Chapter 15
I’m sorry that all my letters have been nothing short of miserable.
There’s still hope here too, if you look.
The Red Jasmine Insurgence are assembling, beginning to fight back and organize against Salt.
River has continued on as it always does, a curl of life sprouting from death.
There’s always a chance we can come back. There’s always hope.
I hope you come back, too.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent.
Kiyan
I watched her run, her big dark eyes round with fear, her strange clothes wet and clinging to her, hair like a storm. Most humans were usually beat down after centuries of existing as a lifeless shade in service of Salt, but she didn’t seem like that.
I remember the last human I’d properly seen—when I’d been a boy fighting in the pits and running weapons to the rebels from Charvellan city.
The Court of Salt had a few humans they’d brought with them, but they were all at the palace, and at that point I was avoiding any connection to the royal family to prevent someone from recognizing me.
A human boy my age was bound by a bargain to a churail, and the witch kept him on a leash made of threads of wind she’d conjured.
His eyes had been vacant and unseeing as he did her bidding.
The peris of River were enslaved to the Salt Court, but I preferred having the ability to resist, even if I died for it.
If humans could be so easily enthralled and manipulated, they wouldn’t last long in Peristan.
I looked in the direction the girl ran, feeling the spark of her life in the forest. It was faint, but still there, the beat of her heart quick and afraid.
She wouldn’t get far, not on foot and not in the Court of River.
I should probably be more worried that she would get herself killed before I managed to find her again.
And I needed to find her, if only to figure out what she knew and how it was possible she had a long dead fae queen’s powerful haath phool on her wrist .
Queen Azari’s bracelet and hand chain had been missing for hundreds of years.
That hadn’t been expected.
As far as I knew, it had been lost to time. Where had she found it?
And could it lead me to the Queen’s crown?
I touched the key that lay against my chest, as if checking it was still there. It sat, undisturbed, beside the ring that was permanently threaded through the chain around my neck.
My fingers wrapped around my sister’s ring and I closed my eyes, letting emotion run through me. My siblings probably looked different after ten years, but I could remember the last time I saw them as if it was permanently burned into my brain.
It was indulgent—letting myself dwell in the memories of them. I only allowed myself small moments to think of them. Amani’s smile when she teased me. My mother ruffling my hair. Even my brother Taym punching me in the arm when I annoyed him.
I knew they were still alive—the beauty of my magic was that I was connected to every living thing in this Court. And even when a thing was cursed, that didn’t stop me from feeling their thread of life.
They were all still alive—and I clung to that.
I looked up, above the trees, above the palace, to where the shadow of the Mountain stood over us, looking the same as it always had, no inkling of the curse on it that had damned us all.
Soon.
Soon I would free them.
The halmasti I killed twitched at my feet, its body spasming. My gaze flickered back to it, as I felt its life sink into the earth and became part of the same threads we were all connected to—even my family, as damned as they were.
But its body wouldn’t go to waste. Not with the plans I had for it.
Already I could feel the gathering rot, the rigor setting in, the other end of the life cycle taking over to return the body to the earth. I was attuned to it now, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it much before.
Why hadn’t I been able to understand this power during a time when I could use my own magic to its full capacity, without resorting to this bastardized version I had now? Likely because I hadn’t needed to.
Why learn about death when I had the life thread of every living creature at my command?
My fingers curled inwards, that same latent rage building again, a swirling river held back by a roughly built dam. Now I didn’t even have a kernel of that power.
The halmasti had come dangerously close to tearing my throat out when my magic had guttered out, and it had humbled me. The plants I’d conjured had barely held me aloft from crushing the girl and being ravaged by the beast in return.
Before Salt came and sucked away our power, I could have stopped the heart of the beast in an instant.
I could have commanded the entire Salt army to freeze in their tracks.
I could have held Reza’s life in my hands and squeezed it out of him, feeding the plants and the earth every last drop of his Salt blood.
A rustling sounded in the trees behind me, and I raised my knife in preparation for what was about to come out of the forest. Another halmasti? A Salt soldier?
I had enough anger in me that I might have attacked no matter the consequences.
But it was neither. Instead, a hooded figure emerged, a rebellion member I recognized, even though it was odd for them to be in the middle of the palace woods at night.
“By the River, you look like shit.”
I relaxed as the hooded figure stepped closer to me and examined the halmasti dead on the ground, crouching down to lift its lifeless head.
“Not tired of killing peris, you have to kill wildlife now?”
I snorted. “Is a Salt Court halmasti what you would call ‘wildlife’?”
“You’re right, it might have been domesticated. I could probably have kept it as a pet.”
I laughed aloud at that, imagining this large beast housebound like a hearth peri. “Not likely.”
“Did you get what you wanted?” They gestured towards the River.
“And more so.” I nodded to the path the human girl had taken earlier, an idea forming. “But I need you to take care of something for me.”
* * *
I returned to the palace through the back entrance, not trusting that if I walked through the front courtyard I wouldn’t get stopped by General Faisal and a dozen soldiers wondering why I was covered in the black blood of an ancient creature from the Court of Salt.
At least one of the advantages of living back at the River Palace was that I could draw a bath whenever I wanted and scrub myself of blood.
It was necessary when one was constantly stained with it.
I lay back in the tub, lifting the key hanging from the chain at my neck and examining it properly for the first time.
I’d never seen the River do something like that—transfigure one object into another.
The River had its own magic, and it could be unpredictable in its nature, but magic often needed to be commanded, conjured, controlled.
I didn’t have power over the River—it wasn’t alive.
But the water that had transformed the ring certainly seemed like it might be.
The ring was ancient peri, that much was true. Whether it was forged by dead Queen Azari, I had no idea. But the next step was going to be finding the door that this key unlocked, and though this was the first clue I’d had in years, I couldn’t begin to think where I’d look next.
The key was gold, like the ring had been, which wasn’t surprising considering the conductivity of magic in the Tashuna gold mostly used by the peris, and Queen Azari in particular.
The bow of the key was elaborate and arching, vines curling above its shoulder.
The inscription would be here somewhere, and I examined it closely in the firelight, searching for those ancient fae words I’d seen before when they were on the ring. Return me to the River.
At the top of the bow, there was an inscription, but it wasn’t the same one. My heart leapt to my throat, and I nearly dropped the key in the bath when I saw the new words.
Of course, the inscription would have changed with the River, just as the ring had. I’d been too distracted with the human and the halmasti to check. It was the same number of words, with a remarkably different meaning.
Take me to the mountains.