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“Laia of Serra said something else.” The efrit’s sand grows dull, its light fading.“Strive even unto your own end, else all is lost—”
The efrit’s words trail off. Between one breath and the next, he is gone, his sand form disappearing in the wind.
Thank the skies Harper tends toward silence, because it gives me a moment to piece it all together. The Commandant left the south open because she wanted me to attack. Because if I’m focused on Silas, I cannot help the one person who can destroy her master.
“Shrike,” Harper finally says. “We need to leave. It’s getting colder. The river will freeze, and we won’t be able to sail south.”
“Let it freeze,” I tell him. “Today, we do not sail. Today, we march.”
Part IV
The Sher Jinnaat
LI:The Nightbringer
For years, I raged. Villages burned. Caravans disappeared. Families murdered. But in the end, there were too many humans. I annihilated thousands, yet when I turned, I would find hundreds more.
Vengeance would take years. Centuries. And I could not do it alone. I needed to prey on humanity’s worst traits. Tribalism. Prejudice. Greed. And while I pitted them against each other, I needed to reconstitute the Star, a far more difficult task. For it had shattered, its pieces scattered to the winds. Each piece had to be hunted down. Each returned to me in love.
The first human I ever loved was a Scholar. Husani of Nava—what would later become Navium. She wore the shard of the Star as a necklace, fashioned by her late husband. Her child died of a fever when she had only just learned to speak. So I came to her as an orphan, red-haired and brown-eyed, grappling with my own pain. She called me her son and named me Roshan.
Light.
My presence filled a hole within her. She loved me instantly.
It took me longer to love her. Though I lived in the body of a human child, my mind was my own, and I could not forget what her kind had done to mine. But she soothed my nightmares and tended my wounds. She attacked my face with kisses, and hugged me so much that I began to crave the comfort of her arms.
Soon after coming to her, I learned to respect her. And in time, I loved her.
She gave me the necklace after I told her I was leaving home to seek my fortune.All my love goes with you, beloved son.Those were her words when she set the necklace around my neck, tears in her eyes.
In that moment, I wanted to transform. To scream at her that I was beloved, once, but that all who loved me were gone. That her kind had not just stolen my people, but my name.
The only parent I had ever had was Mauth, and his love for me was rooted in the duty he laid upon my shoulders. Husani offered me the love of a mother: fierce where Mauth was sober, pure where Mauth was calculated.
And how did I, the one she loved the best, repay her? How did I thank the human who gave me everything, who taught me more of love in a few short years than I had learned in all my millennia?
I abandoned her. After taking her necklace, I left. I did not return.
When she died a few years later, she died nirbara—forsaken. She left this earth with her adopted son’s name on her lips, not knowing where he had gone, or whether he lived, or what she had done to deserve his silence.
I mourned her then. I mourn her still.
Like the Tribes, the Mariners have their own rites for the dead. Like the Tribes, they begin to understand that against me, those rites mean nothing.
The palace of the Mariner royal family is rubble around me—as is much of Adisa. The city that gave haven to my enemies has been laid low by Keris Veturia. Thousands of souls flow from her killing fields and into my hands.
Maro still recovers from the wound Laia dealt him. But I catch nearly as many spirits as him. The souls of men are fickle and thin. They come to me easily. Almost willingly.
“The city is ours.” Keris walks gingerly through the ruins of the palace, her gaze snagging on the shattered glass dome that used to sit above Irmand’s driftwood throne. There is a proprietary air about her. This is her city. Her palace. An extension of her Empire. Just as I promised.
She is splattered with the blood of Marinn’s brave soldiers, none of them a match for her savagery. “Before I killed her, Nikla raised the white flag—”
I give her a withering look, and she bows her head, barely cowed. “My lord,” she adds.
“Adisa is a fallen city,” I tell her. “But the Mariners are not a broken people. Many in the city fled. How many dead?”
“More than twelve thousand, my lord.”
