A Sky Beyond the Storm Read online

  Part II

  The Reaping

  XIV: The Nightbringer

  As a young jinn, I drifted through the trees in awe of the silence and the sound, the light and the redolent earth. In my ignorance, I set the forest alight. But Mauth’s laughter was gentle, his instruction patient. He taught me to dance from shadow to flame, to step lightly so as not to disturb the small creatures with whom I shared the Waiting Place.

  After I had learned the swell of the forest and the curves of the river, after I stalked with the wolves and rode the winds with the falcons, Mauth guided me to the border of the Waiting Place. Beyond, fires burned and stone clashed. The children of clay laughed and fought and stole life and brought it forth with joy and blood.

  “What are they?” They mesmerized me. I could not look away.

  They are your charges, Mauth said. Fragile, yes, but with spirits like the great old oaks, long-lived and strong. When their bodies are finished, those spirits must pass on. Many will do so without you. But others will require your aid.

  “Where do they go?”

  Onward, he said, to the other side. To a twilight sky and a peaceful shore.

  “How do I care for them? How do I help them?”

  You love them, he said.

  The task seemed like a gift. For after a few minutes of watching them, I was half in love already.

  Keris Veturia leaves Marinn with grain, leather, iron, and a treaty that includes the expulsion of every Scholar who walks the Free Lands. Though not their sale, much to her irritation. Still, after days of negotiations, it is a victory. She should feel satisfied.

  But for all of her cunning, Keris is still human. She seethes over the Blood Shrike’s escape, over the fact that I forbade her from personally hunting the Shrike down.

  The Empress finds me on the garden terraces that overlook Fari Harbor, her expression unreadable as she surveys the delicate arched bridge and mirror-clear pond of the terrace below. A young family crosses the bridge, a father holding one giggling child under each arm, while their mother looks on with a smile.

  “The sea efrits will speed your ships to the Tribal lands, Keris,” I say. “Drop anchor outside Sadh. In a fortnight, we will commence the attack.”

  “And Marinn?” Keris wants the Free Lands. She wants this city. She wants Irmand’s throne and Nikla’s head on a pike.

  “A reprieve.” I follow the family’s progress down a neatly cobbled path to a gazebo. “As we promised.”

  Keris inclines her head, gray eyes glittering. “As you will, my lord Nightbringer.”

  I smooth the Empress’s edges as she departs, nudging her mind toward strategy and destruction. When she is out of sight, a cold wind whips at me, depositing two flame-formed jinn to the earth at my side.

  “Khuri. Talis.” I welcome them with a flare of warmth. “Your journey was swift?”

  “The winds were kind, Meherya,” Khuri says.

  “What news of our kin?”

  “Faaz cracked a river boulder yesterday.” Khuri’s voice betrays her pride in her brethren’s skill, and I smile to hear it. She was barely a century when the Scholars came. She lost her younger siblings in the war, her parents to grief. “And Azul sent a snowstorm to Delphinium two days ago.”

  “Talis?”

  “My power was ever a struggle, Meherya,” he says quietly.

  “Only because you fear it.” I raise my hand to his face and he takes a shuddering breath, letting the calm of my years flow through him. “One day, you will not.”

  “The girl—Laia—” Khuri spits the name. “She and her companions entered the forest. We gave chase but—but she escaped, Meherya.”

  Below, the Mariner woman exclaims as her son offers her some small treasure he’s found in the garden.

  Khuri’s flame deepens at the sight, her fists clenching as the children shriek in joy. “If you would only tell us why the girl must live, Meherya? Why can we not simply kill her?”

  I feel the barest touch on my mind. A sudden urge to answer her question.

  “Khuri,” I chide her, for her power is compulsion. I trained her myself, long ago. “That was unnecessary.”

  A moment later, she screams, so high no human could hear it. A flock of starlings explodes from the trees behind us. The young family below watches the birds, exclaiming at their murmurations. Talis cringes and tries to retreat, for when he let that sorry creature Cain die, he, too, was punished. I hold him still with my magic. I do not let him look away.

  Khuri collapses, looking down in horror at her wrists, which are encased in thin chains the color of clotted blood.

  “I destroyed most of them after the fall,” I say of the chains. “I never liked having them in our city, but our guard captains insisted.”

  “F-f-forgive me—please—”

  When Khuri’s fire has flickered to ash, I remove the chains and put them in a sack, offering them to her. She trembles uncontrollably, cringing back.

  “Take it,” I say. “Talis will join me in the south. You have a different task, Khuri.”

  I explain what she is to do, and there is no doubt in the flicker of her flame. As she listens, sorrow grips me. Sorrow that I had to hurt her. Sorrow that I cannot tell her and Talis the truth. The truth, I know, is not something they could bear.

  After they leave, I wander to the edge of the terrace. The father unrolls a cloth and begins doling out morsels of food to his family.

  I smile, remembering two tiny flames from long ago, and my queen laughing at me. You spoil them, Meherya. So many sweets will dim their fire.

  In the end, of course, humans took their fire, crushed it out with salt and steel and summer rain.

  I turn my back on the Mariner family and spin into the sky on an updraft. A moment later, the father shouts, for his wife clutches her throat, suddenly unable to breathe. Just after, his children are also gasping, and his cries transform into screams.

  The guards will come. They will try to breathe life into the children, the mother. But it will do no good. They are gone, and nothing will bring them back.

  XV: The Soul Catcher

  After Laia and her companions depart for the Empire, my days are quiet. Too quiet. Death stalks the land. Food shortages in Delphinium. Wraiths murdering the Scholars who flee from Marinn. Efrits softening up the Tribes to weaken them before Keris Veturia’s invasion.

  I should be losing sleep with all the ghosts I must pass.

  But the Waiting Place remains stubbornly empty, other than a few spirits drifting through. The rustle of bare branches and the pattering of winter’s creatures are nothing against the silence of the place. It’s in this silence, as I scour the trees for ghosts, that I notice the rot.

  The smell hits me first. It is the stench of a decaying animal, or fruit left to insects. It emanates from an evergreen near the River Dusk, one so wide that it would take twenty men standing fingertip to fingertip to encircle it.

  On first glance, the behemoth appears healthy. But deep in its branches, needles that should be a rich green are a sickly orange. The earth at its base is spongy, leaving the tree’s roots exposed.

  When I kneel to touch the soil, pain tears across my spirit. It’s raw and corrosive, every regret I’ve ever dwelled on, every mistake I’ve made. Beneath the pain is the hunger from my nightmares. It envelops me in blinding whiteness. I’m thrown back, and when I sit up, the feeling is gone, though my body still shakes.

  “What the bleeding hells?” I gasp, but there is no one to hear me. I crawl back to the tree, touch the dirt. Nothing happens. The soil around the evergreen is as lifeless as the salt wastes west of Serra. Small carcasses litter the ground—beetles on their backs. Spiders curled into balls. A fledgling jay, its neck broken.

  I don’t bother calling out to Mauth. He hasn’t spoken since the day Cain returned my memories.

 
Perhaps the memories caused this. Eating away at the forest the way they eat away at me. But I’ve had them for days and this rot is new.

  “Little one.” I nearly jump out of my skin, but it’s only the Wisp.

  “A girl walks the trees.” The Wisp tilts her head, as if wondering why I’m on the ground. “A human, near the western border. Do you think she knows where my lovey is?”

  “A girl?” I scramble to my feet. “What girl?”

  “Dark of hair and gold of eye. Heavy of heart and burdened by an ancient soul. She was here before.”

  Laia. I reach for the map of the Waiting Place and find her quickly, a glowing dot due west. She must’ve just entered the wood.

  “Karinna,” I say, not wanting to lose track of the spirit yet again. “Will you wait here for me? I’ll be back soon—we can talk.”

  But Karinna fades into the trees, muttering to herself, lost once again in her search for her lovey.

  I turn toward the setting sun. The girl’s presence might explain why there’s rot in the Waiting Place. If she’s harming the forest, I’ll need to persuade her to leave.

  By the time I find her, the sky is thick with stars, and the treetops dance in the wind. She’s lit a fire. No ghosts watch her and there is no decay in the forest near her. She seems for all the world like a normal girl traversing a normal forest.

  A memory seizes me. Her face hovering above mine in the Serran desert as rain poured down around us. I was poisoned—raving. It was Laia who kept me from drifting away, who tethered me to reality with her quiet, indomitable will. Stay with me. She put her hands on my face. They were gentle and cool and strong.

  You are not welcome here. The words are on my lips, but I don’t speak. Instead I watch her. Perhaps if I look at her for long enough, I’ll see that ancient soul that the Wisp spoke of.

  Or perhaps she’s simply beautiful, and looking at her feels like sunlight flowing into a room lost to the darkness for too long.

  Stop, Soul Catcher. I shake myself and approach loudly, so as not to startle her. But even when I’m certain she’s heard me, she doesn’t look up. Her hair is thrown into a long braid beneath a black kerchief, and she stares fixedly at a simmering pot of water.

  “I wondered how long it would take.” She removes the pot, adding cooler river water to it. Then she unhooks her cloak and starts pulling off her shirt.

  I’m dumbfounded until I realize she’s bathing and I turn away, my neck hot.

  “Laia of Serra,” I say. “You have trespassed into the Wa—”

  “I swear to the skies, Elias, if you finish that sentence, I will tackle you. And you wouldn’t like it.”

  Something twinges within, low in my body. A sly voice in my head urges me to say, Maybe I would.

  “My name is not Elias.”

  “It is to me.”

  Her emotions are veiled, so I reach out with my magic. For a second, I get a sense of her. Sadness, anger, love, and . . . desire. She suddenly goes blank, as if a part of her is shoving me away.

  “Do not do that to me.” Her voice vibrates with anger. “I’m not one of your ghosts.”

  “I only want to understand why you are here. If you need something, I can give it to you, and you can go.”

  “What I want, you cannot give me. Not yet, anyway.”

  “You desire me,” I say. The quiet splash of water ceases. “I can satisfy you if that’s why you’re here. It’s easy enough and if it means you’ll leave, then I’m willing to do it.”

  “Satisfy me? How kind of you.” She laughs, but it doesn’t sound joyful.

  “Desire is simple. Like the need for shelter or warmth. And it won’t be unpleasant.”

  I hear a soft step and turn, forgetting that she has stripped down to very little. I catch a glimpse of skin, curved and golden and tapering to the swell of her hips. She’s piled her hair on top of her head and her expression is preternaturally calm.

  Shouldn’t have looked. I direct my gaze up toward the treetops, which are infinitely less interesting.

  “You really think it will be so easy?” She runs a slim finger along my shoulder blades, before her hand settles in my hair and she comes around to face me. She rises on her toes and tugs me close, stopping before our lips touch.

  “For me, Elias, desire is not simple. It is not shelter. It is not warmth. It is a fire that offers no light, only heat, ruinous and consuming. The longer you deny it, the hotter it burns. You forget shelter. You forget warmth. There is only that which you want and cannot have, and the desolation that follows.”

  Her lashes, I note, are unusually long, but it’s the cool challenge in her eyes that makes me wonder why she doesn’t have the world in her thrall.

  My hands move to her bare waist and I pull her closer. But doing so is a mistake, for I don’t expect her skin to be so soft, nor for the press of her body to evoke a cascading wave of heat in my own.

  “Is that a yes?” Say yes. “If I satisfy you, you’ll leave?”

  I know her irises are gold, but in the darkness, they appear almost black as she searches my face. She sighs so quietly I nearly miss it.

  “Never mind.” She backs away, and I don’t need Mauth’s magic to sense her sadness. “No matter what you do, Soul Catcher, it will not satisfy me. Turn around, please.”

  I do as she asks, though disappointment lashes at me. I don’t let myself dwell on why.

  “In that case, I will escort you from here. Your presence disturbs the ghosts. And there is rot near the river.”

  “There are no ghosts, Elias,” Laia says. “You’re doing an excellent job. I do not know anything about the rot. The river is hundreds of miles away, and I entered the Waiting Place just this afternoon. If something is wrong with the river, I suggest you look elsewhere for the culprit.”

  Water drips from her washcloth as she returns to bathing, and the scent of her soap wafts toward me, light and sugary, like summer fruit. I used to wonder at that scent. How it clung to her even when we traveled through the muck of the Southern Range, even when all we had to wash with was days-old rainwater.

  “Why are you here?” My curiosity gets the better of me. “Why are you traveling through the forest?”

  “I need to get to the Tribes,” Laia says. “To the encampments near Aish. I traveled alongside the Waiting Place for a few days, but decided it was safer in the forest than in the Empire. Keris’s patrols still hunt for her enemies.”

  “The Tribal lands are soon to be a war zone. And I don’t wish to welcome your spirit here.”

  “Your wishes do not matter much to me,” she says. “In any case, Tribe Saif and Tribe Nur are there. I need to find Mamie and Afya Ara-Nur. See if they can help me learn something about the Nightbringer.”

  “You can’t linger here. The jinn walk this wood. You saw what they can do.”

  “You said they would not sense one human walking alone through the forest,” she says. “And they haven’t. Not yet anyway. You can turn around now.”

  She pulls on a shirt and unbinds her hair, which falls in a spill of loose ebony curls across her back. Another memory hits me. An inn, far away. A wall. A bed. Her legs tight on my waist. Her skin smooth and giving beneath my lips, and the sheer joy of getting more than a stolen moment with her. The feeling of rightness—of home.

  I shove the memory to the back of my mind. “Let me take you south,” I say. I could leave her at the border, near the Duskan Sea. If she is causing the rot, it will fade when she leaves.

  “I’m not windwalking with you,” she says. “Besides, I thought I could speak to the ghosts as I traveled. Maybe they know about the Night—”

  “No.” I close the distance between us. She gasps at the suddenness of it. But then her face hardens and I feel steel against my throat.

  “You will not touch me,” she says quietly. “You will not even thin
k about taking me anywhere without my leave.”

  She’s a little breathless, but she holds the blade steady. I do not tell her that it would do no good. That if she plunged it into me, Mauth would heal my body.

  “If you so desperately want to keep me out of trouble,” she says, “walk with me. If the jinn come, I give you leave to take me where you like.”

  Mauth’s magic twinges, a somnolent snake stirring, sensing a distant threat.

  I nod once, in agreement. I give you leave to take me where you like. The way she regards me is—fixed. Yet there is a warmth to it. A sultry heat underlying her determination. What is she thinking, when she looks at me like that? Where would I take her if I could?

  The voice imprisoned within answers: Somewhere peaceful. Rain drumming above and a fire crackling, a soft bed and hours and hours ahead.

  I turn my back on that voice, and on her.

  “I’ll be nearby,” I tell her. “No need to come looking for me.”

  Then I windwalk far enough away to collect myself, before she makes me feel any more.

  XVI: The Blood Shrike

  By the time we reach Delphinium, my arrow wound has reopened and bleeds freely down my thigh. I grit my teeth against the pain as my men drag open the ancient wooden gates, which dump a small avalanche of fresh snow onto my head. When I dismount before the decrepit castle that is the new seat of the Emperor, my legs nearly give way.

  “Harper,” I say. His brows are furrowed, his hand half-extended toward me, but I shoo him into the castle. “See that Musa, Darin, and Tas are well settled. I must find Livia.”

  The Gens Aquilla flag flies high atop the castle’s steeply pitched roof, as does the hawk-and-hammer flag of my nephew. Delphinium has never felt like the rest of the Empire. It lacks the domes and columns of Antium, or the vast orchards of Serra.

  Instead it is a city of thatched roofs and cobbled lanes, tucked into the massive Nevennes Range. The residents are tough and boisterous and less concerned with class than the rest of the Empire. Taius the First was born here five hundred years ago, when it was nothing but a trading post for trappers selling furs and fish.