“No need to be nasty,” I say. “I’m aware that I’m not . . .” I gesture vaguely at her, curved in all the right places.

Laia only raises her eyebrows. “I mean it, Shrike,” she says. “You are very beautiful. It’s no wonder he cannot keep his eyes off you.”

A strange, warm feeling fills me, like after I’ve won a battle, or when I’m a half dozen cups into a keg.

“You—” You really think that? I want to say, because if Faris or Dex or even Elias told me I was beautiful, I’d stab them in the face. “You’re just saying that because you’re my—my—”

“Friend? Is it so hard to admit it?” Laia glances upward, ostentatiously shading her eyes. “A Scholar rebel and a Martial Blood Shrike are friends and the sky didn’t fall in. Whatever shall we do?”

“Let’s start by getting out of here alive,” I say. “Or I’ll have to make new friends in the afterlife, and we know how that will go.”

Harper reaches us then, stepping into our larger boat gracefully and abandoning his punt. He passes so close that I shut my eyes to better feel his warmth. When I open them, he’s at my side, staring at my mouth. His pale green eyes burn as his gaze travels down my body. I should tell him to look elsewhere. I am the Blood Shrike, for skies’ sake. Laia is sitting only a few feet away. This is inappropriate.

But for just a moment, I let him stare.

“Ah—Shrike.” He shakes himself. “Forgive me—”

“Never mind. Report, Harper,” I bark at him, hating the severity of my voice but knowing it’s necessary.

“Soldiers, Shrike.”

“That’s not a report—”

Harper shoves me out of the way as an arrow smacks into the mast beside me. I did not hear it amid the noise of the market. He grabs an oar as Laia cries out.

“Shrike!” The Scholar girl looks left—then right. I see the legionnaires immediately. They are cleverly disguised as merchants, making their way toward us at speed.

And they have us surrounded.

X: Laia

One moment, I am gaping at the sheer number of Martial soldiers closing in on us.

The next, the legionnaires are leaping to our boat from a dozen different punts. I barely have a chance to shout a warning before a thick, gauntleted arm is wrapped around my neck.

Our vessel pitches violently as Harper and the Shrike battle the soldiers swarming us. I kick back, landing a blow on my captor’s knee. He grunts and quite suddenly, I am weightless.

I only realize he has thrown me off the boat and into the bay when water slams into me like a gelid fist.

A memory rises in my head, Elias speaking to me in Serra when I told him I couldn’t swim. Remind me to remedy that when we have a few days.

I thrash my arms in a panic. I cannot feel my face. My legs slow, and my clothes drag at me, like hands pulling me down to welcome me to the depths of the sea.

Let go, I think. Let go and leave this battle to someone else. You’ll see your family again. You’ll see Elias again.

Let go.

A gold figure appears before me in the water, triggering a burst of memories. The room in Adisa. The Jaduna. The excruciating pain as a thing rose out of my body. The Jaduna had a name for it.

Rehmat—a strange name, I think as the life leaves me. The Jaduna did not say what it meant. I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.

“Hail, Laia, and listen well.” Rehmat’s words crack like a whip and my body jerks. “You will not let go. Fight, child.”

Whatever Rehmat is, it is used to being obeyed. I windmill my arms and legs toward the glow of the floating market. I wriggle and claw until my head breaks the surface.

A swell smacks me in the mouth, and I choke on seawater.

“There!” a voice calls out, and moments later, a pale hand yanks me onto our punt.

“Ten hells, Scholar,” the Blood Shrike says. “Can’t you swim?”

I do not have a chance to answer. Harper points to the quay where a platoon of Martials is launching longboats.

“More are coming, Shrike,” he says. “We have to get out of here.”

I hear a small shriek and catch a flash of wings as a scroll drops into the Blood Shrike’s lap from midair.

“Musa and Darin are waiting northwest of here,” she says after reading it. “Just beyond the floating market.”

“Hold on.” Avitas angles our vessel toward the thick of the market and we ram into a cluster of merchants, sending baskets, fish, rope, and people flying. Curses and shouts trail us as the Martials rain down flaming arrows, not caring who they hit.

“Come on, Laia!”

With the grace of gazelles, Avitas and the Shrike leap to another boat, and then another, making their way forward as confidently as if they are on solid ground.

But I am slowed by the chill of freezing air hitting wet clothing. I lurch forward like a drunken bear, barely clearing each deck.

The Blood Shrike turns back. With one stroke of her blade she relieves me of my cloak, a sodden, woolen weight. And thank the skies I’m wearing a chemise, because with two more cuts, my short jacket gapes open and the Shrike yanks it off.

Though my teeth slam into each other, I move more lightly. The Martials are behind us for now, but that will not last. Already I see a group of them circumventing the market, cutting off our escape.

“We can’t break their cordon.” Avitas comes to a halt on a dinghy piloted by a terrified Mariner boy. He dives into the water to escape us. The people of the floating market pole away swiftly, buyers and sellers alike trying to avoid the melee. We have nowhere to run.

“Shrike, you’ll have to swim beneath the cordon,” Avitas says. “Laia—if you can use your invisibility, I’ll distract them—”

The Shrike’s face blanches. “Absolutely not!”

As they argue, I reach for my power. But my magic evades me. The Nightbringer. That monster still lurks in the city, blocking me.

“Not so, Laia of Serra.” The glow manifests at my side this time, and it is so real that I’m stunned my companions cannot see it.

“Go away,” I hiss, feeling insane for talking to something invisible to everyone else.

“The Nightbringer weakened your powers early on,” Rehmat says. “That was before you woke me. You are stronger now. You can disappear. You can even hide those with you.”

The Blood Shrike whips out her bow and picks off our pursuers one by one. But there are too many.

Beside me, Rehmat’s glow pulses. “Is this where you wish to die, daughter of Mirra and Jahan?” it asks. “Imagine your power as a cloak of darkness. Take shelter there. Then pull the Blood Shrike and the Mask within.”

“How do I know you aren’t tricking me? That you aren’t some perversion of the Nightbringer?”

“Trust me or die, child,” Rehmat growls.

A longboat looms out of the dark. There is a Mask aboard and I freeze, my fear taking hold. Then the Shrike is past me, leaping onto the Mask’s boat as our own dinghy lurches. The Mask bares his teeth and draws scims, meeting the Shrike’s attack stroke for stroke.

Another boat of soldiers bashes into ours and now Avitas is at the Shrike’s back, swift and otherworldly. They are a four-armed monster, destroying, deflecting, defying Keris’s men to come closer.

“They cannot fight forever, Laia,” Rehmat says. “Reach for the magic. Save them. Save yourself.”

“I tried—”

“Try harder.” Rehmat’s voice, stern before, is steel now. “You are a child of kedim jadu, girl. Old magic. For centuries, I have waited for one of the kedim jadu to defy the Nightbringer. You did so, glorious and fearless, and now you quake, child? Now you quiver?”

There is an irrefutability in Rehmat’s tone that rings a bell at the core of my being. It is as if the creature is simply uncovering something that has long been carved into the arc of my life. Perhaps it has tampered with my mind, or the Nightbringer has.

Or perhaps my instinct has been honed by enough betrayal that when it sings truth, I listen. Perhaps I finally believe that my victories have been because I decided to fight, when others might have given up.

The Shrike slings arrows and the boat rocks beneath me. Avitas curses as the Martials draw closer.

The world seems to slow, as if time no longer exists. It is a moment of perfect chaos, and within it, I hear my nan. Where there is life, there is hope.

I will not accept death. Why should I, when there is life yet burning in my veins? I will not let the Nightbringer win so easily when it is my fury that will destroy him, and my strength that will release the Scholars from the yoke of his terror.

Disappear. Power breaks over me and I shudder at the force of it. This? This is what I can do?

“Imagine the darkness enveloping the Blood Shrike and Avitas Harper,” Rehmat says. “Quick now!”

This is more difficult, for I do not understand how to do it. I stretch the darkness that covers me, and try to toss it over the Blood Shrike. She flickers.

“Again,” Rehmat urges. “Hold it this time!”

Sweat breaks out on my brow as I try again. And again. Each time, the Shrike flickers, though she does not appear to notice. The Mask she fights gapes at her in bewilderment, and she runs him through.