know what's wrong with me," I whisper. "I feel like--like I can't find an equilibrium."