Ash and Ember

CHAPTER FIVE: Records

My combat scores don't exist. My father made sure of that. But I kept my own, and that means I know something nobody else in this pack does: exactly how good I am.

Five-fifteen in the morning. The training ground is mine.

I've been doing this for two years , arriving early enough that the yard is empty, running the advanced circuits that I'm not permitted to attempt during official sessions. Nobody assigns me here. Nobody knows I come. There are no witnesses and no credit and no commendations waiting, and that used to bother me more than it does now. Somewhere in the last few months it has shifted from wound to simply fact, and facts I can work with.

I run the full circuit , five stations, full form, no shortcuts. My footwork on the third turn is cleaner than it was last week. I note this. My left pivot in the third station is still weak, a half-beat behind where it should be, and I add that too. I finish, check my time against the morning's target, and open the small book.

The book is the size of my palm. My grandmother gave it to me when I was thirteen with the observation that a person who keeps no records has no evidence, and a person with no evidence is at the mercy of anyone who wants to tell a different story. She didn't explain what she meant. I understood it anyway.

Two years of times, techniques, notes on what's working and what isn't. The morning I figured out how to correct my guard on the high strike. The week I shaved four seconds off the full circuit by changing my breathing pattern. A complete and meticulous and accurate history of what I can actually do.

I am not unaware of the irony. The thing I am best at is the thing I am least permitted to show.

I close the book and go home.

My mother sends me to the records hall mid-morning with a message for the pack's keeper , something about festival accounting, a number that needs correcting. A legitimate errand. I walk there, deliver the message, and wait in the anteroom while the keeper disappears into the back room to find the relevant ledger.

The board is on the east wall. This season's training cohort rankings, chalked fresh, updated three days ago after the commendation ceremony. I don't mean to look at it. I look at it anyway, the way you press a bruise.

Leon's name is near the top. His combat score beside it , a number I recognise because it's mine. Not approximately mine. Exactly mine, down to the decimal. From the session two seasons ago when I was assigned to the official cohort as a scoring baseline, a benchmark figure for the others to train toward. They used my number. They just didn't use my name.

I stand in the anteroom of the records hall and I look at my score living inside my brother's name and I feel something that isn't grief and isn't rage but is adjacent to both , a kind of cold, patient clarity. The clarity of someone who has finally seen the whole shape of the thing that's been happening to them.

The keeper returns. I deliver the message. I leave.

I walk home the long way, past the woodstore, and I think about the book.

The loose board is in the corner of my room, third plank from the wall, identifiable by the small notch I made in the edge when I was fourteen. I know the exact pressure required to lift it without sound. I sit cross-legged on the floor and I open the book and I add today's times: circuit complete, left pivot still behind, third station improving.

Then I just hold it.

It's a small thing. Cracked spine, half the pages filled, my handwriting getting smaller toward the bottom of each entry to fit everything in. Not impressive to look at. But this is the only place in the entire Blackrock settlement that has my actual name on it, tied to what I can actually do, unedited and uncorrected and impossible to reassign to someone else.

Leon's commendation is on a board in the great hall. My record is under a floorboard in a room nobody visits.

I close the book. I put it back. I press the plank down until it sits flush.

Then I go to Nara's cottage, because I go to Nara's cottage most evenings, and because today I need to sit somewhere that feels like solid ground.

She has the fire going and the bitter tea and the expression she wears when she already knows more than she's going to say. We go through the usual order: training, first. She asks specifically about the left pivot , she remembers, she always remembers , and I tell her about the half-beat delay, what I think is causing it, what I've tried. She asks two good questions. I leave the conversation with something to work on.

Then she sets her cup down and says: "What do you want to do with it?"

I look at her.

"Your training," she says. "Your skills. If you could do anything with them , not what your father would approve, not what the pack expects. What do you actually want?"

It's such a strange question that for a moment I have no answer. Skills are for the pack. Skills are for the family's standing, for Leon's benchmark scores, for being useful enough that they don't have cause to complain about me. I have never once been asked to consider them as something that belongs to me, that I get to direct.

I think about it honestly. Maybe for the first time.

"I want to use it," I say. "Actually use it. Not as a baseline for someone else's score, not in the kitchen during the ceremony while Leon collects the commendation for my numbers. I want," I stop. The next part is harder. "I want to be in a room where it counts. Where if I'm the best, it's because someone looked at me and said so. Out loud. With my name."

Nara nods. Not with surprise. With the quiet acknowledgment of someone who already knew the answer and just needed to hear me say it.

"And if you had to leave here to do that?"

The fire shifts. I watch it.

"What do you mean."

"I mean exactly what I said." She's watching me with that direct look , the reading look, the one she's had since I was small. "When you have to make a choice , and you will have to, sooner than you think , I don't want you to stay here out of loyalty to people who have never extended the same to you. That's not loyalty. That's a habit they've trained into you so that you won't leave."

"You know something." I sit forward. "Something specific. What is it?"

Nara is quiet for a moment. Her hands move to her cup. This is what she does when she's deciding how much to say.

"Your sister has been meeting with Alpha Caine's delegation privately," she says at last. "Three weeks. Your father doesn't know."

The information settles into the room. I think about the festival. Selena dancing with Caine while my father watched with his planning expression. The kitchen door opening and my father saying Alpha Caine asked about you , the something behind his eyes I couldn't read at the time.

"What does she want from him?"

"What she's always wanted." Nara's jaw tightens. "What she believes is yours by right of birth order. What your father took from you and redistributed poorly." A pause. "Selena has always known she came second. She simply decided years ago that coming second was a temporary arrangement."

"There's nothing of mine to take," I say. "They made sure of that."

"There is one thing." Nara meets my eyes. "The thing they couldn't transfer to someone else. The thing your father's been suppressing for seventeen years because he doesn't understand it and what he doesn't understand frightens him."

My breath catches before I can stop it.

"The fire," I say.

"The fire." Her voice goes very quiet. "Selena doesn't know about it , not the full extent, not what it means. She knows something makes you different. She doesn't know what. But Caine's pack has scholars, Mona. Old knowledge. If he's been meeting with her privately for three weeks,"

"He might know." The cold clarity again, spreading outward from the centre of my chest. "He might know what I am."

"He might know what you are," Nara confirms. "And if Selena is offering him something , if she's brokering something with the Ironmoor pack that involves you, your bloodline, your,"

"Nara." I hear something in my voice that I don't usually let out. "What is she planning?"

Nara opens her mouth.

Closes it.

Something crosses her face that I have never seen there before. My grandmother, who is small and sharp-eyed and has never once flinched from anything in my presence.

She looks afraid.

"I'm not certain yet," she says carefully. "I need another week. Another week and I'll know enough to tell you everything." She reaches across the table and her hand closes over mine , just once, brief, the most physical comfort she has ever offered me. "Promise me. Promise me that if something happens before then, you won't act alone. Promise me you'll come here first."

Outside, in the dark beyond her window, something moves through the treeline.

We both look.

It's gone before either of us can say what it was. Just a shape, low and fast, moving toward the settlement with the particular direction of something that knows exactly where it's going.

Nara's hand tightens on mine.