“Laia.”

Rehmat’s luminous form casts a glow across the starlit desert, sending night creatures scurrying into their burrows. Beside it—her—I am but a smudge in the darkness.

I have a thousand questions. But now that she is here, it takes me long minutes to find any words that do not drip with rancor.

“You’re his wife,” I finally say. “His queen.”

“I was his wife. No longer. I have not been his wife for a millennium.” Only days ago, I wondered if Rehmat was male because of how irritatingly stubborn she was. But now there is a shift in her voice, her form. She no longer hides who she is.

“I did not tell you,” she says, “because I thought the truth would anger you. I worried you would not trust me if you knew I was a jinn—”

“Are a jinn!”

“Was a jinn.” She greets my outburst with infuriating aplomb. “The Jaduna’s blood magic did not allow me to keep my corporeal body, my fire. But jinn souls are linked to our magic. If the magic lives, so do our souls.”

“So they . . . extracted you?” I ask. “He did not know you had died. Did you trick him too?”

“It was necessary.”

“Necessary.” I laugh. “And the deaths of tens of thousands of my people? Was that necessary too?”

“My gift as a jinn was foretelling.” Rehmat keeps pace with me easily, lighting the way, though I wish she wouldn’t. Darkness is what I want right now. Darkness in which to nurse my pain.

“I saw one path forward, Laia. Before our war with the Scholars, I befriended the Jaduna. We shared much lore over the centuries. When I learned that the Meherya would turn, I went to them, hoping their magic could help me stop it.”

She opens her hands and looks down at her form. “All they could offer was this. They said that upon my death, they would draw out my soul and nest me within their own people. A hundred men and women volunteered. It was a testament to our years of friendship that they would do such a thing, not knowing the effect it would have on their progeny. They found my broken body after the battle and took me to their home, far to the west.”

“So you lived in them,” I say. “Like a disease.”

“Like gold eyes.” She is as quiet as a breeze. “Or brown skin. They traveled to Martial lands and Scholar lands and Tribal lands. The bloodlines spread. And with each generation, I grew more removed from wakefulness and watchfulness. Until all that was left was the spark of magic. In some, like you and the Blood Shrike and Musa of Adisa, the magic was awoken under duress. And in others, like Tas of the North, or Darin or Avitas Harper, the magic sleeps. But all of you have kedim jadu in you.”

“Ancient magic,” I mutter. “All that time you were lurking? Did you try to influence us?”

“Never,” she swears. “Blood magic has conditions. For my rebirth, I had to agree to three sacrifices. The first: that my life as a jinn remain in the past—I may never speak of my time with the Nightbringer, my deeds as queen, or even—even my children.”

The misery in her voice at the last is clear. I think of Mother, who struggled to speak of my father or Lis, so deep were her wounds.

“The second,” Rehmat continues, “that I remain dormant until one of the kedim jadu directly defied the Nightbringer. And the third: that I have no corporeal body, unless one of the kedim jadu allowed me to use them as a conduit.”

Skies know, I’ll never make that mistake again. “Why did you want to stay away from the jinn? Can they hurt you?”

“Not exactly—”

“You still feel for them.” I cast the accusation too swiftly for her to refute it. “That’s why you disappeared in the Waiting Place and when I was with Khuri. You’re not afraid of them. You’re afraid of yourself around them.”

“That’s not—”

“Please don’t lie,” I say. “The jinn were your family. You loved them. I felt that within you. That sense of—of yearning. Is that why you do not want me to get the scythe? Why you always say defeat instead of kill? Because you love him and don’t want him dead?”

“Laia—his losses, what he has suffered—it is incalculable.”

“I do not love my family any less than he loved his.” I turn on her, and if she had a body, it would currently sport a black eye.

“I lost my mother,” I say. “My father. My sister. My friends. My grandmother. My grandfather. I was betrayed by the Resistance. Betrayed by the first boy I ever loved. Abandoned by Elias. You think I don’t want to sink a dagger into the Commandant’s heart? You think I don’t want to see the Martials suffer for what they have done to my people? I understand loss. But you do not fix loss with mass murder.”

“Your love is powerful,” Rehmat says. “It is your love that woke me—your love of your people. Your desire to save them. But the Nightbringer is not human, Laia. Can you compare the rage of a storm to the rage of man? When Mauth created the Meherya, he created a creature that could pass on ghosts for millennia, despite all of their pain, all of their sadness. Do you know what Meherya means?”

“No,” I say. “And I don’t care. I do wonder what your name means. Traitor, perhaps?”

“Meherya means Beloved.” She ignores my barb. “Not just because we loved him, but because of the love he offered. To his kin. To the ghosts. To the humans he encountered. For thousands of years.”

I think of all those the Nightbringer loved in order to get back the Star that would set his people free. I remember how he loved me, as Keenan. Something occurs to me then, and my face heats.

“Did you—you know that he and I—that we—”

“I know,” Rehmat says after a pause. “And I understand.”

“Beloved,” I whisper. The word makes me desperately sad. Because even if that’s who he was once, that is not who he is anymore.

“Love and hate, Laia,” Rehmat says. “They are two sides of the same coin. The Nightbringer’s hate burns as brightly as his love. Mauth does not love or hate. So he was not prepared when his son turned against him. But we can imprison the Meherya,” she says. “Bind him. My magic is the only force on this earth strong enough to contain him—”

“No,” I say. “The Nightbringer must die.”

“His death will usher in only more despair. You must trust me, child.”

“Why?” I say. “You deceived me. And now you will not tell me his weaknesses. You won’t tell me anything about him. Instead I go to the Tribes to beg for scraps of his story, which may or may not exist.”