Daughter of Smoke and Bone(71)

“Stop!” barked Hazael again, coming up on Akiva and giving him a hard shove that put distance between him and Liraz. They were high above the city now, in airy silence echoing with the ring of steel. “What are you doing?” Hazael demanded in a tone of disbelief. “You two, fighting—”

“I’m not,” said Akiva, backing away. “I won’t.”

“Why not?” hissed Liraz. “You might as well slit my throat as stab me in the back.”

“Liraz, I don’t want to hurt you—”

She laughed. “You don’t want to, but you will if you have to? Is that what you’re saying?”

Was it? What would he do to protect Karou? He couldn’t harm his sister or brother; he could never live with that. But he couldn’t let them hurt Karou, either. How could these be his only two choices?

“Just… forget her,” he said. “Please. Just let her go.”

The thick emotion in his voice made Liraz’s eyes narrow with scorn. Looking at her, Akiva thought that he might as well appeal to a sword as to her. And wasn’t that what they were all three bred to be, and all the emperor’s other bastards, too? Weapons forged in flesh. Unthinking instruments of age-old enmity.

He couldn’t accept that. They were more than that, all of them. He hoped. He took a risk. He sheathed his swords. Her eyes like slashes, Liraz watched in silence.

“At Bullfinch,” he said, “you asked who tied my tourniquet.”

She waited. Hazael, too.

Akiva thought of Madrigal, remembered the feel of her skin, the surprising smoothness of her leathern wings, and the light of her laughter—so like Karou’s laughter—and he recalled what Karou had said to him that morning: If he’d ever known any chimaera, he couldn’t dismiss them as monsters.

But he had, both. He had known and loved Madrigal, and still he had become what he had become—the dead-eyed husk that had almost slain Karou on impulse. Grief had grown its ugly blooms in him: hate, vengeance, blindness. The person he was now, Madrigal would have regretted ever saving his life. But in Karou, he had another chance—for peace, that is. Not for happiness, not for him. It was too late for him.

For others, maybe there could still be salvation.

“It was a chimaera,” he told his sister and brother. He gulped a breath of air, knowing that this would sound ungodly to them. They had been taught from the cradle that chimaera were vile, crawling things, devils, animals. But Madrigal… she had managed to unchain him in an instant from his bigotry, and it was time he tried to do the same. “A chimaera saved my life,” he said. “And I fell in love with her.”





39





BLOOD WILL OUT



After Bullfinch, everything changed for Akiva. When he sent Hazael and his tattoo kit away, an idea took hold: When he saw the chimaera girl again, he would be able to tell her that he had not used the life she had given him to kill any more of her kindred.

That he would ever see her again was extravagantly unlikely, but the notion took up residence in his mind—a darting, fugitive thing he couldn’t seem to chase away—and he became accustomed to its lurking presence. He grew comfortable with it, and the thing morphed from a wild notion into a hope—a sustaining hope, and the one that would change the course of his life: to see the girl again, and thank her. That was all, just thank her. When he imagined the moment, his mind went no further.

It was enough to keep him going.

He wasn’t long in Morwen Bay after the battle. The battle surgeons sent him back to Astrae to see what the healers there could do for him.

Astrae.

Until the Massacre a millennium past, the seraphim had ruled the Empire from Astrae. For three hundred years it had been, by all accounts, the light of the world, the most beautiful city ever built. Palaces, arcades, fountains, all pearl marble quarried in Evorrain, broad boulevards paved in quartz, overreached by the honey-scented boughs of gilead. It perched above its harbor on striated cliffs, with the emerald Mirea coast as far as the eye could see. Like in Prague, spires pointed to the heavens, one for each of the godstars—the godstars that had ordained seraphim as guardians of the land and all its creatures.

The godstars that had looked on as it all fell into chaos.

At three hundred years, Akiva thought, the citizens of Astrae must have felt that it had always been and would always be. Now, ten centuries later, its golden age seemed like the long-ago blink of some dead god’s eye, and little remained of the original city. The enemy had razed it: toppled the towers, burned everything that would catch fire. They would have torn the very stars from the heavens if they could. Such savagery had no precedent in history. At the end of the first day, the magi lay dead, even their youngest apprentices, and their library was swallowed by fire, with every magical text in all of Eretz.

Strategically, it made sense. Seraphim had come to rely so heavily on magic that in the aftermath of the Massacre, with not a single magus left alive, they were very nearly helpless. Any angels who hadn’t escaped Astrae were sacrificed on an altar by the light of the full moon, and the seraph emperor, ancestor of Akiva’s father, was among them. So many angels had bled out their lives on that altar stone that their blood rolled down the temple steps like monsoon rains and drowned small creatures in the streets.

The beasts held Astrae for centuries, until Joram—Akiva’s father—waged an all-out campaign early in his reign and won back all the territory up to the Adelphas Mountains. He had consolidated power and begun to rebuild the Empire, with its heart where, as he said, it belonged: in Astrae.