Page 95 of Heir

They mutilated and murdered their own women and children, then used unholy magic to resurrect their spirits and unleash them on us. They brought us to our knees in mere days.

Quil had been born in the middle of that war, as the capital around him fell. He’d been spirited away to safety. But those left behind endured Karkaun atrocities that still haunted the city.

Loli Temba regarded Arelia dispassionately. “You hate my people,” she said. “Good. I hate them too.” She turned her full attention to Quil. “I ask again. When did it pick up your trail?”

“Sirsha’s sister’s been tracking us,” he said. “But we haven’t seen her for days. We were looking for you. We have questions—”

Loli hissed through her teeth as if in sudden pain and held up a hand to cut him off. She hummed and the air shimmered in a strange, diamond pattern, like a net made of dew.

Overhead, the clouds shifted and blocked out the sun. The jungle, dim from the thick canopy, grew darker.

Near the road they’d turned off, something moved.

Quil couldn’t make out a shape, let alone a face. But the hair on the back of his neck rose, and he drew his scim. The familiar slide of metal against leather was small comfort. Beside him, Arelia stepped forward, peering at the road.

Loli Temba grabbed Arelia’s arm, shaking her head.

A moment later, Arelia’s surly frustration turned to fright. Quil tried to lift his scim, but terror crept into his chest.

The feeling was horribly familiar, though he’d encountered it only once in his life: when he was twelve and an assassin nearly got the best of him. He’d never forget her grinning face as her knee pressed down on his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs.

Now, in the Thafwan jungle, he felt that soul-deep fear again. Sufiyan’s face went pale, his lips blue. He opened and closed his mouth the way he had that awful day a year ago, when he realized his little brother was dead. Quil tried to shake off his own dread and grabbed his friend’s shoulder. “I’m here, Suf,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

Arelia’s arms shook, her head tucked into her knees, and Quil reachedfor her hand. With Loli Temba hovering, the three of them crouched around a prone Sirsha, waiting, unable to countenance the terror in their chests, to explain it, other than that it felt as if the reaper himself whispered in their ears all the ways they could suffer. All the ways they could die.

The clouds shifted. The sun poured weakly through the trees, and whatever ill creature they’d briefly shared the jungle with appeared to have moved on.

“What in the bleeding skies,” Sufiyan said, “was that?”

Loli answered no questions. Instead, she ordered Quil to pick up Sirsha, and faded into the jungle as swiftly as she’d appeared, expecting them to follow. When Arelia attempted to engage Loli in conversation, she responded with a forbidding growl.

Quil knew he should ask Loli Temba about the Kegari as soon as possible, but all he could think about was how light Sirsha was in his arms. How awful it was not to hear her wry mutter. Ilar’s angry face rose in his memory. The last time he’d seen her whole.

Not Sirsha. Sirsha will be fine.But what if she wasn’t fine? Skies, he couldn’t even help her. He was depending on a Karkaun who didn’t seem to want them there.Stupid, Quil.He should have noticed something was wrong with Sirsha. He should havedonesomething.

They took a circuitous path through the jungle, toward a thunderous, white-water cataract. It boiled through a narrow slot before plunging into a shallow pool a hundred feet below.

Loli led them down a damp, vine-choked trail to a rock shelf at the back of the waterfall. There, she put her hand to the stone and sang a few low notes. Quil thought of what Sirsha said about magic.An emotion exerted on an element.The stone split right down the center, creating an opening wide enough for them to pass through.

Quil cursed. Arelia and Sufiyan still looked sick and weak, and he was holding Sirsha. If Loli had an ambush planned, this would be the idealplace to do it. But she merely closed the stone and motioned for them to follow.

The sound of the waterfall faded to a distant hum, and they emerged into a room with rough gray walls and thick columns of light pouring from above. A settee sat in one corner with a knitted blanket folded over it, and plush rugs lay on the floor. Beside shelves packed with cooking implements, a cold hearth vented into a chimney that disappeared through the cave’s ceiling.

Loli Temba closed her door, passing her hand over it once. Then she nudged Quil toward a side bedroom—small, but lit like the rest of her home, with a broad beam of light.

“Stop gawping and lay her down.” Loli pointed to a rope bed softened with thick, handwoven blankets. “It will take rest and quiet for her to come out of this.”

“But…she will come out of it?” Arelia, at the door, whispered the question Quil was about to ask.

Loli didn’t answer, and Quil didn’t budge. “I’ll stay with her,” he said. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Wouldn’t let anything tear her apart the way Ilar had been torn apart.

Loli put a firm hand on Quil’s arm. “I would die before I saw her harmed,” she said. Quil was about to tell her to piss off, but something in the woman’s uncanny stare assuaged his misgivings.

“Door stays open,” Quil said, and Loli nodded and bade them sit on the settee.

“She is strong,” the Karkaun woman said. “Even if she is a fool.” She considered Quil. “You truly did not feel it tracking you?”

Quil’s frustration finally burst out of him. He was worried about Sirsha, and he didn’t know what the hells was stalking them, and he didn’t want to answer questions—he wanted them bleeding answered.

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