Daughter of Smoke and Bone(65)

What? Karou’s lips moved but no sound came out. She cleared her throat. “What did you say?”

How could he just tell her? He was reeling. Here was the impossible, and it was beautiful, and it was terrible, and it flayed open his chest to show that his heart, numb for so long, was still vital and beating… just so it could be ripped out again, after all these years?

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it’s too late?

“Akiva,” implored Karou. Wide-eyed, distraught, she sank to her knees in front of him. “Tell me.”

“Karou,” he whispered, and her name taunted him—hope—so full of promise and recrimination that he almost wished he was dead. He couldn’t look at her. He gathered her to him and she let herself be gathered, supple as love. Her wind-mussed hair was like tousled silk, and he buried his face in it and tried to think what to tell her.

All around, a weave of murmurs and the weight of being watched, and Akiva registered almost none of it until one sound fought its way forward. A throat was cleared, caustic and theatrically loud. A prickling of unease, and before any words were spoken, he’d already begun to turn.

“Akiva, really. Pull yourself together.”

So out of place here—that voice, that language. His language.

There, with swords sheathed at their sides and wearing twin expressions of dismay, stood Hazael and Liraz.

Akiva couldn’t even register surprise. The appearance of the seraphim was small next to the shocks that had been coming one after another all morning: the crescent-moon knives, Karou’s strange reaction to his tattoos, the dreamlike music of her laughter, and now the undeniable: the wishbone.

“What are you doing here?” he asked them. His arms were still around Karou, who had lifted her head from his shoulder to stare at the intruders.

“What are we doing here?” repeated Liraz. “I think, all things considered, that question belongs to us. What in the name of the godstars are you doing here?” She looked dumbfounded, and Akiva saw himself as she was seeing him: on his knees, weeping, entwined with a human girl.

And it struck him how important it was that they think Karou was just that: a human girl. However strange it might seem, it was only that: strange. The truth would be much worse.

He straightened, still on his knees, and turned, ushering Karou behind him. Quietly, so his brother and sister wouldn’t hear him speak the language of the enemy, he murmured, “Don’t let them see your hands. They won’t understand.”

“Understand what?” she murmured back, not taking her eyes from them, as they didn’t take theirs from her.

“Us,” he said. “They won’t understand us.”

“I don’t understand us, either.”

But thanks to the wishbone, fragile in his fist, Akiva finally did.

Karou lapsed into tense silence, keeping her eyes on the two seraphim. They had their wing glamours in place, but even so, their presence on the bridge seemed unnatural, and not a little unnerving—Liraz especially. Though Hazael was more powerful, Liraz was more frightening, she always had been; perhaps she’d had to be, being female. Her pale hair was scraped back in severe plaits, and there was something coolly sharklike about her beauty: a flat, killer apathy. Hazael had more life in his eyes, but just now it was mostly a frank bafflement as he regarded Akiva before him, still on his knees.

“Get up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t stand the sight of you like that.”

Akiva rose, drawing Karou up with him and keeping her behind the shield of his wings.

“What’s going on?” Liraz demanded. “Akiva, why did you come back here? And… who is that?” She made a wild gesture of disgust toward Karou.

“Just a girl.” Akiva heard himself echo Iz?l, sounding just as unconvincing as the old man had.

“Just a girl who flies,” amended Liraz.

A heartbeat’s pause, and then Akiva said, “You’ve been following me.”

“What did you think,” Liraz spat, “that we’d let you vanish again? The way you were acting after Loramendi, we knew something was coming. But… this?”

“What exactly is this?” Hazael asked, clearly still hoping for some explanation that would make it all okay. Akiva felt split down the middle. Here before him were his closest allies, and they felt like enemies, and it was his fault.

If Akiva had a family, it was not his mother, who had turned away when the soldiers came to take him; and it was certainly not the emperor. His family was these two, and there was no answer he could give them to make this make sense. There was nothing he could say to Karou, either, who stood behind him desperate to know what had been kept from her all her life—a secret so big and so strange he couldn’t begin to find words to frame it. So he stood there mute, the languages of two races useless to help him explain anything.

“I don’t blame you wanting to get away,” said Hazael, always the peacemaker. He and Liraz bore a sibling resemblance they didn’t share with Akiva. They were fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a blush to their honey skin. Hazael had an ease to him, almost a slouch, and for a resting expression a lazy smile that could almost fool you into misjudging him. He was, always, a soldier—reflexes and steel—but at heart he had managed somehow to retain something childlike that training and years of war worked hard to stamp out. He was a dreamer. He said, “I had thoughts myself, of coming back to this world after everything—”