Dawn of Ash by Rebecca Ethington

exhilaration flowing freely at what was about to occur.
    The children looked at each other in question. Even though they didn’t fully understand, they knew this was a greater prize than what they had originally been told. And before Edmund had taken his seat on the billowy nest, they had begun to fight again, this time with more fervor and desperation than before.
    “Will you look at that?” Edmund’s voice was a calm torrent beside me, but I, like him, couldn’t look away from the way the children attacked each other, jumping and clawing and tearing and biting. “They were doing as they were told before, but now … with a promise of victory, a promise of a better goal, they truly fight. Their hearts are in it now.”
    My head snapped from the children to my father, unsurprised to see him sitting there with that grim smile on his face, his eyes revealing all the knowledge and power he had.
    “Tell me, Ovailia, how did his magic react to yours today? Did it try to connect again?”
    “It did.” I was proud, and he was pleased, which increased the ecstasy inside of me.
    “So his desire for you is strengthening?”
    “Yes, Father, as you asked me to do.”
    “Wonderful,” he cooed, his focus finally pulling back to the pits where a lone child stood over a lifeless shape, tiny fists smashing into bloodied flesh again and again. “Use him. Even go as far as completing the bond if you must. Anything to access his sight, to get the information we need.”
    “Complete the bond?” An odd mixture of desire and disgust roared through me, the disgusting emotions making me feel vile.
    “He has secrets we need, Ovailia, and with the magic I have embedded in you, once a bond is complete, you will have full access to whatever I wish. You just need to give him a greater reward. Give him a reason to fight to the death, and you have always been his reason. You just need to show him you still are.”
    He looked away from me as the child was pulled off the heap of the body she had destroyed, her eyes wild and manic, everything so covered in blood and dirt it was difficult to tell if it was the boy or the girl. If it wasn’t for the clothing, I would have never known.
    One thing was perfectly clear: she knew she had won. She knew she had gotten what she wanted. And all because my father had given her the opportunity.
    “Give him a reason to do anything I say,” I whispered more to myself than to my father, but he heard, anyway.
    His face broke out into a smile, the same mania in his eyes darting to me as the pit master brought the child to him. “Give him a reason to fight for it.”
    He was right, and what was more, I knew I could. Sain had shown me something in himself I had never seen before. His eyes had become something different, someone I had never seen, a magic I had never felt. Even when we were bonded, I had always felt that something was missing from the man, something he kept so deeply hidden I had even convinced myself it wasn’t there.
    But today … Today, I had seen it.
    Today, I had wanted it.
    It was a feeling I was trying to ignore, yet hearing my father speak of the connection, of the espionage in such a way, I wanted it. I wanted to exploit it—exploit him.
    “Our King, our lord,” one of my father’s many servants announced loudly from beside us, his voice carrying over the now silent stadium as he presented the child to her new master.
    She was covered in blood and filth, her blonde hair barely visible from underneath the mud that coated it. She did not cower. She did not even try to hide. She stood still and tall as she met my father head-on, her focus solely on him.
    It was as he had said. She knew what she had done; he just needed to give her a reason to do it.
    “What is your name, child?” Edmund asked, his voice calm, obviously taken aback by the loyalty the child was already displaying.
    “Míra,” she said, her voice as strong as the gaze she had fixed him with.
    Edmund said nothing as