But he flashes me Mother’s cavalier smile. “We fight less when we’re not in the same city. And I won’t miss you stealing my food or bossing me around like you’re my nan instead of a wittle cwicket—”

I bat him away, laughing as he pinches my cheeks like I’m an infant. “Oh, piss off—”

He pulls me into a hug, and I yelp when he lifts me up. “Be safe, little sister,” he says, and there is no laughter in his voice anymore. “It’s just us now.”

Part II

The Reaping

XIV: The Nightbringer

As a young jinn, I drifted through the trees in awe of the silence and the sound, the light and the redolent earth. In my ignorance, I set the forest alight. But Mauth’s laughter was gentle, his instruction patient. He taught me to dance from shadow to flame, to step lightly so as not to disturb the small creatures with whom I shared the Waiting Place.

After I had learned the swell of the forest and the curves of the river, after I stalked with the wolves and rode the winds with the falcons, Mauth guided me to the border of the Waiting Place. Beyond, fires burned and stone clashed. The children of clay laughed and fought and stole life and brought it forth with joy and blood.

“What are they?” They mesmerized me. I could not look away.

They are your charges, Mauth said. Fragile, yes, but with spirits like the great old oaks, long-lived and strong. When their bodies are finished, those spirits must pass on. Many will do so without you. But others will require your aid.

“Where do they go?”

Onward, he said, to the other side. To a twilight sky and a peaceful shore.

“How do I care for them? How do I help them?”

You love them, he said.

The task seemed like a gift. For after a few minutes of watching them, I was half in love already.

Keris Veturia leaves Marinn with grain, leather, iron, and a treaty that includes the expulsion of every Scholar who walks the Free Lands. Though not their sale, much to her irritation. Still, after days of negotiations, it is a victory. She should feel satisfied.

But for all of her cunning, Keris is still human. She seethes over the Blood Shrike’s escape, over the fact that I forbade her from personally hunting the Shrike down.

The Empress finds me on the garden terraces that overlook Fari Harbor, her expression unreadable as she surveys the delicate arched bridge and mirror-clear pond of the terrace below. A young family crosses the bridge, a father holding one giggling child under each arm, while their mother looks on with a smile.

“The sea efrits will speed your ships to the Tribal lands, Keris,” I say. “Drop anchor outside Sadh. In a fortnight, we will commence the attack.”

“And Marinn?” Keris wants the Free Lands. She wants this city. She wants Irmand’s throne and Nikla’s head on a pike.

“A reprieve.” I follow the family’s progress down a neatly cobbled path to a gazebo. “As we promised.”

Keris inclines her head, gray eyes glittering. “As you will, my lord Nightbringer.”

I smooth the Empress’s edges as she departs, nudging her mind toward strategy and destruction. When she is out of sight, a cold wind whips at me, depositing two flame-formed jinn to the earth at my side.

“Khuri. Talis.” I welcome them with a flare of warmth. “Your journey was swift?”

“The winds were kind, Meherya,” Khuri says.

“What news of our kin?”

“Faaz cracked a river boulder yesterday.” Khuri’s voice betrays her pride in her brethren’s skill, and I smile to hear it. She was barely a century when the Scholars came. She lost her younger siblings in the war, her parents to grief. “And Azul sent a snowstorm to Delphinium two days ago.”

“Talis?”

“My power was ever a struggle, Meherya,” he says quietly.

“Only because you fear it.” I raise my hand to his face and he takes a shuddering breath, letting the calm of my years flow through him. “One day, you will not.”

“The girl—Laia—” Khuri spits the name. “She and her companions entered the forest. We gave chase but—but she escaped, Meherya.”

Below, the Mariner woman exclaims as her son offers her some small treasure he’s found in the garden.

Khuri’s flame deepens at the sight, her fists clenching as the children shriek in joy. “If you would only tell us why the girl must live, Meherya? Why can we not simply kill her?”

I feel the barest touch on my mind. A sudden urge to answer her question.

“Khuri,” I chide her, for her power is compulsion. I trained her myself, long ago. “That was unnecessary.”

A moment later, she screams, so high no human could hear it. A flock of starlings explodes from the trees behind us. The young family below watches the birds, exclaiming at their murmurations. Talis cringes and tries to retreat, for when he let that sorry creature Cain die, he, too, was punished. I hold him still with my magic. I do not let him look away.

Khuri collapses, looking down in horror at her wrists, which are encased in thin chains the color of clotted blood.

“I destroyed most of them after the fall,” I say of the chains. “I never liked having them in our city, but our guard captains insisted.”

“F-f-forgive me—please—”

When Khuri’s fire has flickered to ash, I remove the chains and put them in a sack, offering them to her. She trembles uncontrollably, cringing back.

“Take it,” I say. “Talis will join me in the south. You have a different task, Khuri.”

I explain what she is to do, and there is no doubt in the flicker of her flame. As she listens, sorrow grips me. Sorrow that I had to hurt her. Sorrow that I cannot tell her and Talis the truth. The truth, I know, is not something they could bear.

After they leave, I wander to the edge of the terrace. The father unrolls a cloth and begins doling out morsels of food to his family.

I smile, remembering two tiny flames from long ago, and my queen laughing at me. You spoil them, Meherya. So many sweets will dim their fire.

In the end, of course, humans took their fire, crushed it out with salt and steel and summer rain.

I turn my back on the Mariner family and spin into the sky on an updraft. A moment later, the father shouts, for his wife clutches her throat, suddenly unable to breathe. Just after, his children are also gasping, and his cries transform into screams.

The guards will come. They will try to breathe life into the children, the mother. But it will do no good. They are gone, and nothing will bring them back.