The Mortal Trials

CHAPTER 1

Eight blades were on the table, their inlaid ruby hilts gleaming in the dying flickers of candlelight.

Umma, the only other person still left in the kitchen at this hour save for me, bustled past, a flour-dusted apron slung around her waist. “Stop dawdling and set those away.” She pointed sharply at the knives. “There’s still much to do before bed.”

I snapped back into gear, reaching for the silverware and a stack of burlap cloth. I grabbed the first knife by its hilt and made quick work of wrapping it before packing it neatly into the cupboard. “How are the morning preparations coming along?”

Umma settled beside me, grabbing a knife and cloth of her own, her fingers nimbly wrapping. “The dough is rising nicely. Although, I suppose we’ve got to get through tonight first.”

I clicked my tongue in dismissal. “You know nothing that’s going on out there–” I gestured with the tip of a knife in the general direction of the window, foggy and condensed from the heat of the kitchen “–affects us in here.”

Umma gave me a disapproving look. “If it happens in our land, it affects us.”

I rolled my shoulders, setting the last of the knives away before turning to her. “We’re perfectly safe. The governor’s house is the strongest fortress in all of Serila. It hasn’t been breached in twenty years.”

Umma did not look convinced. “Nevertheless, I’d prefer we take the usual steps to safeguard ourselves. Do you have the salt?”

I nodded, reaching beneath the table to grab the bag of supplies I had packed earlier that day.

Umma pulled her apron over her head, surveyed the floury mess staining its front and placed it in the laundry basket, amidst the other aprons and dish towels.

She gave one last cursory look around the kitchen, inspecting the locked windows and the hearth, which only housed cinders.

Leaning down so the strands of her graying hair nearly kissed the guttering flames of the sole candle burning on the table, she blew it out.

The room was instantly plunged into darkness.

I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the moonlit room.

I felt my way along the edge of the table to the doorway, the bag of supplies nestled under one arm like a newborn. Umma reached the door first, shucking it open, and the buttery light of the hallway greeted us.

The stone passages were quiet at this time of night, the only sounds that of old floorboards creaking and groaning as we made our way to the servant’s quarters.

Umma slid her key into the lock of the door to our shared bedchamber, and we hurried inside, eager to escape the cold draft from the hallway.

I waited as Umma fiddled with the candle set on the small bedside table – the only thing separating our cots from one another.

She struck a match and then the room was illuminated.

She turned to me expectantly. I set the pack at the foot of my bed, the movement rustling the thin bedsheets, and doled out the supplies.

“Salt for your sorrows, fennel for your fears, a flower for tomorrow and cotton for your tears.” I lined up the jar of salt, fennel, a small daisy from the garden, and a strip of rough canvas on my bed.

Umma sat on her own bed, surveying me like a hawk as I crossed to the window above the bedside table, salt in hand.

Carefully, I unscrewed the lid and dusted the salt on the sill in a neat line.

I repeated the process where the door met the floor.

The fennel went beneath our beds, a token of respect to the gods, the flower was wrapped in the canvas and set on the bedside table.

Umma gave me a nod of approval. She moved toward the small washbasin in an alcove beside the door and scrubbed off the day’s work from her hands and face.

When she was done, I repeated her actions, grateful for the cold water that rinsed away the remnants of dough and flour from beneath my fingernails.

We changed into our bedclothes by the dim candlelight and then settled before our beds, on our knees.

The cold floorboards pressed into my skin, and I rested my elbows on the frame of my bed, eyes drifting shut.

Umma spoke the prayer uttered each night before going to sleep: “We give thanks, mighty gods, for the gift of another day. We are most grateful for the sun, the moon, and the stars. For the blessed air we breathe, and the food provided. We are your humble servants and exist only by your grace and mercy. Cloak us in your warmth and safety and allow us to see a new day tomorrow.”

I rose to my feet at the end of her prayer, pulled back the bedcovers and crawled into the sheets.

Umma reached across to blow out the candle, pausing only briefly to look at me.

“I don’t thank the gods enough for it, but it’s been over twenty years since I found you on the doorstep. I am so grateful for that day.”

I blinked back the prickling sensation in my eyes.

Umma almost never spoke about the winter she found me, a babe left on the doorstep of the governor’s house.

I think she feared it would reveal her softer, good-natured side.

The side she had taught me was a danger to reveal in a world like ours, where life was so fleeting and fragile, at the constant mercy of the gods.

It infuriated and terrified me at the same time.

“Umma, you’re going to make me cry,” I half-joked.

She waved my words away. “Ugh. It’s Augustine. You would think I’d be used to it after five decades, but this day always makes me emotional.”

“Why?” I whispered, taking advantage of her rare sharing mood.

Umma blew out the candle, the light leeching from the room in the blink of an eye.

Silence rang for a moment, and then she said, “It’s easy to carry on ticking like a cog in the well-oiled machine of this house.

We forget how fragile our lives are. How miniscule we are in the grander scheme. This day reminds me of that.”

I chewed on her words. It was harder for me to process my infinitesimal existence when I had grown up knowing only the walls of the governor’s house and its manicured gardens. “Have you ever seen–”

“Do not finish that sentence, Lirah,” Umma warned shrilly. “Not tonight.”

Not on Augustine, when all the things that go bump in the night were out to play.

A shiver skittered across my spine, raising the hairs on my arms, and I pulled my knees to my chest, snuggling closer into the warmth of the duvet.

The wind whistled outside and branches battered against the window, but I drowned all sounds out.

At some point, I drifted into a deep sleep, exhausted from the furnace that was the kitchen and the constant kneading of dough.

A violent shaking of my arms pried me from sleep and my teeth clattered in my jaw as I was roughly pulled into a sitting position. My eyes snapped open to find Umma’s face mere inches from mine, a look of wild terror in her eyes.

“Umma.” I blinked. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”

The room was still dark. Daylight had not yet crept above the horizon, which meant we weren’t due to wake up and put the bread into the oven. My heart stuttered. It was still Augustine.

Umma’s head whipped to the door, then back to me. “You need to get dressed. The house has been breached.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, even as I shoved the bedcovers away, reaching for my slippers at the foot of the frame.

Umma shook her head at my shoe choice. “Not those. Wear your boots. We have to go out through the window.”

I shoved my feet into my boots, haphazardly lacing them as I peered up at her. “How do you know we’ve been breached?”

“I heard them,” she whispered. “The music I’ve only ever heard once before, when I was a child.”

She pressed my cloak into my arms and swiveled to pull her own winter cloak on. “Hurry, Lirah. We only have min–”

The entire room shuddered as the frame around the door splintered. A screech of crackling wood resounded through the room, sharp as a whip, and then the door was pulled clean off its hinges. Umma shrieked as a harsh male outline stepped right across the salt boundary and into the room.

Moonlight cut through the shadows wreathing his body, revealing a handsome face, light hair and golden eyes. But it was the pointed tips of his ears that had me sinking to the ground in horror.

Elven.

He was the stuff of nightmares. Power reeked from him, a palpable scent in the air as he raised his hand toward me, golden rings glinting on nearly every finger.

Those bright, menacing eyes flickered over to where Umma stood near the window, then back to me, crouched before my bed, my fingers reaching for the fennel, as if it would ward him off when the salt had clearly done nothing.

It would be laughable, were I not quaking, that we had thought a bit of salt would stop a male like this.

“You can come quietly, or I can throw you across my shoulder and take you. Your choice,” he said. I heard it then, the music Umma had mentioned. His voice was melodic, at odds with the hard set of his jaw, a lilt that would have mesmerized me under very different circumstances.

Umma took a tentative step forward, her hands clasping my shoulders as she wrenched me to my feet. “There will be no need for force.” Her voice was strong, but the shaking of her fingers betrayed her fear. “We will come.”

The blond elven stepped aside, leaving the hole where the door once stood unbarred. A silent command.

Umma’s fingers fell from my shoulder, along my arm, until her hand brushed mine.

Fingers entwined, she led me past the male and into the hallway.

Several other residents from the second floor of the servant’s quarters stood outside their bedroom chambers, dressed only in their night things, surveyed by yet another elven.

This one had red hair and a gruesome, jagged scar that cut along half of his jawline, as if someone had taken a blade to him but hadn’t managed to finish off the job.