Page 40 of Mother of Death and Dawn

He stopped walking and turned to me. The movement was sharp, almost angry, and for a moment I was gleeful to see it—yes, fight me. Give me something bloody. Give me something that hurts.

But when a cloud fell away from the moon, the cold light across his face revealed only sadness.

“I thought you were dead. I thought…” A hard swallow. “Do you remember Niraja?”

Niraja. A beautiful city of flowers and stone. Laughing children. A strange kind of hope. And—

Blood and broken glass on the floor. Dead bodies. A terrible feeling of guilt, of betrayal.

And then, one image that was so clear it left me shaken:

The image of Caduan, clutching his abdomen, falling backwards over the rail.

It was the clearest memory I’d had in a long time. I did not, could not, answer.

We resumed walking. We were nearly at the castle doors.

“The city was destroyed,” he said, quietly. “So many people died there that night. I awoke at the edge of the river. Both of my legs were broken. I would have died too, if… Ishqa had not returned.”

The sound of his name made me stiffen.

“He pulled me from the ruins and took me back to the House of Wayward Winds.” Caduan’s voice was tight as a drawn bowstring. “He told me that we were the only ones to survive. He told me that the humans killed you.”

I wish they had.

Death was like a lost lover. We circled each other. I craved more with every brush of its touch. All I wanted was for it to take me to its bed and never let me leave.

I tried to imagine the world I had lived in, so many years ago. I tried to imagine what it had been like to beAefe.

“What was I like?” I whispered.

And there was no hesitation as he answered, “You were exceptional.”

We reached the door. He leaned heavily against the stone wall of the castle. “You were like no one I had ever met. Passionate and driven and honest the way so few Fey were, in those days. Because of you, I saw the potential in the new world the Fey could build. But with you gone… everything that I feared would happen came to pass. The House of Wayward Winds and the House of Obsidian went to war, provoked by your father’s foolish actions, and that war nearly led to our extinction.”

My father. I remembered nothing of him but a shadow and a lingering sense of grief, like a reaching hand that was always empty.

“And this is why you brought me back,” I said. “Because I have the power you need to win your wars, now.”

“It isn’t that simple, Aefe.”

“Do not patronize me. I know what it is to be used.”

“Youonlyknow what it is to be used, and that makes me angrier than I can ever express.” We reached the door, and he held it open for me. When it closed behind us, the darkness of the empty hallway swallowed us both.

“Ishqa stood beside me for hundreds of years,” Caduan said. “He became a close friend and a trusted advisor. But when he told me the truth of what he had done to you—the truth of whattheyhad done to you…” He heaved himself upright and paused, his back to me. I watched the line of his shoulders rise and fall and thought of what it had been like to feel someone else’s breath running through me.

“Then why would you bring me back, if not to make me your weapon?” I asked.

He was quiet for such a long time that I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me.

“Five hundred years is a very long time,” he said, at last. “One hundred and eighty thousand days, and I thought of you in every one.”

My throat grew tight for reasons I did not understand.

“The woman you knew then was not me.”

“She was not. And she was.” Slowly, he straightened, turned, and gave me the weak ghost of a smile.

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