Days of Blood & Starlight(123)
Heat.
Karou spun around, and there was Akiva. For a long moment, he was all she saw. Even the Wolf was only a white blur, moving to take his place at her side. Akiva had come back, and his beautiful face was tense with remorse.
“Too late,” she said softly, knowing that this world that had nurtured her in hiding, that had given her art and friends and a chance at normal life, would never be the same again, no matter what happened next.
The chimaera host, bristling in the presence of the enemy, was watching Thiago for a sign that did not come. The pair of seraphim stood not a wingspan away, and their mythic, angelic perfection was everything the “beasts” were not. Karou saw them with her human eyes, this army she had rendered more monstrous than ever nature had, and she knew what the world would see in them if they flew to fight the Dominion: demons, nightmares, evil. The sight of the seraphim would be heralded as a miracle. But chimaera?
The apocalypse.
“No. It isn’t too late,” Akiva said. “This is the beginning.” He put his hand on his heart. Only Karou could know what he meant, and, oh, she did know—we are the beginning—and felt heat flare in her own heart, as if he had laid his hand there. “Come with us,” he said. He turned to Thiago, standing at her side. His voice scraped and his eyes burned hot, and Karou knew how hard it was for him to make himself address the Wolf, but he did.
He said, “We can fight them together. I have an army, too.”
EPILOGUE
The Kirin caves. Two uneasy armies seethe and roil. Only the sprawl of the caverns keeps the peace, by keeping them apart.
The Misbegotten claim to feel the sickness of hamsas even through stone. The revenants, enraged by the cold calculations writ black on the knuckles of their enemies, will not desist from pressing their palms against the walls that divide them. It is not a good beginning. Each army burns to hack off the others’ hands and hurl them over the drop into the ice chasms below.
Akiva tells his brothers and sisters that the magic of the marks doesn’t penetrate stone, but they don’t want to admit it. Every hour he wishes Hazael were here. “He would have them all playing dice together by now,” he tells Liraz.
“The music helps, at least,” she says.
She doesn’t mean the music of the caverns. The wind flutes haunt them all, waking beast and angel both from nightmares more alike than they could ever imagine. The Misbegotten dream of a country of ghosts, the chimaera of a tomb filled with the souls of their loved ones. Only Karou is soothed by the wind music. It is the lullaby of her earliest life, and she has been surprised by deep and dreamless sleep these two nights they have spent here.
Not tonight, though. It is the eve of battle, and they are gathered, several hundred altogether, in this largest of the caverns. Mik’s violin fills the space with a sonata from the other world, and they are all quiet, listening.
Common enemy, their commanders have told them. Common cause.
For now, anyway. It is implied or believed that soon this will change—revert—and they will be released to once more freely pursue their hate as they always have, chimaera against seraphim, seraphim against chimaera. The hope—Karou’s, the Wolf’s, Akiva’s, and even Liraz’s—is that their hate will turn to something else before that day comes.
It feels like a test for the future of all Eretz.
Zuzana’s head is on Karou’s shoulder, and Issa is on her other side. The Wolf isn’t far; Ziri has grown easier in his new body, and, lying back on his elbows beside the fire, he is elegant and exquisite, the former occupant’s cruelty absent from his face unless he remembers to try to put it there, and his smiles no longer seem learned from a book. Karou feels him looking at her, but she doesn’t look back. Her eyes are pulled elsewhere, across the cavern to where Akiva sits at another fire with his own soldiers around him.
He is looking back at her.
As ever when their eyes meet, it is like a lit fuse searing a path through the air between them. These past days, when this has happened, one or the other would turn quickly away, but this time they rest and let the fuse burn. They are filled with the sight of each other. Here in this cavern, this extraordinary gathering—this seethe of colliding hatreds, tamed temporarily by a shared hate—could be their long-ago dream seen through a warped mirror. This is not how it was meant to be. They are not side by side as they once imagined. They are not exultant, and they no longer feel themselves to be the instruments of some great intention. They are creatures grasping at life with stained hands. There is so much between them, all the living and all the dead, but for a moment everything falls away and the fuse burns brighter and nearer, so that Karou and Akiva almost feel as if they are touching.
Tomorrow they will start the apocalypse.
Tonight, they let themselves look at each other, for just a little while.
… to be continued
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Whew.
It always comes as a relief to get to this page, because it means I have finished a book—a thing that gets easier in some ways over time, but not in all ways. Every story is its own challenge, and in the middle I find myself relying on the quote “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Because it does. (I didn’t know who said that until just this moment when I googled it, and now that I know it was Nelson Mandela, finishing a novel doesn’t seem like such a big accomplishment after all. Thanks a lot, Nelson Mandela.)