by Sabaa Tahir
“No point in shouting. The guards have found pressing duties elsewhere.” He crouches beside Keris, feeling her pulse with a gentleness that bewilders me.
“You wish to murder her, Laia of Serra.” He stands and approaches. “For Keris is the font of all your woes. She destroyed your family and turned your mother into a murderess and kinslayer. She annihilated your people and torments them still. You would do anything to stop her, yes? So what makes you so different from me?”
“I am nothing like you—”
“My family was killed too. My wife slaughtered on a battlefield. My children murdered with salt and steel and summer rain. My kin butchered and imprisoned.”
“By people a thousand years gone!” I shout. But why speak with him? He’s buying time until the Commandant wakes up. He believes I am too foolish to notice.
Fury floods my veins, numbing my pain, making me forget the Commandant. It colors everything red, and a darkness roars inside me. The same feral thing that rose within me months ago, when I gave him my armlet. The beast that lashed out in the Forest of Dusk, when I thought he was going to kill Elias.
The Nightbringer glares, mouth curling into an inhuman grimace. “What are you?” he says, and it is an echo of a question he asked before.
“You will not win.” My voice is an unrecognizable snarl that rises from some ancient, visceral part of my soul. “You have harmed too many with your vengeance.” I’m inches from him now, staring into those familiar eyes, hate pouring from my own. “I do not care what it takes, nor how long. I will defeat you, Nightbringer.”
Silence stretches between us. The moment is impossibly long, hushed as death.
Then I hear an ear-blistering, eldritch scream. It goes on and on. The stained glass above cracks, the throne splinters. I clap my hands over my ears. Where is it coming from?
Me, I realize. I am screaming. Only it is not me, is it? It is something inside me. The moment I comprehend that fact, it feels as if my chest has split open. The dark light pouring from my body roars, as if freed after a long imprisonment. I try to stop it, to keep it leashed within.
But it is too powerful. I hear a rush of footsteps, see a flash of kohl-lined eyes. Coins tinkle—a sound I remember now. The headdresses of the Jaduna.
I have to run—I have to escape them.
Instead I collapse to my knees, and all the world goes white.
V: The Soul Catcher
The emotion that explodes in me at the sight of the Augur’s face feels unnatural. Like an animal, claws out, shredding my insides.
“I do not need your anger, Soul Catcher.” The Augur grabs my shoulder and yanks me toward him. I nearly slip in the driving rain. “I need you to listen.”
The ghosts sense Cain’s presence and shriek so loudly it sounds as if there are hundreds of them instead of just a few dozen. Mauth’s magic washes over me, dulling the screams and the cold, muting my anger. I force Cain’s hand away.
“You disturb the spirits, Augur,” I say. “The living are anathema to them.”
“Living! Is that what you call this?” His laugh rattles around his rib cage like a loose stone. “If only the Nightbringer had killed me when he obliterated the rest of my kin. But I escaped his prison and he did not see that coming, did he—”
“Escaped?” The jinn and I have avoided each other for five months. I have no wish to tangle with them now. “What do you mean escaped?”
“They will be here any moment. Listen well, for I have little time.”
“And I’ve none. You cannot be here.” My ire surges, almost incandescent, and I wait for it to fade, for Mauth to take it away.
But a few seconds tick past and I feel no rush of peace. Mauth? I call in my mind.
“Your master is otherwise occupied,” Cain says. “Battling a monster of his own creation.” The Augur’s mouth twists, and he glances over his shoulder, through the trees toward the mist-shrouded City of the Jinn. “The ghosts of our misdeeds seek vengeance. So I said to you long ago. And so it is. Our wrongs return to haunt us, Elias. Even Mauth cannot escape them.”
“Mauth is not good, nor evil,” I say. “There is no right or wrong with Death. Death is death.”
“And death has chained you. Do you not see?” Cain’s skeletal fingers crook toward me, and the jinn grove fills with a strange light, gold but with a shadow at its heart.
At first, it’s too bright to see the source. But when it fades, I blink and catch the impression of thousands of ropes snaking around my body, binding me to the earth.
“You must escape this place. Tell me, Soul Catcher, what do you see when you dream?”
The warrior, the cold woman, and the gold-eyed girl flash through my mind. My hands curl into fists.
“I see . . . I . . .”
An eerie howl rises from the City of the Jinn. A wolf, I’d have thought, if not for the undercurrent of primeval rage. Others join it to create a hair-raising chorus and Cain stumbles toward me.
“The jinn have my scent,” he whispers. “They’ll be here soon. Listen well. You see a war, yes? An army breaking against a wave of flame. Beyond, fair blossoms blanket the ground. Above it all, a hungering maw. A maelstrom that can never be sated.”
“You’ve been tampering with my mind.”
“You think Mauth would let me into your mind, boy? He has you caged and chained, locked away. I did not give you the dreams. You see them because they are truth. Because some small part of your old self lives within you yet. It screams to be free.”
“The Soul Catcher does not care for freedom—”
“But Elias Veturius does,” Cain insists, and I find I cannot move, hypnotized by his use of that name. My name. My old name. “Elias Veturius yet lives. And it is imperative that he live, for the Great War approaches, and it is not the Soul Catcher who will win it, it is Elias Veturius. It is not the Soul Catcher who is an ember in the ashes, it is Elias Veturius. It is not the Soul Catcher who will spark and burn, ravage and destroy. It is Elias Veturius.”
“Elias Veturius is dead,” I say. “And you are trespassing. The walls of the Waiting Place exist for a reason—”
“Forget the walls.” Cain’s face is feral. “For the ghosts, there is a greater threat. There are forces more powerful than death—”
The howls sound again, clear even through the downpour. Mauth’s magic will protect me—already it rises around my body, a shield against the jinn.
But the jinn do not concern me. My duty is to the ghosts, and if something threatens them, I must know what it is. Questions flood my mind. Questions I need answers to.
“What do you mean ‘forget the walls’?” I yank the old man toward me. “What threat do you speak of?”
But he looks over my shoulder to the figures emerging from the dark, their eyes burning like small suns through the curtain of rain.
“He belongs to us, Soul Catcher.” The voice that speaks is sibilant and heavy with rancor. One of the jinn steps forward, a glaive in her hand. “Return him,” she says. “Or suffer our wrath.”
VI: The Blood Shrike
Princess Nikla has not fled to her quarters. No alarm bells sound.
Instead, she strides down a long hallway toward where I lurk. The massive, carved doors of the state dining room—where she is not supposed to be—are across the hall from me and the ebony staircase I’m waxing.
There are a dozen Martials working in the palace, the Beekeeper told me. You won’t be an anomaly, but keep your head down. I’ll send the wights when Laia has done her part and Nikla’s in her quarters. They’ll take you to her.
When Laia says she’ll do something, she does it. I hope to the skies she’s not dead. The Delphinium Scholars will have my head if anything happens to her.
Besides which, she’s grown on me.
My pocket rustles—the wights bringing me a scroll. I crouch, as if
I’ve seen a scratch on the banister, and read the hastily scrawled message.
Keris Veturia in palace.
I hardly have time to comprehend how the Commandant got here—and how Musa’s wights missed it—when the Princess approaches. She halts before the dining room, not ten feet away. Chatter leaks from the closed doors. Once she’s inside with all those courtiers, she won’t emerge for hours.
Do something, Shrike. But what? Kidnap her? Kill her guards? I’m supposed to secure a treaty, not start a war.
Bleeding, burning hells. I told Livia to send a diplomat. Avitas Harper would have been perfect. She could have dispatched him to Marinn and let me stay in Delphinium. I’d have been able to focus on Grímarr and the Karkauns. And I’d have been free of Harper and the maddening desire that muddles my mind and tangles my words whenever he’s near.
But no. The Mariner royal family needs to speak with someone who fought in Antium, Livia said. Someone who knows what Grímarr is doing there.
Just thinking of it makes my blood boil. Four weeks ago, Grímarr ambushed a supply caravan headed for Delphinium. He replaced the food with Martial and Scholar limbs—those hacked off during his violent blood rites. One of his men hid in the caravan and tried to ambush me, shouting, “Ik tachk mort fid iniqant fi!” I gutted him before I got a translation.
When the Paters of Delphinium learned of the incident, they were horrified. Their support wanes, even as the Karkauns wreak havoc on my capital. We need this alliance.
So here I am, standing three yards from the crown princess of Marinn, bold as a Navium dock whore. I have no battle armor. No mask. Just a stolen uniform and my scarred face.
The princess doesn’t enter the room. Instead she stares at the fish and shells and ferns carved in the door as if she’s never seen them before. For an instant, she looks panicked.
The idea of lording over the Martials as an empress—and being subject to the politics and expectations of such a position—makes me ill. Perhaps Nikla feels the same.
One of Nikla’s guards clears her throat. Half of the sentries I’ve seen here are women—something the Empire could use a bit more of. This guard is also female, tall and hawk-faced, with dark skin and a firm voice.
“Your Highness. It has been a long day. Perhaps your steward can make your excuses.”
“You overstep, Lieutenant Eleiba.” Nikla’s shoulders stiffen. “I reinstated you into the guard at my father’s request. Do not—”
Nikla turns as she speaks—and spots me. “You,” she says. “I don’t recognize—”
Don’t kill the bleeding guards, Shrike. Treaty, not war. I rush the princess and she stumbles back, her feet caught in the hem of her dress. Before her defenders can call out, my dagger is in my hand. I ram it, hilt first, into the temple of the first guard, dropping him.
As he falls, I snatch his spear away and spin the butt of it into the face of the guard behind me. A satisfying thump tells me I’ve hit my mark. I jam the spear between the dining room door handles so that the guards and courtiers within cannot get out.
One of the soldiers, Eleiba, rushes away with the princess, screaming for aid. The third guard is on me now, but I disarm her and bash her with the flat of her scim. Before she hits the floor, I have flung a knife at the fleeing Eleiba.
It sinks into her shoulder and she jerks, nearly falling.
“Run, Princess!” she shouts. But I am too fast for them both. I spot a door. According to the map Musa had me memorize, it leads to a small meeting chamber. I herd Nikla and Eleiba toward it.
“In.” I nod to the door. Eleiba growls at me, but I fix my gaze on the princess.
“Do you know who I am?”
She narrows her eyes and nods.
“Then you know that if I’d wanted to kill you, I could have. I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to talk. Tell your guard to stand down.”
“Death first,” Eleiba rasps. “Princess—go—”
I feint letting the scim fall, and in the instant that Eleiba’s gaze drops to it, I punch her square in the face. She drops like a stone.
“In.” I point the scim at Nikla’s throat. Already, soldiers thunder down the hall toward us. “Now, princess.”
She bares her teeth but backs into the chamber. I bar the door and ignore the shouts getting closer.
I flip my scim around and hand it to the princess. “A token of goodwill. As I said, I just want to talk.”
Nikla takes the weapon with the swiftness of someone practiced with a blade—and puts the point to my throat. Distantly, alarm bells clang. Her guards will be breaking down the door soon enough.
“Well, girl,” she says. “What could the Blood Shrike of a pretender possibly have to say to me?”
“I know Keris is here for an alliance, but you can’t trust her,” I say. “She betrayed an entire city of her own civilians to become Empress. Tens of thousands left to the mercies of the Karkauns because of her lust for power.”
“I was not born yesterday. I’d be a fool to trust your empress.”
My vision goes red at that word. “She is not,” I hiss, “my empress. She is a snake, and allying with her is a grave error.”
“Keris is offering me a treaty that would end the jinn attacks on Mariner villages,” Nikla says. “Can you do the same?”
“I—” I need a moment to think. Just a moment. But the blade makes it hard to breathe, let alone come up with a solution to Nikla’s problem. Every trick I learned in rhetoric class flees my mind. I wish, suddenly, for Elias. He could sweet-talk a stone into giving him water.
“It’s Keris’s men who are carrying out those raids,” I say. “She’s allied with the jinn. We could fight them together.”
“You and what army?” Nikla laughs and lowers the scim. Not because she’s tired. But because she’s no longer afraid. “Do you even have enough food to get your people through the winter? You’re a fool, Blood Shrike. I can’t fight Keris and her supernatural allies. I can only make a deal. I suggest you do the same.”
“I’d die first.”
“Then you’ll die.” Nikla’s guards bang on the door, shouting her name. “In a few seconds, at the hands of my soldiers. Or later, at the hands of your empress.”
She’s not my empress! “Keris is evil,” I say. “But I know her. I can defeat her. I just need—”
The door splinters. Nikla observes me pensively. My words won’t convince her. But perhaps threats—
At that moment, a shrill scream punctures the air. It is so deafening that I cringe and cover my ears, hardly noticing as Nikla drops the scim and does the same. The banging on the door stops as cries sound from outside it. With a great crash, the windows of the chamber shatter and glass plunges to the floor. Still, the scream continues.
My skin prickles, and deep within my body, my healing magic stirs, restless as a pup in a thunderstorm.
Laia. Something is wrong. I can feel it.
As quick as it began, the screaming stops. Nikla straightens, her body trembling.
“What—”
The door bursts open and her guards—including Eleiba—pour in.
“Keris will betray you before the end.” I dart past the princess, swiping up the scim. “If you survive it, if you need a true ally, get word to me in Delphinium. I’ll be waiting.”
With that, I offer her a low bow. Then I race for the shattered window and fling myself out.
VII: Laia
I am not alone. I know it even in unconsciousness. Even in this strange blue space where I have no body.
I am not alone, but the presence with me is not outside me. It is in me.
There is something—or someone—inside my mind.
I have always been here, a voice says. I have just been waiting.
“Waiting?” I say, and my words are thin in the vastness. “For what?”
&nbs
p; For you to wake me up.
Now wake up.
Wake up.
“Wake up, Laia of Serra.”
It feels as though someone pours sand in my eyes as I drag them open. Lamplight stabs at me, and five women with kohl-lined eyes stare down at the bed upon which I lay. They wear heavily embroidered dresses that flare at the hips, their hair adorned with strands of golden coins that swoop across their foreheads.
Jaduna. The magic wielders—and allies of the royal family.
Oh skies. I sit up slowly, as if addled, but my mind races toward one thought: I need to get the hells out of here.
The room appears to be on the second or third floor of a Mariner villa, and is strewn with jewel-toned silk rugs and star-patterned screens. Through an arched window, the walls of the palace glow with the light of a thousand lanterns. Their beauty is blighted by the incessant pealing of alarm bells.
Feigning dizziness, I lie back down. Then I gather myself, spring off the bed, and lunge through a gap between the women. I am past them, nearly to the open door, just a few more feet—
It slams shut in my face. The Jaduna pull me back, and when I try to scream, my voice chokes off. I reach for my invisibility, but it is gone. The Nightbringer must still be in the city, because no matter how I grasp at it, it does not come.
The Jaduna set me down in a chair, their grip still tight. I do not attempt to break free. Not yet.
“You—you were following me,” I say.
“Be at ease, Laia of Serra.” I recognize the woman who speaks. She gave me a book once, outside the Great Library of Adisa as it burned down. “We do not wish to hurt you. We saved you from the Meher—”
“Silence, A’vni!” An older woman glares at A’vni before turning her dark gaze on me.
“Look at me, girl,” the old woman says, and though I do not wish to do her bidding, her voice compels me. What magic is this? Was she, too, touched by an efrit? As she forces my face toward her, I claw at the arms of my chair and kick out.