Chapter 217: Life’s Cruelest Jokes

But no matter how much he wanted to leave, it seemed that it was Fated for him to stay.

That was for a simple reason.

Halfway to the mouth of the cave, he heard a familiar name:

"Lady Huda."

He did not stop walking; he only slowed.

Near the entrance, two soldiers sat on overturned crates beside a small cookfire.

One was a Guard of the Fifth with a bandage wrapped around his left hand. The other was a Faraja officer, and he kept turning a dented cup between his fingers without drinking from it.

Malik drifted to the wall beside them and bent as if to fix his boot.

"So it’s tomorrow... our cohort strikes at first light."

"At first light."

"To free her."

"To free Lady Huda."

The Guard agreed.

"Yes."

Malik’s hand stopped on his boot.

The young officer stared into the fire.

The cup went around in his hands again, a nervous circle.

"I keep thinking about it... what they could have done to her. She has been in their hands for weeks. They must have taken her Rukh, and..."

His voice thinned out.

"I can’t stop picturing it."

"Then stop."

"I can’t."

"Listen to me."

The Guard leaned forward and dropped his voice.

"They would not dare. She is the Sultan’s little sister. Do you think those dogs have forgotten what he did in the sky? Every man in that faction knows what happened to the Angels. They fear him still. Dead or not, they fear him. If they put a finger on his sister, they are afraid his ghost will come for them."

"Ghosts don’t..."

"Besides..."

The Guard went on.

"They cannot harm her even if they wanted to. They plan to sell her to the Order. A broken prize is worth half as much as a whole one. They’ll keep her fed and breathing, because breathing is what pays."

The young officer was quiet for a while.

Then his shoulders came down, and he let out a long breath.

"You are right. You’re right. I didn’t think of it that way."

"Of course I’m right."

"And we’ll get her this time."

"We will. Half that bastard faction is dead already. Our last two strikes took their best riders, and the rest are running scared."

The broad Guard clapped him on the arm.

"Drink your water. Sleep. Tomorrow we bring her home."

The young officer nodded, and for the first time he lifted the cup to his mouth.

Malik had not moved.

His blood had gone cold.

It had gone cold so completely that he felt it in his fingertips.

Huda.

His little sister had been taken hostage.

The pieces slid together one after another.

He remembered the Sultan’s Hall, his family filing out with their faces wet, and the one who had not wept at all.

She had looked at him for a single flat heartbeat with those wide pink eyes. Then she had turned and walked out of the hall without a word, never mind an outburst.

That was why she had left so quietly.

Huda had never gone through a circle.

She had gone the other way, towards the Palace, towards him, because she had made up her mind before he finished giving the order, and she had known he would only shout at her if she said so.

His little had not listened.

’...idiot.’

The word came without any heat.

It sat in his mind with a tired warmth, and he found that the corner of his mouth was trying to lift behind the rag.

He had expected nothing less.

She had been the kind of child who climbed out of windows when she was told to stay in. He had named her after nothing in particular and kept her alive for a reason just as shallow.

Her one steady talent had always been doing exactly what she had been told not to.

Of course she had stayed and fought.

Of course she was captured.

The warmth lasted a heartbeat.

Then it curdled, and what remained was something he did not have a name for.

She was somewhere out there on a road, in chains, with no Rukh, with a faction’s laughter around her. And he was standing in a cave with a rag on his face, listening to men talk about her over a cup of water.

Malik straightened and walked out of the cave without a sound.

The hill above the cave was bare and windy, with a few gnarled thornbushes clinging to its crest.

He climbed it slowly, finding a flat stone near the top, hidden from the road below.

Not long after he sat down on it, the sky had darkened to the color of a bruise and the first stars began to show.

Somewhere to the north, past the long curve of the hills, lay the Holy Palace, his grave and banner.

He closed his eyes.

His Soul was loud.

It was a strange thing to feel after days of silence.

The new Rukh in his chest kept surging against the walls of his body. Every few seconds, the fire wanted to climb, and he had to put his metaphorical hand over it to push it back down.

’Breathe.’

Malik did.

In, and out, counting each one.

It would have been very easy to go.

He knew exactly where the faction was camped.

He could have followed the dust of the caravan across the plains in a single burst of light. He could have dropped out of the sky into the middle of their tents, and every man in red and yellow would have been ash before the first one finished screaming.

Huda would have been standing in a circle of cooling stone, blinking at the Sun.

He could do it tonight, in less time than it took to say her name.

But he did not move.

The same hand that held the fire back held him there too, and the reason was very simple.

It was also familiar, for it was a rule followed by this very camp.

Such power did not stay quiet.

A Class Five could not so much as sneeze without the world noticing.

Even if he killed every witness, even if nobody on the ground lived to tell it, the pressure itself would bloom across the sky like a flare.

Every Angel within a thousand miles would turn their heads.

Again, the Order had not confirmed his death.

That meant that they were still searching.

They would pounce on the smallest scrap, any rumor of a white-haired man with one arm and a lantern for a Soul; the cave behind him was full of people who would pay for it.

Layla. Amal. Safira. Every refugee who had been told to go home and rest.

If he saved his sister, he would hand them her killer’s address.

So, for now, he could not.

Malik opened his eyes and looked at the dark.

He would have to stay and roll with this camp in the shadows.

A quiet man in a rag, hiding himself from the people he loved while sleeping thirty paces from their cots.

It was the cruelest arrangement he could have imagined.

He had always disliked it when life made jokes.

’Fine.’

He had endured worse.