Chapter 22: 22: New Beginnings

Ember dipped her quill into the inkwell again, carefully copying down the words from the history tome. A candle sputtered in one corner of her desk, on its last legs from the early hours of studying. 

She focused keenly on the dark and bold words, committing them to memory. Each of the thirteen major city-states, including Ciradyl, had its own ruler, manner of government, and spheres of power. The historical events were known only through the regions’ individual cultures and dialects, making interpretation just as important as memorization. 

She wrote each name almost obsessively, taking comfort in the scratching of the tip on the paper. It seems arbitrary to be so anxious about grades after everything that’s happened… Yet, studying was something she was naturally good at and something that she could control. More importantly, if Corax was to be believed, making high marks in academics would bolster her rise through the rankings. Besting Roland—the black hawk-eagle who had tried to intimidate her—would be a welcome bonus. 

As she shifted to one side, light spilled over the page, announcing dawn’s arrival. She blew out the candle flame, ending its misery, and set her notes out to dry. 

It was cool inside her dorm when she gathered her things and left her room, barefoot. The floor, sometimes wood-paneled and sometimes soil, was rough beneath her toes. She pulled aside the curtain to the bathhouse, releasing a torrent of warm and humid air. 

She stripped off her nightclothes and stepped into the water, sending tiny creatures scuttling to the deep end. The stone was smooth against her skin, and the water washed easily over her overworked muscles. She sank deeper, marveling at whatever apparatus was maintaining the water’s temperature. Overhead, tree roots overlapped, forming a woven ceiling dotted with moss and lichen. 

At ease, she closed her eyes, thinking of her first morning in the dormitory. Back then, she had been so out of place that a single conversation had sent her running from the bathhouse. She had been afraid, bereft amid the broken pieces of her life in Ciradyl. 

The water stilled, and she looked down, meeting her own reflection. The sight startled her; Linnaeans as a race were not vain, and mirrors were a rarity in Mendel. She studied herself: the way her dark brown hair lay damp against her shoulders and neck, framing a face that, once round, was now angular. Her eyes, a muted green in the light, had a discerning quality. 

She brushed a hand over her cheek, where the skin was taut and hollow-feeling like hide stretched over a drum. It was there that the strange ache sometimes originated, giving her glimpses of thermal vision—the fiery reds and yellows at the core of living things. It was her only obvious mutation, but since the incident, it had come too infrequently and fleetingly to be of any use. 

Enough, she told herself, stirring the water’s surface to distort the image. She rose from the bath, drying herself with a towel from her bag and changing into a simple set of pants and a jacket with a hood. It would be a busy day, occupied with moving Carn into his new room, studying, and training, but she took comfort in the schedule. As long as she was moving forward, the tasks left undone were not so unbearable.

***

Carn held his knapsack close to his chest, looking nervous. Naz and Ember walked on either side of him, holding burlap sacks and dragging a moving cart. 

“Have you spoken to the canines?” Ember asked, wondering what kind of reception they could expect to receive at the canine house. The fox had been lodging at the infirmary while his injuries healed, but after two weeks he’d long overstayed his welcome, leading him to secure a spot in the main hall of the mammalia dorm. Unfortunately, however, the remainder of his belongings were still in his old room. 

“Not since they left me in the forest,” he replied. “I reported them for hazing and for being off the treatment, but it’s difficult to prove, so nothing has come of it yet.”

“I heard they’re under investigation,” Naz said hopefully. 

Ember shrugged, not expecting much to come of it. Carn himself had committed most of the crimes that he had reported, making justice a double-edged sword. To distract him, she held up three fingers, remembering what she’d read from his notes. “What are the three tenets of cell theory?”

He rolled his eyes but played along. “One: the cell is the basic unit of life. Two: all living organisms have at least one cell. Three…” he frowned, scrunching his face up. “I’m not sure.”

Ember feigned disappointment. “Cells come from other cells, during mitosis or meiosis.” He nodded, taking note, and Naz jumped in, quizzing him until they reached the final stretch of the path. 

Ahead, nestled between two trees, lay the wooden building that served as the dormitory for the pack of male canines that had caused them so much strife. Ember tightened her grip on the wagon handle, remembering the last time she and Naz had visited the house and the sting of rejection that had followed. From his downturned expression, Carn seemed to be sharing the thought. 

They skirted the house cautiously. When they reached the front door, it was Carn who knocked, tentatively at first and then hard enough to shake the entrance. 

The three Linnaeans glanced at each other. “I don’t think anyone is home,” he said, pulling the brass key from his pocket and twisting it in the lock. 

They waited with bated breath as the doors swung open. Ember stepped over the threshold and paused, taken aback. The interior was a far cry from when she had first seen it: polished and kept up, without a single flask or joint strewn over the floor. “Looks like you were right about the investigation,” she commented.

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Carn mumbled his assent, but the stiffness of his shoulders and his twitching nose betrayed his uneasiness. They picked their way up the stairs, listening carefully, but the house was as silent as if it had been abandoned. 

With slightly more confidence, he unlocked the room and pushed open the door. 

“Oh, god,” Naz whispered. Ember cringed; Carn’s half of the room had been trashed. His bed and clothes were shredded, and what little belongings he had left behind were smashed to smithereens. There was a foul smell in the air, and when Ember caught sight of the yellow and brown-stained linens, her teeth clenched with anger at what the canines had done. 

Carn stood in the center of the room, cradling his knapsack as he took it all in. His expression was ambiguous, with his mouth drawn into a thin line and his ears pulled slightly back. “Let’s go,” Naz said, throwing her arm around his shoulders. 

He shook himself, and Ember realized that he had already finished mourning the months spent in fictitious friendship. “You’re right,” he said, “there’s nothing here worth saving.” 

***

Ember took a sharp breath, hunching her shoulders and bending her knees. Naz’s bony first caught her in the side of the head, a clean tap that surprised her more than it stung. 

“Not again,” she complained, backing up out of the pisces’ range. They had been practicing slips and rolls—skills used to dodge punches—for at least half an hour, with minimal success. Carn chuckled slightly where he sat in the nearby grass, a textbook open on his lap.

“You need to keep your eyes up,” Naz instructed with a slight grin on her face. “I’m short, so you might have to bend your knees more than usual.”

Ember sighed, brushing the hair from her face. The pisces was faster and more skilled than her regular training partner, and in the growing darkness, it was difficult to read her movements. 

“Again,” Naz ordered. She darted forward and sent two straight punches to Ember’s head, followed by a hook to her body. She controlled her strength and technique carefully, keeping her sharp fins tucked close to her skin, but Ember reacted a fraction of a second too late. Scrambling, she turned into the punches rather than away from them, and without much fat to protect her, the blows promised to bruise. 

“Ugh!” Giving up, she wrapped her arms around Naz’s waist and lifted her, kicking, into the air. 

Carn leaped up, abandoning his studying to join in, poking the pisces’ belly and tickling under her arms. “Put me down!” she squealed, and Ember complied, dumping her unceremoniously onto her butt. She reached out as she fell, grabbing Carn by his legs, and the three collapsed into a pile.

For a moment, Ember was lost within the mess of writhing limbs, unsure which way was up and which was down. It seemed a lifetime before she managed to separate from the jumble, hardly able to breathe from the force of her laughter. 

The friends egged each other on as the sun set, interrupting the moments of calm with poorly-concealed snorts. When they finally grew tired, they flopped on their backs in the grass like children let out to play. The area in which they lay was hilly and open, giving them a prime view of the sunset as it painted the horizon orange and purple. 

Carn stretched his hand up to the sky, spreading out his fingers as if to encompass all that lay above. “Bayport, where I was born, is a divided city,” he said suddenly. He had rarely mentioned his hometown, so Ember and Naz quieted, listening attentively.

“There are precious metals in the earth and money to be made in the sale of fish, crabs, and snails,” he continued, “so the merchants, metalworkers, and jewelers own fine houses. But for the townspeople and the prospectors that travel from the east, the winters are cold and the sea unyielding. They cannot swim, and they do not have the boats to fish or the skill for apprenticeship. 

“To survive, they sell themselves or their children into the service of the traffickers—there is a slave market twice yearly for this purpose. It is a short life, one that ends with sailor’s disease, frostbite, or the black lung of the mines. This is what I suspect befell my parents… and many of the children at the orphanage who required extra care or expensive medicines.”

Naz reached for him, but he shook his head. “I was a fool,” he said quietly. “Because I never knew my family, when the canines promised that I could earn a place in their pack, I wanted to believe them. Now I see that true kinship is not bought nor given so easily.”

Ember turned to face him, hoping her expression conveyed what words could not. “To new beginnings,” she said simply. 

“To new beginnings,” they echoed. 

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