Will she? The Cauldron didn’t punish your grandmother for binding your magic.
I believe that, in time, it would have.
“The Mahananda sees all,” Agrippina tells Kanti. Well, warns her. “I know you missed it, but it drained Malka when she challenged its choice of monarch.”
I expect this to rid Kanti of a modicum of smugness, but steady as ever, she says, “Good thing I’m not lying, then.”
Shockingly enough, she’s not. The instant I place my hands on Behati’s forehead I see my mother wandering around sandy streets. Not only that, I see her leaving behind a trail of bodies. Which just doesn’t make sense. Why would she go on a killing rampage? In the human district of Luce, no less?
I understand why, when that night, a ship manages to penetrate the fortifications and drift down the Sahklare right into the Amkhuti.
One with a message inked in human blood:Build your army, batee.
Chapter 64
Zendaya
Seventy-one corpses. That is how many dead bodies lay aboard the warship flying a Lucin flag. Though I do not retch, my stomach spasms with horror and my fingers ball with anger as I tread across the tacky deck.
Fallon, who was luckily already on her way over to Shabbe when she heard about the boat, closes her fingers around my fist. “I know Meriam, and this isn’t something she’d do.”
“Um, yeah it is,” Kanti says from where she sits high above us on the Amkhuti’s embankment, legs swinging, palms flat on the grass as though sunning herself instead of observing a horror show. “Plus, how would the ship penetrate our fortificationsandsail down our rivers were it not powered by Shabbin magic?”
When news of the boat spread, Kanti was one of the first Shabbins to traipse out of her abode to take in the spectacle.
“There are other sorceresses who could’ve floated that boat in,” Agrippina counters, while my daughter steadfastly insists, “Meriam wouldn’t murder a bunch of innocents, Kanti.”
Yet some of the corpses from Behati’s vision are there.
Right.
There.
The newborn babe nestled in a scarf knotted around its mother’s back. The pubescent boy with a star-shaped birthmark on his jaw. The woman with a tattoo over her heart representing an anchor wrapped in a rope that spells a name—Raphaelle.
They might be dead but they’ve still got blood in their bodies, Day,Enzo says.It could work.
Seventy-one.
Seventy-one.
Seventy-one…
The number clangs between my temples like a death knoll, springing chills down my spine.
“Lazarus, maybe you could try to heal them with crystals?” Fallon suggests.
“I’m afraid crystals only work when the subject has a pulse, Your Majesty.” The giant’s sapphire robes flap in a gentle breeze. The lax wind feels discordant with the brutal scene. There should be a tempest, or at the very least, harsh gusts. “But I can try.”
He rubs one of the beads hooped through his ear and leans over the babe. We all watch the infant’s diaphanous lids, willing them to flutter, willing the child’s rosebud mouth to part around a wail.
Nothing.
The healer unfurls his broad body, lips twisted in sorrow. “Perhaps if we sunk the ship and reversed the trajectory of the waterrises, your namesake beasts could be herded into the Amkhuti to try and heal them.” The healer squints at the algae-lit Sahklare. “Where are the serpents, anyway? They usually swarm when they scent blood.”
“Thatisodd.” Fallon peers over the boat’s railing. “Aoife, can you fly and see if you spot any?”
My heart pinches that my daughter cannot just spring off the deck of this ship and take to the sky at will.
