by Sabaa Tahir
“A spirit.” Karinna flutters past me, and I think I feel her hands along my hair. “Haunted like you.”
She shifts behind me now, and I’m afraid to move, worried that when I look, she will be gone. But she returns, drifting in front of my face.
“Come, little broken bird,” she whispers. “Walk with me. I will take you to the other ghost. I will tell you of my lovey.”
LV: Laia
“Have you eaten yet?”
Darin finds me among the Tribespeople, where I am tending those still struggling with injuries from the wraith attack. Aubarit just joined me, her intrinsic understanding of the body making her an excellent partner. I look at my brother, dazed. I have not had time to eat. I have not had time for anything besides trying to help the wounded.
“She hasn’t. Nor have I.” Musa, his long hair pulled into a knot on top of his head, carries my supplies—mostly to irritate the pretty Martial, he’d chuckled to himself.
“Go on, both of you.” Aubarit takes my bag from Musa. “You’ve been at this for hours. Gibran can help me.” She glances from under her eyelashes at the handsome young Tribesman trailing Darin.
“Ah, young love,” Musa says, and I glance at him, wondering if I will see bitterness in his regard. But his smile takes years off his face, which has been drawn and desolate of late.
Darin leads Musa and me to the Blood Shrike’s tent. It is the largest in the camp, and doubles as a command center. Within, the Shrike, Avitas, and Elias gather around a central table with Spiro, Quin, and a few Martial Paters. Afya stands across from them, moving stones around on a large map.
Darin heads immediately to the far corner of the tent, where someone has laid out dried fruit, flatbread, and lentil stew. My stomach twinges hopefully. I do not remember when I last ate.
The Soul Catcher glances up at me when I enter, and briefly over to Musa, before he turns back to the Shrike.
“—catapults won’t be done until the morning,” she is saying. “And since that’s when the enemy army will arrive, it doesn’t give us much time to break down the city.”
“We’re not trying to break them down,” Elias responds. “We just want the jinn in the Sher Jinnaat to keep their distance until Laia can get to the Nightbringer. If we put archers here”—he points to a map—“along the river—”
“He’s jealous,” Musa murmurs in my ear. “Mark me.”
“He’s not jealous.” I thought before that he might have been. But while Elias has been more himself these past few days, he has still kept his distance. “He’s the Soul Catcher, and he is here in service to the dead.”
“Rubbish.” Musa nudges me. “Look at him.”
“He’s ignoring me.”
“Ah, but you’re thick, aapan.” Musa gives me an exasperated look as we make our way to the food. “To ignore you, he first has to be aware of you. And he is. He’s aware of every move you make. If you tripped right now—”
At that, Musa deviously sticks out his foot. I stumble and nearly fall on my face, catching myself just in time. Almost before I’ve righted myself, the Soul Catcher shoots out a hand, as if to catch me from across the room. The Blood Shrike and Avitas Harper exchange a glance. Musa, meanwhile, has caught my arm, and watches the tableau with a smug grin.
“See,” he says. “I told—ow!” He winces when I dig my fingers into his arm with more force than strictly needed.
“He has a battle to plan, Musa,” I say. “He doesn’t have time for me right now. Nor I for him.”
“Love can be more powerful in a battle than planning or strategy. Love keeps us fighting. Love drives us to survive.”
“Skies, stop meddling—”
“I meddle because I hope, aapan.” The humor bleeds from his voice, and I’m certain he’s remembering his beloved, doomed Nikla. “Life is too short not to hope.”
Musa excuses himself, moving to Darin, but by the time my brother’s made a plate for me, I can only pick at it. After a few minutes, I step out into the night. A drop of rain lands on my nose. Within seconds, a spring drizzle falls, promising a muddy morning.
I do not wish to go to Mamie’s wagon, where I have been sleeping. Instead, I wind through the camp, my hood low so that no one calls out to me. A gold form appears and Rehmat speaks.
“What troubles you?”
That I don’t trust you, I think. That I might die in the morning. That I’ve never felt more alone in my life.
“Tomorrow I will fight with you,” I tell her. “I will allow you to join with me so that we might defeat the Nightbringer. But right now, I just want to be alone.”
She bows her head in assent. “I have another I must seek out. I will return when it is time, young warrior, and not before.” Her glow fades, leaving me in the dark once more.
I pass by a group of soldiers struggling to keep their lamps lit as they work on the catapults. What will tomorrow be like? I know what the Blood Shrike’s troops are supposed to do, and where the efrits are meant to be. I know how the Tribes will be divided, and where we expect Keris’s forces to attack.
But facing the Nightbringer—I cannot wrap my mind around it. Rehmat says defeating him will not be as simple as killing him with the scythe strapped across my back.
Yet Mamie’s story gave me such little knowledge.
Love can be more powerful in a battle than planning or strategy.
So Musa said. But my love is a stream of water poured into a desert. Down a crevasse where it will never see the light. Never bloom into anything greater.
Rubbish, Laia. A calmer voice prevails—a wiser voice. If there is anything I have learned since the day that wretched Mask killed my grandparents and arrested Darin, it is that you must love while you can. For tomorrow, all that you love might be ash.
I pass by Tribe Saif and Mamie Rila’s wagon, my thoughts on Elias. On what it felt like the first time I met him. That fire blazing in his eyes, that need for freedom, so like my own. The slow, careful way he built my trust after we escaped Blackcliff, and how he believed in me before I did.
And I think of the way he held me after I learned, in these very woods, that my mother was a murderer and that she still lived.
Afterward, he spoke words that I haven’t wanted to remember. Because I feared I would never again see the man who said them, no matter how much I called him by his name.
If I seem different, remember that I love you. No matter what happens to me. Say you’ll remember, please.
“I remember,” I whisper, and make my way across the jinn grove. “I remember.”
* * *
«««
Elias’s tent sits at the northern end of the camp, closer to the trees than to the rest of the soldiers. But I know just by looking at it, and by listening to some voice inside me that connects me to him, that he is not there. I follow that voice south, to the edge of the jinn grove, where he stands alone, soaked to the skin, looking over the Sher Jinnaat.
I step toward him, only to hear the hiss of a blade. Cold steel meets my throat. He makes out my face and drops his scim instantly.
“Sorry.” He turns back to the city. “Jumpy.”
“Me too.” I ask him, “Is it always like this before a battle?”
“You’ve fought in a fair few yourself now,” he says.
“Not one where everything depends on me.”
“You’re not alone. You have Darin. Afya, Mamie, and the Tribes.” Elias’s gaze flashes to me. “The Blood Shrike and the Martials. Musa and the Scholars. Those who love you. Those—those who you love.”
“You forgot yourself, then,” I say. “You most of all.”
He shakes his head. “I’m here because I must be,” he says. “It is my duty. My burden to make up for my wrongs. I do not deserve your love, Laia—”
“Haven’t you learned?” I say. “You don’t get to decide if y
ou deserve my love or not. I decide that. You are worthy of my love. You are worthy of the love Mamie has for you, and the love the Blood Shrike feels. You’ve done terrible things? So have I. We were born into war, Elias. It is all we’ve known. Your mistakes only define the rest of your life if you let them. Don’t let them.”
He regards me thoughtfully and reaches for my hand. A spark jumps between us and he hesitates, but then laces his fingers through mine.
“There’s a question I have been meaning to ask you,” I blurt out, for if I do not ask now, I never will. “But it is from before you took your vow to Mauth. I don’t know if you will remember—”
“When it comes to you, I remember everything,” he says, and my pulse quickens.
“After we escaped Nur with Afya, you left,” I say. “You said something to me before you did. I was sleeping, but—”
“How do you know I said something to you?” He turns to me, but his face is in shadow.
“What did you say?”
“I said—” But he stops short. The drizzle thickens and threatens to transform into a downpour.
“Never mind.” He raises his voice as the rain intensifies. “We should get back to camp, Laia. You need dry clothes—”
But camp is full of people and weapons and reminders that tomorrow is coming. I shake my head, and when he tugs me, I dig my heels in.
“Take me somewhere else,” I say. “You can windwalk. There must be a place we could go.”
He steps toward me slowly, deliberately. His eyes burn, sweeping across my skin with as much heat as a caress. We could windwalk with just our hands connected, but he wraps his arms around my waist, and I bury my face in the hard expanse of his chest as we fly through the dark.
I do not dwell on tomorrow or on the war or the Nightbringer. I immerse myself in the feeling of Elias’s touch. I breathe him in, that spice and rain scent that weaves itself through my dreams.
We stop abruptly, stumbling forward a few steps before he steadies us.
“This is the only other place in the forest the jinn won’t go,” he says. His cabin.
The door is not locked—for no human would come so far into the Waiting Place. Once we are inside, Elias scrapes tinder against flint, and the barest glow bursts from the fireplace. When the flame is higher, he lights four or five lamps before turning to me.
“You need dry clothes.” He opens a chest near his bed and rifles through it until he finds a soft black shirt.
I set my scythe down beside Elias’s weapons and change in the washroom, stripping my sodden clothing and toweling off. I am thankful there is no looking glass. His shirt is far too big on me, and my hair is a disaster, the dozens of pins I used to tame it this morning tangled in one big mass. It will take me ages to pull them out. I sigh, reach for Elias’s lone wooden comb, and step out.
The Soul Catcher has changed into dry fatigues and kicked off his shoes. He sits on a deerskin rug before the fire, warming his hands.
“You can sleep there.” He nods to his bed. “I’ll take the floor. At least you’ll get a good night of rest before tomorrow.”
Sleep isn’t what I had in mind, but I shrug and sit near him cross-legged. Ever so carefully, I begin to pull out my pins. The first few make me wince, so tangled that I’m worried I’ll pull out half my hair with them.
Elias looks over at me and I catch my breath. The fire tinges his brown skin a deep, beguiling gold, and his hair, dark and unruly, falls into his eyes. The cabin is chilly, but beneath his gaze, I am not. His regard does not feel like the regard of the Soul Catcher.
He shifts his attention to the pin in my hand and my ineffectual efforts to remove it.
“Let me.” He comes around and sits behind me atop a fat cushion, long legs stretched on either side.
I feel his hands in my hair, removing the pin with deft gentleness. I shiver, and he shifts closer, his chest against my back now. The scrape of his stubble on my neck is maddening, and I find myself knotting my shirt in my hands, then unknotting it. I am suddenly without words, my thoughts a jumble of desire and confusion and anger. Why are you so cruel? I want to shout at him. Why offer warmth and gentleness and your touch if you are so determined to be the Soul Catcher instead of the man I love?
But I banish those thoughts. I will not feel anger tonight. Nor fear. Only hope.
My body melts against his, and I tip my head back so it’s easier for him to reach the pins. He pulls out a particularly stubborn one, and I marvel that hands so big, hands calloused from holding scims and daggers, could so cleverly work the pins from my hair.
“Does that magic of yours extend to hair knots?” I murmur.
His deep, quiet laugh echoes through my chest. “Apparently. They seem very agreeable.”
“They must like you.”
He shifts back again, and though I want to protest the fact that I cannot feel him anymore, his legs press against mine in a way that leaves no doubt that I am not the only one whose heart now beats faster.
“That night in the desert, when I was leaving,” he says, his lips so close to my ear that I tremble, a thrill running down my body. “I did say something to you.”
He removes another pin. My shirt slides off one shoulder, and the hard muscles of his arm brush against it slowly.
“I said: You are my temple.” His voice is low and hoarse. I lean my body into his, unable to stop, desiring him with a soul-deep wanting that aches. His scent intoxicates me, and I inhale so that I might remember it always. Even as he carefully removes another pin, his hard thighs tighten against my hips. I feel him, all of him, enough to know that Soul Catcher or not, he wants me as badly as I want him.
“You are my priest,” he says. His lips brush my neck, and I’m not dreaming it. He pulls out the last pin. He threads his fingers through my hair, loose now, with great care. His touch on my waist is less patient—he pulls my body around until my legs are slung to the side, my chest pressed against his.
My hands fall to his hips, and I gasp and dig my fingers into them as he tilts my head back, as he skims his lips along the hollow of my throat. I want him. Skies above, I want him. More so because I can feel him holding himself back, feel his entire body thrumming with need.
“You are my prayer,” he says, and now his eyes meet mine, and I see the war in him. See him teetering between the Soul Catcher and Elias. Between duty and hope. Between the task thrust upon him and the freedom he so craves. I know what he is going to say next. I have heard him whisper his mantra many times, though never like this. But as he teeters between who he’s become and who he wants to be, I say nothing. You’re in there, I think. Come back to me.
“You are my release,” he whispers.
A breath then, a slice of time that will mark the before and the after of this moment. A heartbeat during which I do not know who will win the battle inside him or if our love is enough.
Then his eyes clear, and he is Elias Veturius, warm and beautiful and mine. I pull him to me, reveling in the feel of his lush mouth as I steal the words from his lips. I run my hands over the hard planes of his shoulders, his arms—it isn’t enough. I want more of him, all of him.
He yanks me closer, as hungry as I am, kissing me with the same dark heat, as if he knows that this night, our last night, our only night, will never come again.
LVI: The Soul Catcher
If Mauth objects to Laia and me being together, I don’t hear it. And if the duty-obsessed Soul Catcher whispers at me that I am a fool, I don’t hear him either. I lose myself in the feel of her lips against mine, her scent filling my senses. She pulls her fingers through my hair, trailing kisses from my jaw to the ridges of my shoulders.
Her nails dig into my back, and she bites me, gentle and forceful at the same time. I curse at the frisson of heat that grips me and push her away.
We have a battle to fight tomorrow. I have a dut
y to fulfill. This won’t end well.
“Laia—”
But she shakes her head, gold eyes fiery, and puts a finger against my lips. “You love me,” she says. “And I love you. And that is all that matters this night.”
She runs her hands down my chest, straddles me, and with one smooth pull, tears open the buttons of my shirt, defiance suffusing every move. Stop me, she dares. But I wouldn’t. Not for the world, and in seconds, I’m pulling off hers.
I marvel at the perfection of every curve, every muscle, every scar, every last inch of her, but I don’t have words for it, and she looks away, embarrassed, her arms rising to cover herself.
“Don’t you dare,” I say fervently. “You’re perfect.” She smiles then, the smile I dream about.
“That,” she says, “is the most gratifying look I have ever seen on your face.”
I pull her to me, grazing my teeth across her lips, and then down her neck, across the hard perfection of her collarbone and to the silk below.
Clothes—accursed clothes—we remove what is left, laughing as we do, and then, still atop me, she takes my hand, moving it to the sweetest part of her body, dropping her head back, her breath going shallow when I do as she wishes. I smile, inordinately pleased at watching her eyes flutter closed as she rocks above me, as she loses herself to her pleasure.
Her body shudders, and I nearly lose my control at the feel of Laia losing hers. When she is still again, she looks at me, ducking her head in sudden shyness, but I lift her chin. The light of the fire deepens her gold eyes, and they burn like embers.
I kiss her slow then, the way I’ve wanted to for so long. I take my time, savoring the fullness of her mouth, tracing circles on the smooth swell of her hips. When I move my lips down her body, I watch her face, the delicate shifts in her expression, the way her pulse flutters at her throat, rapid as my own.
But she moans impatiently, and the sound undoes me. I flip her onto her back, settling only a little of my weight on her. Her fingers lace through mine, and when I lift them over her head, she curves into me.