Page 157 of A ?Sky Beyond the Storm

“Just free the boy, Mauth. I’ll do whatever you bleeding want.” Mirra considers. “Except forget her.” She nods to Laia.

You are her mother, Lioness. No power in the universe could wrest her from your heart. She is of you. Very well. Mirra of Serra, kinslayer and Lioness, hear me. To serve the Waiting Place is to light the way for the weak, the weary, the fallen, and the forgotten in the darkness that follows death. You will be bound to me until another is worthy enough to release you. Do you submit?

I notice that he does not threaten to punish Mirra for leaving the forest. Nor does he call her the ruler of the Waiting Place, as he did me.

Perhaps she won’t be bound for an eternity after all.

“I submit,” Mirra says.

Her vow is unlike mine, for Mauth does not need to bring her back to life. Still, her body goes rigid, and I know what she feels—the power of Mauth passing into her as he gives her a touch of magic that he can never take away.

A moment later, the Lioness shakes herself and turns to me.

“Right, then,” she says. “You best start telling me what I need to know. And since you won’t be Soul Catcher for much longer, don’t mind me if call you Elias.”

“The Mother watches over them all,” I say. Cain and his bleeding prophecy. “I thought the Augur was talking about the Commandant. But it was you. You’re the Mother.”

“That I am, Elias.” The Lioness takes her daughter’s fingers in one hand and mine in the other. “That I am.”

LXIX:The Blood Shrike

Duty first, unto death.I learned those words at the age of six from my father, on the night the Augurs took me to Blackcliff.

Duty can be a burden, my daughter. My father knelt before me, his hands on my shoulders. He brushed his thumbs against my eyes, so the Augurs would not see my tears.Or it can be an ally. It is your choice.

After the battle in the Waiting Place, duty carries me through the negotiations with Keris’s generals and the surrender of what is left of her forces. It keeps me flinty-eyed when Elias thanks and dismisses his army of Tribespeople and efrits, and asks me to take mine from the forest.

Duty gives me a straight back when Musa, his own eyes red at the loss of Darin, finds me and takes me to a line of bodies to be buried in the jinn grove.

But when I look down at the still form of Avitas Harper, duty does not hold me up. It offers me no comfort.

My knees sink into the mud on which he lies, though I do not remember kneeling. His face is as serene in repose as it was in life. But there is no mistaking that he is dead. Even with a cloak pulled over the vicious gash delivered him by Keris, he is blood-spattered, cut and bruised in a dozen places.

I reach out my hand to touch Harper’s face, but pull it back at the last moment. Not long ago, he drove the chill from my bones, from my heart. But now he will feel cold, for Death has my love and all his warmth is gone from this world.

Damn you, I shout at him in my head.Damn you for not being faster. Fornot loving me less. For not being locked in some other battle so you didn’t have to risk yourself in mine.

I do not say those things. I look into his face and seek—I do not know. An answer. A reason for all that has happened. Some meaning.

But sometimes, there is no reason. Sometimes you kill and you hate killing but you are a soldier through and through so you keep killing. Your friends die. Your lovers die. And what you have at the end of your life is not the surety that you did it for some grand reason, but the hard knowledge that something was taken from you and you also gave it away. And you know you will carry that weight with you always. For it is a regret that only death can relieve.

I put my hand on Harper’s heart, and lift his to mine.

“You got there first, my love,” I whisper. “I envy you so. For how will I endure without you?”

I hear no answer to my question, only his eyes that will remain forever closed, the stillness of his body beneath my hand, and the rain falling cold upon us.

«««

It takes three days to get the army out of the forest—and another two and a half weeks to make our way across the rolling green hills of the Empire to the Estium garrison, tucked into a curve of the River Taius.

“Camp is set, Shrike.” Quin Veturius, impeccable as always, finds me in my tent in the middle of the encampment. “Do you wish to have quarters readied in the garrison?”

I wish to be left alone, but my tent is full. Laia arrived first, bringingwith her a tin of mango jam she dug up from skies-know-where. She’s been spreading it on flatbread, with a soft white cheese on top, quietly handing it to whoever comes into the tent.

Musa is here too, gesturing with the flatbread while flirting with Afya Ara-Nur. The Tribeswoman is still pale from her injury, wincing even as she laughs. Mamie looks amused while Spiro Teluman watches with a dark glare. The smith shouldn’t worry. Musa’s heart is as shattered as mine.

“Blood Shrike?”

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