The Young Elites

Page 30

The sound of steel ringing out in the hall catches my attention. I sit up, more alert now. For an instant, I think it might be Inquisitors. They’ve discovered our hideout here and are coming after us. But the more I listen, the more I realize that the sound is coming from one sword, its lonely sound echoing every few seconds from some distant chamber. I rise from the bed and press my ear to the door. It sounds like swordplay. I listen for a while, until it finally dies down.
Footsteps approach in the hall outside. I lean away from the door. Seconds later, a soft knock sounds out. It takes me a moment to answer. “Yes?”
“It’s me.”
Enzo’s voice. I stay quiet, and a moment later I hear the lock click. The door opens a sliver to reveal part of Enzo’s face. He returns my stare for a moment before his gaze falls on Violetta’s fragile form. “How is she?” he asks.
“She just needs rest,” I reply. “I’ve seen her like this enough times. It seems to happen after she uses her powers.”
“Come with me,” he says after a moment. Then he leaves the door ajar and motions for me to follow him.
I hesitate, and for an instant I’m afraid that this will be the moment when Enzo finally gets rid of me once and for all. But he waits patiently, and after a while, I get up and follow him out of the chamber. One look at him sends a warm flush through me. He’s clad in simple clothes tonight, his linen shirt hanging loose over his torso, its undone lacings revealing skin underneath. His hair is untamed and untied, a dark red mane falling slightly past his shoulders. One hand holds a sword. That’s what the ringing sound had been in the hallway. Enzo must be practicing for the duel tomorrow.
I follow him down the hall with soft steps until we reach the door of his chamber.
We enter without a sound. In here, Enzo’s figure is barely illuminated by soft candlelight. My heart hammers in my chest. I stand near the door while he wanders over to the tiny desk at his bedside and uses his energy to strengthen the candle’s glow. His loose shirt reveals the skin of his lower neck. The silence sits heavily between us.
He gestures to the desk’s chair. “Sit, please.” Then he leans against the edge of his bed.
I sit. A long silence passes between us. Now that we’re alone, his eyes are gentle—not the hard, dark vision I’m so accustomed to—the same softness I’d seen when we kissed in the courtyard. He studies me. There’s a cloud of fear hovering around him tonight, subtle but significant. Is he afraid of me? “Tell me. Why did you really run away?” he asks. “There was another reason, other than your sister. Wasn’t there?”
He knows. A sudden fear floods through me. He doesn’t know about Dante—how could he? He’s digging for something else. Slowly, I let myself revisit the night when I covered the floor of my bedchamber with visions of blood, when I scrawled words of fury onto my wall. “Is it true?” I finally reply. “What Dante said to you in the hallway that night? About . . . getting rid of me?”
Enzo doesn’t look surprised. He suspected my reason all along. “You were there in the hall,” he says. I nod wordlessly. After a while, he clears his throat. “Dante’s opinions were his own.” Then, he adds in a softer tone, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Were. I shiver. Suddenly the room seems colder. “What happened to Dante?” I say.
Enzo pauses for a while, considering. Then he looks at me again. He tells me how they all scouted the city that night after seeing Inquisitors flooding the streets. How they split up. How all of them came back except one. How Lucent was the one to discover Dante’s body in an alley.
The story stirs the whispers in my mind, calling them back to the surface so that for a moment I can barely hear Enzo through the hisses of my thoughts. Dante deserved it, the whispers say. I murmur my condolences through a fog, and Enzo takes it all with a composed face.
How long can I keep up this lie?
We fall into a long silence. As the seconds drag by, I sense a new energy coming from Enzo, something all too familiar to me but foreign from him. I watch him for a while before I’m sure of what I’m feeling. He’s afraid.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” I whisper.
Enzo hesitates. It’s so unlike him to have this aura of fear. It sends an ache through my chest, and I rise from the chair to move closer to him. Dante was wrong. I must mean something to him. He must care.
Enzo watches me drawing near. He doesn’t move away. When I come to sit beside him, some of his tension seems to ease, and his expression softens, letting me in. “Teren’s father taught me how to fight.” He says it in a matter-of-fact way. “I am good. But Teren is better.”
I think back to how the two confronted each other before—first at my burning, and then at the Spring Moons. Each time, their clashes lasted for mere seconds. What will happen tomorrow morning, when they face each other in a fight to the death?
“Has he always hated us so much?” I murmur.
Enzo gives me a wry smile. “No. Not always.”
I wait for a moment, and soon Enzo begins talking again. He unveils the story of them as children, sparring together, and as I listen, the world around me fades until I feel as if I were standing in the palace courtyard from years ago, looking on as a young prince and a Lead Inquisitor’s son faced each other on a sunny afternoon. They were very young; Enzo was eight, Teren nine, both of them still unmarked. The blood fever had not yet hit Estenzia. Teren’s eyes were a deeper blue back then, but lit with the same intensity. Beside them, the old Lead Inquisitor looked on and called out instructions as the boys dueled. He was careful not to criticize the crown prince, but his words landed harshly on his own son, hardening him. Enzo shouted at the man sometimes, defending Teren’s skills. Teren would bow to Enzo after every match, complimenting him.
As I listen, I picture the difference between the two boys. Enzo himself must have still fought like a young boy, but Teren . . . his intensity sounded unlike a child’s, even frightening.
“He struck as if to kill,” Enzo says. “I liked training with him, because he was so much better than me. But he was not cruel. He was just a boy.”
Enzo pauses, and the scene fades. “Years later, the fever swept through,” he continues. “We both emerged marked. Teren’s father died. After, I would wander into the courtyard and Teren would no longer be there, eager for afternoon sparring sessions. Instead, he spent his days muttering in the temples, mourning his father, building his self-loathing, taking in the Inquisition’s doctrine that malfettos were cursed demons. I don’t think he hated us, not yet, because neither of us knew yet about our powers. But I saw the shift in him, and so did my sister.” His jaw tightens. “Ever since he became Lead Inquisitor, he’s hunted Elites, as well as those who help Elites.”
Something in the way he says it sparks a memory. It takes all my strength to ask. “Daphne?” I say hesitantly.
Enzo looks up at me. A hint of something familiar dances in his eyes—and I wish I didn’t know what it meant. The pain that comes from him, an emotion of darkness and anger and guilt and grief, glitters in the air as countless threads of energy.
“Her name was Daphne Chouryana,” he says. “Tamouran girl, as you can tell. She was an apprentice at a local apothecary.”
His words pick away at my heart, piece by piece, reminding me that the things he loved about me might not have been me at all. He must have seen her in my face, in the olive of my skin. He must have seen her every time he looked at me.
“She would sneak illegal herbs and powders from the apothecary to help malfettos hide their markings,” he goes on. “Dyes that temporarily changed hair color, creams that temporarily erased dark markings on skin. She was a friend to us. When we first discovered Dante, still wounded from battle, she nursed him back to health.”
“You loved her,” I say gently, sad for his loss and bitter for mine.
Enzo doesn’t acknowledge this directly. He doesn’t need to. “A malfetto prince is still a prince. I couldn’t marry her. She wasn’t from a noble family. It didn’t matter, in the end.”
I don’t want to ask the details of what happened to her. Instead, I bow my head in respect. “I’m sorry.”
Enzo nods back, accepting my condolence. “So it may go for all of us. We must move forward.” He seems weary, and I wonder whether it has to do with thoughts of Daphne or grief over Teren. Perhaps both.
In the silence that follows, he leans toward me until we are separated only by inches. The glow in his eyes beckons me. There is a heaviness about them, a dark depth that I might never understand. He touches my chin. His heat flows through me again, and I realize how much I’ve missed it right as he bends toward me.
“I know who you are,” Enzo whispers, as if he can sense the thought in my head. Do you care for me only because of Daphne?
No. He knows me. He cares for me because of who I am. The thought floods me with exhilarating speed, awakening all of my senses. His kisses are gentle this time, one after another, patient and exploring. His hands brush against mine, running up my arms, drawing me in. Nothing separates us except the thin fabric of my nightgown and his linen shirt, and when he pulls me into his embrace, his heat sparks against my skin. My alignment to passion roars, sending my energy hurtling through me, desperate to weave its dark threads into Enzo’s own, ensnaring him. It makes me dizzy, the same way I felt the night in the alley, the night I am forcing myself not to remember. It is out of control. I can’t stop it.
He pulls away. Then he leans his head against mine and sighs. “Stay,” he whispers. And I know that the aura of fear around him is fear of tomorrow, of what might happen to all of us, that perhaps he cannot save Raffaele’s life, he cannot win against Teren, that in the morning he may step out of this place and never return. He is afraid, and it leaves him vulnerable tonight. I try to forget my own fears by putting my hands on his face, then running them down to clasp his neck.
After a moment, I nod without a word. He settles down beside me as I curl up on one side of the bed, and then he brushes my silver hair away from my forehead. Instinctively, I shrink away when his eyes settle on the broken side of my face, but he doesn’t react. His fingers trail gently across my scars. They leave a path of warmth in their wake. It soothes me, leaving me drowsy. His eyes close eventually, and his breathing turns even. I find myself sinking into the comfort of early sleep too. I concentrate on the sensation until I feel nothing anymore, until I fall into a restless nightmare of demons, sisters, fathers, and words from a young Inquisitor with pale blue eyes.
I heard my sisters wailing through the night. They knew
what I had done, and they hated me for it. —Dantelle, by Boran Valhimere
Adelina Amouteru
Today is supposed to be the first day of the Tournament of Storms. Instead, it’s an endgame with the Inquisition.
The main Estenzian square, usually left open and uncluttered, has been transformed into a sprawling marketplace of makeshift wooden stalls and colorful flags, a sea of shops and people that surrounds the main arena looming at the harbor. But with today’s Tournament now a funeral for the king and a challenge to the Daggers, the atmosphere is ominous and eerily quiet considering how many people are flooding in. Here and there, lines of Inquisitors observe the masses. Teren wants the public to see us dead, right before their eyes.
I walk with Violetta through the crowds. No invisibility right now; it’s too hard for me to hold such a shifting illusion for as long as we’ll need it—and with this many people, we’d draw suspicion the instant others bump shoulders with us. I have to save my energy for our attack. Instead, I’ve woven the illusion of different faces over each of ours. I changed my dark eye and the ruined side of my face into a flawless visage with bright green eyes, each of them framed with blond lashes instead of silver. I adjusted my skin color from dark olive to light cream, my lips to a pale pink blush. My hair looks red-gold, and my bone structure is different. Violetta, too, now has skin as fair as a Beldish girl’s, and her dark hair is instead a coppery blond.
We are still not perfect images. I never had time to train myself in mastering the illusion of faces, and even though I’m improving rapidly, there are little things that seem off and unnatural. It should work, if no one stares too hard—but people who linger too long on our faces will frown, because they will know that something is off about us. So we move on.
By the time we’ve reached the general vicinity of the arena, sweat is running down my back.
The arena is enormous, perhaps the largest structure I’ve ever seen, rows and rows of archways stacked upon one another in a giant ring of stone. The number of Inquisitors grows as we near the arena. Teren has stationed an army of enforcers here. I try to keep my face down as much as I can, to imitate the rest of the crowd, and shuffle past the Inquisitors without looking at them. I half expect them to recognize me, to see through my shimmering illusion, but they seem to buy my appearance whenever they peer down at my face. They are searching for the Daggers’ allies. Threads of fear blanket the entire square, thickening right in the center of the arena.
“Stop,” an Inquisitor says to me. I pause, remembering to look bewildered, and peer up at the Inquisitor. He stares down at my face. Beside me, Violetta stops moving. I suck in my breath and focus all my concentration on solidifying my illusion, emphasizing the subtle movements of my face, the pores of my skin and the details of my eyes.
The Inquisitor frowns. “Name?” he grunts.
I lift my chin and give him my most confident look. “Anne of House Tamerly,” I answer. I nod at Violetta, who curtsies prettily. “My cousin.”