A Reaper at the Gates

The Nightbringer adds Laia’s armlet to the Star and sends a Wraith Lord to deliver a scroll to Helene. The scroll tells Helene that the recent raids on Martial caravans, resulting in Scholars prisoners being freed, are Laia’s doing. Laia, Darin, and Afya participate in a raid to free the Tribe Saif prisoners. Elias is supposed to help, but Shaeva delays his arrival because he has been late for training and would disappear when he should be learning how to be Soul Catcher. Elias needs to learn to pass the ghosts through more swiftly. Shaeva urges him to let go of the human world so that he can forge a deep bond with the Waiting Place’s magic, Mauth. Every time he touches Laia, Mauth causes physical pain to Elias because Mauth disapproves of their connection.

Mamie Rila is separated from the other Tribe Saif prisoners, so Laia goes to find her. She locates Mami Rila, but it is a trap for Elias. After losing her family, Helene is changed, harder, and angrier. Shaeva lets Elias leave the grove in time for him to stop Helene from killing Laia, but Laia is a bound hostage. Helene tells Elias that if he puts on the manacles she brought and comes with them, his mother will go free and she won’t hunt down Darin, Afya, and the escaped prisoners. Elias agrees, but feels pain as the Waiting Place pulls at him. Elias tells Helene that she should look for his grandfather, Quin Veturius, to help her against Keris, but Helene says she already tried and couldn't. Shaeva comes and supernaturally whisks Elias away. Harper unties Laia and she grabs Helene's hand and expresses sympathy for the loss of her family before disappearing, using her invisibility powers. Helene releases Mamie Rila who makes it to the healers at Nur. Afya tells Laia that Marcus does not have a peace treaty with the Tribal nations like the last emperor did, and there has been violence between the tribes and the Empire.

Elias realizes he needs to commit to learning to be Soul Catcher. He asks Shaeva for time to say goodbye to his mother and Laia, but the Nightbringer unexpectedly appears. The ghosts from the forest scream for Laia and she runs into the Waiting Place with Darin. Shaeva tells Laia that Laia's answers lie in Adisa with The Beekeeper. The Nightbringer stabs Shaeva through the heart as she screams out a strange prophecy, confirming that the Nightbringer only needs one more piece of the Star. The Nightbringer attempts to hurt Elias but unexpectedly disappears.

The full power of the Waiting Place descends on Elias, and the jinn whisper to him that he will fail as Soul Catcher. Elias uses the powers of the forest to transport Darin and Laia closer to Adisa, Marinn’s capitol, quickly. Elias and Laia know their time together is likely over and say an emotional goodbye. As Laia and Darin enter Adisa, they realize a man has been following them. When they arrive, they are directed to a Scholar refugee camp and they see a Wanted poster: the King of Marinn is looking for Darin and Laia. A soldier is about to burn the Scholar refugee camp, demanding the Scholars give up the siblings, so Laia and Darin surrender to prevent anyone from being killed.

Back in Antium, the Empire's capital, Marcus is angry at Helene for not destroying Keris in the last three months. Barbarians, the Karkauns, are attacking, and Keris is in Navium, asking for more men. Marcus sends Helene to Navium to find out what Keris is up to. To enunciate his displeasure, he breaks Livia’s fingers in front of Helene. Later, Livia takes Helene through a passageway from her rooms to Marcus’s and they watch him talk to Zak, his dead brother. Livia says that he can’t remain emperor if he is either hallucinating or taking orders from a ghost. Livia reveals she is pregnant. If Marcus disappears after a son is born, Livia and Gens Aquilla will run the Empire until the child, raised to be a true and just man, comes of age and can rule. Livia tells Helene to defeat Keris so that Keris can’t get in the way of this plan.

Elias goes to Tribe Nasur to meet with their Fakir, the person who helps each soul in their tribe cross over, because he needs to know more about being Soul Catcher. Elias tells the Fakira, Aubarit, that he needs to pass the souls through more quickly. Aubarit tells him that other Fakirs and Fakiras are dying mysteriously and she is having a hard time dealing with the spirits. Mauth pulls on Elias, wanting him to return to the forest. When he does, he sees the spirits pushing at the wall of the Waiting Place, trying to get out. An old ghost, the Whisp, tells Elias that the jinn have deeper knowledge of the magic of the Waiting Place. Elias goes to the jinn for help. Instead, they tell Elias he is like Keris and show him visions of Keris. When he comes back to the Waiting Place, Afya and Aubarit are at the edge of the forest, looking for him because the Tribal dead are not passing on as they should. A few ghosts break free of the Waiting Place, seeking to attack mortals. Elias hears screams.

An escaped ghost takes over the body of Gibran, Afya’s little brother. Afya and Elias fight Gibran and Elias finally knocks him unconscious. Elias tells the Tribesmen to stay near the river, because ghosts hate water. Then Afya becomes possessed and kills a little girl. Elias knocks Afya out too and then uses the power of Mauth to bind the spirit and fling it back into the Waiting Place. He collects the rest of the spirits from the possessed Tribesmen. While Elias is gone, the jinn summon efrits to burn Elias’s Waiting Place cabin, the only place he is safe to sleep and rest in safety where the supernatural beings cannot hurt him. The jinn laugh as Elias watches his sanctuary go up in flames.

As Helene approaches Navium, Harper tells her the city is under siege by Karkaun’s Barbarian forces, let by Grimarr. The Nightbringer approaches Helene as she arrives and congratulates her because she will soon be an aunt, revealing that both he and Keris know Helene's most precious secret. Keris is allowing the siege to go on for a month in the hopes of capturing Karkaun ships at the cost of many lives. Helene disagrees with this plan and orders Keris to launch their fleet. The Nightbringer brings a storm that seemingly destroys the fleet and kills thousands of men. This undermines Helene with the heads of Illustrian houses, the Paters. After this, only one Pater supports Helene and Keris successfully cuts Helene out of the next two battles.

In Adisa’s prison, a woman surrounded by ghuls enters Laia’s cell. She is the princess of Marinn, Nikla. The ghuls whisper to her, influencing her mind, unseen by anyone except Laia and Darin. Nikla suspects they are in Adisa to make steel for the Scholars so they can rise against Adisa. Nikla asks Darin to make serric steel for Marinn instead, but he refuses. The princess gives Darin until morning to reconsider and then leaves. The man who was following them appears outside their cell door with a key and introduces himself as Musa. He wants Darin to make weapons for the Scholars and Laia to resurrect the Northern Scholars Resistance. He knows they are looking for the Beekeeper and swears he will take them to him. As they leave, the Princess’s Captain, Eleiba, tries to stop them, but Musa mutters something and Eleiba falls back, cursing, as if an invisible foe has attacked her. Once they are outside the prison, Musa tells them that he is the Beekeeper.

Musa takes Darin and Laia to a forge, and Darin gets to work. Musa asks Laia to tell him her story so that he can use it to sculpt her into a Resistance leader and spread tales about her to Scholars. Laia walks Adisa’s streets at night, invisible, exploring. The Nightbringer’s voice comes to her, speaking to her, from a distance. He shows her a vision of a woman singing in a cell. This happens again when Laia uses her powers as she travels from Adisa with Musa to get information from a Kehanni, a storyteller from Tribe Sulud. The Kehanni takes newly forged Teluman-style blades as payment for a story. Laia asks whether the Nightbringer can be killed. The Kehanni says no, but he can be stopped, and that Laia should return another time for the full story. More is revealed about Musa’s powers. He has an affinity with small creatures. He was good with his father’s bees, but wights also bring him news about what is happening in other cities.

Helene finally finds Quin Veturius hiding in Navium. They speak of Keris. Her mother, Karinna, died when she was young and her father was busy at war and did not give Keris enough of his attention. She had no friends at Blackcliff when she attended, but she loved Elias’s father. Helene knows from Harper that Elias’s father was Arius Harper, a Plebeian Combat Centurian at Blackcliff who was repeatedly reprimanded for showing kindness and mercy to the students. He was murdered by a group of masks the day after they graduated. They beat him to death. Quin tells Helene that while Helene loves the Empire, Keris only loves power and herself. Helene must find out why Keris is in Navium and what she hopes to achieve there. When the Karkaun’s attack Navium and the Plebeians again, Helene opens her home and the Black Guard barracks to the people, providing them with food, water, shelter, and physicians. She goes around to wounded children and sings them back to health, but this effort weakens her enough that when she walks outside, an assassin nearly kills her with a blade to the gut.

Without the cottage to protect him, Elias’s mind is vulnerable to the jinn. He tries to stay awake, but when he can’t, he dreams. He sees Helene in the road, a serious wound in her abdomen. She apologizes for what she did to Mamie Rila. Elias commands her to get up and survive. He is then transported to a room. Laia enters. They speak, kiss, and start to be intimate and Elias realizes this is not a regular dream and he is actually with Laia. Mauth shouts that the jinn are deceiving him, using his weaknesses against him, and he has to go back. The jinn siphon the power Elias doesn’t use and strengthen themselves. Mauth urges Elias to forget the mortal world and his humanity. Elias returns to the Waiting Place.

A wounded Helene crawls back toward safety and Harper and Dex (one of her men and former classmates) find her and take her to the Nightbringer. The Nightbringer implies that Helene can heal herself. The Nightbringer sings the right notes of Helene's "song," and Helene is healed. Cook visits Helene and tells her that the real war is coming soon, Cook has killed several would-be assassins for Helene, and that Helene should return to Livia and the Emperor, because she can’t defeat Keris without becoming her, and Helene does not have it in her. Cook has been leaving disturbing statues in Keris’s room to mess with her.

Wraiths attack Tribe Sulud before Laia can hear the Kehanni’s story. Laia and Musa go to see if anyone needs help. The Kehanni lies crumpled, her limbs at odd angles. She wakes and tells Laia to seek out the Augurs’ words. “Prophecy," she says. "The Great Library.” She says the Augurs are allies “of a kind” and then dies. They return to Adisa to find the Great library and the Scholar camp burning, set on fire by efrits. Laia runs into the library to look for the book the Kehanni talked about. She encounters a magician, a Jaduna, who tells her to leave before the fire kills her. Laia saves the Jaduna from an efrit before Darin pulls Laia out of the library. In thanks, the Jaduna gives Laia the book Laia was looking for. The Jaduna tells Laia to go east, to Kotama, and ask for D’arju, a teacher who can help Laia “control the darkness, lest it grown beyond her ken.” The Jaduna also calls the Nightbringer the Meherya, and says it is his true name. Reading the book, Laia realizes that Helene has the last piece of the Star, and that is why the Nightbringer is in Navium. Lai believes the last piece is the ring Helene’s father gave her before he died.

The jinn show Elias their city as it was before the humans betrayed them. In the past, hundreds of jinn Soul Catchers helped the humans move on. A Scholar king convinced Shaeva to give him the Star. The jinn tell Elias he cannot do a job that hundreds of jinn handled, because he is human. Aubarit finds Elias because multiple Tribes have gathered over their shared crisis. Tribespeople are dying by suicide, but their spirits are not leaving, and the corpses walk, tormented, and say cruel things. The tribesmen are having trouble moving their dead. Elias is able to harness Mauth’s power and find a solution only when he pushes his love and emotions for his people aside. Elias tells them to surround the bodies with salt so the ghuls holding onto their spirits will let go. The Martials are coming to decimate and enslave the gathered tribes. Elias goes into the Martial camp, kills all the mask commanders, and forces the drummer to drum orders to abandon the attack and return to a Martial garrison 40 miles away. Elias kills the drummer and returns to the Waiting Place.

Helene figures out that the fleet was not destroyed in the storm - Keris had them hide and the Nightbringer created a storm to dredge up old wrecks so that everyone would turn against Helene. Keris wants to take those ships, as well as the Karkaun ships, to Marinn to find and kill the Scholar refugees for the Nightbringer. When the Karkauns attack next, Helene stirs the Plebeians up against Keris, reveals Keris’s treachery, arrests her, wins the battle, tricks the hiding ships into returning, saves the Plebeians, and reinstates Quin as head of his house. As Helene savors her victory, she receives news that Livia was poisoned. Helene rushes back to Antium to heal Livia. The Nightwatcher is there to help and tells Helene he wants to win her trust. Helene finds Livia’s song and sings it to her, healing her from the poison. The Nightbringer tells Helene that the fetus has no song yet, but if she wants to heal the heir, she should sing into the child who she wants him to grow up to be, but it will tie her to the child forever. Helene sings the best qualities of her family into the heir, healing him. Marcus catches Helene using her powers.

Musa and Laia go to King Irmand to convince him to aid the Scholars and tell him of the threat to his kingdom from the Martials. Laia finds out that Musa is the king’s former son-in-law. The king is delighted to meet Laia, because he knew her parents, but he publicly refuses her requests, siding with his heir, Princess Nikla. He tells Laia to take Darin and get out of his kingdom so that the Martials don’t question his commitment to peace. However, as Laia and Musa leave, Captain Eleiba tells them it was a ruse to appease the princess and that the king accepts their offer of Darin's weapons in exchange for providing better accommodations for the Scholars in Marinn. Eleiba gives Laia a silver signet ring and says that if she shows that to any Mariner, they are honor bound to aid her. Laia prepares to leave with Musa, and Darin wants to go with her, but Laia wants him to stay and forge weapons. Laia says Darin owes it to Elias and all the people who died for him to be able to do this work. Princess Nikla’s men attack Musa and Darin goes to hold them off so Laia can escape. Days later, Musa sends a message through his wights and tells Laia they are safe. Laia goes to the Waiting Place in order to get to Antium quickly.

Keris is freed via a legal loophole, so Marcus and Helene plot against her again. Marcus breaks Livia’s arm and orders Helene to heal Livia and show her powers again. Marcus asks Helene to heal his insanity, and Helene tries but they are interrupted by the Nightbringer who tells them Zak’s ghost is real and Marcus is sane. Helene figures out that Keris murdered all the noblemen who beat her lover, Arius Harper, to death and she got a tattoo commemorating their killings. Helene leaks the information to undermine Keris, but while it hurts Keris with Illustrians, it helps her with Plebeians. Helene discovers Keris met with the Karkauns and nearly 50,000 of them, led by Grimarr, are coming for Antium. Helene tells Marcus of the attack and asks him to send Livia away so that she and his heir are safe if there is a siege. Marcus agrees.

The Nightbringer comes to Laia in the grove and forces a vision on her. Laia sees her mother, father, and sister imprisoned by Keris. The singing woman she saw before is her mother. Her mother kills her husband and daughter to prevent them from giving away Darin and Laia's location. Keris carves her mother’s face and pours hot coals down her throat. Laia realizes she knows her mother and her mother lives: she is Cook. Elias arrives and begs the jinn to release Laia’s mind. He pulls Laia out of the vision, comforting her and walking her through the forest so she can get to Antium. However, in spending his time doing this, he ignores Mauth and his duties. The spirits break out of the Waiting Place and swarm the physical world. Elias travels to different cities, collecting the souls. He notices a large group of spirits (called by Grimarr, who has magic) head for Antium.

Marcus consults the Augurs about the coming battle. Their counsel leads him to put Helene in charge. Keris returns to Antium with Livia, having enacted a ruse that makes it look like she saved Livia from attacking Karkauns. Keris scared off every legitimate midwife in the city so she can orchestrate the heir's death and make it look natural. The new midwife recommends drinks that will make the baby come out too early, but Livia realizes it and asks Helene to have the midwife killed. The fighting begins and Harper is wounded. Helene heals him. They learn that the Karkauns split their forces and they actually have 100,000 men. The second half is coming from another direct.

Cook finds Laia on her way to Antium and immediately knows someone told Laia who she is. Cook and Laia travel to Antium together to retrieve the last piece of the Star which will evanesce when Laia takes it. Helene prepares evacuation tunnels for a worst case scenario. Helene watches possessed Karkauns swarm Antium, not dying when they are hit. During the battle, Laia tries to invisibly sneak up on Helene and steal her ring, but the Nightbringer is near Helene, so she can’t. Laia abandons Cook’s plan in an attempt to save two children, but an explosion throws her 30 feet and knocks her out. The Nightbringer saves Laia from dying from the blast. Ghosts swarm Antium and Helene wonders if this means Elias is dead, but he appears and orders the dead back to the waiting place. He tells Helene he did not come for her, but for his duty.

Livia goes into labor and the new midwife is found dead. After Cook orchestrates it, Laia arrives to act as midwife and get the ring. Laia tells Helene to wash her hands and remove her rings to help with the birthing. The baby is born and Marcus bursts in, telling Helene to get his heir out of the city. Antium is lost. Keris knew the city would fall and moved her supporters and the treasury prior to battle, and she sabotaged the communiques to Marcus’s additional legions, so they are not coming. Helene leaves Livia with her guards and goes back to the battlefield. Helene finds Marcus mortally wounded and he asks her to protect his son and kill him so he does not suffer. Helene drives a dagger into Marcus’s throat.

Laia has the ring, but it does not evanesce as she expected it to. The Nightbringer comes to her and tells her the Ring is not from the Star and all her efforts have been futile. Elias surrenders completely to Mauth for the good of humanity, joining totally with the magic, his feelings for Laia and other humans erased. Elias tells Laia the jinn must be set free and the world must be broken before it can be remade. He believes the jinn must handle the dead and the balance must be restored.

Laia and Cook help Scholars escape to Marinn. Helene and her men make a last stand to help as many of their people evacuate as possible. After the last battle, the Nightbringer comes to Helene and asks her to give him her silver mask. She pries it off her face, leaving bloody wounds, and gives it to him. Cook bravely holds off oncoming Karkauns, sacrificing herself for others while Laia forces Helene to run. When Helene wakes, she is safe with Harper, Laia, and Livia. Harper tells her that while many escaped Antium, many more of her people are enslaved by Karkauns. Keris retreated to Serra and established a capital there as Empress. Helene and Marcus are blamed by the Empire’s citizens for the city’s loss. Livia, now Queen Regent, frees the Scholars who escaped and helped her. Laia asks Helene to teach her how to fight and the two become allies. Helene and Harper have a romantic moment, but she halts it.

In the Waiting Place, Elias helps both Zak and Marcus move on. Laia comes to check on Elias and he explains to her that many of the deaths at Antium were his fault because he failed to hold the forest borders. Elias says Laia will forget him. Laia feels betrayed and leaves. It is revealed that the Whisp is Karinna, Keris’s mother. The Nightbringer enters the forest and the Augurs arrive to witness the jinn have their freedom and magic restored to him. The Nightbringer says that Cain’s three champions will fail. Elias has lost his humanity, the Nightbringer took Helene’s soul, and he plans to crush Laia’s heart, and the humans will all be ground down under the bloody, iron fist of Keris. When the Nightbringer plunges the completed Star into the ground, all but one of the Augurs dies. The victorious jinn surround him, saying his name, Meherya, which means Beloved.