Chapter 43

43

Sirsha

As Quil told his friends the story of what happened in the war camp—and of his own magic—Sirsha struggled to silence the voices in her mind.

The earth shifted, and a breeze scraped at the window of the room. Sirsha's ears filled with the roar of the sea. The three elements spoke as one.

Leave this place. Leave, and hunt Div.

Their voices had plagued her since she'd fled Thafwa, and grown more insistent the less she tried to think about Div. By the time she and Quil reached Burku, it was all she could do to ride in a straight line. Every part of her wanted to follow the pull of her vow out of the city.

A pull that would only grow stronger in the coming days, until it would supplant the need for food, water, sleep. Until it consumed her. She had weeks, at best.

She'd planned to head to Burku's docks. Get a ticket out of here, find Elias, and get him to release her from the vow. She'd pushed a blood oath before. It wasn't easy, but she could outlast it until she reached the Empire.

But a week on the road with Quil made it clear he was still planning on hunting the Tel Ilessi. And not just because of the carnage she'd unleashed on the Empire. That bitch had betrayed Quil and killed Sufiyan's little brother. For Quil it was personal. He wouldn't stop until she was dead.

Which created a problem for Sirsha.

Quil couldn't kill the Tel Ilessi while Mother Div lived. That creature fed the Tel Ilessi too much power. Div would kill Quil.

Unless Sirsha killed Div first.

"What do you mean you have magic ?" Sufiyan practically shouted, and Sirsha grimaced at the sadness and shame she felt through Quil's oath coin. He'd nearly broken down when he'd told Sufiyan of the Tel Ilessi's true identity. To their credit, Quil's friends had shown wrath for that Kegari snake and empathy for Quil—Sirsha would have accepted nothing less. It wasn't Quil's fault his old lover was a lying hag.

The concealment of his magic, however, appeared to have struck a nerve.

A surge of tender exasperation swept through her. Of course, if anyone could suppress magic so even an Inashi couldn't sense it, it would be Quil. He wouldn't have wanted to burden anyone with the struggle of it. The magic also explained why he didn't have typical Martial suspicion of magic-users. Why it felt like he understood Sirsha. Had always understood her.

When he'd explained his magic, Sirsha classified him immediately. He was a Yaad. A type of magic-user so rare that Sirsha had never met one. Most had died out.

"If you do have magic," Arelia was saying, "then you should react to these—" She pulled a set of purple-black chains and manacles from her coveralls and Quil grimaced. Sirsha, barely paying attention to the conversation until that point, recoiled.

"Ikfa," she said. "You shouldn't have that!"

Tas, meanwhile, tried and failed to snatch them from Arelia. "Those were supposed to go to the Empire."

"They will, eventually," Arelia said. "But for now, we have them, and we can study them. Sirsha, I'd wondered if you'd be familiar with the metal, as a Jaduna—"

"We don't keep Ikfa," Sirsha said, pulling an ill-looking Quil away from the metal. Almost immediately, the color returned to his face. "We use magic to suppress magic. We only trust the jinn to be custodians of Ikfa. When we find it, we give it to them. Don't tell me that's what you sent to the Empire—"

"We spoke of reactive forces before," Arelia said. "Is this Rajin's fifth law again? Does the metal—"

"It doesn't matter." Sirsha thanked the skies R'zwana wasn't here. Her sister's head would have exploded at the sight of so much of the hated metal. "Ikfa is dangerous to anyone with magic—"

Quil immediately perked up. "Then it will work on the Tel Ilessi," he said. "Do you think it'll work on Div?"

"I—I don't know." Sirsha hadn't considered such a thing because she'd never seen so much Ikfa at once. If it was found, it was usually no more than a thimble's worth. "I—"

Div. Hunt her. The elements possessed her. Took full control of her body. Get up. Move. Hunt. Hunt. HUNT—

Sirsha only realized she'd left the room when Quil grabbed her hand, pulling her from her trance.

"Sirsha." Quil had stopped her in the middle of the Pennybrush's narrow upper hall. What must he think of her, walking out in the middle of a conversation. "Are you all right?"

Sirsha didn't even consider hiding the truth. There didn't seem to be a point to doing so anymore.

"The vow I made to Elias," Sirsha said. "It's affecting my mind, Quil. I should have told you before—but I was too confident in myself. Too sure I'd catch the killer. An oath like this must be fulfilled. If it isn't, it will be the only thing I can think about—I'll be a danger to you—to everyone around me."

"I know," he said after a pause. "J'yan told me the night before he died. He thought the oath was to me—wanted me to break it." Quil looked off, face briefly murderous. "I'll have choice words for Elias the next time I see him."

"Get in line." Sirsha sighed and put a hand to her temple. "I need some air."

"Do you want company?"

Sirsha smiled, glancing over his shoulder. "Not as much as Arelia wants to know the precise internal mechanism you use to trigger your magic. Go on—I have a feeling you four have a lot to talk about. Tell her to keep that Ikfa away from you. I'll be back in a bit."

As Sirsha walked the streets of Ankana, her pack slung over her shoulder, she considered something Arelia had said of magic weeks ago. Rajin's fifth law says that every action evokes an equal and opposite reaction.

Sirsha learned the same concept as a child. After much pestering by Sirsha, her mother, the Raani, told her the story of the Nightbringer—the most skilled and wily of the jinn. A thousand years before, an enemy king imprisoned the jinn and stole their powers. The Nightbringer, the only one to escape the genocide, spent a millennium trying to free his people.

It was the indifference of Mauth, the Nightbringer's creator and the source of all magic, that set the jinn on his path , Sirsha's mother said. And it was the love of Rehmat, his beloved wife, that released him from it. Sometimes, the only way to blunt the violence of twisted magic is to confront it with its opposite.

Stars still scattered the dark sky, bright even with the streetlamps. In the north, it was late winter, but here in Ankana, it was a cool summer night, flowers and trees in bloom, the capital almost offensively beautiful.

It reminded Sirsha of the Cloud Forest. In a few months, it would be full spring there. The vines would be heavy with honeyflowers and the bees that loved them. The Raanis would bemoan the pollen staining every window of their homes in the Gandafur trees.

For Jaduna, spring and summer were the seasons of giving. Friends made daisy chains, lovers proposed, Adah oaths were celebrated. Sirsha was twenty now—an adult by Jaduna standards. This would have been the year she and J'yan had their full Adah ceremony, honoring the vow they'd made as children.

It would be weeks before R'zwana reached the Cloud Forest. Weeks before J'yan's Kin knew what happened to him. Sirsha hoped R'z told Ma about her fading magic. She hoped her sister made peace with what she'd lost.

Which might include Sirsha, if this vow—or Div—killed her.

I need more information , Sirsha told the elements. Where can I find it?

Hunt , the earth rumbled.

Hunt , the sea roared.

Read , the wind whispered.

The streets were empty, the stores shuttered. What the hells did the wind want her to read? A signpost?

Then she remembered she did have a book. Recollections by Rajin of Serra. She'd stolen it from Quil a few weeks ago.

Yes , the wind hissed, and Sirsha found a bench next to a lamppost and dug the battered little book out of her pack.

The old philosopher lived five centuries ago and did so love to drone on. But his insights were worth his verbosity, as long as you accepted that reading his work was like digging through horse dung for gold.

Even Jaduna instructors had a few of his books in their libraries. Most of them especially enjoyed his chapters on how the youth of his time were wastrels contributing to the destruction of society.

Sirsha had never read Recollections ; as she flipped to a short section about Jaduna magical theory, she wished she had.

The Jaduna lasso their magic with emotion, using it to control an element. The emotion is most often desire—an exertion of willpower. They understand the third law—that magic cannot be destroyed, only contained or transformed.

He waxed ecstatic for a bit about how the Jaduna eschewed the hoarding of power. Clearly, the old windbag never met R'zwana. Sirsha read on.

The Jaduna value the community over the individual. Humility above bluster. Service and giving above greed. Sacrifice above selfishness and magical gluttony.

Sirsha shut the book, her mind snagging on Rajin's third law: Magic cannot be destroyed, only contained or transformed.

Sirsha hadn't been able to bind Div, let alone kill her. If Div couldn't be destroyed or contained, perhaps she could be transformed. Into a toadstool, perhaps. Or a particularly ugly tarantula.

Sometimes, the only way to blunt the violence of twisted magic is to confront it with its opposite.

She didn't know the source of Div's malignancy. But she'd learned enough about the types of magic extant in the world to take a guess.

All magic came from the same source. A force who was a legend whispered but unproven.

Mauth— Death in Old Rei. Mauth's presence was most strongly felt in the Waiting Place, where the humans and jinn unfortunate enough to be his servants passed traumatized ghosts from this world to a peaceful after, so they didn't wail everyone's ears off. Sufiyan's grandmother, the Bani al-Mauth, was one of these servants. Like the other ghost talkers, she cast the suffering and torment of the spirits into a seething dimension that abutted their own.

The Tribes called that miserable place the Sea of Suffering. Sirsha liked the Jaduna name better: Owa Khel—the Empty. A place of sallow yellow skies and haunted seas. She and J'yan told scary stories about it when they were kids, as D'rudo made them memorize entire texts on the subject.

A line from those texts came back to Sirsha: And though the Sea of Suffering churns, ever restless, verily does Mauth preside, a bulwark against its hunger.

Div wasn't hungry. She was hunger . A desire to consume that defied any sense of the ethical or moral. Pure selfishness.

Yes , the elements whispered.

"Indifference was counteracted with love," Sirsha muttered. "So, Div, with her greed, her hunger—"

Sacrifice above selfishness and magical gluttony.

Understanding was a knife twisting slowly inside her. Sirsha wanted to shout. Or perhaps slowly applaud the justice of the universe. Her actions had, after all, led to the deaths of more than a thousand innocent villagers. Intentional or not, she'd as good as killed them herself, and that sort of imbalance wouldn't be left unanswered.

Well, here it was. The answer. If Sirsha wanted to bind Div, she was going to have to sacrifice her own life to do so.

Now , the elements said as one, you begin to understand.

Bleeding hells. Would that she had been born a cat. Or a partridge. Something cute and fluffy that didn't have to think about things like magical laws and heartbreak.

When she returned to the inn, the dining room was empty—it was too early for the innkeeper, even. But Quil, hair still wet from the bath, leaned against the closed bar, lost in thought. He must be exhausted, but that resolve that formed his core, quiet and unshakable—she could feel it from here.

No more secrets. She needed to tell him that if they wanted Div to die, Sirsha would have to pay with her blood. He'd be a pest about it, of course, try every trick he knew to talk her out of it. But he deserved to know, not least because when she died, the oath coin would amplify his grief terribly.

Ah, the joys of Jaduna magic.

"Sirsha."

He turned to her, and the sound of her name on his lips echoed through her veins as if spoken by thunder instead of a man. Since she was a little girl, she'd always been S'rsha. That pause from deep in the throat, it was the highest honor of this world, for it meant she was a Jaduna, one of the first users of magic. Her line was long, her ancestors titans of their time. When she lost that pause—when she became Seer-shah , instead of S'rsha—it felt as if she'd been shoved out of her own body and into another one she cared nothing for.

But from Quil's mouth, her name felt beautiful again.

"Quil," she said. Tell him. Tell him that you must die. That you need to say goodbye.

But Sirsha knew he'd mull and dissect her words until he'd convinced himself there was a way out. For once, she didn't feel like a fight.

Sirsha grabbed his hand, wishing she could articulate the desire suffusing her, something more than I need you and I wish I didn't . They stumbled up the stairs, and any words still in Sirsha's head felt unnecessary when Quil closed the door and swept her up in his arms, lifting her effortlessly. She sighed as he backed her into the wall, kissing her as if some part of him knew they didn't have much time, as if he had to make up for everything he'd never get again.

She threaded her fingers through his hair and pulled away from his mouth to trace her lips along his jaw, his throat, smiling at the curse he uttered. He carried her to the bed, but she flipped him onto his back and caught a flash of dimple. Her heart leaped.

The lamps bathed them both in blue light, so she stripped him slowly, and almost didn't look at him, almost didn't appreciate his lean, muscled elegance, but then she made herself because, well, this was it for them, wasn't it?

"You're beautiful," she murmured. She straddled him, and pulled free her hairpins, letting her hair fall in a curtain around them. Her body craved him, craved the fullness she knew he would give her, but she fought against it and kissed him slow, the way she knew he liked.

He eased off her clothing, and slowly, so slowly, they joined, breaths shortening, his fingers almost painfully tight on her waist, golden eyes fixed on her, taking what she gave, giving all that he had in return.

"More," Sirsha gasped. "Closer."

He complied, and were these sounds coming from her, or someone else? He bit his full lip so he wouldn't give them away. These walls were thin, and it was quiet, and this was a family inn, for skies' sake, but he deserved to be able to shout when he was angry and gasp when he took his pleasure.

She leaned down and took his lips between hers so he could cry out into her, so they could cry out into each other, leaving their wanting and everything they couldn't say in each other's chests, in the chambers of their hearts.

After, when they lay next to each other, she turned to him to find him looking at her.

Their coin burned hot as she traced his face with one hand. Sirsha knew the pattern was blooming, and grief lanced through her, because if he was her Adah, her other half, then what would he do when she was gone? It would hurt—more than he could know. Not just the pain of love lost, but the sundering of a blood oath. She still felt the hole where J'yan's oath had been, years later.

But he wouldn't be alone. He had Sufiyan and Tas and Arelia. They would help him. He'd get through it.

"Sirsha." He caught her gaze and held her tight. "Your eyes look like you're saying goodbye. Come back. Be here with me."

She nodded, looking away so he wouldn't realize that she was saying goodbye. She just didn't have the strength to speak it aloud.