by Sabaa Tahir
“Laia! Watch it!” a Scholar man with dark skin and long, black hair calls out. He holds off three legionnaires with a scim, a short dagger, and—I squint—a cloud of hundreds of wights who befuddle his foes. They defend him with a vicious protectiveness that wights aren’t known for. Laia, meanwhile, spins, nocks, and shoots a soldier creeping up on her.
“Get Tas out of here now,” she shouts. The sandy-haired man grabs the child by the arm and drags him up the trail, directly toward where I’m standing.
The forest groans. Perhaps Mauth is occupied, as the Augur said. But he still feels the assault on his territory. And he doesn’t like it.
“You have trespassed into the Waiting Place, the forest of the dead.” I step out of the trees. Though I don’t shout, Mauth’s magic carries my words down to a blonde woman fighting back to back with a Mask. To the Scholar with the wights, and Laia. To the soldiers, all of whom gape at me. “You are not welcome.”
One of the legionnaires spits blood onto the beach and glares at his men. “Put an arrow in that son of a—”
He grabs his throat and drops to his knees. His men inch away.
When he is flat on his back, clawing at the sand, I look to the rest, letting the outsiders feel the full weight of the Waiting Place’s oppression. Then I draw away their vitality—all but the child’s—until the soldiers are gasping and stumbling through the shallows back to their boats. I turn to the others, who are still struggling to breathe.
I must kill them. Shaeva was right to leave broken bodies along the border. These constant interruptions are a distraction I can ill afford.
But the child, who is crouched behind a boulder, cries out. His distress plucks at something deep within that I cannot name. I ease the magic.
The remaining outsiders drink in long, shuddering draughts of air. Those four on the beach move swiftly up the trail, away from the soldiers. The child emerges from his hiding spot, wary gaze fixed on me. His companion stalks forward, reaching back for his scim.
“You,” he says. Darin, I think as he bears down. His name is Darin.
“I thought you were a decent human,” he hisses at me. “But you—”
“Now, now.” The tall Scholar steps in front of Darin. His cloud of wights has disappeared. “Let’s not irritate the creature formerly called Elias. He is the one who has to get us out of here.”
“Get off, Musa—”
“I will not help you.” I am puzzled that they think I would. “Leave at once.”
“Not bleeding likely.” Helene—no, the Blood Shrike—appears at the top of the trail. Blood soaks her fatigues and she limps heavily. She glances down at the Martials, who have retreated—but not far. “Not unless you want a half dozen more ghosts clogging up your day—ah—”
“Careful, Shrike.” The Mask catches her, and there’s something about him that makes me stare, some instinct urging me to look closer at him. We mean something to each other. But what? I have no memories of him.
The Shrike stumbles. The pain in her leg is likely hitting her now that the adrenaline of battle has worn off. Without thinking, I hold her up on one side, while the Mask grabs her other arm. The feeling of her is so familiar, the rush of memory so heady that I jerk away.
“Don’t let me fall, you idiot.” She lists forward. “Unless you want to carry my carcass the next hundred miles.”
“Wouldn’t be the first bleeding time.”
It’s not until she grins at me that I realize my voice wasn’t that of the Soul Catcher but of someone else. The person I once was. Elias Veturius.
“Shut it and help me find a place to sit so I can get this arrow out, would you? Laia? Do you have your kit?” The Shrike glances over her shoulder. “Harper, where the hells is she?”
Harper murmurs something to the Shrike and she glances at me, brow furrowing.
“Tend to your wounds,” I say. “Then leave. Go back to the beach. To your boats. To a quick death, it matters not. But you will not enter the Waiting Place.”
“He’s your brother.” Musa speaks up, nodding to Harper. The Mask gapes at Musa, who doesn’t seem to notice.
I cock my head, surveying Harper. His hair lies flat while mine curls at the ends. He’s shorter and leaner than me, and his eyes are green instead of gray. They are large like mine, but curved up at the outer corners. We have the same gold-brown skin. The same sharp cheekbones and generous mouth.
“How dare—” the Blood Shrike sputters, eyes flashing. “Musa! That’s not your—”
“Not my secret? It is if it will save our lives.” The Scholar turns to me. “You’ve been looking at him funny. Your gut’s probably telling you there’s a connection. Your gut is right. Same father. Different mother—thankfully for him.” The Scholar chuckles to himself. “You wouldn’t let your own brother die, would you? You were raised among the Tribes. Family is everything.”
“Once, perhaps,” I say. “No longer.”
“Enough.” The voice that speaks conjures laughter and wonder, molten honey skin and hair the color of night. She emerges from the cliff trail and for a long time as she stares at me, she’s silent.
Her regard bothers me. It makes my skin feel hot, feverish, raises memories in my mind of a granite-walled school, and a dance beneath a full moon. Of a trek through the mountains, an inn far away, her body against mine—
“You will grant us passage, Soul Catcher.”
“Laia of Serra.” I say her name softly. “It is not your time. The forest will not abide it.”
“I say it will. You will grant us passage.”
There is a weight to Laia’s voice that wasn’t there before, and a glow manifests near her. That light feels familiar, yet I cannot recall seeing it before.
A cluster of ghosts gathers behind me, but they are silent. Laia lowers her gaze, fists clenched, and I have a sudden, strange thought. She is conferring with someone—or something. As a man used to voices in my head, I recognize when others are listening to voices too.
Nodding as if in agreement with someone, Laia steps past me, into the Waiting Place. I wait for the ghosts to howl, for Mauth to protest. But the forest is still.
The others follow her in. If I do not stop them, something will shift. Something irrevocable. Something that began with that blasted Augur giving me back my memories.
I gather up my magic, prepared to drive them out.
But Laia looks back at me with betrayal and pain in her eyes and I let the magic drain away. An unfamiliar emotion fills me.
Shame, I realize. Deep and gnawing.
XII: The Blood Shrike
The Soul Catcher guides us away from the edge of the forest to a muddy game trail. I glance at him, searching for vestiges of my friend Elias Veturius. But other than the hard lines of his body and the sharp planes of his face, there isn’t a shred of the boy I knew.
We stop in a small clearing, and he watches as Laia carefully removes the arrow and bandages my wound. At the crack of a branch behind me, I draw my scim.
“Just a squirrel,” the Soul Catcher says. “The soldiers won’t enter here. The ghosts would drive them mad.”
My neck prickles. I know there are ghosts here, but they are quiet, far different from the screeching demons that possessed my men at the gates of Antium.
“Why won’t they drive us mad?” It is the first Tas has spoken.
The Soul Catcher looks down at the boy, and his voice is gentler. “I don’t know,” he says. His brow is furrowed. It’s the look he’d get at Blackcliff when the Commandant would send us after a deserter, and he couldn’t settle on how he felt about it.
Forget about Blackcliff, Shrike. I have more important things to think about. Like getting the hells back to my nephew. Figuring out what my next steps are beyond crossing this wood for three weeks.
By the time I reach Delphinium, I will have been gone for t
wo months. Skies know what I will find on my return.
When I mutter as much to Laia, she shakes her head.
“Not if he helps us.” She glances at the Soul Catcher. He hears. He might be some otherworldly servant of ghosts now, but he’s still tied to Laia, still a part of her song, whether he admits it or not.
“You’ll be through by dawn,” he says. “But stay close. The ghosts are not the only fey who walk the Waiting Place. There are older creatures that would seek to harm you.”
“The jinn,” Laia says. “Those the Nightbringer freed.”
The Soul Catcher gives her a brief, unreadable look. “Yes. One human might slip through the forest undetected by them. But a half dozen? They will know you are here soon enough.”
“Can’t you just—” Musa puts his hands around his throat and mimes choking—referring no doubt to how the Soul Catcher can steal away breath.
“I’d rather not.” The Soul Catcher’s voice is so cold that Musa, who lives and breathes impudence, is silent. “I will windwalk you across,” the Soul Catcher goes on. “But there are many of you, and it will take time. We will be pursued.”
“But the jinn were just rampaging across the Mariner countryside,” Darin says. “How—”
“Not all of them,” Musa says. “The Nightbringer takes only a few on his raids. But thousands were imprisoned. And they used to live here. Do they still?” Musa glances around warily. “Do you let them?”
“This was their home before it was mine.” The Soul Catcher tilts his head, and it’s another gesture I recognize. His instincts shout a warning at him.
“We’ve tarried too long. Child—” He reaches out a hand to Tas, whose face falls at the Soul Catcher’s aloofness.
I understand his grief. When Elias turned his back on me in Antium, I didn’t realize what he had become. Not really. Even now, he looks the same as ever. He feels solid. Real.
But he’s put duty above all things. He’s put on the mask and set aside his humanity. Just like we were trained to do.
Tas takes the Soul Catcher’s hand and we form a chain, Tas holding on to Harper, then me, Musa, Darin, and Laia.
“Walk as you normally would,” the Soul Catcher says. “Close your eyes if you wish. But no matter what you see, do not let go of each other. Do not reach for a weapon. Do not try to fight.” He looks at me when he says this and I nod grudgingly. I know an order when I hear one.
Seconds later, we are flying, the trees blurring by faster than I thought possible. It feels as if I am on a boat tearing across a wild sea with the wind at my back. Naked branches whip past, a massive oak, a clearing of frosted grass, a lake, a family of foxes.
The smell of the ocean fades, and we are in the deep woods, the canopy so thick I cannot make out the evening sky. Beneath my feet, the underbrush is soft and springy. I don’t understand how the Soul Catcher can move us through such dense forest without knocking us all unconscious. But, as when he was a soldier fighting at my back, he does it with complete confidence. After an hour passes, I let myself relax.
Then Laia screams. Her hair has come loose from her braid, streaming out behind her. Beyond it, a half dozen shadows stir, each with eyes that blaze like tiny suns.
My stomach plunges, and I want my scim so badly that I nearly countermand the Soul Catcher’s order and pull away from Harper. Because for a second, I think one of the shadows is him. The Nightbringer. The monster who demanded my mask from me, who engineered the hell rained down upon my people.
But these shapes are different. The Nightbringer is a typhoon of wrath and subtlety. These creatures are a shadow of that. Still, their anger is palpable, like the air before a lightning storm.
“Soul Catcher!” I shout.
“I see them.” He sounds almost bored, but when he looks back over his shoulder, he has the flat concentration of a Mask surrounded by the enemy. He cuts north—then west again, then north, then west until my head spins and I don’t know what direction we’re going.
The sun dips below the horizon, and for a time, it seems as though we’ve outrun the jinn. The River Dusk is nothing more than a flash of blue and a rush of sound before it is past. But not long after we cross, they catch us. This time, we can’t shake them. The jinn shriek madly and surround us.
Ahhh, Blood Shrike. The voice is sibilant and feels as if it’s worming through my mind. Without your sacrifice we would never have been free. Accept a token of our gratitude, a glimpse into your future.
“No!” I shout. “I don’t want—”
We see you, baby bird, not a Shrike but a small and weak thing, fallen far from safety. Parents dead, sister gone, and the other sister soon to join her—
“Stop!” I curse them, but they do not stop. The minutes are hours, and the hours are days as the jinn dig around in my thoughts. I cannot keep them out.
You do not love the child, they say. He is your blood, but you’ll see him dead and yourself upon the throne. You have always wanted it, wicked, wicked Shrike. They pack my mind with images of violence: my nephew, sweet Zacharias, lying limp, his small face drained of life. The horror of it is worse for his innocence, for the burden of rulership that he never knew he carried.
As I cry and beg that he be brought back, Keris laughs. The scars on my face ache, a soul-deep pain. Cook speaks in my ear, poor dead Mirra, but I cannot hear what she says because now there is a great roaring, a maelstrom coming closer, and it will devour us all—
Then I hear the Soul Catcher, though he is not next to me. “Do not listen to them,” he says. “They want to break the chain. They want to fall upon each of you, tear you away and consume your minds. Do not let them. Fight.”
“I can’t,” I whisper. “I—”
“You can. It is who you are. It is what you do best.”
It is what I do best. Because I am strong, and I dig for that strength now. I watched my family bleed out at my feet and I fought for my people and faced a horde of Karkauns alone on a hill of dead bodies. I am a fighter. I am the Blood Shrike.
You are a child.
I am the Blood Shrike.
You are weak.
I am the Blood Shrike.
You are nothing.
“I am the Blood Shrike!” I scream, and the words echo back to me, not in my own voice but in my father’s and my mother’s, in Hannah’s and in the voices of all those lost at Antium.
Broken, unmade thing, you will lose more before the end, for you are a torch against the night, little Shrike, and above all a torch burns.
Quite suddenly, we stumble to a stop in a clearing. A dimly lit cabin rises out of the darkness. I stumble toward it, along with Darin and Harper. Laia has an arm wrapped around Tas, her teeth bared.
The Soul Catcher stands between us and the heavily cloaked jinn, who pace beyond the clearing. He has no weapon. He needs none, for in this moment, he calls to mind his mother’s quiet violence.
“You will not touch these humans,” he says. “Leave.”
One of the jinn detaches from the others. “They are your weakness, Soul Catcher.” She drips with malice, shakes with it. “You will fall and the Waiting Place will fall with you.”
“Not today, Umber,” the Soul Catcher says. “They are under my protection. And you have no power here.”
The softer the Commandant spoke, the more dangerous she was. The Soul Catcher’s voice is very low indeed, and power pulses through him. The air in the clearing thickens. The fire in the jinns’ eyes pales, as if suddenly quenched.
The jinn retreat, fading into the trees, and when they are gone, my legs go weak, my wound aching. Harper is beside me instantly, shaky himself but trying to hold me up. Musa stands apart, eyes glazed. Darin is pale as he wraps an arm around Laia’s trembling shoulders.
Tas is unaffected, and glances between us. “What—what happened?”
“Are you okay
, Tas?” Laia pulls him close. “It wasn’t real what they said. You know that—”
“They didn’t speak to the child.” The Soul Catcher casts an appraising look at us. “The border is close,” he says. “But they will be waiting, and they are strongest at night. You are depleted. As am I. Come. They cannot hurt us in the cabin.”
The cabin is large and smells of wood shavings, but it’s tight as a drum and solid as Blackcliff. A stove squats in one corner, with copper pans hanging from hooks on the wall. Beside it is a shelf with baskets of carrots and gourds and potatoes. Strings of garlic and onion hang from above, along with bunches of herbs I couldn’t begin to name.
There is also a table, fresh-built with a long bench on either side. A fireplace sits in the center of the room against the back wall, with a soft Tribal rug and cushions strewn about. The Soul Catcher’s bed is spare, but Tribal lanterns hang above it, making it seem almost cozy.
After a moment I realize what the cabin reminds me of: Mamie Rila’s wagon.
The Soul Catcher prepares a meal and though I know I should help, I do nothing, still numb from the jinns’ predations. Only Tas has the energy, setting out plates and cups until the Soul Catcher bids him sit.
I always preferred Elias’s cooking on long journeys. Distantly, I understand that the meal he serves us is hearty and well seasoned. But I do not taste it. From the silence at the table, no one else does either.
After, we take turns in the washroom, and though the water is ice-cold, I scrub off a week’s worth of sea brine gratefully. By the time I emerge, Musa, Darin, and Tas are fast asleep on the floor. Harper has lain down on his roll too, his eyes shut. But if he’s asleep, then I am a walrus. I wonder what the jinn said to him. I do not ask.
Instead I sit beside Laia, who is cross-legged before the fire. She runs a comb through her long hair, pointedly ignoring Elias as he cleans. His sleeves are rolled up, big hands carefully scrubbing out the stew pot with sand. His hair is longer, curling at the ends, but other than that, he looks like he’ll turn to me any moment with a smile on his face and a tale that will have me in stitches.
