Page 19 of Mother of Death and Dawn

The three of us stood in silence for a moment. The soldiers still hurried about, continuing their clean-up. Birds sang. The breeze rustled the leaves.

Vivian turned away. “I just thought—”

The words became a wet crunch.

Vivian was no longer standing there.

She was in two pieces, clutched in the grasp of a creature of shadow, her head dangling from one spindly-fingered hand, and her body from the other.

As if they had just stepped from the air, the monsters were everywhere.

CHAPTERSIX

TISAANAH

Iwas confused about the bowl of raspberries.

“Where did those come from?” I asked Sammerin when we entered the tent. He shrugged, said he had no idea, and mentioned that berries were the last thing I should be concerned about when my hand was hanging from a few threads of flesh.

The two of us sat at the table now, Sammerin painstakingly reconnecting every piece of severed bone and muscle. It hurt horrifically. Even after all this time, I still found it stomach-turning to watch him work. So instead, I watched the raspberries, frowning. A single fly circled them lazily. They seeped red onto the white cloth beneath them.

It was hard to get raspberries out here. This encampment was so far east that the rolling plains of native Nyzerene started to wither into desert. It was a temporary base, as the rebel leadership—me, Serel, Filias, Riasha, and our closest teams of spies and diplomats—mapped our next steps in our war for freedom against the Threllians and the Fey.

My head hurt. I blinked and saw Melina’s small body falling to the ground.

I pushed away the thought, burying it instead beneath a thousand other worries.

“Any news from Orasiev?” I asked. “Shirav? Malakahn?”

“Not as far as I’ve heard. Not that that means anything.”

I chewed my lip. I just needed something to think about. And I wanted to know that Orasiev was alright. Remarkably, we were actually starting to win this thing, and victory felt more precarious than loss ever did.

I hadn’t fully realized the spark I was igniting by killing the Mikov family, nor the flames that we were fanning by returning to Threll. Slaves across the country had begun to realize how much power they held, and how much more possibility lay beyond their lives. The city of Orasiev was the first—a lesser estate overthrown by a successful slave rebellion. We took Shirav next, and then Malakahn, and finally, Exendriff. Four cities that belonged—truly belonged—to once-dead civilizations. Yes, they were small ones, spread across the outskirts of the Threllian empire. But they wereours. We had fought and bled for them.

For the first few weeks in Orasiev, I woke up every morning certain that Threllian Lords would be at our gates by sundown, ready to tear us to the ground. Miraculously, it did not happen.

These were strange times. The entire world, it seemed, was at war. The Fey—and by extension, their Threllian allies—were locked in a bloodthirsty conflict with Ara. This played out both across the sea and in Ara’s Threllian territory, which Nura had slowly but surely expanded from what was once the Mikov estate over recent months.

A thousand knives were poised at our backs—Nura’s, the Fey’s, the Threllians’. And yet, perhaps because everyone was so distracted by all the other people they had to go kill, our infant nation still stood.

Still, at least once a week I dreamed of fire consuming the tentative freedom my people and I had created, just as it had once consumed a stone cabin and sprawling garden that I thought of as—

I hissed in a breath as pain shot up my arm.

“Sorry,” Sammerin murmured. “Reattaching nerves.”

I made the mistake of glancing at my wrist and immediately regretted it.

Sammerin frowned down at my hand, examining, not for the first time, the strange mark. The gold had formed an intricate pattern, like spiderwebs that started at my fingertips and twined down the front of my palm. It ended near my wrist, the metallic streaks dwindling and disappearing. The marks felt different than my flesh—harder, and colder, like metal—but I could still open and close my hand normally.

“And Ishqa had no ideas as to what this could be?”

“He said he will look closer when he returns.”

He’d barely had time to glance at it before dumping me on the ground and flying away again. Apparently, he had somewhere very important to be that I had disrupted with my butchering of our plans. We were all used to it. Ishqa came and went as he pleased, often disappearing for days or weeks on end without a word. Not that any of us could complain. Our mysterious Fey ally, and the information that he brought us, had been key to so many of our victories against the Threllians. Ishqa viewed the Fey as our ultimate adversary, and every blow to the Threllian empire weakened them by extension.

“Hm.” Sammerin looked concerned. But then again, he always looked concerned, these days.

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