A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,177

these days.”

Elias tilts his head, gray eyes sober. “How is your heart, Hel?”

For a long moment, I do not answer. The drummers cease and a group of oud players strums a slower tune.

After Harper’s death, I wanted to rip out my heart to stop it aching. Learning what his spirit said to Elias—a message my friend brought to me himself—offered me no comfort. I paced the streets of Antium late at night, cursing my actions, reliving the battle. Tormenting myself with what I could have done.

But as the days turned into weeks and months, I grew accustomed to the pain—the same way I learned to live with the scars on my face. And instead of hating my heart, I began to marvel at its strength, at the fact that it thuds on insistently. I am here, it seems to say. For we are not done, Helene. We must live.

“Before she died,” I say, “Livvy told me I’d have to reckon with all that I tried to hide from myself. She said it would hurt. And”—I meet my old friend’s gaze—“it does.”

“We’re trailing ghosts now, Hel,” he says, and there is strange comfort in knowing that at the very least, there is someone in the world who understands this pain. “All we can do is try not to make any more.”

“Pardon me, Elias.” Musa appears, moon cake in hand. I promptly steal it from him. I’m starving. “May I cut in?”

Elias bows his head, and Musa waits patiently as I devour the moon cake. The second I’m done, he takes my hand and pulls me close.

Very close.

“This is a bit inappropriate.” I glance up at him and find myself slightly breathless.

“Do you like it?” Musa arches a fine, dark eyebrow. Surprised, I consider his question.

“Yes,” I say.

He shrugs. “Then who cares.”

“I hear Adisa’s new king reinstated your lands and title,” I say. “When does your caravan leave?”

“Why, Empress? Are you trying to get rid of me?”

Am I? Musa has been invaluable in court, charming Illustrian Paters as easily as he has Scholars. When we broke up the estates of Keris’s top allies, it was Musa who suggested we award them to Scholars and Plebeians who fought in the Battle of Antium.

And when grief threatens to consume me, it is Musa who appears with a meal and insists we eat it out in the sunshine. Musa who drags me to the palace kitchens to bake bread with him, and Musa who suggests a visit to Zacharias, even if it means canceling two weeks of court.

I thought at first that the Scholar had wights watching me to make sure I did not fall too deeply into despair. But the wights, he told me, are no longer his spies.

Knowing too many secrets isn’t particularly pleasant, he said when we were out riding one day. How am I supposed to take the Pater of Gens Visselia seriously when I know he spends most of his time composing odes to his hounds?

“Empress?” He waits for an answer to his question, and I shake myself.

“I don’t want to keep you in the Empire”—I can’t quite look at him—“if you don’t want to stay.”

“Do you want me to stay?” Despite the arrogance that he wears like armor, I hear a thread of vulnerability in his voice that makes me look up into his dark eyes.

“Yes,” I say to his uncertainty. “I want you to stay, Musa.”

He lets out a breath. “Thank the skies,” he says. “I don’t actually like bees very much. Little bastards always sting me. And anyway, you need me around.”

I scoff and step on his foot. “I do not need you.”

“You do. Power is a strange thing.” He glances out at Afya and Spiro, clapping and spinning a few feet away, and at Mamie, feeding a gleeful Zacharias yet another moon cake. “It can twist loneliness into despair if there is not someone nearby to keep an eye out.”

“I’m not lonely!” A lie, though Musa is too much a gentleman to call me on it.

“But you are alone, Empress.” A shadow passes across his face, and I know he thinks of his wife, Nikla, dead six months now. “As all those in power are alone. You don’t have to be.”

His words sting. Because they are true. His usually mirthful face softens as he watches me.

“It should have been him dancing with you,” Musa says, and at the raw emotion in his voice, my eyes heat.

In that moment, I ache for Harper’s hands. His grace and