A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,75

most. The jinn grove, or what is left of it.

As I enter, I sense a presence watching from the forest. A spirit. An ancient impulse to pass her on seizes me, so deeply ingrained that after a thousand years of ignoring the ghosts, I nearly go to her. But I crush that instinct.

Khuri’s ashes fly away on a gentle wind, and I consider her life and all that she was: the deep burgundy of her flame; how she loved her siblings; how she took up a scim when they were lost, destroying an entire legion of Scholar invaders with her wrath.

When my pain is as sharp as the scythe on my back, I ram through Mauth’s defenses and seek out a place that exists beyond the Forest of Dusk. A place of claws and teeth. A Sea of Suffering.

The suffering reaches out to me. More, it demands, and I sense its unending hunger. A maw that can never be filled. More.

“Soon,” I whisper.

I consider, then, the problem of Laia. The girl knows now of the scythe. She realizes what it can do.

Yet I am no closer to understanding the unnatural magic that exists within her. Time to remedy that.

My son, do not do this.

Mauth has tried to speak to me before. Always, I have ignored that hated voice, so ancient, so wise, so monstrously unfeeling.

Thou art the Beloved, Mauth says.

“No, Father,” I say after a long time. “I was the Beloved. Now I am something else.”

XXX: Laia

After Elias departs, I sink onto the rock where we kissed, stunned as the depths of my failure sink in. For it is not just that Elias left again. After all, I told him to go.

It is that I did not get the scythe. I am alone in the middle of the Tribal desert with no food, no water, and no way of getting to either of those things quickly. All I have is my dagger and a freshly ravaged heart.

“Rehmat?” The creature does not respond, and I wince when I think of the dismay in its voice after I killed Khuri. Like I was a cruel child who broke the neck of a bird.

I drop my face into my hands and try to breathe, focusing on the desert scents of salt and earth and juniper. The wind yanks at my hair and clothes, its wail echoing in my head like the Nightbringer’s keen. I wish for Nan and Pop. For my mother. I wish for Izzi. For Keenan. For everyone who is gone.

But there is one who isn’t gone. Not yet.

I close my eyes, as I did weeks ago in the Forest of Dusk, and think about all that has bonded Darin and me. Then I call out softly, so as not to draw unwanted attention like last time.

“Darin?”

The minutes slide by. Perhaps I did not hear him before. Perhaps it was wishful thinking—

Laia?

“Darin!” I make myself speak his name quietly. “You can hear me?”

Yes. A heavy pause. So I did hear you before. I wondered if I’d imagined it. Darin sounds as if he has not slept in an age. But it is his voice and I want to sob in relief.

How do I know this isn’t a trick?

“When you were fifteen, you liked our neighbor Sendiya so much that you spent a month drawing a portrait of her even though I told you she was horribly vain. But she gave it back because she said you made her nose too small. You moped for weeks.”

It wasn’t weeks. Maybe three days.

“Three weeks,” I insist, though I am grinning.

Thankfully my luck has improved.

“Ugh.” I make a vomiting sound. “I don’t want to know. You have terrible taste in girls, Darin.”

Not this time! You know her, she says. Nawal—she’s a healer.

I nod though of course he cannot see me. “I do know her. She’s too good for you.”

Probably. Are you all right? Where are you?

“I—I am fine.”

The lie weighs heavy on my tongue. I have never been able to fool my brother. Not when I broke a jar of Nan’s precious jam and tried to blame it on an alley cat; not when our parents and Lis died, and I told him I could fall asleep fine without him watching over me. In the end, he took the blame for the jam. And he watched over my sleep for months, though he was only seven at the time.

Laia, he says. Tell me.

His words are a boulder that breaks a dam. I tell him everything.