The roar of the fire devoured the night. Men poured from the barracks into the yard, a panicked mob caught between the flames and the walls. Guards shouted uselessly, their authority incinerated in the blistering heat. The blaze, born from the King's absurd shrine as I had known it would be, had already consumed the corner of the weaving workshop and was climbing the dry timber walls with terrifying speed, its orange light painting the faces of the prisoners in a flickering glow.
The sheer scale of the chaos threatened to drag me back down into the helpless fear of the boy I used to be. The voice of the imposter, the one I had almost silenced, hissed from the depths of my gut: You are just a boy playing at being a leader, and now they will all burn for it.
Then, another voice. Kael's. He had once woken us in the dead of night, shouting that the barracks were being overrun. In the pitch-black confusion, he'd watched us stumble and collide. "Panic is the enemy's best soldier," he'd said later. "It fights for him for free. Your first task in the dark is not to find the enemy, but to find your discipline. Kill the panic before it kills you." It was a lesson, a command. But was I the one to give it? I was a thief who had failed to save his own sister. What right did I have to lead these men?
My blood ran cold, but the fire was hotter. I began to move.
"Basim! Kayden!" My voice was a raw bark, but it carried. I found them in the throng and grabbed their shoulders. "The well. Get a bucket line started. Two lines—one for water, one for sand! Move!"
They stared for a second, their faces blank with shock, then the ingrained discipline took over. They began shouting, grabbing men, forcing them into lines, their own authority adding weight to my command. The chaos began to take a crude shape.
I saw Borin, his face pale with terror, standing frozen. "Borin!" I yelled. "The east wall! Get men to tear it down! Create a firebreak!" The order, a specific and achievable task, seemed to shock him back into himself. He nodded dumbly and began bellowing at the men nearest him.
The bucket brigade formed, a clumsy, desperate serpent of men passing buckets of water and sand toward the inferno. I stood back for a moment, watching, assessing. It wasn't enough. The flames were too high, the heat too intense. For every bucket of water that hit the base, a dozen new tongues of fire licked at the sky. We were losing. The imposter whispered again: See? Your first commands are leading to failure. You are sending them on a fool's errand.
Suddenly, Mara was at my side, her face grim, her eyes wide. "Having fun playing commander?" she rasped. "Because the Prince's vanity is about to give us all a royal cremation." She grabbed my arm, her grip surprisingly strong. "The west wall, Nadim!" she shrieked over the roar. "The bolts by the west wall! They're treated with linseed oil for the royal banners! They'll go up like a torch!"
It wasn't just a burning workshop, it was a potential inferno that could consume the entire prison. Like one of Kael's impossible training scenarios. If that wall went, the fire would triple in size, cutting off the path to the well and trapping us all.
"Tarik!" I roared, spotting the Head Guard trying to organize his own panicked men near the gate. He looked at me. "Tarik, the west wall is about to flash! Get your men clear and help Borin with the firebreak! Now!"
He didn't argue. In the face of total disaster, the prison's hierarchy had melted away, replaced by the simple logic of survival. He saw the danger, relayed the order, and his men scrambled to help.
Just as they moved, a great groaning sound came from the heart of the fire. The main roof of the workshop, its supports eaten through by the flames, began to collapse inward. A shower of sparks and burning debris rained down. Most men scrambled back, but a lone guard, who had been trying to pull a heavy loom away from the flames, was caught. A massive, burning crossbeam pinned him to the ground.
He screamed, a sound of pure agony. The other guards froze, horrified. I recognized him. He had kicked over an old prisoner's water cup on the hottest day of the year and laughed as the man licked the dust. The prisoners stared, their faces a mixture of pity and a cold, hard satisfaction. For a moment, so did I.
Then the moment passed. He was a man, and he was burning.
My body moved, pushing past the doubt. I grabbed a water-soaked blanket from the end of the bucket line. "Kael! On me!" I shouted, not knowing if he was even there.
But he was. His solid presence was suddenly beside me. He had another soaked blanket. We didn't need to speak. We moved as one, a two-man assault team, holding the heavy, wet cloth in front of us as a shield.
The heat seared my lungs, blistered my skin. We reached the trapped guard. His uniform was smoldering. Kael and I threw our blankets over him, smothering the flames on his clothes. The beam was immense, too heavy for two men to lift. Failure, the voice hissed. You will fail him, too.
"Leverage!" I gasped, my voice painful from the smoke. "Never fight the weight," Kael had drilled into us during a lesson on moving siege stones. "Redirect it. Use the world as your weapon." I saw a long, iron pry bar lying discarded near the wreckage. I scrambled for it, the ground hot enough to burn through the soles of my sandals. I jammed it under the beam, using a chunk of fallen masonry as a fulcrum.
"Heave!" I yelled.
Kael, Basim, and two other prisoners who had followed our charge put their weight on the bar with me. The beam groaned, but didn't move. My muscles screamed. It was too heavy. We were going to watch him die. This is your fault.
"Again!" I roared, putting every ounce of my being into the effort, my own scream of defiance against the fire, against the failure, against the voice in my head.
This time, the beam groaned and lifted a few precious inches. It was enough. Two other men darted in and dragged the screaming guard clear.
We fell back, choking, our eyes streaming, as the rest of the roof collapsed, vomiting a geyser of embers into the night. The immediate danger was past, but the work was far from over. The main blaze was contained, but smaller fires now licked at the edges of the yard, threatening the granary. The men were exhausted and sluggish. A section of the firebreak, where embers had landed, suddenly flared up, a fresh wave of heat washing over us. A collective groan went through the men. Their will was breaking.
And so was mine. I wanted to collapse, to let the smoke take me. But I looked at their faces, turned to me, waiting. They had followed me this far.
"The granary!" I shouted, my voice cracking. "We hold the line here! Form a new chain!" I grabbed the first bucket myself, shoving it into the hands of a man whose shoulders were slumped in defeat, and looked him in the eye. "We finish this."
Slowly, painfully, the lines reformed. For another hour, we fought the dying beast, stamping out embers, dousing flare-ups, until the last wisp of smoke curled into the dawn sky and the only sound was the drip of water and the ragged breathing of exhausted men.
By the time the Warden arrived, the yard was a ruin of black timbers and mud, but it was safe. He walked through the smoke and steam until he stood before me. I felt a tremor of fear. He would see the fraud. He would see the boy who got lucky.
"I was told a workshop was burning," he said, his voice low and rough. He gestured with his chin toward the city walls, barely visible over the prison ramparts. "That fire was a breath away from the granaries. If it had jumped that wall, it wouldn't have been a prison fire. It would have been a city fire." He looked from the smoldering ruins to the rescued guard, now being tended to. "And a life."
He looked back at me. There was no praise, no gratitude, not yet. There was only a long, silent assessment, as if he were weighing my actions on a scale only he could see. He had seen a problem solved, a disaster averted, and he knew exactly who was responsible.
"A debt has been incurred this night, Nadim," the Warden said finally, his voice quiet but clear over the crackle of the dying embers. "A significant one." He held my gaze for a moment longer, then turned and walked back toward his office.