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“You—cannot kill me—Nightbringer—”
“But I am so much more than the Nightbringer now, Laia.” His voice is that flood below, all-consuming and treacherous.
Once again, I am shoved to one side of my own mind. I stare down the Nightbringer in all of his wrath. But I feel no fear, because Rehmat feels no fear.
“You,” the Nightbringer whispers, “have been hiding for a very long time. What are you? Speak!”
“I am your chains, Meherya. I am your end.” But Rehmat does not sound triumphant. It sounds anguished. It sounds broken.
The Nightbringer releases me. He takes a step back, a slow shock rolling over him. I expect Rehmat to use the moment to spirit us away. But it does not. Nor does it attack the Nightbringer. Instead, we stare together at the king of the jinn, and an unexpected emotion unfurls within Rehmat. One that makes me recoil in disgust.
Longing.
The Nightbringer appears as paralyzed as I am. “I know you,” he says. “I know you, but—”
Rehmat lifts my—our—hand, but we do not touch him. Not yet.
“I am your end,” Rehmat says. “But I was there at the beginning too, my love. When you were king alone, solitary and ever apart from our people. You went wandering near the sea one day, and you found a queen.”
I try to wrap my mind around what I am hearing, but it is too deep a betrayal for me to comprehend. This... thing living inside of me was a jinn? And not just any jinn, but theirqueen?
“Rehmat,” the Nightbringer says, the name a prayer and a curse at once. “You died. In the Duskan Sea battle—”
What the bleeding skies is happening?I scream in my mind at Rehmat.
It—or she—ignores me. But when she speaks again, it is in the manner that I’ve become accustomed to, as if she has finally remembered why she is here.
“I did not die,” she says. “I saw what was to come and I called on an old magic, blood magic. Lay down your scythe, Meherya. Stop this madness—”
But the Nightbringer flinches. “I was alone,” he whispers. “For a thousand years, I thought I was—” He shakes his head, and it is such a human gesture that I actually feel sorry for him. For in this moment, we have both been betrayed.
Damn you, Rehmat, I shout at her in my head.Get out of my mind.
Laia—
Get out!Her magic fades first, then her presence, and I am alone.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the Nightbringer, “I—I didn’t know—” Why am I telling him this? He will only use it against me. He might have loved me, but he hated himself as he did so, because his hatred for my people is the air he breathes.
An aroma of cedar and lemon fills my senses, and I return to a cellar miles to the north, where a red-haired boy I loved made me feel less alone. I have spent so long hating the Nightbringer that I never mourned who he used to be. Keenan, my first love, my friend, a boy who understood my loss so deeply because he had endured his own.
“We are doomed, you and I,” the Nightbringer whispers, and when he touches my face with his hands, their fire cooled, I do not quail. “To offer more love than we will ever be given.”
He is not violence then, or vengeance. All his hate has drained away, replaced by despair, and I put my hands on his face. I am glad Rehmat has fled, for this strange impulse is mine alone.
Salt flows over his fingers as fire trickles down mine. Would that we all knew the cracked terrain of each other’s broken hearts. Perhaps then, we would not be so cruel to those who walk this lonely world with us.
Our moment is over too quickly. As if realizing what he is doing, he wrenches his hands from my skin, and I stumble back, toward the canyon’s edge. He snatches me from peril, but that act of mercy seems to rekindle his fury. A fey wind howls out of the somber sky, and he spins away.
Just like that, we are at war again.
I watch him until he is gone and then look down at my hands. They are unmarked by his fire, appearing whole, as if I’d touched a human and not a creature of flame.
Still, they burn.
XXXIV:The Blood Shrike
As we enter the city, a horn wails. A Karkaun warning call, rousing them from sleep and drink and less savory entertainments. In minutes, the sound echoes across the city.
