Chapter 25
I’m starting to forget your voices, and it scares me. How long until I forget what you look like entirely? Sometimes I wonder if this is a dream,
and we are actually still together.
Then I kill someone else and realize I’m never getting out of this nightmare.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
Kiyan
It was time, though I couldn’t shake the uneasiness running through me as I began to pile the bodies I’d been collecting.
The greatest asset was the rotting halmasti, at the top of my death creature, forming the bulk of the body of the beast. From there, mulch and leaves and rotting branches awaited my command.
I closed my eyes, having never created life out of anything this big before.
This time I was in the forest outside the palace, and the connection to my life magic was stronger with my feet planted in the earth. Even though Reza put limits on our powers, I was at my strongest with nature.
I concentrated on the rot that had begun on the beast first, grabbing that tiny thread of life still working inside, using the decomposing material to my advantage.
It was easier this time, linking all the different stages of death.
If I could harness a main thread connecting all the different stages of the death cycle, then the rest of the bodies began to fall in line.
It seemed that I could amplify the death cycle the more I piled together.
And this magic felt strong—stronger than I’d ever felt since Reza had used King Rusul’s crown to drain us.
The he fact that my previous attempt had killed one Salt soldier and injured another gave me the means I hadn’t had in years—a way of fighting back.
I needed this power.
Reza had found the map to Queen Azari’s crown, and with it, a way to destroy the royal family.
He needed to be stopped.
I flooded my energy, the limited spark of my power, into the pile of death at my feet.
Slowly, pieces of it began to snap together, the dead halmasti I’d killed in the forest rearing up on its hind legs and towering over me, a festering, bloody beast. Crusted black ichor clumped its matted fur and provided a landing place of sorts for leaves and logs and mulch and dead sprites.
I had become an expert at collecting death, a gravedigger without graves.
If life no longer obeyed me, then I would command death.
I would use whatever power I had at my disposal to free my kingdom, even if that meant sinking into the stench of rot, becoming a piece of the forest floor that thrived on decomposing bodies.
Slowly, the creature started to form, and I began to see the beauty in what I was doing.
Others might not; the stink was foul, pieces of limbs and rotted plant fell in clumps, only to be scooped up by the frothing cloud of death I had spun.
When I had compiled it, the beast began to move at my command, pieces of it in constant motion as I manipulated the cycle of death.
“Kill Reza,” I commanded. “And take back the map.”
It obeyed, and just like the others I had made, it groggily answered in my mind, unused to a master, unused to the manipulation of an outside force.
Life, I found, was used to being manipulated. It obeyed easily.
But death resisted me at every turn; the side of life that was death was almost never interfered with.
I got the sense that it listened to my conjuring out of curiosity more than anything.
It was curious about this new sensation of being used in this way, created as a weapon, being called upon by the living.
We will, it whispered, a thousand voices and yet only one.
We will kill. We will take.
The beast took a hideous step toward the palace where the Salt festival was being celebrated—honoring the day Salt took over by stealing our magic, killing the River Court peris, and sucking our powers away.
A fitting day to attack.
* * *
I slipped into the palace before my absence was noted, walking idly around the dancing and merrymaking of the Salt Court.
Most of the River Court was working in the palace, with a few of the high peris from River celebrating half-heartedly, so as not to be punished by Reza for not taking part.
I remembered when I was a boy working at the palace, how one whiff of dissatisfaction with the new regime would get you publicly whipped in the courtyard.
I learned quickly to become frozen, no emotions or reactions.
I had climbed further up in the palace with that attitude, a cold mask of indifference to torture and insults, doing what I could to ease the pain of those that had been affected, while at the same time trying everything to look for a way to bring our power back.
Until one day Reza had become aware of a young fighter from River whom he could exploit to catch rebels. A River peri who wouldn’t hesitate to arrest their own neighbor, if it meant serving the Court of Salt.
It was the perfect place to inject my own rot into his rule.
And yet, I couldn’t help but think I’d been rotting too while working for him.
It felt too good to release my power, too satisfying to fight back.
Finally.
Resistance felt like I was reclaiming a part of my soul that had been battered down so long it didn’t know anything but compliance. Until now.
Yaseema was standing at the periphery of the dance floor with Mishah.
She looked uncertain as she watched the dancing, her own outfit a product of the Salt Court—elaborate, ostentatious and glittering.
She didn’t wear a mask however, and kept the gold jewelry on her face instead, even with the thin crack in one lens.
It made me perversely happy to see her without a Salt Court mask on her face.
I was the only other peri without one except for the staff, and it made me feel a kinship to her which I most certainly shouldn’t.
Not with the power she wielded and how devastating it would be for the River Court if Salt used it to their advantage.
It was surprising that no one had attempted to enthrall her yet, though likely Reza’s interest had something to do with that. I didn’t know if her magic prevented it—I hadn’t even tried in the dungeon, despite acting as though I did. The less power Reza had over the human girl, the better.
He still sat at the high table, staring at Yaseema with a heavy, focused gaze. Uneasiness swept over me—the same feeling I’d had when he touched her—and though I always wanted to smash Reza’s teeth through his face, the feeling was currently trebled.
I didn’t like his interest in her, which I knew went beyond her ability to find the crown.
Every time he spoke to her, watched her, interacted with her, it set my teeth on edge.
I knew he would torture her to get what he wanted—he would have no compunction about extending her suffering and savoring it.
He’d done it too many times in the past, and humans were even more fragile than we were.
He would break her.
She would have no chance against him, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it. Not if I wanted to free the Court of River from Salt’s clutches.
It made something wild and ugly rear up inside me, and I wondered if using the death magic was starting to affect other parts of me, beyond my powers.
When he’d hurt others of my Court before, I’d been able to hone my rage into action and focus—that one day we would take him down and do everything to him as he had done to us.
. But his attention on this human girl made me want to unleash all the darkness in me and drown him in it, and I struggled with restraining myself.
I couldn’t afford such emotion, not for a human like her. Not when her power gave him a way we could lose all hope of winning against the Salt Court.
She tucked her large cloud of hair behind one rounded ear and readjusted the golden jewelry on her face. I followed the progress of her hands, the way they delicately traced her skin when she pushed back her hair.
She wouldn’t survive here. Not with how soft, and trusting she was.
I remembered her eyes when the halmasti was upon us, how wide and frightened they were.
And yet, she still withdrew your dagger. She still slipped it between your teeth, no matter how badly her hands were shaking.
And she still fought it with a tree branch when your magic failed.
I walked toward her as if being pulled by one of her golden threads, unable to keep away, to stop myself from talking to her.
She was in this now, just as I was. We were both one of Reza’s puppets to use.
And she would never find a way to cut the strings.