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Quil made his way back to the body, to a Plebeian woman wiping away tears as she looked at the dead boy.
“Pardon me,” Quil called gently to get her attention. “Did you know him?”
She shook her head. “He lived on the streets. Took care of some of the younger children.”
The woman glanced over, mouth twisting as she recognized Quil. “You Illustrian bastards,” she whispered. “You don’t give two figs about us. He’s not the first to die like this.”
Quil brushed off the insult, focusing on the last thing she said. The Masks had also died with their hearts burned to cinders, though that knowledge was carefully guarded. “How—”
But the woman disappeared into the crowd. Before Quil could follow, the voice cracked through his mind.
Enough! I need to speak with you. There’s an apothecary on the southeast corner of the square. Meet me inside. Hurry. I haven’t got all bleeding day.
Quil weighed the risk of answering this voice against his own curiosity. The latter won. When he stepped into the darkened building moments later, scim drawn, a hooded figure emerged from the shadows behind the apothecary’s dusty counter.
“Put that big knife away, boy.”
Quil recognized the woman instantly.
“Bani al-Mauth.” The prince sheathed his scim and bowed.Chosen of Death.She’d been a runaway, a revolutionary, a slave, and a murderess.
Now she was a holy figure who guided restless spirits from this life to the next. She took the pain that anchored them to the human plane and cast it into another dimension—the Sea of Suffering—so the ghosts could move on in peace. It was a task that confined her mostly to a haunted wood on the edge of the Martial Empire. The Waiting Place, it was called, for the ghosts unwilling to move on from it.
Quil had met the Bani al-Mauth many times. Often when she visited Empress Helene. But mostly when she came to the Tribal Lands to see her family—including Sufiyan, her grandson, and his parents, Laia of Serra and Elias Veturius.
Of course, he’d seen her more recently, too. But almost as soon as he thought about it, the woman growled at him.
“Dash that thought from your head, boy.” She must have read his expression. “You know better. You know the cost.”
He knew. But sensations still crowded his mind—things he didn’t want to remember from that night months ago. The mountains. A cavern. The iron tang of blood. So sharp, as if he’d walked into a slaughterhouse.
Which, he supposed, he had.
“You.” He forced the thoughts away—he’d gotten better at it since he’d last seen her. “You were following me.”
“Thought you’d catch on quicker. Been shadowing you since the palace.”
Well, that was embarrassing. “Should I get Sufiyan?” Quil’s face heated. “He’d want—”
“My grandson and his family want nothing to do with me,” the Bani al-Mauth said. “I came to get your help.”
“My help?” Quil shook his head. “You’re the one who knew about the dead boy, not me. How?”
“Felt it coming,” she said. “Tell me what you know about the others who died like him.”
Quil met that dark blue stare. The Empress had told Quil to speak to no one of the Masks’ deaths.Especially not Sufiyan or his family.She didn’t have to tell Quil twice. Sufiyan’s little sisters were only fifteen and thirteen. And Laia and Elias had been through enough.
But the Bani al-Mauth was different. When Quil was a child, she arrived in Antium and demanded to speak to the Empress. Quil was visiting from the Tribal Lands and expected his aunt to reject such an abrupt summons. Instead, she’d cleared her evening.
“Maybe we should go to Aunt Hel together,” Quil offered, but the Bani al-Mauth waved away the suggestion.
“Your aunt’s acting like everything is fine. She’s doing nothing about the murders.”
Quil’s hackles rose. He might resent Aunt Hel, but he’d be damned before he would let anyone else say a word against her. “Those dead Masks were young and Illustrian and they were murdered in the Tribal Lands. She kept it quiet because she knew it would look like the Tribes had killed them. She didn’t want Illustrian families out for blood.”
“I’m not talking about the Masks,” the Bani al-Mauth said. “I’m talking about the children. Ruh was the first—” Her voice caught, but she cleared her throat. “Then your girl—Ilar.”
Quil’s chest twisted at the sound of their names, which conjured their faces, their scents, their voices.Stop. Don’t think of them. Bury it.
