“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.