A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,36

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