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.”