T he city stank of flesh. When we arrived in Malakahn, I had to press my hand over my mouth to stop my stomach from emptying. The smoke
was so thick and unnaturally acrid that it made my eyes drip. Shouts and screams in a cacophony of languages echoed in the distance.
Meajqa muttered a curse.
Everything smelled like death—the air even tasted of it. Destruction stretched in every direction. Once this had been a majestic city of white marble, but now it was crumbling and ash-stained, painted with blood. To our left, a building still stood, walls only partially collapsing, and hordes of soldiers pushed against it, magic slowly but methodically ripping the stone to shreds while those within scurried and shouted like mice trapped upon a sinking ship. Banners marked with Threllian house sigils burned. In the distance, we spotted gold flags—the banners of Ela’Dar, barely standing.
Meajqa turned to the others. He had brought a small group of ten soldiers and commanded that everyone split up in groups of two to locate our Fey battalions.
I looked down to my feet. I stood on a slab of stone. A pale, ash- covered hand reached out from beneath the rubble.
“What if they are buried?” one of the soldiers asked, following my gaze. Meajqa glared at her and told her not to ask unhelpful questions.
I remained with Meajqa. I thought he would go to the Threllian leaders clustered at the far end of the city, but he sent soldiers to do that instead and we walked alone through the rubble.
It was incredible. The city was just… gone.
It reminded me of the level of destruction that the Zorokovs had showed us when they called us to Lady Zorokov’s sister’s estate—a place where humans had lived their lives, now nothing but a graveyard. But this was worse, because while that city had been a ghost of itself, this one was still writhing through its death throes. The glorious euphoria of battle had passed, but the slow drip of death had not.
We walked in awkward zigzags to sidestep the bodies strewn over the ground. I kept my gaze drawn down to the corpses, not only to avoid stepping on them but to inspect each of their faces. Just in case.
We were nearly to those broken banners when I tripped. I looked down to see long fingers wrapped around my ankle, gripping with surprising strength.
It was a human woman, trapped beneath a slab of stone. When I turned to look down at her, her expression changed, spasms of pain running over it. I could have pulled away easily and kept walking. She was weak.
Instead I found myself kneeling down beside her. I watched her with fascination. The muscles in her face twitched. Her breaths were long and rattling. One eye was obscured by bloody gore, but the other locked to me. It was green, a shade that reminded me of someone that I knew in another life.
Blood poured from her abdomen onto the dusty ground. I removed my cloak, folded it in half, and pressed it to her wound. She writhed and let out a gargle. The fabric was soaked in seconds.
Meajqa grabbed my arm and yanked me away.
“What are you doing? She would’ve killed you if she had the strength for it. That isn’t how war works. You don’t try to save the other side.”
He dragged me to my feet, and we continued towards the banners.
When I glanced over my shoulder, the woman was no longer moving.
 |
BY THE TIME we reached the Fey banners, the smoke was thick enough to blot out the sky. There was little movement. I feared the worst, and Meajqa did too, based on his tense silence.
We crested a hill and saw a cluster of soldiers, silhouetted in the mist. My heart leapt. At a flash of copper, I began to walk faster. When we
approached, one of them turned around—to my utter relief, Caduan.
His face changed immediately when he saw us. “What are you doing here?” he asked, as soon as we were close enough.
“Five days with no word,” Meajqa shot back. He didn’t bother to hide his annoyance, though with it came a visible breath of relief. “Of course we would send reinforcements.”
“We had no time to write letters. This is the longest we’ve gone without a clash in a week.”
Meajqa’s gaze flicked across the field, and the soldiers that surrounded Caduan. “My aunt? Is she—”
“She needed to fly south to handle another conflict, before this one began. She is safe.”
Caduan took several steps through the wreckage towards us. Though he ducked his head, I noticed the wince, and though he moved slowly, I saw the pain in his movements.
“You’re injured,” I said.
“No. Just tired.” He looked to the horizon line, and it was only then that I saw beyond our encampment to what was happening in the valley below. Threllian and Fey soldiers clustered together. Before them, uniformed humans stood in straight lines, hands bound behind them.
Someone shouted. The humans knelt. And then, before I had time to react to what I was seeing, the Threllians and the Fey walked up and down the lines of rebels, executing them. The bodies flopped into the dirt one by one like discarded rag dolls.
Further in the distance, our soldiers yanked humans out of houses, door to door. It was all very methodical, systematic.
Once, nothing had been more comforting to me than to be surrounded by death. I could hide my powerlessness beneath my wrath and make the entire world just as stagnant and empty as I was. Even now, shameful as it may be, it felt like slipping back into clothing that had once fit me perfectly.
But this? This cold, mechanical taking of life? It seemed wrong. Caduan had moved closer to me. “I did not—”
“To the east!” One of our soldier’s shouts cut through his voice. We turned to see him pointing up.
I looked up and saw a flash of gold in the sky.
My breath hitched. I recognized Ishqa right away, even from this distance. You memorize everything about your nightmares.
Meajqa cocked his bow.
“What the hell is he doing here?” one of the soldiers muttered. “Shoot him down!” Caduan commanded.
Meajqa let his arrow fly before the words were out of Caduan’s mouth. Ishqa’s graceful movements lurched. The arrow missed, but only barely,
nicking his left wing. He ventured lower, coming closer to us.
Caduan’s lip twitched. “I am surprised he has the nerve to approach us.” Then he glanced at me. “Are you alright?”
I understood all he was asking with those three words. “Yes.”
“You can leave.”
“I want to see him.”
In five hundred years, I had not confronted my fears. I knew Ishqa’s face, or at least I thought I did. In my dreams he was as still as marble, his gold eyes unnervingly bright, his mouth frozen in perpetual disinterest. It was the face of someone who had not even cared—had not even thought twice—about betraying me.
The man who stood before me now looked exactly as I remembered him, and yet, so very different. His face was not so still, his eyes not so bright. When his gaze fell to Caduan, it was not emotionless detachment that lingered in it, but genuine pain.
He remained far away, beyond the reach of hands or weapons. Meajqa’s aim held.
“Are you pleased with yourself?” Ishqa said, voice stretching across the rubble. “Does all this death bring you the satisfaction of a job well done?”
“It was stupid of you to come here,” Caduan replied.
Meajqa’s only response was to let forth another arrow, which Ishqa dodged easily.
Meajqa had said he was no warrior, but he truly was a terrible marksman.
Ishqa’s lips thinned. “Iajqa. Where is she? I know she was a general here. I have not seen her.”
“You lost the right to ask after your family.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Caduan. You forgot that we were friends for four hundred years.” Ishqa’s gaze fell to Meajqa, who still aimed at his father. “I will never stop asking after my family. You know it as well as I. And I hope they know it, too.”
Meajqa’s jaw tightened. He let another arrow fly. This one didn’t even come close to hitting, burying itself uselessly in the ground several feet to Ishqa’s left.
No, this wasn’t right. I didn’t like any of this.
Ishqa was pretending to be someone kind, someone who looked at his son with such open affection, someone who chided Caduan—Caduan!— about the morality of this battle.
I did not like to be lied to. And this version of Ishqa was a lie. I knew it because the real version, the true version, had destroyed me without a second thought. I wanted to peel all the skin off his beautiful face until it exposed the rotting darkness underneath.
Without intending to, I took several steps closer, just enough to reveal myself from behind the line of Caduan’s soldiers.
Ishqa’s eyes met mine and went wide.
I was not expecting his stare to strike me as it did, yanking me back to a terrible day five hundred years ago without even a touch.
His lips fell open, as if words escaped him.
“What is this?” he choked out, after a moment. He whirled to Caduan. “What did you do?”
Caduan stepped in front of me.
“How did you do this?” Ishqa staggered closer, and I tensed—and that was enough to break the thread of Caduan’s restraint.
“Leave before we kill you,” Caduan said, calmly. “Now.”
Meajqa let an arrow fly just as Ishqa launched himself into the air. He hit his mark this time, though only enough to make Ishqa stagger as he arced gracefully through the sky. He flew fast. Seconds, and he was gone beneath the cloud cover.
But my pounding heart and shaking hands lingered long after he left.
|
THE EXECUTIONS LASTED LATE into the night. There were many humans to kill. Caduan told us that the battle had been lengthy and hard-fought, and that he hadn’t been able to send word back to Ela’Dar because there simply hadn’t been time—we had arrived only hours after the tides had turned,
leading to Threllian victory. Even he had underestimated the strength of sheer numbers the rebels commanded.
We piled bodies over bodies. The pyres burned so high and hot that often they threatened to spiral out of control, requiring groups of frantic Threllians to rush in with pails of water and Fey magic users to force flames back with whispered spells. I was certain my clothes and hair would never stop smelling of burning human flesh.
The piles of burning bodies were reserved only for the rebels and those killed within their territory. The Threllians burned their dead separately, in neat, individual pyres by the shore presided over by priestesses. Their dead slave warriors were burned separate from the rebels, too—the Threllians believed that even their loyal slaves deserved to be separated from the rebel traitors.
As for the Fey—by Caduan’s order, the dead were treated with the utmost care and respect. We collected all the Fey bodies, painstakingly combing through rubble to make sure we recovered all of them, even those that were in such terrible condition that they were unrecognizable. We wrapped the corpses in ivory silk shrouds and laid them side by side, far away from the burning humans. Soon, rows and rows of pristine white punctuated the charred remains of the city.
Caduan barely spoke to me—barely spoke to anyone—the entire time.
Days passed of this. Eating, sleeping. Collecting the dead.
On the third day, Caduan at last sank down beside me. The hours were between midnight and dawn. I had not seen him rest once.
“Why did you come here?”
I struggled to verbalize the answer to that question. “You were gone for too long.”
“And that mattered to you?”
It did matter to me. Only now did I realize how different that was from the way I had been when I had first returned to this body—that the word I had really been looking for was “concern.”
The sensation of caring for someone else was, oddly, frightening. Caduan seemed as if he made this connection, too.
“I did not want you to see this,” he said.
“I have seen plenty of death, in all of my lives.”
“It isn’t the violence I wanted to shield you from. It was…” His stare was glassy as they stared out into the destruction—at those rows of neat,
Nina kept her head down, her hood drawn tight. Despite being the instigator of the chaos and knowing the plague was a fabrication, her heart still raced, driven by the panic swelling around her. People were crying, pushing, and shouting, fighting for space on the browboats. It was pandemonium, all of her own making.
I caused this, she marveled. I controlled those corpses, those fragments of bone, those dying cells. What did that make her? If any Grisha had wielded such power, she had never heard of it. What would the other Grisha think? Her fellow Corporalki, the Heartrenders and Healers? We are linked to the essence of creation itself, the force at the core of the world. Maybe she should feel ashamed, perhaps even afraid. But shame was not in her nature.
Perhaps Djel had extinguished one light and ignited another. Nina didn’t care if it was Djel or the Saints or a troop of fire-breathing kittens; as she moved eastward, she realized that, for the first time in a long while, she felt strong. Her breathing was easy, the ache in her muscles had faded. She was ravenous. The craving for parem felt distant, like a memory of true hunger.
Nina had mourned the loss of her power, the connection to the living world. She had resented this shadow gift. It had seemed a mockery, a punishment. But just as life connected all things, so did death. It was that endless, swift river. She had dipped her fingers into its flow, held its swirling power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown.
I was just as angry as Caduan was. Hated these humans, and what they made him do, just as much.
“I know what it is like,” I said, softly, “to become the thing you hate the most.”
“I won’t let us become them.” “No. We will be better.”
Caduan’s gaze snapped to me fast, as if this was an unexpected response. I felt like he was seeing me, truly seeing me, for the first time since I had gotten here.
Pleasure shivered over me at that stare.
He put his hand out to help me stand. I took it, but only so I could slide my fingers over the soft skin on the inside of his wrist, where his pulse thrummed. I let my hand remain there even after I stood.
“We will be better,” he agreed.
On Caduan’s lips, it was a promise.
|
WE RETURNED TO ELA’DAR EXHAUSTED. I traveled with Meajqa, and Caduan, along with our other troops, would follow soon after. When we arrived at the palace, I went to my chambers and immediately collapsed onto my bed. Now I understood why mortals liked these things so much. When you feel like your muscles have all been peeled out from beneath your skin, the softness doesn’t seem so overwhelming.
I did not even feel myself dozing off, until I blinked through my bleary half-sleep to see a silhouette in the door.
I sat up. Caduan did not look as if he had stopped anywhere before coming to me, his clothes still bloodstained and face still dirty.
“I see you have come to appreciate beds,” he said. “It is… not horrible.”
“Enjoy it while you can. We start training again at dawn.” “Good,” I replied.
“Good,” he echoed, nodded stiffly, and said nothing more.
After he left, I lay back into my nest of pillows, stared at the copper ceiling, and smiled.
