A Reaper at the Gates (An Ember in the Ashes, #3)

by Sabaa Tahir

It was not a ghost, but a girl.

Laia of Serra is all passion. Feeling. Everything she thinks is written on her face.

He will come for her. He always will. As he never will for me.

You used to know me, I think. But you don’t know me anymore. I don’t know me anymore.

The cruelest anger comes from the deepest pain.

The world suffered for my love. It suffers still.”

But for us, Elias, duty must reign over all else: desire, sadness, loneliness. Love cannot live here.

Are all those who get close to me fated to suffer?

“I thought we would have more time,”

Win. Find joy. Remember me.

“You are cruel, Elias,” she whispers against my mouth. “To give a girl all she desires only to tear it away.”

“This isn’t the end for us, Laia of Serra.” I cannot give up what we could have. I don’t care what bleeding vow I made. “Do you hear me? This is not our end.” “You’ve never been a liar.” She dashes her hands against the wetness in her eyes. “Don’t start now.”

I watch her until she is just a shadow on the horizon. Turn around, I think. Just once. Turn around.

“You live and breathe and eat and sleep on the backs of those less fortunate. Your entire existence is due to the oppression of those you view to be lesser. But why you, Blood Shrike? Why did fate see fit to make you the oppressor instead of the oppressed? What is the meaning of your life?”

Strange how monsters can reach from beyond the grave, as potent in death as they were in life.

Why is it always us? All of these people—so many children—hunted and abused and tormented. Families stolen, lives shattered. They come all this way to be rejected yet again, sent outside the city walls to sleep in flimsy tents, to fight over paltry scraps of food, to starve and freeze and suffer more.

I wonder if my entire life will be a series of moments in which I realize I’m an idiot long after I can actually do anything about it. Will I ever feel like I know what I’m doing?

You humans give your loyalty so willingly for just a little hope.”

“Hope is stronger than fear. It is stronger than hate.”

“She’s penned a play,” he says. “I can feel it. Don’t act the part she’s written for you.”

She was funny and clever, I want to say. She could shoot a sparrow on a branch from a hundred paces. She only ever wanted true freedom for us—for you. She only ever wanted better.

“You have your own strength,” he finally says. “It doesn’t have to be the same as the Lioness’s.”

To lead, you have to do ugly things.

Love. I sigh. Love is joy coupled with misery, elation bound to despair. It is a fire that beckons me gently and then burns when I get too close. I hate love. I yearn for it. And it drives me mad.

I step toward her, gripped by a soul-deep longing for her to be real. I want to hear her speak my name. I want to dip my hands into the cool shade of her hair, to take solace in her gaze.

“Why is it like this?” she asks. “Why must we be apart? I miss what we should have been, Elias. Is that possible—”

There is success. And there is failure. The land in between is for those too weak to live.

He calms her anger. Makes promises. Even at the distance of a thousand years, I know he’ll break those promises.

I don’t know how I will release my humanity. I don’t know if I can. But at least I know why I should.

“My sister is my home,” I say. “Until I reach her, it doesn’t matter where I bleeding sleep.”

My brother, stubborn as the sun.

Now I know why Elias left a note all those months ago when he disappeared, instead of saying goodbye. It’s not because he didn’t care. It’s because he cared too much.

She is a child whose happiness is gauged by the strange weather between her parents, sometimes sunny but more often a gale.

We do not lie. We told her the truth, and the truth has freed her. She will never hope again.

I hold her now. I call to her. But she will grow old and die, while I will live on. She is the blink of an eye. And I am an age.

But for just this one moment, I let myself look at her.

“The truth is ugly,” I say. “The truth of our parents uglier still. But we are not them, Laia.”

“I was there, and you were there. And it was a perfect slice of time.

“We will find a way, Laia. Somehow. But if … if I change … if I seem different, remember that I love you. No matter what happens to me. Say you’ll remember, please—”

I will find you, Laia. I will find a way. This is not our end.

I witness myself through his eyes: angry and cold and weak and strong and brave and warm.

And I would be blind not to see what he feels for me. I am woven into his consciousness

There is a price for greed and violence. We do not always know who will pay it. But for good or ill, it will be paid.

“The world will burn,” I say. “But it will be reborn from the ashes.”

“Why do we have to change and not you? Why do we have to become less human instead of you becoming more so?”

Curse this world for what it does to the mothers, for what it does to the daughters. Curse it for making us strong through loss and pain, our hearts torn from our chests again and again. Curse it for forcing us to endure.

“Laia.” She turns, and at the sight of her, something in me twists. An old memory. A kiss. A dream. Her hair like silk between my fingers, her body rising beneath my hands.

We are, all of us, just visitors in each other’s lives.

“It’s not mortality I feel,” I say, “though it is something uniquely mortal.” Sadness? “A type of sadness,” I say, “called loneliness.”