Chapter 26

26

Quil

The woman appeared out of nowhere. She wore shades of green that blended into the jungle so seamlessly that at first, Quil thought he was hallucinating a pale floating head.

Then she crouched beside Sirsha, the pelt of emerald feathers woven into her blond hair giving her the look of some delicate bird. Quil drew his scim, but Sirsha croaked, "Loli Temba," before her lids fluttered closed over her ghostly white irises.

Quil knelt and felt for her pulse, expelling a breath when he felt it, strong and rhythmic.

"She's alive." He'd no sooner said it than Arelia turned on Sufiyan.

"What the bleeding hells did you put in that porridge this morning?"

"Nothing!" Sufiyan crouched beside Sirsha, trying to figure out what was wrong with her. "We all ate it. Let me check her for injuries."

"Boy." Loli Temba spoke so quietly that it wasn't until she fixed her pale blue eyes on Quil that he realized she was talking to him. "When did it pick up your trail?"

To Quil's surprise, she spoke fluent Serran.

With a Karkaun accent.

Arelia noticed at the same moment that Quil did, and glowered. The temperature in the little clearing seemed to drop a few degrees.

Most Karkauns had the sense to stay away from Martials. Quil still remembered the day he'd learned about the horror they'd inflicted on Antium twenty years ago. His aunt had insisted on telling him herself.

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 reached for 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 have done something.

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 ideal place 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.

"What do you mean it ?" he snapped. "What was that thing? What did it want with us?"

Reli and Sufiyan exchanged a glance at his rare show of temper. Loli shook her head.

"I do not know. I only felt it when it breached the barriers I've put near my home. It stinks of death." Loli shuddered. "And guile."

"You have magic, then." Arelia leaned forward. "What is your emotion—and your element?"

"Sirsha has been instructing you, I see." Loli's voice was cold. "Did she not teach you that asking such a question is akin to asking the contours of your heart? Who you love? How it makes you feel?"

Arelia flushed and crossed her arms. "I'm trying to understand."

"You seek to understand the fibers that make the world," Loli Temba said, "but not your own pain, nor that of others. You'd be better served understanding the latter."

With that, Loli walked swiftly to a counter beside the hearth, above which hung copper pots and pans of varying sizes, as well as bunches of dried lavender and coriander, and strings of garlic and chilies. She grabbed a wooden bowl and brought it back to Sufiyan, handing it to him as he turned away from them and retched into it.

Quil was at his side immediately, patting his friend's back. He'd felt sick this way himself after the first time he killed a Karkaun. After he found Ilar and Ruh. "Get it out, brother," he said. "You'll feel better in a minute."

"Maybe it was the porridge," Sufiyan moaned.

"It wasn't." Loli took the bowl, waving away Sufiyan's apologies. A pump churned in a room beyond, and Loli returned a few minutes later with a tray of water glasses.

"I suspect that the more your soul hurts," she said, her tone kinder than it had been with any of the rest of them, "the worse you will feel when you're around it."

"We need help, not riddles." Quil didn't care that he was verging on rudeness. "Speak plainly. You must suspect what that thing could be."

For the first time, Loli Temba appeared surprised. "This is the first time you have seen it. But Sirsha must have felt it. She did not warn you?"

"She's been acting strange," Arelia offered, though her mistrust of Loli was still clear. "For days."

"She hasn't been well," Sufiyan said. "Yesterday I gave her Iltim powder for a headache. Do you think she knew and was hiding it from us?"

"If so," Quil said, "maybe she had a reason. Though—" He turned to Loli. "Is the creature following us? Or her?"

Loli dug through her pantry until she found a stack of plates. "Her, I think. When she left, I told her not to return. I told her she would bring something with her."

"Can you help her?" Quil said. "She said she came to you before. Long ago. That you healed her."

"I did not heal her," Loli Temba said. "I gave her time and love. Her own people offered neither. But that is her story to tell."

"We don't have time." Quil stood, pacing in impatience, peering at Sirsha's prone body through the open door. She was so still that for a moment, he thought she wasn't breathing and his own heart almost stopped. But then he caught the slightest flutter of her eyelashes.

"She will wake," Loli Temba said. "When she does, we will learn more of what she knew. You have more questions. Different questions. Ask."

He'd been so worried about Sirsha that he'd forgotten the reason he'd come here. He needed to get hold of himself. He was the crown prince of a shattered Empire. His people were depending on him.

"Sirsha said you might know about the Kegari," he said. "About their magic."

"Long ago"—Loli set four plates on her dining table—"the Martials attacked the Scholars. Took their lands. Enslaved their people. Why did they do this?"

"They were manipulated by the Nightbringer," Arelia said. Loli Temba's expression soured.

"They were greedy," Quil amended. "They wanted what the Scholars had."

"Greedy later, yes." Loli Temba pulled a long, dark fruit from the pantry, peeling back its thick outer skin and slicing up the soft pink innards. "But in the beginning, the Martials were simply poor and hungry. So it is with the Kegari. Their population is starving. Their leaders raid their neighbors to keep them fed. They cannot grow grain or raise livestock. So, they suffer."

"They didn't fly thousands of miles north to the Empire because they're hungry," Arelia snapped, sharper than Quil had ever heard her.

"Bah!" Loli Temba curled her lip. "Why should I tell you more about them when you do not listen? Perhaps, like the Scholars before you, you deserve to be conquered."

"For someone who hates the Karkauns," Sufiyan said, "you sound a lot like one of their warlocks."

"Shut it," Quil ordered his companions. "Both of you." He turned to Loli. "Please, tell us. We need the knowledge. My people—"

Loli Temba huffed in disgust as she washed a bouquet of thick green leaves. "Yes, your people," she said. "Your people barely knew Kegar existed. When they learned, the first thing your Empress did was demand the secrets of flight. When the Kegari failed to offer them, your people refused to speak with their envoys. Your people aren't as deserving as you think."

Quil's magic, quiet these past few days, warmed in his chest. A memory lived at the core of this woman. He could feel it. A pain that made her who she was.

He considered her. She was a loner. But she'd helped Sirsha. She understood abandonment. For the first time, Quil noticed the scars all over her pale skin. Tiny lines, as if she'd been cut repeatedly. He thought of how her lip curled when she'd said, You hate my people. Good. I hate them too.

"When I first understood that the Kegari were attacking us," Quil said, "I hated them. I still hate them. But hate doesn't fix anything." He leaned forward. "I must understand what they want from the Empire. If they have magic, why are they attacking us? If all they need is food, there are a dozen countries they can raid thousands of miles closer than the Empire."

Loli looked at him steadily. "You're an Aquillus, yes?" she said. "Nephew of the Empress?"

Quil was surprised—and unnerved—that she recognized him. Loli smiled, but there was no joy in it as she explained. "When my people attacked yours," she said, "twenty years ago, I was there as a sacrifice. I saw the Blood Shrike walking the walls. And another who walked in shadow with his other half behind him. The first ghost in the city."

"My father," Quil said, voice flattening like his aunt's did when she spoke of Marcus Farrar. "The ghost was that of the twin brother he killed." Or so the rumors said. Emperor Marcus was known to pace the city's walls, muttering to someone only he could see.

Quil shook thoughts of his father away, and sadness filled him at what Loli had suffered. "You were a sacrifice, you say. But the Karkauns killed their sacrifices, used spirit magic to chain their ghosts and unleash them upon the city."

"Indeed," Loli Temba said. "The warlocks wanted my ghost badly, for the ghost of a human imbued with magic, as I was, is far more powerful than one without. But I escaped them."

She gestured them to the table. The meal was fragrant and fresh—a salad topped with seeds, salted legumes, and a nutty oil; a thick, bouncy bread slathered in butter; and a mountain of the sweet pink fruit tossed with red chili.

Quil didn't realize how hungry he was until he'd demolished the plate, and Loli was heaping on a second helping and sitting down herself.

"You ask why the Kegari attacked you," she said. "You're a child of Gens Aquilla. Whatever your woes, they have not involved watching your people die from empty bellies. Hunger is part of it." She glanced at Arelia. "But perhaps this is only the beginning of the reason they chose you."

"Their magic," Quil said. "Is it spirit magic, like the Karkauns'?"

"Don't be foolish, boy," Loli Temba chided. "They keep their Sails aloft by manipulating the wind."

Arelia frowned. "That doesn't make sense." She'd softened her tone, though Quil could tell it was taking a great deal of effort. "Even if they could manipulate the wind, that would only provide lift. They'd need thrust, too, to maneuver the Sails forward. I didn't get a close look at them. But I didn't see an engine."

"And what about their weaponry?" Sufiyan asked. "Do they use magic for that, too? I've never seen weapons that appear to move on their own like that. As if they're alive."

"I do not know much of their weapons," Loli Temba said. "Listen to my words. Even with magic, the Kegari were nothing. Less than nothing. They raided and stole and barely subsisted. Then, many months ago, that changed. They changed. They began to rally around one man. A highborn leader, the rumors say. They call him the Tel Ilessi."

The words felt like thunder in Quil's ears.

"Rue la ba Tel Ilessi," he whispered. He'd heard those words over and again. He'd had no idea what it meant. Loli Temba nodded.

"An honorific or prayer," she said. "I do not know what the words mean. But I have heard they call upon him, invoke his name every time they kill. Or die."

"What does he want?" Sufiyan said.

"Maybe he wants what they've always wanted," Arelia said. "Food. Security. But unlike the leaders who've come before, he knows how to get it."

"So, the Tel Ilessi is everything to them," Quil said. "Not just a leader. A—a savior."

"Yes," Loli said. "His people would follow him into the sea if he asked. Without him, they would be nothing."

"We met him," Quil said, turning to Sufiyan. "In Jibaut. The man who stopped us—who captured us with wind."

Sufiyan shook his head. "That could have been anyone."

"It was him." Certainty pounded through Quil's blood. "He knew me. He knew I was the crown prince and that I went not by Zacharias, but Quil." Long have I wished to look upon you.

"He's the one we have to talk to," Arelia said. "The one we need to treat with."

Treat. As if Quil could make peace with the man who'd destroyed Navium and Silas. Murdered thousands. As if anyone who had done such a thing, for whatever reason, would say anything that Quil was willing to hear. The prince shook his head. His hatred was stronger than his desire to understand.

"He's not the one we're making deals with," Quil said. "He's the one I'm going to kill."

Loli Temba disappeared into a back room, and Arelia and Sufiyan slept not long after. Suf tossed and turned, troubled by dreams. Quil put a blanket over him, and put his hand on his friend's shoulder, as Tas used to do for Quil. When Sufiyan finally went still, Quil slipped into Sirsha's room, unable to sleep knowing that she was alone.

Loli Temba had placed a low stool beside the rope pallet, and Quil perched on it, feeling slightly ridiculous. He thought about taking Sirsha's hand, but he wasn't sure if she'd want that.

"You should wake up," he whispered. "I have a plan. You might even like it."

He didn't mean to touch the pallet. In fact, he hadn't even realized what happened until he looked up, and noticed the light in the room had shifted drastically. The change happened so seamlessly that, like before, Quil didn't understand he was in the past until it was too late to leave.

The girl in the bed wasn't Sirsha.

Or rather, it wasn't the Sirsha he knew. This person was a child. Twelve or thirteen at most. Scrawny and short, with bruises on her arms and neck. She stared straight up, unblinking.

Loli Temba appeared behind Quil, leaning through him as if he wasn't there. She laid her hand on Sirsha's brow.

"You have to sleep, little one," Loli said with a quiet tenderness. "You cannot heal unless you sleep."

"When I sleep," Sirsha the child whispered, "I see the village. I see everyone I—I—"

Tears trailed down into her hair. Loli Temba's eyes were red-rimmed and her scars were darker. She looked much younger, barely older than Quil now.

"Tell me what you see," Loli Temba said. "Expel it from your mind."

"I see them," Sirsha whispered. "The mothers and daughters. The lovers and the s-s-s-sisters. I see everyone I killed."

"You are a child," Loli Temba said. "It is not your fault."

"Should have listened to the Raani," Sirsha mumbled, and Quil wondered if she meant her mother. "I deserve it, what's happened. Let me suffer. Let me feel the pain, Loli Temba. I deserve it."

"You don't, child—"

"You don't understand," Sirsha whispered. "I'm alone now. I'll be alone forever."

That shift again, like a breeze drifting past. Quil didn't know he was back in the present until he found himself staring into Sirsha's open eyes.

She reached out a hand, resting it against his cheek. His face was wet, he realized, but there was no question in her face about why.

"I'm here," he whispered. "You're not alone, Sirsha."

For once, she didn't have a quip or a comment.

At his throat, their oath coin burned.