Shaeva broke bones and bodies and left them at the borders for others to find. I could not bring myself to do as she did—and this is what I get. To humans, the Waiting Place is simply the Forest of Dusk. They have forgotten what lives here.
The few ghosts I have not yet passed gather behind me, crying out at the presence of the living, which pains them. The men exchange glances. But the woman carrying the child grits her teeth and continues toward the shelter of the tree line.
When she steps beneath the canopy, the ghosts surround her. She cannot see them. But her face goes pale at their moans of displeasure. The child in her arms stirs fitfully.
“You are not welcome here, travelers.” I emerge from the trees and the men halt.
“I need to feed her.” The woman’s anger swirls around her, tinged with despair. “I need a fire to keep her warm.”
The ghosts hiss as the forest ripples. The trees reflect Mauth’s moods, and he doesn’t like the intruders any more than the spirits do.
The last time I took a life with Mauth’s magic was months ago. I killed a group of Karkaun warlords with barely a thought. I use that power again now, finding the thread of the woman’s life and pulling. At first, she grips her child more tightly. Then she gasps, reaching for her throat.
“Fozya!” one of the men cries out. “Get back—”
“I won’t!” Fozya spits, even as I squeeze the air from her lungs. “His people are murderers. How many has he killed, lurking here like a spider? How—”
Fozya’s words stick in my head. How many has he killed—
How many—
Screams erupt in my mind: the cries of thousands of men, women, and children who died after I let the walls of the Waiting Place fall last summer. The people I killed as a soldier, friends who died at my hand—they all march through my brain, judging me with dead eyes. It is too much. I cannot bear it—
As suddenly as the feeling is upon me, it fades. Magic floods me: Mauth, soothing my mind, offering me peace. Distance.
Fozya and her kin must go. I drain the woman’s life away again. She nearly drops the child. With each step I take toward her, she stumbles back, finally collapsing on the beach.
“All right, we’ll go,” she gasps. “I’m sorry—”
I release her and she flees north, her companions hurrying behind her. They keep to the coastline, casting frightened glances at the trees until they are out of sight.
“Hail, Soul Catcher.” The scent of salt overwhelms me as the waves foam at my feet and coalesce into a vaguely man-like form. “Your power has grown.”
“Why so far inland, efrit?” I ask the creature. “Does tormenting humans hold such allure?”
“The Nightbringer requested destruction,” the efrit says. “We are . . . eager to please him.”
“You mean you fear displeasing him.”
“He has killed many of my kind,” the efrit says. “I would not see any more suffer.”
“Leave them in peace.” I nod in the direction of the departing humans. “They are in your domain no longer, and they have done nothing to you.”
“Why do you care what happens to them? You are no longer one of them.”
“The fewer the ghosts I deal with,” I say, “the better.”
The efrit surges toward me, wrapping itself around my legs and yanking as if to drag me underwater. But Mauth’s power shields me. When the efrit lets go, I get the distinct feeling that it was testing me.
“A time will come,” the efrit says, “when you will wish you hadn’t spoken those words. When Mauth can no longer magic away the screams in your head. On that day, seek out Siladh, lord of the sea efrits.”
“Is that you?”
The creature doesn’t answer, instead collapsing to the sand, leaving me soaked to the knees.
Once back in the forest, I pass on a dozen ghosts. Doing so means understanding and unraveling their hurt and wrath so they can release it and move on from this dimension. Mauth’s magic suffuses me, allowing me swift, deep insight into the spirits’ suffering.
Most take only a few moments to pass. After I finish, I check for weakness in the border wall, which is invisible to human eyes. The trees open for me as I walk, the path beneath my feet smooth as an Empire road.
It has been like this since I surrendered myself to Mauth. When I built the cabin, wood appeared at regular intervals, hewn and sanded as if by a craftsman. I’ve never been bitten nor suffered illness, nor struggled to find game. This forest is a physical manifestation of Mauth. Though to an outsider, it appears as any other forest would, he alters it to fit my needs.
Only so long as you’re useful to him.
Screams and faces rise in my head again, and this time they do not fade. I windwalk back into the storm to the heart of the Waiting Place: the jinn grove, or what is left of it.
Before I joined with Mauth, I avoided the grove assiduously. But now it is a place where I can forget my troubles. It is a vast plain on a bluff high above the City of the Jinn. Beyond the dark sprawl of that eerily silent place, the River Dusk winds, a serpentine glimmer.
I survey the blackened husks of the grove’s few remaining trees, which stand like sentinels, lonely between drenching sheets of rain. In the five months since the Nightbringer freed the jinn, I have not seen signs of a single one. Not even here, in the place that was once their prison.
“ . . . guide me to Kauf Prison . . . help me break my brother out of there.”
The words trigger a memory of the gold-eyed girl. I grit my teeth and head to the largest of the trees, a dead yew whose branches are blackened by fire. Its trunk is deeply scored on either side. Beside it sits an iron chain with links half the size of my hand, burgled from a Martial village.
I heft the chain and bring it down on one side of the tree trunk, and then the other, deepening the score marks. After only a few minutes, my arms begin to ache.
When your mind does not hear you, train your body. Your mind will follow. Skies know who said those words to me, but I have clung to them these past few months, returning to the jinn grove again and again when my thoughts grow unruly.
After half an hour, I am soaked in sweat. I peel off my shirt, my body screaming, but I have just begun. For as I heave stones and whip the tree and run the escarpment that leads down to the jinn city, the faces and sounds that haunt me fade away.
My body is the only part of me that is still human. It is solid and real and suffers hunger and exhaustion just as it always did. Flogging it means I must breathe a certain way, balance a certain way. Doing so takes all of my focus, leaving nothing for my demons.
Once I’ve exhausted the possibilities of the jinn grove, I trudge to its eastern edge, which slopes down to the River Dusk, swift and treacherous from the storm. I dive in, gasping at the frigid water, and swim the quarter mile across, emptying my mind of everything but the cold and the current.