Page 127 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Good,” I replied.

“Good,” he echoed, nodded stiffly, and said nothing more.

After he left, I lay back into my nest of pillows, stared at the copper ceiling, and smiled.

CHAPTERFORTY-THREE

TISAANAH

Ishqa returned many hours later. He landed and was still for such a long moment, gaze to the ground. Immediately, my stomach was in knots.

I stood. “What did you see?”

He was silent, his hands curled at his sides. Unusually, he didn’t magic away his wings immediately, leaving the shimming golden feathers out and trembling beneath the sunrise breeze.

“What did you see, Ishqa?”

He turned, and I was so taken aback by the fire in his eyes that I stepped backwards.

“This war will destroy all of us. My people. Yours. Yours.” He gestured broadly to everyone here—Fey, Threllian, Aran, and people who were none of those things.

I had never seen Ishqa like this. Max, Sammerin, and I glanced at each other uneasily. Dread coiled in my stomach.

“What did you see?”

I was really asking,Are all my people dead?

The sadness etched into his face told me too much. He shook his head.

“Malakahn fell. Nothing remains.”

Everything went numb.

Gods, we had fought and bled and wept for those cities. Months of strategizing, of operating in the shadows, of taking over from the inside. My friends had died for this.

Gone.

“Serel,” I choked out.

“I could not see individual bodies. He may have escaped.”

I rubbed my temples.

I needed to believe that Serel had gotten out alive, just as I had needed to believe it a year ago, when I was desperate to return to Threll to save him. I needed to believe that he had escaped with the rest of our leadership—that they had made it to Orasiev, and that Orasiev had held. The alternative was to believe that in a single strike, the movement that hundreds of thousands of people had fought and bled for had been killed.

I could not allow myself to believe that.

“There is more,” Ishqa said, gravely. “Aefe was there.”

My brows contorted in confusion. “What do you mean, she wasthere?”

Aefe was dead. Aefe had become Reshaye. We knew that Caduan had Reshaye in his possession—but Reshaye was a very different being than the Fey woman it used to be.

“I mean what I say,” Ishqa said. “Aefe was there. Aefe, just as she looked five hundred years ago.”

“In a… body?”

“Not justabody.Herbody.”

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