All around, weapons and armor are stowed away. A great many of the fighters travel inside wagons, while their mounts bear supplies instead of riders. The sand efrits settle the dust of the caravan so it’s unnoticeable from afar, and the wind efrits lure clouds over us to mask us further. A jinn would have to get close to tell that this is an army, and according to the efrits none have.

“Once we’re in,” Darin says, “the Soul Catcher said there won’t be a need for the invisibility.”

“Because we won’t be able to hide from him,” I say. Rehmat wished to strengthen my magic by joining with me. But exhausted as I am from hiding so many of us for so long, I cannot bear having her inside my mind again. It feels too invasive.

“Don’t worry about hiding from him,” Darin says. “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we? No sign of those fiery bastards.”

All I can offer is a weak smile. Fear flares in my bones. It is an old enemy, my companion since childhood. Fear of what is to come. Fear of what awaits among those trees. Fear that all the Tribes and the Scholars have suffered was only a precursor to something worse.

“I am with you Laia.” Rehmat has given me space, sensing my distrust. Her sunlight figure floats alongside me, steady despite the wind. “When he comes, I will not leave your side.”

I nod, but I do not trust her yet. For I must kill the Nightbringer, and once, she loved the Nightbringer.

Love. Always, I return to that word. Darin went to prison because of love. Elias gave up his future because of love. The Nightbringer seeks vengeance because of love.

But, I shake myself out of my doldrums, love is why I still live. Why, when I look at Elias, I do not see the Mask or the Soul Catcher, no matter how he wishes me to. Love is why the Blood Shrike agreed to march her army hundreds of miles to support us, instead of stealing the Commandant’s Empire out from under her.

Though love will not help me if I do not have the Nightbringer’s story. With the Waiting Place only a day away, we are out of time. I pull my horse aside to wait for Mamie Rila’s wagon. Shan drives it, and she sits beside him, eyes closed, muttering.

“Not yet, child,” she says when I draw up beside her, somehow sensing my presence.

“We do not have much time.”

When she opens her eyes, the whites are reddened, as if she has not slept in days. A depthless well of night beckons from her gaze, and I am dizzy suddenly, grasping the pommel of my mount so I do not fall. It is not until she looks away that I return to myself.

“Not yet.”

“It must be soon,” I tell her. “The moment we enter that forest, he will know. And he will come for us.”

Mamie observes the trees ahead, as if she has just noticed them.

“Come to me in the darkest hour of night,” she says. “When the stars sleep. Come and hear the Tale.” She emphasizes the last word as if it a singular entity, and closes her eyes again. “Though I do not know what good it will do you.”

* * *

???

Rehmat wakes me from a deep sleep just after midnight. A fat half-moon tints the dead grass blue, and lights my way to Mamie’s wagon. Despite the fact that I can see the path clearly, my steps are heavy. I have begged Mamie for the story. But now that it is time to hear it, I do not know if I wish to.

On my way, I see Elias on watch, walking the perimeter of the camp. His whole body shifts as I approach, but not with that tension he had when I walked through the Waiting Place with him. This is different. He is not a wounded thing, avoiding my touch. Instead his tautness is that of an oud string, aching to be played.

“The Blood Shrike will be here by dawn.” He keeps his attention fixed on the rolling hills of the Empire. “It won’t take more than four days to get to the jinn grove.”

The woods appear gnarled and impassable, but Elias senses my skepticism. “The forest will open for us,” he says. “And the jinn grove will hold us.”

I shudder when I think of that place. Rehmat hates it the way I hated Kauf, for it is where her kin suffered. But I hate it because of what I learned there. What I saw and what I heard: my mother killing my father and sister to spare them torment at Keris’s hands. Mother’s song, and the sound of her crime. The soft crack of lives sundered, of her heart destroyed.

I still hear that sound in my nightmares. Often enough that I never forget. Often enough that it lurks at the back of my mind.

“Come back,” Elias says, and I emerge from my recollections and look down in surprise, for his hand is twined with mine.

“I’m with you, Laia,” he says. He spoke those words to me as we fled Blackcliff, what feels like eons ago.

“Are you?” I whisper, for though I wanted this, I am scared to trust it. Scared he will pull away again.

He tucks a curl back from my face. A simple gesture that sets me aflame. “I’m trying.”

The space between us is too great, so I step nearer. “Why?”

“Because—” His voice is low and we are close to—something. Skies know what, but I just want to get there. “Because you are—you are my—”

His head jerks up then, and he steps back, a rueful half smile on his face. “Ah—someone is waiting for you.”

I glance around and spot Mamie vanishing behind a nearby wagon. Internally, I curse.

“One day,” I tell Elias, “we won’t be interrupted. And I expect you to finish that sentence.”

When I reach Mamie’s wagon, I put thoughts of Elias aside. For it is not familiar, loving Mamie Rila waiting for me, but the Kehanni of Tribe Saif. She wears eggplant-purple robes with bell sleeves and a severe neck. They are hand-embroidered in a dozen shades of green and silver, and edged in tiny mirrors. Her thick hair is unbound and curls magnificently about her shoulders, a midnight halo.

Without a word, she gestures for me to follow her. I look back at the camp, worried it will be visible from above, but the wind efrits have enticed a thick fog to hide it.

“Go,” Rehmat whispers. “They are safe.”

Mamie Rila and I make our way past the sentries and up a hill shrouded in mist. When we reach the top she bids me sit on the damp grass, and settles herself across from me. I cannot see the camp from here. I cannot see anything but Mamie.

“The Tale lives in me now, Laia of Serra,” she says. “It is unlike any that I have told. I am changed. But do not fear. For I will return.”

Her eyes fade to white, and she grasps my hands. Her voice deepens, transforming from a gentle lilt to a growl from the very heart of the earth.

“I awoke in the glow of a young world,” she says, and I am gripped. “When man knew of hunting but not tilling, of stone but not steel. It smelled of rain and earth and life. It smelled of hope.

“Arise, beloved.”

For the next few hours, I do not sit with Mamie, but with the Nightbringer. I am not in the Empire, but deep in the Waiting Place, and then in lands far beyond. I am not enthralled by the story of a creature I’m only just beginning to understand. I am him.

I learn of his creation, his education, his loneliness. His relationship to humans and his marrow-deep love of his people. I discover Rehmat as she was in life, a fierce wandering poet. When Cain is mentioned—when Mamie speaks of what he and the Scholars did—I burn with hatred. And when I hear of the Nightbringer’s vengeance, of his love for Husani, my heart breaks.

“—I mourned her then. I mourn her still.”

As suddenly as it begun, the Tale is over. Mamie’s eyes darken to their familiar brown, and when she speaks, it is with her own voice.

“It is done,” she says.

“No.” I stop her from rising. “It cannot be done. There must be something else. Something about—about the scythe, or when he is at his weakest. Something more about him.”

Mamie bows her head. “That is all the darkness gave me, my love,” she says. “It will have to be enough.”

But it is not. I already know that it is not.

LIII: The Soul Catcher

The Blood Shrike and her army approach from the north, on the plains that sweep out from the Waiting Place. When the rumble of hooves is deafening and the smell of horse and men overwhelming, the Shrike lifts her fist and slows her forces to a halt.

Wind howls along the plains, and the two armies stare each other down. Scholars stand with the Blood Shrike’s troops, true. But there are far more Martials, and the Tribes have seen their people destroyed by the Martials.

The Shrike swings off her horse and approaches. My magic, scant as it is, rises, and I sense what is in her. Love. Joy. Sadness. And as she looks at Mamie, a deep well of self-hate.

Mauth’s warning rings through my mind. Your duty is not to the living. Your duty is not to yourself. Your duty is to the dead, even to the breaking of the world.

But when I look at the Blood Shrike’s bare, scarred face, the past overwhelms me. She is not just the Shrike. She is Helene Aquilla. Friend. Warrior. Comrade-in-arms. We did violence together. We survived together. We saved each other from death and madness and loneliness in those long years at Blackcliff.

Not seeing her made it easy to ignore the memories Cain gave me. Now that she stands before me, those recollections hit like one of her scim attacks—swift and painful.

“Hail, Shrike.”

“Hail, Banu al-Mauth.” We regard each other, wary as two eagles meeting over a dead antelope.