Days of Blood & Starlight(71)

“And I don’t, either? Don’t I deserve to finally be free of you?”

At first he said nothing, and Karou’s words echoed in the silence. They were so ugly—edged in mockery to cover her anguish; she hated the sound of herself. When he did answer, his anguish was undisguised. “You do deserve it. I didn’t come here to torment you—”

“Then why did you come?” she cried.

Even before Akiva rose to his feet, Karou felt as if she were fighting against something, but when he did stand, unsteadily, and she had to take a step away and tip back her head to look up at him, she knew what it was. The shape of him—the breadth and contours of his chest, the sharp line of his widow’s peak that her fingers had traced so many times, and his eyes—above all his eyes, his eyes. Confronted with his realness, his nearness, Karou understood that what she was fighting was familiarity—familiarity of a magnitude that was a profound kind of recognition.

This was Akiva, and the recognition had been there even when he was a stranger, that day at Bullfinch when she had first laid eyes on him. It was why she had done such an astonishing thing as save the enemy’s life. It had been there in the dance in Loramendi, even when he wore a mask, and it had been there again in the lane in Marrakesh, when he was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger again.

Except that he wasn’t.

Akiva had never been a stranger, and that was the problem. A kind of call echoed between them, even now, and from the hollow of Karou’s heart where there should have been only enmity and bitterness, came a slow pull of… longing. Rage rushed in and swamped it. Foul heart! She wanted to rip it out.

How could she still not hate him?




And when their eyes met, this was what Akiva saw: not the longing but a sudden flare of violence and loathing. He failed to recognize it as self-loathing, and he was lost. He looked sharply away, realizing only now—fool—that he had still had hope. Of what? Not that Karou would be glad to see him—he wasn’t that big a fool—but maybe for a flash, a hint that something remained in her besides hate.

But that hope vanished and left him empty, and when he found his voice to answer her question, he sounded empty. Scraped and dry.

“I came to find the new resurrectionist. I didn’t know that it was… you.”

“Surprised?” she asked. The loathing was as thick in her voice as in her look, and could he blame her for it?

Surprised? “Yes,” he said, though that wasn’t the word for what he was. He was gutted. “You could say that.”

She cocked her head in that birdlike way she had, and Akiva’s heart was raw. She saw, and understood. She said, “You wonder why I never told you.”

He shook his head, dismissing it, but there it was. She had never told him. In the requiem grove for that month that was the only real happiness of Akiva’s life, in all their talk of peace and hope, all their love and discovery and their plans, so grand—to invent a new way of living—Madrigal had never spoken of resurrection. It was the White Wolf who had spilled the chimaera’s great secret, gloating in the prison of Loramendi between lashes of the whip.

Akiva had kept nothing from her. He had wanted her to know him, truly and fully, from the terrible tally his inked knuckles boasted to the misery of his earliest memories, and love him for who he was, and all these years he’d believed she had. So what did it mean that she had kept such a secret? She may even have come straight from the work of resurrection into his arms and never breathed a word of it.

“I’ll tell you why,” said Karou. Her words were precise, a knife sliding between his ribs. “I never trusted you.”

He nodded; he couldn’t look at her. What had been emptiness filled with nausea, as powerful as if revenants were arrayed around him with their hamsas upheld.

“So are you going to kill me?” she asked. “That’s why you came, isn’t it? To kill another resurrectionist?”

Akiva’s head snapped up. “What? No. Karou. No. Never.” How could she even ask that? “There’s no reason for you to believe it,” he said, “but I’m done killing chimaera.”

“You told me that once before.”

“It was true then,” he said. “And it’s true now.” After Bullfinch he had stopped killing chimaera.

And after her death, he had started again.

He couldn’t stop himself from turning his hands, trying to hide the evidence tattooed on them. He wanted to tell her that everything he had done he had done because he was broken, because watching her die had destroyed him, but there was no way to say it that didn’t sound like he was trying to pin the blame outside himself. There was no way to talk about what he had done, nothing to plead, and no mitigation. Even thinking about it, he came up again and again against the sheer magnitude of his guilt, and there were no words. Confession and apology were worse than inadequate—they were an affront; explanation was impossible. But he had to say something.

I lost my soul. “I lost our dream. Vengeance eclipsed everything. I barely remember the weeks and months after…” After I watched you die, and part of me died, too. “I can’t account for what I’ve done, let alone atone for it. I would bring them all back if I could. I would die a death for every single chimaera. I would do anything. I will do anything, and everything, and I know… I know it will never be enough—”