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But these shapes are different. The Nightbringer is a typhoon of wrath and subtlety. These creatures are a shadow of that. Still, their anger is palpable, like the air before a lightning storm.
“Soul Catcher!” I shout.
“I see them.” He sounds almost bored, but when he looks back over his shoulder, he has the flat concentration of a Mask surrounded by the enemy. He cuts north—then west again, then north, then west until my head spins and I don’t know what direction we’re going.
The sun dips below the horizon, and for a time, it seems as though we’ve outrun the jinn. The River Dusk is nothing more than a flash of blue and a rush of sound before it is past. But not long after we cross, they catch us. This time, we can’t shake them. The jinn shriek madly and surround us.
Ahhh, Blood Shrike. The voice is sibilant and feels as if it’s worming through my mind.Without your sacrifice we would never have been free. Accept a token of our gratitude, a glimpse into your future.
“No!” I shout. “I don’t want—”
We see you, baby bird, not a Shrike but a small and weak thing, fallen far from safety. Parents dead, sister gone, and the other sister soon to join her—
“Stop!” I curse them, but they do not stop. The minutes are hours, and the hours are days as the jinn dig around in my thoughts. I cannot keep them out.
You do not love the child, they say.He is your blood, but you’ll see him dead and yourself upon the throne. You have always wanted it, wicked, wicked Shrike. They pack my mind with images of violence: my nephew, sweet Zacharias, lying limp, his small face drained of life. The horror of itis worse for his innocence, for the burden of rulership that he never knew he carried.
As I cry and beg that he be brought back, Keris laughs. The scars on my face ache, a soul-deep pain. Cook speaks in my ear, poor dead Mirra, but I cannot hear what she says because now there is a great roaring, a maelstrom coming closer, and it will devour us all—
Then I hear the Soul Catcher, though he is not next to me. “Do not listen to them,” he says. “They want to break the chain. They want to fall upon each of you, tear you away and consume your minds. Do not let them. Fight.”
“I can’t,” I whisper. “I—”
“You can. It is who you are. It is what you do best.”
Itiswhat I do best. Because I am strong, and I dig for that strength now. I watched my family bleed out at my feet and I fought for my people and faced a horde of Karkauns alone on a hill of dead bodies. I am a fighter. I am the Blood Shrike.
You are a child.
I am the Blood Shrike.
You are weak.
I am the Blood Shrike.
You are nothing.
“I am the Blood Shrike!” I scream, and the words echo back to me, not in my own voice but in my father’s and my mother’s, in Hannah’s and in the voices of all those lost at Antium.
Broken, unmade thing, you will lose more before the end, for you are a torch against the night, little Shrike, and above all a torch burns.
Quite suddenly, we stumble to a stop in a clearing. A dimly lit cabin risesout of the darkness. I stumble toward it, along with Darin and Harper. Laia has an arm wrapped around Tas, her teeth bared.
The Soul Catcher stands between us and the heavily cloaked jinn, who pace beyond the clearing. He has no weapon. He needs none, for in this moment, he calls to mind his mother’s quiet violence.
“You will not touch these humans,” he says. “Leave.”
One of the jinn detaches from the others. “They are your weakness, Soul Catcher.” She drips with malice, shakes with it. “You will fall and the Waiting Place will fall with you.”
“Not today, Umber,” the Soul Catcher says. “They are under my protection. And you have no power here.”
The softer the Commandant spoke, the more dangerous she was. The Soul Catcher’s voice is very low indeed, and power pulses through him. The air in the clearing thickens. The fire in the jinns’ eyes pales, as if suddenly quenched.
The jinn retreat, fading into the trees, and when they are gone, my legs go weak, my wound aching. Harper is beside me instantly, shaky himself but trying to hold me up. Musa stands apart, eyes glazed. Darin is pale as he wraps an arm around Laia’s trembling shoulders.
Tas is unaffected, and glances between us. “What—what happened?”
“Are you okay, Tas?” Laia pulls him close. “It wasn’t real what they said. You know that—”
