Page 153 of A ?Sky Beyond the Storm

“So that we might be free of it,” I say. “But I will not forget.”

Rehmat. I call to her with all the force of my mind. Her light is a beacon through the swirling silver mist, and in a moment, she is beside me.

But she does not speak to me or even look to me. She has eyes only for her Meherya.

“My beloved,” she murmurs. “Come to me now, for I have waited long years for this, our last union. Come now, and give me your pain. I must bind you, that you may never release this agony upon the world again. You must submit to me.”

“Finally, Rehmat,” the Meherya says, “I understand the meaning of your name.” He turns to me. “Do not forget the story, Laia of Serra,” he says. “Vow it.”

“I swear I will not forget,” I say. “Nor will my children. Nor theirs. As long as one of my line draws breath, Meherya, the Tale will be told.”

The very air shudders with the force of the vow, and a deep crack echoes beneath me, as if the axis of the earth has shifted. I wonder what I have bequeathed to my own blood.

The Meherya lifts his hand to my face, and I feel his sorrow and his love, extant still, despite all that has happened.

Then he turns to Rehmat, who opens her arms, drawing him to her. Her gold body shudders and splits, exploding into hundreds of burning ropes, inexorable as they wrap around him tighter and tighter. He does not resist. He is lost within the binding as it drains him of his pain, his suffering, his power—and releases it back to Mauth.

The maelstrom slows, dissolving first at the edges as it drains back through the rift the Meherya opened. It thins, disappearing faster and faster, swirling blue, then gray, then white, until finally there is nothing left.

I stand upon the promontory, though it is riven down the middle as if struck by a giant hammer. The rift is only a few feet away from me, closing before my eyes.

Rehmat is nowhere to be seen. I find that I regret her loss. I regret not being able to say goodbye and not thanking her. And I regret that she never told me the meaning of her name.

A voice whispers in my ear. “Mercy,” she says. “My name meansmercy.”

Then the Queen of the Jinn is gone, dragging her prisoner with her to some unknown plane where I cannot follow. In that moment, the wind ceases. All falls silent. All goes still.

For the Beloved who woke with the dawning of the world is no more. And for a single, anguished moment, the earth itself mourns him.

LXVIII:The Soul Catcher

The plateau splits down the middle as I emerge from the maelstrom. The earth shudders with the force of it, a tremor rippling through the Waiting Place, eliciting great arboreal groans from the woods.

The shaking drops me to my knees, and I slide back toward the tree line. A figure emerges from the cyclone, and, as suddenly as the storm entered this dimension, it drains away, as if through a crack in the air. All is silent. Even the trees do not move.

Then the figure at the edge of the plateau collapses, and the world breathes again. I scramble to my feet, and at the sound, she turns.

“Are—are you real?” She half lifts her hand, and in five steps, I have reached her and pulled her to me, shaking in relief because she is impossibly, miraculously alive. The rock of the plateau groans, and in moments I have windwalked us away from it, down the tree line to the edge of the jinn grove.

“He’s gone,” Laia whispers when we stop. “Rehmat chained him. At the end he was destroyed, Elias.” She looks down at her hands, and her eyes fill, voice cracking. “He killed my brother. Darin is d-dead.”

What can I say to her that will comfort her? She defeated a creature that defies description—more than a king, more than a jinn, more than a foe. And in the process, she lost the only family she had left in this world.

A wind stirs the trees behind us, and the first of the Tala tree blossoms detach and swirl through the air.

“In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe,” she says. “In flowerfall, the daughter will pay a blood tithe.” Her dark eyes are red and dull. “Skies-forsaken foretellings.”

“The same foretelling said I would die.” I remember the jinn’s prophecy as clearly as if she spoke it yesterday.The son of shadow and heir of death will fight and fail with his final breath.

“But it didn’t say I’d find my way back.” I pull Laia close. “And it didn’t say that you’d win.”

“Have we won?” Laia says as we stare out at the jinn grove. Soldiers on both sides of the escarpment stumble to their feet, still shaken from the maelstrom. Musa has an arm under the Blood Shrike’s shoulders, and together they stagger away from the front line, anguish emanating from both. Spiro and Gibran carry an injured Afya toward the infirmary tents.

Laia and I walk to the edge of the escarpment, and she gasps, for Keris’s army appears to have taken the brunt of the maelstrom’s wrath. A deep gash in the earth and a few pockets of stunned-looking soldiers are all that remain of the Commandant’s one-massive host.

As for Keris herself, her standard flaps in the wind near the edge of the escarpment. Beside it, she lies faceup, blonde hair streaked with mud, her throat bloody, gray eyes fixed on the sky.

Dead.

---