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“—we are not going to bleeding Marinn—” TheZaldarof Tribe Nasur speaks, shouting down a dozen other voices. “If you wish to help the Mariners, that is your choice—”
“If we do not all go, the Nightbringer will win.” Laia’s voice is low, and she struggles to temper her frustration. “He will have his vengeance on the Scholars, and Keris will hunt you down like she hunted down my people. You’ll be enslaved. Destroyed. Just like we were.”
“You have the scythe,” another voice calls out. “You go fight him. Was it not your people whose violence led to the Nightbringer’s ire?”
“That was a thousand years ago—” Darin speaks, which is when I notice Martials sprinkled through the crowd. The Blood Shrike’s men.
“There’s no point in staying if we’re just going to be hunted,” Afya says forcefully. “We go. We fight. Laia takes down the Nightbringer. Maybe we win.”
“That will take weeks—”
“Months,” Gibran calls out. “Maybe years. But at least we fight insteadof hiding like rats.”
I think of Mauth’s warning, and Khuri’s prophecy.In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe.
We do not have months or years. We have weeks, if that. Spring is close.
It is Laia who sees me first. Laia whose eyes go wide as I step out of the dark.
Whispers ofBanu al-Mauthstreak through the crowd gathered around the fire. They could shout at me. Ask me why I left. Instead they shift back, giving me space to pass. Watchful. Defiant.
“The Nightbringer’s maleficence runs deeper than we thought,” I tell them. “For he is not stealing your ghosts to empower his people. He is stealing them so that he can destroy all life. And if we wish for a future—any future—we have no choice but to stop him.”
XLVII:The Blood Shrike
We bury the Empress Regent two days after her murder, as the sun goes to rest in the west. Thousands line Antium’s streets, littering it with winter rose petals as six Masks carry her to the Aquilla Mausoleum on the north end of the city. There, under a rainy, slate-colored sky, she is movingly eulogized by a handful of highborn Paters and Maters who barely knew her.
Or so I am told, after. I do not attend. I do not leave the palace for days following. Instead, I plot how I will destroy Keris.
Two weeks after the funeral, I am holed up in a meeting chamber with Livia’s advisory council, listening to a group of recently arrived generals arguing over why their war plan is the only one that will allow us to take back Silas—and eventually Serra and Navium—from Keris.
“We should wait,” says old General Pontilius, fresh from Tiborum. He paces around the long table where I sit with Mettias, Quin Veturius, Musa, Cassius, and six others.
“No. We strike now,” Quin says. “While she’s trying to take the Free Lands. Secure Silas, and move south from there.”
“And what if it’s a trap?” Pontilius asks. “She could have an army lying in wait for us. Reports put her forces in Marinn at nearly forty thousand men. She has another thirty thousand in reserve. That leaves fifty thousand men unaccounted for.”
“They’re scattered throughout the south—” Musa offers, and Pontilius recoils as if slapped.
“How would you know, Scholar?”
Once, Musa might have laughed off such insolence. Now he frowns. Eleiba’s tidings from Marinn have sobered him. All I could send was a token force. Two Masks. Two hundred soldiers. They will not have even reached Marinn yet.They won’t get through in time, Musa had fretted.We have to draw Keris off. We have to take back the Empire so she has no choice but to return.
He could have gone back with Eleiba. He’d wanted to, even. But his people are here, so he stayed.
“Do you know where Musa of Adisa was in the fight to take Antium, Pontilius?” I say now. “At my side, bleeding for an Empire he’d never set foot in until a few months ago. Fighting for the Scholars. Tell me,General, where were you during the fighting?”
Pontilius pales. “You’ve been taken in by a handsome face—”
My blade is at his throat before he finishes. “Do not make the mistake,” I say, “of thinking I won’t slit your throat for discourteousness, old man. Everyone at this table knows I won’t hesitate.”
Pontilius swallows and, in what he no doubt thinks of as a more reasonable tone, says, “He is aScholar—”
My punch lands with acrackacross his jaw, and he topples backward, stunned. I am embarrassed for him. He’s younger than Quin. At the very least he should be able to handle a punch on his feet.
“You—” he sputters. “How dare you—”
“She could have killed you.” Pater Mettias, wan and quiet until now, speaks up. “Count yourself lucky.”
