A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,166

The Soul Catcher

The plateau splits down the middle as I emerge from the maelstrom. The earth shudders with the force of it, a tremor rippling through the Waiting Place, eliciting great arboreal groans from the woods.

The shaking drops me to my knees, and I slide back toward the tree line. A figure emerges from the cyclone, and, as suddenly as the storm entered this dimension, it drains away, as if through a crack in the air. All is silent. Even the trees do not move.

Then the figure at the edge of the plateau collapses, and the world breathes again. I scramble to my feet, and at the sound, she turns.

“Are—are you real?” She half lifts her hand, and in five steps, I have reached her and pulled her to me, shaking in relief because she is impossibly, miraculously alive. The rock of the plateau groans, and in moments I have windwalked us away from it, down the tree line to the edge of the jinn grove.

“He’s gone,” Laia whispers when we stop. “Rehmat chained him. At the end he was destroyed, Elias.” She looks down at her hands, and her eyes fill, voice cracking. “He killed my brother. Darin is d-dead.”

What can I say to her that will comfort her? She defeated a creature that defies description—more than a king, more than a jinn, more than a foe. And in the process, she lost the only family she had left in this world.

A wind stirs the trees behind us, and the first of the Tala tree blossoms detach and swirl through the air.

“In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe,” she says. “In flowerfall, the daughter will pay a blood tithe.” Her dark eyes are red and dull. “Skies-forsaken foretellings.”

“The same foretelling said I would die.” I remember the jinn’s prophecy as clearly as if she spoke it yesterday. The son of shadow and heir of death will fight and fail with his final breath.

“But it didn’t say I’d find my way back.” I pull Laia close. “And it didn’t say that you’d win.”

“Have we won?” Laia says as we stare out at the jinn grove. Soldiers on both sides of the escarpment stumble to their feet, still shaken from the maelstrom. Musa has an arm under the Blood Shrike’s shoulders, and together they stagger away from the front line, anguish emanating from both. Spiro and Gibran carry an injured Afya toward the infirmary tents.

Laia and I walk to the edge of the escarpment, and she gasps, for Keris’s army appears to have taken the brunt of the maelstrom’s wrath. A deep gash in the earth and a few pockets of stunned-looking soldiers are all that remain of the Commandant’s one-massive host.

As for Keris herself, her standard flaps in the wind near the edge of the escarpment. Beside it, she lies faceup, blonde hair streaked with mud, her throat bloody, gray eyes fixed on the sky.

Dead.

Laia releases me, her hand on her mouth. I kneel beside the body of my mother, whose heart and mind will now forever be a cipher. Despite her violence, her implacable hatred, I grieve her loss. Her skin is cold and soft beneath my hands as I close her eyes. My eyes.

Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas. Such a strange and unexpected warning. Why did she caution me, when she spent so many years trying to kill me?

Perhaps she was never trying to kill me. Perhaps she was trying to kill some part of herself. But I will never know. Not truly.

Just a few feet away, Avitas Harper lies dead too. Now I understand the Blood Shrike’s devastation. We had one meaningful conversation, Avitas and I. It was not enough.

Even as my heart aches for my brother and my mother, Mauth’s magic swells, a wave of forgetting that he will unleash to wash away the mess in my mind.

“No,” I whisper, knowing that he can hear me. “My duty is not yet done. I must restore the balance.”

You will speak to the jinn. Mauth has returned to full power, and his voice thunders in my bones. But you must be clear of mind and heart, Soul Catcher. Not distracted by love and regret and hope.

“That is exactly what I must be distracted by,” I tell him. “Love and regret and hope are all I can offer.”

A long silence as he mulls it over. Laia watches me knowingly—the one person on this earth who understands the bone-deep intrusion of having a supernatural voice in your