Days of Blood & Starlight(28)

Ziri had been one of those babies, tiny and new as a kit with its eyes still shut. Karou had some small memories of him in Loramendi later: he used to follow her around blushing—her foster sister, Chiro, teased her that he had a crush on her. “Your little Kirin shadow,” she had called him.

“It’s not a crush,” Madrigal had argued. “It’s kinship. It’s longing for what he never had.”

She’d felt deeply for him, an orphan like her but with no memories of their home or their people to hold on to. There had been some elder Kirin left, and a few other orphans his age, but Madrigal was the only Kirin in her prime whom he had ever seen.

Funny, now the tables were turned, and it was her looking to him and seeing what she had lost. He was grown now, and tall even before the antelope horns that added several more feet. His legs were human tapering to antelope, as her own had once been, and, coupled with his vast bat wings, gave him the same buoyant gait all the Kirin had possessed—a lightness as if the earth underfoot were incidental and he might at any instant go airborne and rise leagues above it all.

Only there was no lightness in him now. His tread was heavy and his face grim, and as the patrol assembled in formation to await their general, he was the only one to give a glance up at Karou’s window. She half raised her hand to him, her bruised arm screaming at the simple gesture, which… he did not return. He lowered his head again as if she weren’t even there.

Stung, Karou let her hand fall.

Where were they coming from? What had they seen? What had they done?

Go down and find out, came a whisper in the back of her mind, but she didn’t heed it. Whatever went on in the ashfall landscape and blood-crusted world of war where her creations went forth to do violence, it wasn’t her concern. She conjured the bodies; that was all.

What more could she possibly do?





26


GRIEVOUS HARM


The Wolf was in the window right below Karou’s. As soon as Ziri lifted his eyes to look for her, he saw white and dropped his head again. It was barely enough time to register the look of half hope on her face as she raised her hand to him, tentative. Lonely.

And then he shunned her.

The Wolf had told him he must have no contact with her. He had told them all, but Ziri thought those pale eyes had lingered on him when he said it, and that he was the one Thiago watched most closely. Because he was Kirin? Did he think that fact alone would bond them, or did he remember Ziri as a child? At the Warlord’s ball?

At the execution.

He had tried to save her. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic—how he had crouched in the crawl space under the tourney stands, getting up his courage, gripping his edgeless training swords as though they might deliver her. The stands had been erected in the agora so the folk could better watch her die; it was a spectacle. Madrigal, so still and straight, so beautiful, had made the stamping masses seem like animals, and he, a skinny boy of twelve, had thought he could storm the scaffold and… what? Cut her pinion, her manacles? The city itself was a cage; she would have had nowhere to go.

It hadn’t mattered. He’d been laid out by the hilt of a soldier’s sword before his feet ever touched the platform. Madrigal never even saw his fool heroics. Her eyes had never left her lover.

That was another lifetime. Ziri hadn’t understood her treason then, or where it could lead. Where it had led. But he wasn’t a lovestruck little boy anymore, and Karou was nothing to him.

So why were his eyes drawn to her window? To her, on the rare occasions she came down?

Was it pity? A glance was all it took to see how alone she was. In the first days, in Eretz, she had been pale, trembling, mute—clearly in shock. It had been harder then, not to go to her or speak even a word. She must have seen it—how something in him leapt to answer her grief, her loneliness, and now she sought him out with that look of half-hope whenever she saw him, as if he might be a friend.

And he turned away from her. Thiago had been clear: The rebels needed her but couldn’t make the mistake of trusting her. She was treacherous and must be managed carefully—by him.

And here he was now, come down to greet the patrol.

“Well met,” said Thiago, striding out like the lord of the manor. Lord of the ruins, rather, but if this mud castle was a comedown for the great White Wolf, he claimed it as he had ever claimed anything—or everything: as his to do with as he wished until he seized the next and better thing. He would have the throne in Astrae before he was through, he claimed, and seraphim for slaves, and as ludicrous a claim as it seemed in light of their circumstances, Ziri would never underestimate the Wolf.

Thiago was a soldier’s soldier. His troops worshipped him, and would do anything for him. He ate, drank, and breathed battle, never more at home than in a campaign tent strewn with maps, hashing strategy with his captains or, better yet, hurling himself at angels with his teeth bared and bloody.

“Reckless,” the Warlord had fumed once, furious when his son had been killed and come back in a new body. “A general need not die at the front!” But Thiago had never been one to hang back in safety and send others forth to die. He led, and Ziri knew firsthand how his fearlessness spread like wildfire in the fray. It was what made him great.

Now, though, with the chimaera hanging on to the frayed end of their existence, it seemed his father’s words had gotten through. When the patrols had gone out to Eretz, he’d stayed behind—with clear reluctance and even bad grace that put Ziri in mind of guardsmen who drew duty during the festival times. It was a heavy thing, to miss out. He had paced, wolf-restless, hungry, envious, and he came alive now at his soldiers’ return.