by Sabaa Tahir
“Unnatural,” I say. “Is it?”
“The Augurs taught me to make the armor. It will help our fighters blend in with the darkness. It will turn away arrows. It’s resistant to fire. And it loses that glow as soon as it’s put on.”
I regard the smith thoughtfully. “I don’t remember much about the journey out. But I do remember you saying you’d been waiting for me.”
He turns to a scim awaiting polish. “The Augurs warned me you’d come,” he says. “Told me much depended on me working in that damned cave, making armor until you showed up. I was starting to think they were crazy.”
“Why you? And . . .” I glance at Darin. “Why him? You knew the risks in taking him on. In sharing our secrets. It’s a miracle you weren’t both executed.”
“The secrets never should have been ours alone.” Teluman’s voice is harsh, and he glares down at the scim. “I had a sister,” he says after a moment. “Isadora. When she was sixteen, she fell in love with a Scholar girl. They were discovered together by an Illustrian who had been courting Isa.”
“Oh,” I say. “Oh no.”
“I tried to get her to Marinn, where she could love who she wished. I failed. The Empire used one of my blades to execute her. Or so they told me. They didn’t let me see her, before the end.”
His look of self-loathing is as familiar to me as my own face. “Do you know how many blades I made for them before Isa died, Shrike?” he says. “Do you know how many were used to kill innocents? But it wasn’t until it affected my family that I finally did something. That fact will haunt me until I die.”
“What happened to the Scholar girl?”
“I found her. Put her on a ship south. She lives in Ankana. Writes to me sometimes. Anyway, I met him a few months after.” Spiro nods to Darin. “Curious, just like Isa. An artist like her. Full of questions like her. And he told me he had a little sister.”
The smith gives me a level stare, snow dusting his many piercings. “I waited for you because the Augurs said you’d set things right. That you’d help to forge a new world. I will hold you to that, Shrike. I’m done siding with tyrants.”
“Shrike.” Darin interrupts us, a furrow between his brows. “Musa says one of his wights just returned from the Tribal desert. Aish has fallen to Keris. No one’s seen Laia. She’s been missing for days.”
“Missing?” Worry gnaws at me, and I turn to Musa. “I thought you had eyes everywhere.”
“I do,” Musa says. “The wights can’t find her.”
“Which means I need to,” Darin says. “I know we need weapons for the Scholars, but she’s my sister, Shrike.”
I cannot lose him now. We need his smithing skills—not to mention the fact that if he leaves and Keris gets to him, Laia will murder me. “Darin, give me until after we take Antium—”
“What if something’s happened to her?”
“Your sister,” I say, “is tough. Tougher than you. As tough as me. Wherever she is, she will be all right. I’ll have my spies in the south keep an eye out for her.”
As it happens, I already sent Laia a message, asking her to tell the Tribes that we’ll offer support in their fight against Keris if they swear fealty to Zacharias. “When I get word of her—and I will get word of her—I promise, I’ll let you know.”
The Scholar is about to protest again, but if I have to argue further, I might lose my temper. “Musa.” I grab the Beekeeper by the arm and walk him out of the forge. “Come with me.”
“Now, Shrike.” Musa follows me reluctantly. “While I do like my women tall and bossy, and while I know this face is difficult to resist, sadly, my heart belongs to another—”
“Oh, shut up.” I stop when we’re far from the courtyard. “You’re not that pretty.” He bats his eyelashes at me, and I wish he were just a bit uglier. “I need eyes in Antium, Scholar. Mine have all gone to ground.”
“Hmm. Humans are sadly unreliable.” Musa pulls an apple from his cloak and pares off a slice. Its sweet scent cuts through the damp, and he hands me the piece. “What do I get for helping you, Blood Shrike?”
“The thanks of the Emperor and his Blood Shrike,” I say. At the distaste on his face, I sigh. “What do you want?”
“A favor,” he says. “At a time and place of my choosing.”
“I can’t promise that. You could ask for anything.”
He shrugs. “Good luck taking back your capital.”
Of course. He wouldn’t make things easy. Then again, if it were me in his shoes, I’d ask for the same. “Fine,” I say. “But nothing . . . untoward.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” Musa shakes my hand with only mildly exaggerated solemnity. “In fact, I’ll offer you a little tidbit right now. Captain Avitas Harper is on his way here. He’s in the northwest corridor, passing that very ugly statue of a yak, and moving rather quickly.”
“How—” I know how he does it. Still, the specificity is uncanny.
“Ten seconds,” Musa murmurs. “Eight—six—”
I stride swiftly away, wincing at the pain lancing up my leg. But I’m not fast enough.
“Blood Shrike,” Harper calls in a voice that I cannot ignore. I curse Musa as he walks off, laughing quietly.
“Harper,” I say. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Quin is, would you?” I keep walking through the dark stone halls of the keep, fast enough that he has to jog to catch up. I am lightheaded—despite my swift healing, I’m not recovered from what happened in Antium. “I need to ask him if—”
Harper steps in front of me, grabs my hand, and pulls me into a side hallway with a force that surprises me.
“I know you’re angry at me,” he says. “Maybe I deserve it. But you’re also angry at yourself. And you shouldn’t be. Faris—”
“Faris knew what he was doing.” I yank my hand back, and the fleeting hurt in Harper’s expression makes me look down. “Faris was a soldier. Faris gave me a fighting chance.”
“But you’re still angry,” Harper says softly.
“And why shouldn’t I be,” I snarl at him. “You know what they’re doing to us in that city. The city I lost, Harper. The city I let Keris betray—”
“You didn’t—”
“It was so quiet,” I say. “All our people cowering because they are desperately afraid. Not of death or torture. They’re too strong for that. No, they’re afraid of being forgotten, Harper.”
Harper sighs, and it feels like he can see right into me, into those moments I mourned Faris, those moments I spent staring into the eyes of a child’s skull, thinking death had finally come.
He steps near enough that I can smell the cinnamon and cedar of his skin, the steel at his waist. Snow has melted in his black hair, cut so close that it looks like the feathers of a raven.
“That is a terrible thing, Shrike,” he says. “But it’s not why you’re angry. Tell me why you’re angry.”
That hollowness that has gnawed at me since waking expands, and I cannot stop it. I feel every wound. Every scar.
“When I was in the tunnels,” I say, “and I thought I was going to die, I thought about you.”
Though people pass us, no one looks twice. All they see is the Blood Shrike standing with her second. A minute passes. Still, he waits.
“It might have been you with me,” I finally whisper. “Instead of Faris. But it wasn’t. And when he stayed back because there were too many Karkauns, I—” My eyes burn. Curse the Nightbringer for taking my mask. In this moment, I would have drawn strength from it.
“I’ve known him all my life, Harper. We survived Blackcliff together. Skies, he tried to kill me once or twice when we were Fivers. But when I was crawling through that tunnel, when I knew he was fighting and dying for me, all I could think was that I was so thankful it wasn’t you up there. Because if it had been, we’d have died together.”
I step back from him now, and tears threaten. “But it wasn’t you,” I go on. “So Faris died alone. Now I have Paters to appease, and an army to gather, and an invasion to plan. I have an Empire to reclaim. But I am afraid of everything I might lose. So yes, Harper. I am angry. Wouldn’t you be?”
My eyes are full so I cannot see his expression. I think he reaches for me, but this time, when I walk away, he doesn’t follow. Just as well. Far to the west, my people suffer under the violent rulership of Grímarr. I failed them. I let that bastard sack our capital. I do not have time to agonize over Harper, or to ponder how much it cost me to tell him the truth. I do not have time to feel.
I have a city to take.
XXIX: The Nightbringer
For centuries, humans were enough. I welcomed those who came to the Forest of Dusk with love, as Mauth asked me to. It was no chore, for many were lost, and longing to be found, healed, and passed on to a kinder place.
But in time, a loneliness descended. No matter how rich and varied the lives of humans, they were falling stars in my world. They flared bright and brief, and then they burned out.
My powers were familiar terrain, and the Waiting Place itself no mystery. Even the nuances of the ghosts grew predictable. My domain was flooded with spirits as human civilization spread. But I could pass them with hardly a thought.
I grew restless. Emptiness gripped me, a vast chasm that nothing could fill. I wanted. I yearned. But I did not know what for.
Mauth must have sensed my agitation, for in time, I felt new sparks enter the Waiting Place. Fully formed and as bewildered as I was when I arrived.
Your own kind, Mauth said, guiding me to them. For those of clay and fire are not meant to walk alone. And the Beloved was meant to receive love as well as give it, else how could I have named you such?
I nurtured those young flames, until they were full grown and burning bright. Together, we discovered their names. Their magic. Diriya learned to manipulate water in the flat heat of the summer, when we had forgotten the taste of rain. Pithar spoke to stone long before she realized it spoke back, and she raised up the Sher Jinnaat—our city. Supnar gave life to the walls, so we could imbue them with our stories. In time, the jinn began to pair and create their own little flames, each more beautiful than the last. We had a city, now. A civilization.
Still, I felt incomplete. Empty.
Little remains of Khuri. A few ashes that I gather close, untouched by the wind. Umber bunches to fly in pursuit of Laia and the Soul Catcher, but I stop her.
“They are unimportant,” I say. “Protect Maro. Only the reaping matters.”
Perhaps she will defy me. Her hands tighten on her glaive, and Faaz and Azul step forward, ready to quell her flame with stone and weather. Talis shudders, inconsolable at Khuri’s loss.
“We will have our vengeance, bright one,” I say to Umber. “But not if we think like mortals.”
From the city, screams rise. Keris does her work well. And Umber is hungry to join in.
“Unleash your spite on the humans,” I say. “I will return.”
I gather what little I have of Khuri and ride the winds deep into the Forest of Dusk, to the place I hate the most. The jinn grove, or what is left of it.
As I enter, I sense a presence watching from the forest. A spirit. An ancient impulse to pass her on seizes me, so deeply ingrained that after a thousand years of ignoring the ghosts, I nearly go to her. But I crush that instinct.
Khuri’s ashes fly away on a gentle wind, and I consider her life and all that she was: the deep burgundy of her flame; how she loved her siblings; how she took up a scim when they were lost, destroying an entire legion of Scholar invaders with her wrath.
When my pain is as sharp as the scythe on my back, I ram through Mauth’s defenses and seek out a place that exists beyond the Forest of Dusk. A place of claws and teeth. A Sea of Suffering.
The suffering reaches out to me. More, it demands, and I sense its unending hunger. A maw that can never be filled. More.
“Soon,” I whisper.
I consider, then, the problem of Laia. The girl knows now of the scythe. She realizes what it can do.
Yet I am no closer to understanding the unnatural magic that exists within her. Time to remedy that.
My son, do not do this.
Mauth has tried to speak to me before. Always, I have ignored that hated voice, so ancient, so wise, so monstrously unfeeling.
Thou art the Beloved, Mauth says.
“No, Father,” I say after a long time. “I was the Beloved. Now I am something else.”
XXX: Laia
After Elias departs, I sink onto the rock where we kissed, stunned as the depths of my failure sink in. For it is not just that Elias left again. After all, I told him to go.
It is that I did not get the scythe. I am alone in the middle of the Tribal desert with no food, no water, and no way of getting to either of those things quickly. All I have is my dagger and a freshly ravaged heart.
“Rehmat?” The creature does not respond, and I wince when I think of the dismay in its voice after I killed Khuri. Like I was a cruel child who broke the neck of a bird.
I drop my face into my hands and try to breathe, focusing on the desert scents of salt and earth and juniper. The wind yanks at my hair and clothes, its wail echoing in my head like the Nightbringer’s keen. I wish for Nan and Pop. For my mother. I wish for Izzi. For Keenan. For everyone who is gone.
But there is one who isn’t gone. Not yet.
I close my eyes, as I did weeks ago in the Forest of Dusk, and think about all that has bonded Darin and me. Then I call out softly, so as not to draw unwanted attention like last time.
“Darin?”
The minutes slide by. Perhaps I did not hear him before. Perhaps it was wishful thinking—
Laia?
“Darin!” I make myself speak his name quietly. “You can hear me?”
Yes. A heavy pause. So I did hear you before. I wondered if I’d imagined it. Darin sounds as if he has not slept in an age. But it is his voice and I want to sob in relief.
How do I know this isn’t a trick?
“When you were fifteen, you liked our neighbor Sendiya so much that you spent a month drawing a portrait of her even though I told you she was horribly vain. But she gave it back because she said you made her nose too small. You moped for weeks.”
It wasn’t weeks. Maybe three days.
“Three weeks,” I insist, though I am grinning.
Thankfully my luck has improved.
“Ugh.” I make a vomiting sound. “I don’t want to know. You have terrible taste in girls, Darin.”
Not this time! You know her, she says. Nawal—she’s a healer.
I nod though of course he cannot see me. “I do know her. She’s too good for you.”
Probably. Are you all right? Where are you?
“I—I am fine.”
The lie weighs heavy on my tongue. I have never been able to fool my brother. Not when I broke a jar of Nan’s precious jam and tried to blame it on an alley cat; not when our parents and Lis died, and I told him I could fall asleep fine without him watching over me. In the end, he took the blame for the jam. And he watched over my sleep for months, though he was only seven at the time.
Laia, he says. Tell me.
His words are a boulder that breaks a dam. I tell him everything. My inability to break through to Elias and remind him of his humanity. My impotence when Khuri took control of my mind. The feeling of the scythe falling from my fingers. The only thing I do not mention is Khuri’s death. It is too raw, yet.
“And now I am stuck.” I am surprised that as I finish, a thin line of purple blooms on the eastern horizon, illuminating an undulating landscape of canyons and cliffs and massive fingers of rock jutting into the sky. “I have no idea what I am going to do.”
Yes you do, Darin says. You just can’t see it yet. You feel defeated, Laia. And it’s no wonder. It’s so great a burden to bear alone. But I’m with you, even if I’m not beside you. You will sort through this, like you do everything that comes your way. And you will do it with strength. So stop. Think. Tell me, what are you going to do?
I stare out at the desert, a speck of nothing against its vastness. These rocks, this dirt, it will abide for millennia, while I am but a moment in time that will be over all too soon. The thought is crushing, and I cannot breathe. I look up at the stars as if they will give me air. They have been the only constant in my life these past eighteen months.
Though that is not true. My own heart has been constant too. My will. That is not much. But it has gotten me this far.
“Water runs through a gully nearby,” I say to Darin. “Rare enough in the desert that there’s likely a settlement—or at least a road—nearby. I am going to find it. And I am going to find Mamie Rila and Afya.”
Good. One step at a time, little sister. Just like always. Be safe.
Then he’s gone and I am alone again. But not lonely anymore. By the time the sun rises, I have made my way to a settlement a mile or so from the gully. It is a small Tribal village where I am able to trade news of Aish for a pack, a canteen, and a bit of food.
The villagers tell me of a Martial outpost only a few miles away. In the dead of night, I sneak into the stables with my magic cloaking me and a small sack of pears. I find a likely looking mare, who stands still while I muffle her hooves with sackcloth and saddle her. When I go to put on her bridle, she nearly bites my fingers off. I have to bribe her with four pears before she will allow me to lead her out of the stable.
For the next two weeks, I make my way toward Aish in the hopes of finding the Tribes that escaped the city. Two weeks of gathering up scraps of news about the Nightbringer’s location. Two weeks of rationing water, trading out stolen horses, and avoiding Martial patrols by the skin of my teeth.