Daughter of Smoke and Bone(58)
Behind the counter, the waitress was staring back and forth between them. Karou wanted to ask her what she was looking at, but didn’t. “So basically,” she said to Akiva, trying to gather all the things he’d told her into a simple strand, “the seraphim want to rule the world, the chimaera don’t want to be ruled, and that makes them evil.”
His jaw worked; he was displeased with the simplification. “They were nothing but barbarians in mud villages. We gave them light, engineering, the written word—”
“And took nothing for it, I’m sure.”
“Nothing unreasonable.”
“Uh-huh.” Karou wished she’d paid closer attention in her own human history classes so she could better imagine a context for the vast scope of what he was telling her. “So, a thousand years ago, for no good reason, the chimaera rose up and slaughtered their masters, and took back control of their lands.”
He objected. “The land had never been theirs. They had small farm holdings, stone hovels. At the most, villages. The cities were built by the Empire, and not just cities. Viaducts, harbors, roads—”
“But it was where they’d been born and died since, like, the beginning of everything? Where they fell in love, raised their babies, buried their elders. So what if they hadn’t built cities on it? Wasn’t it still theirs? I mean, unless you’re going on the rule that what’s yours is what you can defend, in which case anyone is within their rights at any time to try to take anything from anyone else. That’s hardly civilization.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
Akiva took a deep breath. “We built the world, in good faith. We lived alongside them—”
“As equals?” Karou asked. “You keep calling them ‘beasts,’ so I have to wonder.”
He didn’t answer right away. “What have you seen of them, Karou? Did you say four chimaera, and none of them warriors? When you have seen your brothers and sisters gored by minotaurs, mauled by lion-dogs, ripped to pieces by dragons, when you have seen your—” Whatever he was about to say, he bit it off hard, with a look of agony. “When you have been tortured and forced to witness the execution of… loved ones… then you can speak to me of what makes a beast.”
Loved ones? He didn’t mean brothers and sisters, the way he said that. Karou felt a pang of… surely it wasn’t jealousy. What did it matter who he loved, or had loved? She swallowed. What could she say? She couldn’t contradict a thing he’d told her. Her ignorance was entire, but that didn’t mean she had to just believe him, either. “I’d like to hear Brimstone’s side,” she said quietly. Something occurred to her then, something big. “You could take me there. You could take me back.”
He blinked, startled, then shook his head. “No. It’s no place for humans.”
“And this is a place for angels?”
“It’s not the same. It’s safe here.”
“Oh, really? Tell my scars how safe it is here.” She pulled the collar of her shirt out of shape to reveal the puckered slash of scar tissue across her collarbone. Akiva winced at the sight of it, ugly and of his own making, and Karou set her collar back in place. “Besides,” she argued, “there are more important things than safety. Like… loved ones.” She felt cruel, using his words, like she was twisting a knife.
“Loved ones,” he repeated.
“I told Brimstone I would never just leave him, and I won’t. I’m going, even without your help.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“There are ways,” she said, cagey. “But it would be easier if you would take me.” Easier indeed. What a preferable traveling companion Akiva would be to Razgut.
But he said, “I can’t take you. The portal is guarded. You’d be killed on sight.”
“You seraphim do a lot of that, killing on sight.”
“The monsters have made us who we are.”
“Monsters.” Karou thought of Issa’s laughing eyes, Yasri’s excitable flutter and soothing touch. She called them monsters herself sometimes, but fondly, the same way she called Zuzana rabid. From Akiva’s mouth, the word was just ugly. “Beasts, devils, monsters. If you’d ever known any chimaera, you couldn’t dismiss them like that.”
He dropped his eyes and didn’t answer, and the thread of their conversation was lost in a tense silence. She thought he looked pale, still unwell. The tea mugs were big earthen affairs without handles, and Karou cupped hers with both hands. She kept her palms flat against it, both to warm them up after the frigid hours atop the cathedral and to prevent herself from inadvertently flashing any painful magic at Akiva. Across the table, his pose mirrored her own, his hands also wrapped around his mug, so that she couldn’t help seeing his tattoos: the repeating black bars across the tops of his fingers.
Each one was slightly raised, like scar tissue, and Karou thought that, unlike hers, they were just cuts rubbed in lampblack—a primitive procedure. The longer she looked at them, the more she was seized with a strange sense of knowing something, or almost knowing it. It was as if she was at the cusp of an awareness, vibrating between knowing and not knowing, so fast that she couldn’t quite register what it was—like trying to see the wings of a bee in flight. She couldn’t fix on it.