The body twitched several times before going still, streaks of blood mixing in with the fountain’s clear water. The Kestrel drew back, panting and blood-covered, but still alive. An energy Karina had never felt rolled off her mother in waves, and all the trees in the garden curled protectively toward her.

Karina let out something between a sob and a cheer. The Kestrel turned to Karina, her face tired but triumphant, and Karina knew that anything that had happened between them before that moment was irrelevant. They were alive, and that was everything.

“Karina, are you all r—”

Before she could finish her sentence, the Kestrel fell forward, the assassin’s sword lodged in her back.

The world stopped. Karina’s screams died in her throat.

As she ran to her mother’s side, yells of alarm rang out behind Karina; the Sentinels had finally arrived, but it was too late. Without saying a word, the assassin took out a second dagger and plunged it into his heart. His body fell to the ground with a thud.

Karina knelt beside the Kestrel, taking in the spot where the unyielding metal sank into her mother’s warm brown skin. Should she pull the sword out? Leave it be? Great Mother help her, her mother was dying right before her eyes, and there was nothing she could do.

“It’s going to be all right, Mama,” Karina whimpered, not believing her own words.

Weakly, the Kestrel slipped off her signet ring and began to lift it toward Karina, but her hand went limp. The ring fell into the dust. The last thing Karina remembered seeing as her mother’s body went still was Bahia’s Comet shining with a cruel, bright light in the corner of the midnight sky.

7

Malik

As Malik stared at Gege’s limp form on the ground before him, a single thought ran through his head.

They’d been wrong. Everyone he knew had been wrong.

It had begun when he was six years old, and he and his grandmother had gone to visit Nana Titi, an old woman in their village who had caught the river flu. He’d been playing in the garden outside her hut while the adults talked with somber voices inside, and the flower spirits living in her bushes had told him the old woman wouldn’t see the next sunrise. When he had helpfully relayed the information to her family, they’d brushed off his claims as childish grief.

Nana Titi had been dead by morning.

After that had come the screaming—screaming from Nana Titi’s family at his; screaming from his family at him; screaming from panicked villagers as a rumor spread that Malik had used sorcery to end the old woman’s life. Him screaming as the elders tried to “chase the demon out of him,” whipping his feet until they bled and forcing him to drink concoctions he couldn’t stomach. Screaming again when he returned home only to find the hallucinations—he knew now they were hallucinations, they always had been, everyone said they were—hadn’t gone away and he was still as broken as he’d ever been.

All of them—the elders, the other villagers, even his own family—had told Malik that spirits didn’t exist. He had let them tell him that he was crazy, that he was ill, that he was cursed. He had listened when they said that all he had to do was try a little harder, just be a little less of what he was to make everything easier for everyone.

He had trusted them. And they had been wrong.

It was this single thought that resounded through Malik’s mind as Idir’s shadows cleared around him. There were no signs of Nyeni, Idir, or the grim folk anywhere, nothing but the empty eyes of the masks gazing down at them. Malik bit down a hysterical laugh—of course, now that he had proof that the lie that had shaped his childhood was just that, the grim folk would choose to leave him alone.

“He took her. He just—he just took her,” Leila said, as if repeating the words might make them less true.

Malik had held Nadia in his arms and that thing—no, Idir—had ripped her away, like she wasn’t the baby he used to rock to sleep every night or teach how to walk. Like she was just some doll to be thrown around on a whim.

“This can’t—no!” Leila tore the nearest mask off the wall, searching beneath it. She ran her hands over every crack and even fell to her hands and knees, inspecting the lines in the floor. “Is there a trapdoor here somewhere? Some kind of, I don’t know, lever? People don’t just disappear into thin air!”

If Malik had been able to form words, he would have reminded his sister they weren’t dealing with people. People couldn’t possess animals the size of houses or control shadows like puppeteers. A shiver ran down Malik’s spine; he had never told Idir his name, and yet the obosom had known it anyway. How long had the spirit been watching them? What else did he know?

As Leila continued her frantic search of the house, Malik crawled over to Gege and gently brought the toy to his chest. Nadia never went anywhere without it—whether she was playing, eating, or even sleeping, Gege was always curled lovingly in her arms or stuffed down the front of her shirt. He had to get the toy back to her, or else she wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight . . .

That was when the tears began. Without his satchel strap to hold on to, Malik clutched at the front of his already tattered tunic, his body shaking. He heaved but nothing came out—it had been days since his last meal, and nothing, not even bile, remained in his stomach.

This was all his fault. If only he hadn’t followed that griot. If only he hadn’t helped that boy. If only he had listened to everyone when they told him to keep his head down and his mouth shut. Malik was the one who deserved to rot as Idir’s captive, not Nadia. With no one else to turn to, he prayed to Adanko, to the Great Mother, to every deity that had ever existed and ever would, to spare Nadia. He would have taken death a thousand times over if it meant his sister could live.

If the gods heard him, they didn’t respond.

So many questions crowded within Malik. If the grim folk were real, did that mean the gods were too? Idir clearly had some kind of history with Bahia Alahari—what had he done to make her trap him for a thousand years? If Idir wanted revenge against her entire line, why did he want Princess Karina dead and not the sultana as well?

And of the millions of people who lived in Sonande, why did Idir think he could kill Princess Karina?

Could he kill Princess Karina?

As Malik’s head swam, the Mark scurried over his chest to settle on his left arm. The feeling was akin to oil running over his skin, and the sensation sent another wave of revulsion coursing through him. It was all too easy to imagine the heat of the Mark growing into a blazing inferno, one that would burn through his chest if he dared speak of what had transpired that night.

Idir had called its weapon form a spirit blade, another phrase Malik had never heard. His free hand twitched to claw away the taint Idir had left on his body, but he squeezed Gege instead. Even if the Mark felt like a violation of all his boundaries, he couldn’t risk damaging it, not when it would be the key to killing the princess.

Yet beneath the terror and exhaustion and disgust, the tendrils of a force Malik had never had a name for pulsed within him. That same force had drawn him to Nyeni’s call that afternoon and that had bonded itself to Idir during the blood oath.

Magic. That was what the spirit had called the restless thing inside Malik. The realization spread through his body, filling in cracks he hadn’t even known were there.

He’d never been crazy. He’d been right.

Head spinning and throat burning, Malik looked up to see Leila standing in front of him.

“We have to—” Her voice cracked. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “We have to get out of here. We don’t know how safe this place is.”

“But what if Nadia comes looking for us?” If their sister somehow managed to escape from Idir, or the obosom changed his mind and let her go, they were best off waiting for her here.

“We both know that isn’t going to happen.”

Leila reached for Malik, but he jerked away. Suddenly, they were children again, fighting each other for no other reason than because they could. Malik didn’t understand how Leila could be so calm about this, so heartless. Just because she could push her emotions aside and never feel anything didn’t mean he could.

“We have to leave now!”

“Just a little longer!” Malik cried. “She could come back!”

A chill ran down his spine, followed by a high-pitched keening in his ears. Heavy footfalls pounded toward the house.

“We sensed the disturbance coming from this street,” said a deep voice.

Malik and Leila both froze. Soldiers.