Page 72 of Ashes of Gold
Why is she even bringing that up? She doubting I’m going to do what I said? We traipse down the hall past the room I slept in and up through Totsi’s closet. Zora and Bri are sitting back-to-back on the floor, Bri’s nose is in a book, and Zora is running the tip of her blade against a stone.
“Rue! You’re okay.” Bri hops up and throws her arms around me.
Zora lets out a huge breath in relief. “So good to see you, Jelani.” She clamps a hand on my shoulder, tugging up on her gloves as they slip down.
“But Bri kept reminding me that you could handle yourself. And that I shouldn’t worry. You would make—”
“A way,” I say. “Yes.”
Bri is beaming, and the Seer’s words prick me, slinking through my head like a snake.
Could it be Bri who is gonna betray me? Could it be her who already has?
“I’ll call for everyone to come up,” Taavi says, and I nod, despite Zora’s and Bri’s wrinkled expressions. Taavi takes off, and I catch them up on everything that happened while below: the Macazi I met, how frail they are as a people, the Seer giving me the spell, and my agreement with Taavi to deposit a bit of magic here for their protection in exchange for their allyship.
I leave out the Seer’s warning of betrayal.
That, I’m not telling anyone.
Bri’s brow dents deeper the longer I talk, and Zora’s nostrils are flaring. They aren’t happy with this plan, and I know why. I get it, but this is the only way.
“Go ahead.” I gesture at Bri. “I can hear your brain going a thousand miles per hour. I’m listening.”
“Rue, I mean, I’m an outsider here, so feel free to toss my opinion out the window, seriously. But…” She leans in, whispering. “TheMacazi? They’ve got nothing. They have nothing to lose. I can’t even imagine what sort of pent-up anger they have….”
“Toward theChancellor. The enemy of my enemy, Bri, is my friend. We have no reason to not like them. What have they done to anyone?”
“Well, I remember once, my dad had come home from the mines,and he’d saved up just enough coin to grab some dongyas from the sweetshop. He paid the vendor, got his order, turned his back, and it wasgone.Just gone! Some Maca had snuck up and stolen it right under his nose. Dad saw them getting away, but there was nothing he could do at that point. They’re fast runners, apparently. Like, who does that?!”
“People who are hungry.”
She sighs, exasperated. “I’m just saying we have no reasontotrust them, either. They live in alleyways and in shadows, stealing to…”
“Feedthemselves.”
She sighs again, this time pinching the bridge of her nose. “The Macazi aren’t magical. How can they even help?”
“Bri?”
“Yes?”
“You’re doing that thing again.”
“What?”
“Where you sound really privileged and selfish.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it. Only to open and close it again.
“Maybe marinate on that for a bit?”
She turns pink and nods.
I turn to Zora, burying my annoyance with how quickly Bri can pop off and show me no matter how tight we are, there’s still dissonance. It’s like she can only “get it”somuch. Because at the end of the day, she’s Zruki. She was given magic, raised in a world where she was not at the tip-top of society, but still valued, trusted. Told she mattered.
The Macazi don’t have that. They were literally told and shown the opposite. Their people are carted off to community housing,tests are run on them from what I heard. That has to garner some empathy. That has to at least crack the walls of how she sees the world.
And what about my people, the Ghizoni? We got even less than the Macazi. We got nothing. Not life. Not freedom. Not a choice. None of that. Does she only ride with me on getting the Ghizoni magic back because I explained it to her? That’s not gon’ work. She has to fully reshape those glasses sitting on her nose. She has to get itherself.
