33 Why the Hell Are You Alive? #2
“There is something inside of you.” She spoke to the bird in her own language, one Esme had learned when they were hunting down Brawna’s people decades ago. Brawna searched the animal’s face and finally found something. She tipped its little head back at a dangerous angle.
“I see you,” she said to Urias.
She brought the bird up to her face. “I think I have missed you,” she cooed. “Have you been well?”
“How are you alive?” Urias asked through the bird’s beak. His voice shook.
“I am more than alive.” Brawna petted the bird’s head, and Urias shivered under the touch. “I am like you.” She grinned. Urias gasped like someone had blown a hole in his chest. “Did your little kings enjoy seeing their friends?”
The Red Rain, she meant. Esme’s stomach soured.
“Why?” Urias cawed.
Brawna leaned back against the windowsill, staring out into the air.
She closed her eyes and the sun glistened off her face with preternatural brightness.
Magic bunched in her taunt muscles and shone in the steel-bright gleam of her eyes.
She was like them indeed. “To avenge my family,” she vowed.
“More family than I ever knew I’d lost.”
“Brawna, please, this is a gift,” Urias said. “Use it to truly live. Do not waste your new life fighting.” He made the bird fly to her shoulder. “I am sorry.”
“Ah. That was the last thing you said to me, liprika,” she whispered.
“It’s such a silly thing to remember. My brother’s last words, my mother’s, my father’s—all burned to ash in my memory.
But yours, so pitiful and quiet, have haunted my bones for a century.
I will make you gasp them, beg them, spit them up with blood.
I will gather your precious family of monsters and do to them as you did to my people.
I am lucky yours are not as easily lost. Their deaths will provide me with endless entertainment. ”
“The Asterou are dead—”
“There is still a pale king sitting on the seat stolen from my brother. I will take it. It is my birthright to take it. My family made it.” Brawna petted the bird again, but her touch was heavy. A threat.
“Brawna, please,” Urias repeated.
“Perhaps then I will own you too. Is that how I gain your loyalty?” She raised a brow at Urias through the bird.
“Friendship is nothing to you but violence. That is how you Micreans speak to each other, isn’t it?
It’s how you spoke to me. With blades and fists and massacres in the millions. So let us speak, then, liprika.
“My men will be upon you in twenty days exactly. And when they enter your peaceful, civilized city, they will sear a hole so deep in the earth that I will be able to reach down and pull up my family from the hell you sent them to. I will make a God Jaw of your Amaris, and I will leave everything you love to burn inside.”
Brawna’s fingers wrapped around the bird’s throat.
“And when it is done, when the only survivors are your family of killers, I will bury you and build a new world on your bones so that you can listen as I slander your families, your people, your culture. As I tear your world apart child by child. As I twist your memory into disgrace. I will make you witness, as I had to, as I do what your beloved Asterou kings did to me.”
Urias ripped out of the bird’s mind with just seconds to spare, but the crack of its neck shattered through their ears.
Esme turned to him, eyes wide and terrified. “You know who that was.”
Urias nodded, sallow and sick, and they looked to Mak’kon.
“I don’t,” Balthazar said. He was heaving, his face screwed up tight at having had Tagas’ magic in his head for so long. “Who was that? She was the person who sent the birds?”
The Wraiths crossed their arms. None of them wanted to say it. Dread clogged their throats.
Then Mak’kon coughed and told Balthazar the truth of his country.
“The Asterui Bukkai? Forget it—every word, every legend. It’s a lie.
” His words sent bubbles of dissent up from the table, but Bal quieted them.
“Long before Ramniel was even born, Brawna Baltain’s family ruled over the unified country of Bahn-Nuk.
They were not uncivilized bear-riding beasts.
They were tradespeople and politicians and scientists and strategists.
They had universities and hospitals and castles.
” Every word sent a flinch through Esme’s body: universities they’d burned, hospitals they’d torn down to the bricks, castles they’d razed.
“Ramniel Asterou was exiled from his lands in Fortuna after a failed coup against its council,” Mak’kon continued.
“He sailed across the sea and purchased a cut of land from the Baltains. There, he enslaved his crew and worked them dead on his poisonous plantations devoted to producing liars’ nectar.
“When the Baltains tried to stop him from poisoning the land and killing his servants by closing his plantations, Ramniel decided to take the land back by force. He’d gotten rich peddling poisons, so he purchased ships and sailed thousands of poor from Fortuna over the sea.
He told them that the land was destined to be theirs, that all they had to do was take it.
He raised an army of men who had nothing by telling them they deserved everything.
They were so desperate for something that they believed him.
The bastard grew his borders and brought over more and more men.
Gave them stolen land for their blades and filled their minds with the myth that they were entitled to dirt they’d never set foot on.
“Soon, Ramniel and Omniel and had enough men to sweep out across Bahn-Nuk and hunt Brawna and the last of her army to the north, up by the Spine. But they always fended us off. So instead, Omniel tasked Urias with infiltrating the army and bringing them down from the inside,” Mak’kon said with sweat beading on his brow.
Urias struggled to breathe beside Esme. She could still remember the fight the three of them had had like it was yesterday.
They hadn’t been close then, but Esme and Mak’kon had told Urias it was wrong, that they should try to run again.
Urias had told them it was a long and useless death, and he was gone the next morning.
“He brought us Brawna and her generals. We lured the rest of the army into a trap in the God Jaw. We coated the canyon with yimri, the black powder in Bahn-Nuk cannons, and then we… we set it all on fire. And after the men’s screaming stopped, Omniel commanded Urias pick Brawna up and throw her in the inferno. So he did.”
Urias had wept the whole time. He’d scratched at his own arms, peeled his skin, and cracked his bones to stop himself, and it hadn’t worked.
He’d vomited immediately after, and then collapsed from the pain.
Later, he’d tell Esme and Mak’kon that he and Brawna had become friends, that he’d tried to convince her to escape but she’d refused.
Brawna had told him she would never abandon her people.
Mak’kon cleared his throat and blinked his glassy eyes.
“After that,” he said, “Esme, Urias, and I murdered the rest of the Bahn-Nuk. Every village and township and tribe. Anyone who spoke the language. Anyone who remembered the Baltains. Then Omniel published his Asterui Bukkai. There was no one to challenge anything he’d written, so it became truth.
It’s how he controls you: he tells you that he and his line are gods so you’ll be too terrified to disobey.
Tells you they’ll rise again so you feel him watching you every second.
Tells you you’re special and better and right so you don’t feel guilt when you massacre those that are common and lesser and wrong,” Mak’kon spat.
Esme dropped her face into her hands. They’d done that.
They’d killed thousands, maybe even millions.
All so Omniel could make them into monsters.
All so he could reign as a god on earth.
There was no divine birth, no twin gods that favored people pale as snow, no evil monster below to justify the butchery above.
Brawna Baltain had every right to slaughter them all. They’d earned this.
But they were all fucking cowards. They didn’t want to die.
“Then she’s dead?” Isobel’s voice wavered as she spoke, her eyes darting around a mind full of lies.
“No, she’s very much alive,” Esme said. “And in Waldovia. I do not understand how.” She pushed her fingers through her hair.
“Magic, obviously,” Mak’kon said.
“Yes, fine, Magic. But why? Why Brawna? Who else did they bring back? Does a resurrected army march on our city? They are twenty days away. Will they be living or dead, man or Magic?”
“We don’t know any of those answers, Esme,” Urias said. “Let’s not lose ourselves to possibilities. Sam, I need those counts.”
Esme told herself she would find those answers herself.
“They took three hundred from Prelyn, all Scourge men,” Samander said, arms crossed at the end of the table.
“The army still has twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty. General Dahl’s Blight sits at fourteen thousand and twenty-nine.
The Wail is fifteen thousand and nineteen.
The Lake lost men, but they have eight thousand and twenty left. We have numbers.”
Padrian did the math. “Just under fifty thousand men,” he said.
Esme still thought of some sixty thousand reanimated soldiers clawing up out of the God Jaw and shuddered at their chances.
“We have twenty days to gather our soldiers. The Scourge is six days away,” Balthazar said. “But they won’t be enough.”
“The Blight can get here in eight,” Samander said. “That would double our numbers.”
“Then send for them now,” he said.
Samander nodded and was gone.
“I’ll write to the Scourge,” Bal added. And though his and Sam’s words were those of action, the eldest Wraiths sat in unmovable terror. There was a vengeful corpse coming for them, and for all that they feared her, there were none among them that could fault her for her fury.
“We need to empty the city,” Esme muttered.