Todos os capítulos de Ember Academy : Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 9

"You. Girl. Come out here."Sera didn't move at first. She was sitting on the edge of her cot, hands pressed flat between her knees like she could keep them still by sheer force, and the voice from outside the door was not one she knew. Not Bett's, not her mother's. A stranger's voice, clipped and cold, the kind that expected to be obeyed the first time it spoke."I said come out.""Sera." Her mother's hand found her shoulder, and it was trembling, actually trembling, in a way Sera had never felt from her before, not even the night her father didn't come back from the mountain pass. "Sera, love, you have to go out there.""Who is it?""I don't... I don't know. Three of them. They rode in an hour ago, on horses like nothing I've ever seen, all grey and silver, and they asked for you by description before anyone even said your name." Her mother's voice cracked on the last word. "They knew, Sera. Somehow they already knew."Sera stood. Her legs didn't feel entirely like her own legs.Out

"There." Vell's hand shot up, flat and sharp, cutting through the easy rhythm of hoofbeats they'd fallen into over the last hour of riding. "Off the road, now. Into the trees."Sera didn't ask questions this time. She'd learned that much already, in less than a day of riding beside this woman, that when Vell's voice changed like that, quick and low and utterly without room for argument, the smartest thing Sera could do was move first and understand later. She turned her mare hard off the packed dirt track, ducking low under a branch that nearly caught her across the shoulder, and pressed herself flat against the horse's neck in the shadow of the trees.Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat.A moment later four riders came around the bend at a hard canter, black cloaks snapping behind them, no house colors that Sera could make out, no crest, no banner, nothing at all to say who they were or who they served. Their faces stayed hooded despite the heat of the afte

"You cannot be serious." A woman's voice, sharp, cutting through the door before Sera even reached it. "You want to enroll her? Openly? After what happened in that hall tonight?""I want her trained, Instructor Renna, not hidden in a cellar until she burns her way out of it." That voice Sera knew now. Master Oren, gravel-rough, unbothered. "Which is what will happen if you leave a fire mage untaught out of fear."Sera had been marched straight from the Great Hall to a small stone antechamber and told to wait, and waiting had turned out to mean standing outside a heavy door listening to five raised voices argue about her future like she wasn't fifteen feet away and perfectly capable of hearing every word."The prophecy is a legend for frightening novices," said a third voice, thin, precise. "It has no bearing on academy policy.""Tell that to the Headmaster," Oren shot back. "He said the word himself, in front of the entire school. You think that stays quiet? By morning every noble hou

"Late." Master Oren didn't look up from the brazier he was tending when Sera burst through the practice yard doors, breath still short from running the length of the east wing. "Fire mages who arrive late to their own first lesson tend not to arrive at all to their second.""I got lost. This place has about four hundred identical corridors.""Three hundred and twelve, actually, but I appreciate the effort." A ghost of a smile crossed his face before it vanished back into the gravel. "Come. Stand here."The practice yard was smaller than Sera expected, walled in on all sides by dark stone scorched black in places from what must have been decades of exactly this kind of lesson, and at its center sat a shallow iron brazier, cold and empty, waiting."Before you do anything," Oren said, "you need to understand the one rule that matters more than every other rule combined. Fire answers to will. Not to bloodline, not to technique, not to how badly you want it. Will. Which means the moment yo