by Sabaa Tahir
The air near me glows the faintest gold. “Flee, Laia of Serra,” Rehmat whispers, its sadness palpable. “Flee, lest he burn you to ash.”
I do not know if Elias heard Rehmat, or if he simply senses the Nightbringer’s rage building like a tempest over a warm sea. It does not matter. As my eyes meet those of the jinn, the Soul Catcher’s arm comes around me, and seconds later, we are on the wind.
XXVII: The Soul Catcher
The soldier in me tallies up the jinns’ weaknesses: Umber succumbing to my magic as I siphoned away her life force; the glaive wounding Khuri; the scythe killing her.
The Soul Catcher in me yearns for the Waiting Place, rattled by Khuri’s prophecy. I need the peace of the trees, the focus that the ghosts give me. I need Mauth to ease my mind.
And the human in me marvels at the feel of this girl in my arms—that she lives, that she not only survived the Nightbringer but wielded his weapon.
“I had it in my hands,” she whispers as we windwalk. “I had it and I lost it.”
When we stop, it is with a crash at the top of a dry gully choked with scree and spindly trees. I take the brunt of the fall, wincing at the rocks slicing through my clothing. Branches groan in the fierce wind tearing across the desert, and Laia tucks her head into her arm, shielding her eyes from the sand.
“Elias, are you all—”
“Fine.” I lift her off me quickly, then back away a few feet. The sky above is ablaze with stars and we are so far from Aish that it isn’t even a glow on the horizon.
It’s hard to make out Laia’s face in the dark. But that’s a relief. “The foretelling we heard,” I tell her. “Those first two lines were about me.”
“You?” She gets gingerly to her feet. “The son of shadow and heir of death—”
“Will fight and fail with his final breath.” I pause for a long moment. “You know the cost of my failure. You’ve seen it firsthand.”
“It is just a foretelling,” Laia says. “Not all foretellings are real—”
“Shaeva’s foretelling came to pass,” I say. “Every line of it. And she, too, was a jinn. You were right, you know. The Nightbringer is doing something to the ghosts. I nearly found out what it was. But—”
“But you saved me instead.” Laia looks at me like she knows my insides. “Elias.” Her voice is strained. “I’m not sorry. You came back to me—I’ve missed—”
“You’ll have to make your way back to wherever it is you’re going,” I say. “I’ve been away from the forest for long enough.”
She closes the distance between us, grabbing my hand before I can windwalk away. Her fingers are twined between mine, and I think of the night she spent with me in Blackcliff. Before she left, she tried to give my blade back. The words she spoke carry layers of meaning now that they did not have then.
You have a soul. It’s damaged, but it’s there. Don’t let them take it from you.
“Talk to me,” she says now. “Just for a moment.” The gully is filled with scraggly trees that are blue in the starlight. But she finds a long, flat rock and sits, pulling me down with her.
“Look at me, Elias.” She takes my chin in her hand. “The Nightbringer baited you. And I gave him the perfect bait. He knows you, like he knows all humans. He expected you to help me and knew you would later feel guilty about it. He’s always a step ahead of us. But the cost this time is thousands of lives—tens of thousands—”
“The concerns of the human world are not—”
“He’s playing a tune and you are dancing to it. That is your concern. The Nightbringer wants you chained to the Waiting Place. It serves his purposes perfectly. Because if you are trying to control things there, you are not fighting out here.”
“If I am chained to the Waiting Place, it is because of my own choices—not because of the Nightbringer.”
“You’re chained because of me.” She releases me, her face in her hands. Seeing her this way feels wrong. No, I realize. It feels wrong to see her this way and not give her comfort.
“You died, Elias, and still you could not let yourself fail. You promised to save Darin and so you did, though it led to your own imprisonment. You promised to serve Mauth and so you do, though it will lead to the destruction of my people. You are so—so—” She throws up her hands. “So stubborn! And the Nightbringer knows it! He is counting on it, for it allows him to wreak havoc in the human world without anyone to stop him.”
Laia’s disquiet swirls around her, a weight too heavy to carry alone. “You said yourself the forest is sick. The ghosts are not coming through. I tell you, the source of these ills is the Nightbringer. If you want to fix the Waiting Place, you must stop him from tampering with the spirits.”
Though I’m certain I had the good sense to put a foot of space between us, our knees touch. She pulls my hands to her heart, and my pulse judders in response.
“Thank you for helping me,” she says. “I know it cost you. But if you hadn’t helped me—”
“You’d have been fine.” This, I know. “You’re tough and smart. You’re a survivor, Laia. You always have been.”
She smiles and looks down, her hair falling into her face. “It is sweet to hear you say my name,” she whispers.
A desert wind gusts through the gully, and I breathe in the scent of her, sugar and sweat and something unknowable that makes my head spin. I push her hair back from her face, and find my thumb lingering on her cheek. It is flushed, though the night is cold.
Laia looks up at me as if she is going to speak, and her fingers press into my forearm. My own desire stirs at the depth of hers, and I imagine her fingers digging into my back, her eyes on me like they are now, her legs around my hips—
Stop. You are the Banu al-Mauth.
But the voice fades when she rises to her knees on the rock and brushes her lips against mine. She is careful, like I might flee. But her wildly thudding pulse matches mine, and I drop my hands to her waist and pull her close, my lips parting hers. Closer still when she moans, her nails grazing my neck. The sound that it elicits from me is nothing close to decent.
She pulls away, smiling, and I wish she had not, for in the space that opens between us, tumult takes hold, the cold reality of my present sweeping over the horizon of my mind.
I am a fool. Holding Laia, kissing her, touching her, letting myself want her. All I’ve done is given her hope.
She must sense it, for she tilts my face toward hers. “Elias—”
“That’s not my name.” I pull away and stand, grasping for the coldest version of myself: Mask, Soul Catcher, Chosen of Death. I think of the thousands of ghosts I created, the thousands who died because of me—friends and enemies and people whose names I never even knew.
The Nightbringer was right about humans. Murdering and smashing and forgetting.
“Please,” I tell her. “I could not live with myself if more suffer because of me. Stay away. Leave me in peace. Find someplace safe to—”
“Safe?” Laia laughs and it is a terrible sound. “There is no safe place for me in this world, Elias. Not unless I create it for myself. Go then to your duty. I will go to mine.”
Before she turns her back on me, I am gone, windwalking east, flying faster and faster until sand turns to scrub and scrub to trees. I do not stop until I am at my cabin. There, the only sound is my ragged breathing. And once it slows, the silence settles in. I am so used to hearing the soughing of the ghosts that their complete absence is unnatural.
A small figure emerges from the trees. She looks around with innocent curiosity, and I know her immediately. The child from Aish who recognized me. Of course. She and her family could not have survived the assault.
“Welcome to the Waiting Place, the realm of ghosts, little one,” I say to her. “I am the Soul Catcher, and I am here to help you cross to the other side.”
“I know who you are,” she says. �
�Why didn’t you help us? I looked for you.”
“You must forget the living,” I say. “For they can hurt you no longer.”
“How can I forget? That silver woman killed Irfa and Azma at the same time. Azma was only four. Why did she do that, Soul Catcher? Why didn’t you help?”
The child is but one ghost, but it takes me hours to pass her on, for how do I answer her queries? How do I explain Keris’s hatred to an innocent?
When it is done, when I have finally answered every question and heard every hurt, small or large, she walks into the river. I wait for the old sense of rightness to fill me. All the way home I wait. It does not come, not even when I enter my cabin and light the lamps.
Home, I tell myself. I am home. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore.
It feels like a prison.
XXVIII: The Blood Shrike
Something sits on my chest.
The fact sinks into my consciousness slowly and I don’t move a muscle. Whatever it is, it’s warm. Alive. And I don’t want it to realize I’m awake.
The weight shifts. A drop of warm water plops onto my forehead. I tense. I’ve heard of Karkaun water torture—
“Ha! Ba-ba-ba-ba.”
Two small hands dig into my face and pull the way one’s face simply shouldn’t be pulled. I open my eyes to find my nephew sitting atop me, drooling happily. When he sees I am awake, he smiles, revealing one perfect, pearly tooth that was not there when I left.
“Ba!” he declares as I sit up gingerly.
“I thought if anyone could wake you up”—Livia offers me a handkerchief from her seat beside my bed—“it was the Emperor.”
I wipe off the baby drool and give Zacharias a kiss, carefully untangling his fingers from my jaw and swinging my legs out of the bed. Snow flurries swirl outside the mottled glass windows of my room, and the blazing fireplace does little against the chill in the air. I feel hollowed out, like someone has taken a shovel to my insides. I edge away from the feeling, focusing instead on standing up.
“Easy, Shrike.” Livia takes Zacharias from me. “Spiro Teluman carried you through the tunnels, and you’ve been in and out of consciousness for the last two days. That bite on your neck was infected. You were raving when he first got here.”
And it must have taken at least five days to get out of the tunnels. Bleeding skies. A week. I have to pull together a strike force for Antium. Convince the Paters of my plan. Make sure we’ve enough weapons and food and horses. Alert those resisting within the capital. So much to accomplish and I’ve been asleep.
“I need my scims, Empress.” My vision goes funny when I stand, and my leg aches something vicious. But I thank the skies for my healing power, for without it, I’d have died before even reaching Teluman. I limp to the dresser and pull on a clean set of fatigues. “Where’s Teluman?”
“The Paters wanted him in the dungeons, but I thought that would be poor thanks for the man who brought back our Shrike,” Livia says. “He’s with Darin and Tas at the forge. Speaking of—I’ve made young Tas a little bed in Zacharias’s room. The child doesn’t seem keen on smithing, and I thought he could be companion to the Emperor instead.”
“The Paters won’t like—”
“The Paters won’t notice. To them, he’s just a Scholar. But he’s clever and kind-hearted. He likes Zacharias. Perhaps Tas could be a friend to him.” My sister’s face clouds. “Something normal in all of this madness.”
I nod quickly, because the last thing I need is Livia again musing about running off with the Emperor to the Southern Lands. “If Tas wishes it, I have no objection.”
“Good.” Livia beams at me. “And there’s something else I wish to discuss with you.”
Dread knots my belly, because she has that look on her face. The one she’d get before challenging my father on Martial jurisprudence. The one she had before she sent me to Adisa.
“Keris named herself Empress and the Paters accepted it,” Livia says. “You could do the same.”
In my shock, it takes me a moment to find the appropriate response. “That’s—that’s treason—”
“Oh, rubbish. He’s my son, Shrike.” She looks down at Zacharias, and smiles when he babbles at her. “I would never harm him. I want what is best for him, and this life is not it. You saved thousands of Martials and Scholars. The people love you—”
“There’s more to ruling than popularity.” I hold up my hands. “I’d need to be as diplomatic as Father, as clever as Mother, and as patient as you. Can you imagine me trying to make peace between Paters? Most of the time I just want to punch them. Having to meet ambassadors and make small talk—”
“You met with the Ankanese ambassador and now we have a treaty.”
“He was a warrior, like me. Easy to talk to. I was made to fight, Livia. Not rule. In any case, the Augurs named Marcus our emperor. Zacharias is his son and the skies-chosen heir—”
“The Augurs are dead.” My sister’s lips thin, as does her patience. “Everyone knows. Keris and her allies are using it as a reason to question Zacharias’s legitimacy as Emperor.”
“Then they are fools and we will fight—”
A knock sounds on the outer chamber, and never have I been so relieved to be interrupted. An unfamiliar voice speaks.
“Empress?”
My scim is in my hand in an instant. “Who the bleeding hells is that? Where’s Far—”
Then I remember.
Loyal to the end, he had cried. The mantra of my Gens. My scars ache and the hollowed-out feeling in my chest makes sense.
“That’s Deci Veturius.” Livia looks at me like I might break, and it makes me want to snarl at her. “Faris’s replacement. Harper cleared him.”
“Empress,” Deci says again. “Forgive me. Captain Harper is here to see the Blood Shrike.”
I look around the room for an escape. The closet has a passageway. It’s guarded. But not by anyone who would dare to talk.
“She’s—ah—” Livia calls to Deci as I walk through the doorway to the closet. “She’s indisposed.”
“Very good, Empress.”
Livia scurries after me, ignoring Zacharias chewing on her knuckles. “Harper’s been worried sick.” She gives me a reproachful look. “I don’t think he’s slept since Quin came back.”
My heart twinges a little at that, fool that it is.
“Empress.” I feel for the passage entrance, and it opens silently. “If we are to solidify the loyalty of the Paters and lure over Keris’s allies, then we must win Antium for the Emperor,” I say. “I have much to do. By your leave.”
My little sister sighs, and Zacharias regards us solemnly, as if waiting to be let in on a secret.
“One day, sister,” Livia says, “you’ll have to reckon with all the things you try to hide from yourself. And the longer you wait, the more it will hurt.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But not today.”
I slip through the passageway and into the castle, which is as damp and chilly as ever, though humming with courtiers and soldiers and servants.
“It’s good to see you up and about, Shrike.” A Martial woman in a maid’s uniform smiles as she passes, a Scholar soldier at her side.
“Heard you gave Grímarr hell, sir,” he says. “I’m sorry he’s still alive, but I hope to be by your side when you kill him dead.”
All the way to Darin’s smithy, people call greetings or stop to talk to me about Antium.
“When are we taking back the capital, Shrike—”
“I knew you’d be back on your feet—”
“Heard you took down a hundred of those Karkaun thugs—”
The more people approach, the faster I walk. The people love you, Livia said. But it is the Emperor who they must love. The Emperor who they must fight for.
My injuries pain me, and it takes me longer
than I anticipate to get to Darin’s smithy, a half-covered courtyard in the middle of the castle. The Scholar is stripped to his waist despite the chill, muscles rippling as he plunges a scim into the forge while Spiro Teluman works the bellows. As I step through one of the peaked archways into the courtyard, I notice a Scholar healer named Nawal watching Darin, steeling herself to approach.
“Not hard to look at, is he?” I jump at the voice next to me, my scim half-drawn. It is Musa, one hand gently nudging my blade back to its scabbard. He has a dozen bruises and as many cuts, most half-healed.
“So jumpy, Shrike. One would think you’d only just escaped a band of Karkauns by the skin of your teeth.” He chuckles darkly at his little joke, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Forgive me,” he says. “Laughing hurts less than facing what happened. I am sorry about Faris. I liked him.”
“Thank you,” I say. “And your joke was terrible, so naturally, Faris would have loved it.” I offer the Scholar a smile. “You’re no worse for wear, I hope?”
He pats his face, preening. “Everyone says I’m even more dashing with scars.”
“Piss off, you.” I shove him, surprised to find myself laughing, and move for Darin.
“How go the blades?”
Laia’s brother jumps, so immersed that he hadn’t noticed me.
“We’ve made two hundred since you left for Antium,” he says. “No beauty to them, but they won’t break.”
Spiro joins us, wiping melted snow off his shaved head with a rag. “The work goes more swiftly now,” he says. “You look better, Shrike.”
“I’m alive because of you.” I offer him my hand. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Get your men to wear the armor I’ve been forging for the past year.” He pulls me to the side as Darin and Musa converse. “The Empress Regent had it carted here at my request. But your soldiers say it’s unnatural.”
I have a vague memory of a glowing helmet. While Scholars attempt to find logical excuses for the supernatural, Martials are wary of it. It’s why I hid my healing powers for so long. I had no wish to be killed for practicing witchery.