Ash and Ember

CHAPTER TWO The Arithmetic of Worth

Nobody's going to wait for me. I know. I've always known. The trick is making sure they never see that I know.

Five-forty in the morning. The training ground is empty except for me and the cold, and I prefer it that way.

I run the third circuit again. My lungs are already burning , I've been out here for an hour , but I run it because the first two times I shaved a half-second in the final turn and I want to know if I can hold it clean. I can. I log it in the small book my grandmother gave me: third circuit, full form, no shortcuts. Then I log my total time for the morning, compare it to yesterday's, note the improvement. Two-point-three seconds over the course of a week. Small. Steady. Mine.

I've been keeping records since I was thirteen. I know exactly where I stand in my generation's rankings , not because anyone's told me, but because I've done the arithmetic myself, tallied my times against the numbers posted on the great hall board. I've placed first in every category that matters for three years running.

My name has never appeared on that board.

My father had the clerk remove it the second time I ranked first. It confuses people, he told me, in the tone he uses when he's decided something is already settled. When they see a red-haired girl at the top, they assume there's been a mistake.

I keep my own board. In my room, under the loose floorboard, in the book with the cracked spine. I know exactly where I stand. That has to be enough.

I'm running the final circuit when I hear the gate.

Leon arrives with his usual entourage , three boys who have never once laughed at something before checking that Leon laughed first. They're loud in the way of people who've never had a reason to be quiet. I move to the edge of the yard and begin my cool-down stretches, which is the polite way of saying I become furniture. I'm good at it. I've been practising since I was ten.

Leon runs the same drills I just finished.

His form is sloppy , left elbow dropping on the turn, weight too far forward in the sprint stance, the kind of errors that get you injured in a real fight. He shaves two seconds off his third circuit time by cutting the corner near the eastern post. The post is there for a reason. Cutting it means he's covering about sixty percent of the required distance. Nobody says anything. His friends call his time and write it down like it means something.

I watch. I keep my face blank. It's a skill, the blank face. You maintain it not by feeling nothing but by giving the feeling nowhere to go , you push it somewhere low and interior and you let it sit there until it goes quiet. I've been doing it long enough that the pushing is automatic now.

Leon catches me looking.

He doesn't say anything. He just smiles , unhurried, certain , the smile of someone who has never once needed to be better than you, only louder. I hold his gaze for exactly one second, then I go back to my stretches. I hear him say something to the boys behind him. I don't catch the words. I don't need to.

I pick up my record book and I go home.

My mother is waiting.

She stands behind me in the small bedroom, working the headscarf into my hair with the focused efficiency of someone completing a task on a list. Not rough. Not kind. Just thorough, the way she is with all domestic things. The mid-season gathering starts in an hour and there are appearances to maintain.

"Don't speak unless spoken to," she says to the mirror. Not to me , to the mirror, or to the headscarf, or to some version of tonight she's already mapped out in her head. "Don't draw attention. If anyone asks about your training scores, you haven't any."

I watch her face in the glass. She's looking at the scarf, adjusting the knot with two fingers, the expression she wears when she's almost satisfied but not quite. She has a different face for Selena. I noticed it when I was seven and I have been noticing it ever since , the way her eyes change when Selena walks into a room, something in her going soft and alert at once, the face of someone holding something precious. She has never once looked at me that way.

I wonder sometimes if she knows my name. Not the one she gave me. The one I'm building. The one that lives in the record book under the floorboard, in every logged time, every drill run before dawn while everyone else was sleeping.

I don't say this.

I say: "Yes, Mother."

She pats the knot once and leaves.

Sophie is already in the kitchen when I arrive, wearing the expression she gets when she's done something technically wrong but morally correct. She's stationed herself near the dessert tray, and when she sees me she produces a honey cake from behind the flour bin with the gravity of someone passing state secrets.

"I stole two," she says. "Strategically."

I take the cake. "How is it stealing if we made them?"

"It's stealing because it makes me feel better." She leans against the counter, watching me eat. Sophie Crane is the daughter of a disgraced lieutenant and the only person in the Blackrock settlement who has never once looked at me like I'm a problem to manage. We found each other the way you find things in the dark , slowly, by process of elimination, by discovering that neither of us had anywhere better to be.

She was the one who gave me bread in the ruins, seven years ago. She's never mentioned it. I've never forgotten it.

"I watched Leon's drill this morning," she says.

"He cut the third circuit."

"By about forty feet. And somehow ran a personal best." She says this with the flat delivery of someone who has catalogued too many injustices to be surprised by them anymore. "You did it in half his time. Full circuit. I checked your marks in the dirt."

"I know."

Sophie looks at me. There's an expression she gets , not pity, I'd have left a long time ago if it were pity , but a kind of fierce, specific outrage she carries like a personal grievance, like every slight against me is something that happened to her too. I don't know what to do with it, most of the time. It's too warm to look at directly.

"One day," she says, "someone is going to look at you and see the whole damn sky."

The laugh comes out real. That still surprises me sometimes , that she can do that, pull something genuine out of me when I'm not braced for it. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Say things like that. It makes it harder."

She's quiet for a moment. When Sophie goes quiet it means she's choosing her words, not losing them. "Harder to what?"

I don't answer right away. I turn back to the dishes , there's a whole rack of them, the pre-gathering prep, greasy pans and serving bowls , and I pick up the cloth and I look through the c***k in the kitchen door instead.

Six years I've been using that c***k. It lines up perfectly with the great hall's main floor when both doors are open, and tonight both doors are open. I can see the firelight, the clusters of people in their good clothes, the smoke curling toward the rafters. My father is laughing at something Alpha Crane said, head thrown back, easy and open in a way he never is at home. Selena is dancing with someone , I don't know his name, he's older, pack-ranked, his hand at her waist like she's something worth holding carefully.

Leon is at the centre of the room, standing under the rankings board. His scores are up there in fresh chalk. Mine are not. He's talking and three people are listening and two more are drifting over to listen, and I watch him and I feel the thing I'm not supposed to feel, the thing I push down low and interior , not envy exactly, or not only envy.

Something more like grief.

"Harder to stop," I say finally.

"Stop what?"

"Caring. That they," I stop. The word won't come out right. I go back to the dishes. "Never mind."

"Mona."

"Sophie,"

"Say it. You never say it, and I think that's the problem. I think keeping it in is,"

The kitchen door swings open.

Not the c***k in the door. The door itself , all the way, flooding the kitchen with hall noise and firelight and the smell of pine smoke. And standing in it, filling the frame in a way that makes the whole room feel suddenly smaller, is someone I don't recognise.

He's looking directly at me.

Not through me. Not past me. At me, with the particular focus of someone who walked through that door already knowing what they were looking for.

"Mona Ashveil," he says. Not a question.

Behind me, Sophie makes a sound that is not quite a word.

I set down the cloth. I turn around fully. I make my face very, very blank.

"Who's asking," I say.