The Ember Covenant

Chapter 1

The Night the Workshop Answered

Kael Ardent had lived alone in the workshop for eleven months, and he had learned to tell the time by its sounds.

The pipes knocked at six. The old clock over the door lost two minutes every day. And at night, when the city went quiet, the metal shelves ticked as they cooled, like a crowd of tiny people whispering about him.

He was seventeen. His father had been dead for a year, and nobody had ever told him exactly how the fire started.

That night he was walking home with a bag of groceries and a bad feeling. The streets near the old rail yard were empty. A shadow stepped out of an alley, then another.

"Nice bag," said the first one. "Hand it over."

Kael did not want to fight. He never wanted to fight. He held out the bag, and that should have been the end of it.

But the second boy grabbed his collar, and something under Kael's shirt began to burn.

It was not like a fire on the skin. It was like a word being written into him, one stroke at a time, in a language he had never learned. He fell to his knees. Light poured out from his chest in red and gold lines, a circle inside a circle inside a circle.

The two boys backed away. "What is that? What is that?"

The air in front of Kael folded like paper. Someone stepped out of the fold.

He was tall and covered in dark armor, scratched and dented from a hundred battles. A scar ran from his left eyebrow to his jaw. He looked at the two frightened boys, and they ran without another word.

Then he turned and looked down at Kael.

Kael stared up at him. The face under the helmet was his own face, only older and harder, with eyes that looked as if they had forgotten how to be surprised.

"So it's you," said the armored one. He looked Kael up and down, from his muddy shoes to his shaking hands.

"You're weaker than I expected."

Chapter 2

The Seven Marks

"Who are you?" Kael said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted.

"You can call me Ember." The armored man pulled off one glove and flexed his fingers, as if he were checking that they still worked. "It is the name you are going to give me anyway. I would rather skip the part where you argue about it."

"I am not going to give you a name. I am going to go home and sleep, and when I wake up this will be a dream."

"The mark on your chest says otherwise."

Kael pulled his shirt open. The circles had faded to a dull glow, like a coal that was almost out. The skin around them was warm. It did not hurt anymore, which was somehow worse.

Ember crouched in front of him. "Listen carefully, because I will only explain this once, and badly. Every twelve years, seven people are marked. We call them Bearers. Each Bearer can call one Manifestation."

"Like a ghost?"

"Like a possibility." Ember tapped the armor over his own heart. "I am not a dead hero from a history book. I am the person you could become, if your life went a certain way."

Kael looked at the scar, the dented armor, the tired eyes. "I don't want to become you."

"Nobody does," said Ember. "That is exactly why it works."

A bell rang somewhere across the city, deep and slow, though it was not midnight and no church in this town had a bell like that.

Ember stood up fast. His hand went to the sword at his hip. "Six more of them just woke up. Seven Bearers, seven Manifestations, and only one pair gets to stay at the end. The winner earns the right to rewrite one event."

"One event," Kael whispered. His father. The fire.

"Yes," said Ember, watching his face. "I saw you think of it."

"And what happens to the others?"

Ember did not answer. He looked up at the sky over the rail yard, and for a moment he seemed to be looking at something that was not there.

"This city has already burned once," he said quietly.

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing. Walk. We need to find somewhere with walls before they find us."

Kael picked up his groceries, because he could not think what else to do, and followed the stranger with his own face into the dark.