A ​Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes, #4)

by Sabaa Tahir

“I talked to Mamie, you know. I—” I did not wish to. I was ashamed. But I made myself go to her. Made myself ask for forgiveness for imprisoning her and her Tribe when I was hunting Elias. And I made myself walk away when she ...

Sometimes, it is better to die than to live as a monster.”

But we don’t have to be monsters.

“In all our years at Blackcliff,” I say, “I never imagined this was how you and I would draw swords. Fending off our old teacher while a Scholar hunted a jinn.” “There is no one I’d rather have at my back, Blood Shrike,”

The song is one of healing. Of mothers and daughters. Of my own mother and her quiet love, which bathed me like the rays of the sun for as long as she lived.

“The other?”

“What—what other? Who else have you been talking to?” “A spirit.” Karinna flutters past me, and I think I feel her hands along my hair. “Haunted like you.”

“Come, little broken bird,” she whispers. “Walk with me. I will take you to the other ghost. I will tell you of my lovey.”

“Love can be more powerful in a battle than planning or strategy. Love keeps us fighting. Love drives us to survive.”

But my love is a stream of water poured into a desert. Down a crevasse where it will never see the light. Never bloom into anything greater.

that you must love while you can. For tomorrow, all that you love might be ash.

If I seem different, remember that I love you. No matter what happens to me. Say you’ll remember, please. “I remember,” I whisper, and make my way across the jinn grove. “I remember.”

I do not deserve your love, Laia—”

“Haven’t you learned?” I say. “You don’t get to decide if you deserve my love or not. I decide that. You are worthy of my love. You are worthy of the love Mamie has for you, and the love the Blood Shrike feels. You’ve done terrible things? So have I. We were born into war, Elias. It is all we’ve known. Your mistakes only define the rest of your life if you let them. Don’t let them.”

“I did say something to you.”

“I said: You are my temple.”

“You are my priest,”

“You are my prayer,”

“You are my release,”

know she wants me to look at her. I hesitate, for if I do so, my heart will be bare. But love rolls off her in gentle waves, enveloping me, and finally I meet her gaze.

Laia’s steady stare captures me, and I am lost, hypnotized by the dark passion that blooms there as she loses herself to the movement of our bodies, to that ancient alchemy melding the agony of desire with the ecstasy of its fulfillment.

“Because this cannot be the only night we spend together.” Her fingers are light as she traces lines on my skin, but her voice is fierce. “I want a life with you. Adventures. Meals. Late nights in front of fires. A thousand rainy walks. You talking me out of my clothing in inappropriate places. I want ch—” She stops, sadness in her eyes, though she hides it quickly. But I know what she was going to say. Because I want children too, perhaps not now, but one day. “I want more,” she says.

I pull Laia to me and kiss her once more, putting all of my love and hope and desire into that kiss. Everything I wanted to give her in a lifetime together.

I close the cabin door firmly, taking a breath as I am hit with a premonition as strong as any Augur’s, that she and I will never return here together again.

“May death claim me first.” “Ah, no, my love.” He gathers me close. “You cannot go first. I could not make sense of the world if you did.”

the eyes of someone who believes in you so deeply that you have no choice but to believe in yourself. “You are the strongest person here. The strongest in the camp. Stronger than me, Spiro, the Blood Shrike, the Soul Catcher, Afya. You are the daughter of the Lioness. The granddaughter of Nan and Pop. You are Lis’s sister and mine.”

I am her and she is me.

“Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas,”

Go back to the caravan, Ilyaas. Dark creatures walk the desert at night.

War is your past. War is your present. War is your future.

But the end is here. And I am not ready.

reaches back without looking, and breaks Darin’s neck.

The sound. It has stalked my nightmares for months. This is how my father died. How Lis died. How my mother’s hope died.

Do not kill the Nightbringer. It is what he wants. What he needs. It is the last—

I am moved by pity. I want to hold her. To tell her that soon, all of our pain will disappear. The world will be consumed by suffering incarnate, and there will be no survivors, not even my own kin.

For I did love her, this brave, wild-haired, gold-eyed girl, terrified yet defiant, hesitant yet determined. I loved her for all that she was and all that she would become.

That the only way to release the maelstrom, to bore a hole between this world and Mauth’s, was to pour a thousand years of my own pain into the Sea of Suffering.

My corporeal body disintegrates, but I still exist. The Sea wraps itself around me, consumes me. Every last scrap of my essence is suffering. Not the Meherya anymore, nor the King of No Name, nor the Nightbringer. But something else entirely.

Our eyes meet for one frantic moment. Then the Sea of Suffering drags me into darkness and claims me, body and soul.

“You’re Arius Harper.” My father,

I wasn’t about to let the son kill me after the father had failed.

But even a maelstrom has a center. A heart. I must find it.

But Mother came back. She came back and she fought for me, and I hold on to her words. I love you, Laia. I immerse myself in her love. For, tortured as it was, it was still love, in the only way she could give it to me.

He has turned his back on his duty and humanity. On Mauth. But in truth, humanity turned against him first. And Mauth, who should have loved the Meherya best, did nothing when his son and all that he cherished were destroyed. The Nightbringer gave Mauth everything—and Mauth repaid him with a thousand years of torment.

“Nirbara,”

“Forsaken by humans and by Mauth,” I say, and the maelstrom grows more violent with each word. “Forsaken by the Scholars, who you sought only to help and who stole all that you loved. Forsaken by Rehmat, who left you alone with all of your pain. What a terrible thing love is, when this is the cost.

“Perhaps you and I are doomed.” My voice is raw, aching. “Doomed to always hurt. But what we do with that hurt is our choice. I cannot hate. Not forever. Are you not tired of it, Nirbara? Do you not seek rest?”

He looks at me and shudders, so alone. So I reach out and pull together the shreds that remain of him. The scraps solidify into the shape of a child, a young boy with brown eyes, and when I pull him into my arms, he collapses. Together we weep over all we have done and all that has been done to us. Though I do not speak, I pour what love I have into this, the truest manifestation of a broken creature.

I see all that he has done and I choose not to hate him.

“He would take the pain of the world and lock it away—” “So that we might be free of it,” I say. “But I will not forget.”