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Now it is just Livia and me, and the space feels too vast. Too empty.
“I miss them.” The words escape me, and once I say them, more come that I cannot stop. “Sometimes I think I failed them, Livvy—”
“You did not fail them.” Livia takes my shoulders, and though she is smaller than me, I see my father in the steadiness of her gaze, the strength of her hands. “You held fast against the tide, Blood Shrike,” she says. “None could have stood as you did. Without you, we would all be dead.”
I dash my hands against my eyes. “Bleeding Avitas has turned me soft,” I mutter, and Livia bursts into laughter.
“Thank the skies someone has,” she says. “And don’t you go getting mean on him now. Tell him how you feel, sister.”
I shove her and go back to my tea, putting my feet up on her table because I know it will irritate her. “With candles and oud player?” I say. “Shall I make him a flower crown too? Skies, Livia, next you’ll want me to propose.”
“That’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
I nearly spew out my tea. “Harper and I are just—this doesn’t mean anything—”
Livia rolls her eyes. “And I’m a three-headed Karka vulture.”
“Well, you are one in the morning.”
“Youtry being cheery when you’re being woken up every three hours and yelled at for food.”
I snort, and my sister smiles, taking years off her face.
“Ah, Helly,” she says with such sweetness that I cannot even get angryat her for calling me by that old name. “It’s so good to hear you laugh. You don’t laugh enough. Too bad Avitas is as serious as you are.”
I grin at her. “He has other skills.”
She giggles, a high-pitched wheeze that sounds like a goat being choked. When I say so, she giggles harder, until we are both laughing far too loudly to not wake a sleeping child.
In the next room, Zak shrieks.
“Oh, now you’ve done it.” Livia shoves me and grabs one of the lamps off the table. “You’re rocking him to sleep this time! Poor Tas needs a break, and I need dreams.”
“I have plans this evening,” I call after her. “I need to make a flower crown, remember—”
My sister snorts and enters my nephew’s room, her tone softening. “Zakky, my love, Mama istired, and fed you twice this eve—”
Her voice chokes off. Instantly I am on my feet, across the room, scims out, screaming for the guards. No one could have gotten in without us seeing. There are no passageways into that bleeding room. The windows are fifty feet off the ground. The gardens below are guarded, day and night.
I burst through the door. Zacharias’s chamber is small, only a dozen feet across, but right now, it might as well be as wide as the space between stars. For Keris Veturia stands by the window, mask gleaming, a wickedly curved dagger in hand. And Livia is frozen before her, not fighting, not screaming. Just standing there, arms loose at her side, voice low and pleading.
Don’t stand there, Livia!I want to scream.Move! Run!
Instead my sister’s begging chokes off as the Commandant steps forward and slides her blade across Livia’s throat. The sound is like cloth tearing, and at first, I cannot believe what I hear. What I see.
The scream building inside me never emerges, for as my sister drops, as her life pours out of her, all I can think of is getting to Keris.
But the Commandant holds a squirming Zacharias in her arms—and I understand now why Livia was frozen in fear. When I leap toward the Bitch of Blackcliff, she throws Zacharias at me. My nephew howls as he flies through the air and I drop my scim to catch him, stumbling.
It is a delay of only seconds. But it’s enough for the Commandant to escape out the window. I am at the sill in three steps, in time to see a swirl of cloak and the glare of two sun eyes.
Then the Nightbringer and his minion are gone, disappearing on the back of a screaming wind.
Livvy moans, and I am at her side, her son wailing in my arms as she bleeds out. The guards, including Rallius, burst into the room, going silent when they see the Empress Regent fallen.
I hold up a hand so they don’t speak. I do not have much time. The desire to heal overwhelms me. I close my eyes and search for her song. It comes to my lips immediately, but as I hum, Livia scrabbles at me with her hand. It is slick with blood, but I hold it tight.
I keep singing, but Livvy’s face is bone-white. The need to heal fades as it never has before. Zacharias reaches out to her, crying, no doubt wondering why Auntie Shrike holds him so tight.
