A Reaper at the Gates (An Ember in the Ashes)

“It hurts.”

Surrender always does. But it will not hurt forever.

Curse this world for what it does to the mothers, for what it does to the daughters. Curse it for making us strong through loss and pain, our hearts torn from our chests again and again. Curse it for forcing us to endure.

The cruelest anger comes from the deepest pain.

For Renée, who knows my heart.

For Alexandra, who holds my hopes.

And for Ben, who shares the dream.

“You freed us,” they murmur. “Our king. Our father. Our Meherya. You did not forget us.”

The humans were wrong. I had a name, once. A beautiful name. A name spoken by the great dark that came before all else. A name whose meaning brought me into existence and defined all I would ever be.

My queen spoke my name long ago. Now my people whisper it.

“Meherya.”

Their long-banked flames blaze brighter. From red to incandescent white, too bright for human eyes, but glorious to mine. I see their power and magic, their pain and rage.

I see their soul-deep need for vengeance. I see the bloody reaping to come.

“Meherya.” My children say my name again, and the sound of it drops me to my knees. “Meherya.”

Beloved.

A crack echoes through the grove, loud as summer thunder. Deep in the Waiting Place, the soughs of the spirits transform into screams as one of the trees splits, then another. Flames pour from those great gouges, bursting forth as if the gates to all of the hells have been breached. My flames. My family. My jinn.

The trees explode into cinders, their glow painting the firmament an infernal red. Moss and shrubs curdle to soot, leaving an acres-wide black ring. The earth shudders, a tremor that will shatter glass from Marinn to Navium.

I taste fear on the air: from the Augurs and the ghosts, from the humans that infest this world. Visions flash across my mind: a scarred soldier cries out, reaching for daggers that will not help her. A newborn babe awakes, howling. A girl I once loved gasps, wheeling her horse about to gaze with gold eyes at the crimson sky over the Forest of Dusk.

“Look into my eyes, you wretch of a man,” I whisper. “See the darkest moments of your future. Witness the devastation I will unleash.”

Cain stiffens as he looks, as he sees in my gaze field upon field of the dead. Villages, towns, cities aflame. His people, his precious Scholars obliterated at the hands of my brethren, ground down until even their name is no longer remembered. The Mariners, the Tribes, the Martials all under the bloody, iron-fisted rule of Keris Veturia.

And his champions, those three flames in which he placed all his hopes—Laia of Serra, Helene Aquilla, and Elias Veturius—I smother those flames. For I have taken the Blood Shrike’s soul. The Waiting Place has taken the Soul Catcher’s humanity. And I will crush Laia of Serra’s heart.

Shadows emerge from behind me, fourteen in number. I know them and I hate them, for they are the wellsprings of all my sorrows.

The Augurs.

Do they still hear the screams of the jinn children who were slaughtered with cold steel and summer rain? Do they recall how my people begged for mercy even as they were sealed into the jinn grove?

“You cannot stop me,” I say to the Augurs. “My vengeance is written.”

“We are here to witness.” Cain speaks. He is a far cry from the power-obsessed Scholar king of a millennium ago. Strange to think that this withered creature is the same man who betrayed the jinn, promising peace while plotting destruction. “Those who ignited the blaze must suffer its wrath,” he says.

“It’s not mortality I feel,” I say, “though it is something uniquely mortal.”

Sadness?

“A type of sadness,” I say, “called loneliness.”

There is a long silence, so long that I think he has left me. Then I feel the earth shift around me. The tree’s roots rumble, curving, softening, until they fashion themselves around me, into a sort of seat. Vines grow, and flowers burst from them.

You are not alone, Banu al-Mauth. I am here with you.

A ghost drifts close to me, flitting about in agitation. Searching, always searching. I know her. The Wisp.

“Hello, young one.” Her hand drifts across my face. “Have you seen my lovey?”

“I have not,” I say, but this time I give her all of my attention. “Can you tell me her name?”

“Lovey.”

I nod, feeling none of the impatience I felt before. “Lovey,” I say. “What about you? What is your name?”

“My name,” she whispers. “My name? She called me Ama. But I had another name.” I sense her agitation and try to soothe her. I seek a way into her memories, but I cannot find one. She has built a wall around herself. When she tilts her head, her profile manifests briefly. The curves of her face strike a deep and visceral chord. I feel like I’m catching a glimpse of someone I’ve always known.

“Karinna.” She sits down next to me. “That was my name. Before I was Ama, I was Karinna.”

Karinna. I recognize the name, though it takes me a moment to realize why. Karinna was my grandmother’s name. Quin’s wife.

When I have been back in the Waiting Place more than a week, I suddenly feel an outsider’s presence far to the north, near Delphinium. It takes me only a moment to realize who it is.

Leave it, Mauth says in my head. You know she will bring you no joy.

“I would like to tell her why I left.” I have let go of her. But sometimes old images drift to the shores of my mind, leaving me restless. “Perhaps if I do, she will cease to haunt me.”

I feel Mauth sigh, but he speaks no more, and in a half hour I can see her through the trees, pacing back and forth. She is alone.

“Laia.”

She turns, and at the sight of her, something in me twists. An old memory. A kiss. A dream. Her hair like silk between my fingers, her body rising beneath my hands.