Chapter 48

48

Quil

Because I love him, you cussed nags! Why else!

Quil heard Sirsha's outburst, saw her speaking to voices he couldn't hear. The coin at his throat burned white hot, but he couldn't do anything. He felt a sudden awareness of Sirsha, a glimpse of the inside of her. All the pain that she kept caged away, like a wild animal that she couldn't risk letting loose. But the love, too, infinite shades of it veined through her soul.

For a second, she was resplendent, garbed in her magic, her power finally unleashed. The light grew so brilliant that he had to look away, shielding his vision.

Then he felt an emptiness. A yawning chasm in the shape of the girl he realized he loved. Though the moon shone through the window of one of the jail cells, its light felt wan. The shadows of the cellblock contracted, slow and heavy as a lament.

Sirsha was gone.

Quil could move again, no longer held in place by Div. Sufiyan and Arelia limped toward him.

"What the bleeding hells happened?" Suf asked. His clothes were covered in blood. His hands shook, and he couldn't stop looking at the two prone bodies on the stone floor.

Cero and Aiz. Dead. He considered the former—so desperate to free his friend, desperate to protect her. And Aiz. No, she's not Aiz. Nor is she Ilar. She is the Tel Ilessi. The beast who unleashed the hells on your people and her own.

"We need to go." Tas lurched toward Quil, a gash on his head oozing an alarming amount of blood. "If the High Seer's soldiers find us down here with dead bodies, we'll be answering questions for days. We need to get back to the Empire. I'm assuming he told you a way out of here."

"He did, but we can't leave." Quil spun around the cellblock. "Not without Sirsha."

Arelia shook her head. "I don't know if her magic consumed her or if Div did, but I saw her disappear. One moment she was here, and the next…"

Quil reached for his oath coin. It was intricately carved now, a pattern so complex he could hardly follow it. It was also warm.

"She's alive," he said. "I know she is. We must find her—"

"We will." Tas pulled Quil away from the dead Kegari. "But not here."

Quil searched for Sirsha for days. He went to every market in Ankana. He went to the High Seer. But Remi E'twa was less worried about a missing Jaduna, and more concerned with the fact that Ambassador Ifalu, despite having been imprisoned, was nowhere to be found.

Just like Sirsha. No one had seen her. When he called out to her in his mind, he heard only a taunting silence.

"Maybe she used her magic to take the monster away," Arelia suggested at one point. "She bound it. We all saw it. Perhaps she took it to Elias."

But Quil knew that wasn't right. He could feel it in his bones, and with every day that passed, he grew more frantic. Sirsha wouldn't have just left. Because I love him, you cussed nags! Not the declaration of love that someone might dream of, and yet the words were precious to him.

Quil kept going back to the last night they had together. The sadness in Sirsha's eyes. As if she'd known her time was short.

No! Sirsha lived. He felt it in their coin and in his blood. Come what may, they would be reunited. He would love her if she let him, give over his body if she demanded it, be the home he knew she longed for. He would find her. He needed to find her.

But his people needed him too. And he could not abandon them to the predations of the Kegari.

Musa sent a wight detailing the near annihilation of a full legion. And though Sirsha had destroyed Div and Sufiyan had killed the Tel Ilessi, their demise was only the first step to expelling the Kegari from the Empire. So, after five days of searching, Quil asked Tas to find a ship. By the morning, he and his companions watched as Ankana's shores faded into the distance.

Quil still had hope even then. Sirsha would appear from belowdecks. Yawning, rolling her eyes. Telling him she'd found his frantic search highly entertaining.

But she didn't appear, and as the days passed and the miles vanished, Quil turned to the immense task before him: liberating the Empire from the Kegari, who had roosted all over his land like malignant tumors.

Quil ordered the ship to the Tribal Lands—to one of the smaller fishing villages that the Kegari hadn't yet noticed. Musa would meet them there. His recent message said the Ikfa had arrived, and the smiths were hard at work shaping it into weaponry.

Tas's pirate friends sailed swiftly, and neither Kegari nor any other marauder approached. Three weeks after departing Burku, as night fled from the approaching dawn, the captain shouted.

"Land ho!"

Quil was the only one of his group awake as the southern coast of the Tribal Lands materialized on the horizon. A bright spring sun illuminated bursts of wildflowers that stretched across the desert, their aroma cutting through the salty tang of the sea. Underlying it all was the scent of dust and creosote and Quil breathed deep. Home.

He pocketed the two silver hairpins he'd taken to fiddling with. The sun-white buildings of the sleepy fishing village came into view. The docks were empty. It was too late for the fishing boats, which were already out to sea, and too early for market. Quil's heart quailed as they approached the shoreline. As soon as he stepped back on land, it would mean he'd truly left Sirsha behind. The part of his journey that belonged to her would be over.

I will find her. The oath coin flared white hot, as if in agreement.

After the captain dropped the gangplank, Quil, heavily hooded, made his way off the ship, his gait rolling after weeks at sea. It wasn't until he'd reached the empty market at the end of the dock that a dark-garbed figure appeared from behind a cargo pulley.

There was something familiar about how she moved, and for a brief, overjoyed moment, Quil was sure Sirsha had found him.

But it took less than a second for him to realize this wasn't her. This woman was smaller, her stride shorter.

She approached Quil, and as he reached for his scim, she lowered her hood.

"Laia?"

The Kehanni nodded a greeting, opening her arms, and Quil hugged her, relieved that she was alive and unharmed. He turned back to the dhow to call out to Sufiyan, who he knew had been aching for his family. But Laia shook her head.

"I want more than anything to see my son, Quil," she said. "But I will wait. Walk with me. There is something I must tell you about the creature that murdered Ruh. The one you helped to hunt."

"You know about it?" Quil said as they turned onto a path that ran away from the village and toward the desert. "How—"

"I've known about it for a long while now, though it was only four weeks ago that I remembered I knew," Laia said, and Quil stiffened. When Sirsha had eradicated Div—when the creature's power had finally been broken.

Laia slowed as they reached the edge of the village, and stared out at a brilliant carpet of bone-white wildflowers.

"There are some stories that aren't meant to be shared, Quil," she said, gold eyes anguished. "There is one that should never have been told. Years ago, I hunted that story. I found it and listened and then released it upon the world. And in doing so, I planted the seeds of my own Ruh's death. Sit, child. Let me tell you of the First Durani. The first chaos storyteller. Me."