Days of Blood & Starlight(72)

“No, it won’t. Not ever, because they’re gone—”

“I know. I’m not looking for forgiveness. But there are still lives to be saved, and choices. Karou, the future will have chimaera in it or not, depending on what we do now.”

“We?” Karou was incredulous. “What we?”

“I,” he hastened to clarify. He knew that no “we” would ever again stretch to encompass the two of them. “And in the seraph ranks there may be others who are tired, and who want life, not death.”

“They have life. Unlike my people.”

Akiva had been thinking of Brimstone’s last words—“It is life that expands to fill worlds”—but of course Karou couldn’t know that. He wanted to tell her what Brimstone had said. He thought she would want to know, but coming from him, wouldn’t it seem like a taunt? “It’s not a life worth living,” he said. “Not one worth handing on to children.”

“Children,” said Karou, and she was so bleak—and so beautiful. Akiva couldn’t help himself—he looked at her and looked at her, and he ached, looking, knowing he would never again touch her or see her smile. “When both sides start butchering children,” she said, “I think it’s safe to say life has lost.”

What did she mean? She saw his confusion. “Oh. You don’t know yet?” Grim. “You will.”

It hit him. Thiago. “What has he done?”

“Nothing you haven’t.”

“I’ve never killed a child.”

“You’ve killed thousands of children, Beast’s Bane,” she hissed. He flinched to hear her speak the name, and he couldn’t argue.

He hadn’t done it with his own swords, but he’d opened the way for the killers. There were things he had seen that he would never unsee. Images swelled in him like screams—strobe memories, flashing, ugly, ugly, unforgivable. Akiva closed his eyes. This was what he was to her: a killer of children, a monster. She was working side by side with the White Wolf, and it was Akiva who was the monster. How had the world gotten so twisted around?

If Thiago had not found them out and come to the requiem grove that night, what might they have gone on to do?

Maybe nothing. Maybe they would have died some other way and accomplished nothing.

It didn’t matter. The dream had been pure. Even in his despair, Akiva knew it, felt it, but he knew Karou couldn’t. He took a step back from her, ventured to look at her again. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and her face was desolation. She was broken, as he had been all these years. And… he had broken her.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I didn’t come to cause you pain, and please believe I didn’t come to kill. I came because… I thought you were dead. Karou, I thought…”

His hand went to the thurible. What would it mean to her, he wondered, this vessel and its message: Karou. If it wasn’t her soul, whose was it? His first thought on finding it had been that the name was a label, but it was clear to him now that it was an inscription.

“I found this in the Kirin caves,” he said, and held it out. “It must have been left there for you to find.” She looked startled by the sight of a thurible in his hands. He held it out; she hesitated, unwilling to come any nearer to him. “This is why I wanted to die,” he said, and he turned the small square of paper so that she could read it. “Because I thought it was you.”




Karou snatched the vessel from him and stared at the writing. She wasn’t breathing.

Karou.

How many times, back in Prague, had she gotten notes just like this? Then, they would have been pierced through by Kishmish’s claws and somewhat the worse for wear, but the paper was the same, and the writing… she would know it anywhere.

It was Brimstone’s.

She stared at it until a gust of sparks pulled her out of her shock, and she knew that Akiva had gone. She didn’t have to look around. She felt his absence, the way she always had—as cold rushing in to fill the void he left behind. Her heart was hammering, she held the vessel to her chest and imagined she could feel the soul within vibrating against her heartbeat. That was pure fancy; there could be no hint through the silver of what—who—was inside. But it had to be….

It had to be.

Her hands shook. All it would take was twisting the vessel open. An impression of the soul would filter out and she would know at once.

She held it ready. Hesitated. What if it wasn’t?

Her thoughts were scattershot; they came and cascaded away, but one came and came again. Akiva had brought her the thurible. Thiago—her ally—lied to keep her isolated and alone. Akiva—her enemy—brought her the thurible that might… that might… that might contain… Brimstone.

Did it?

A twist of the wrist and Karou opened the vessel. Half a second. The soul skimmed against her senses.

And she knew.





55


THE EMPEROR’S PROWESS


A bare foot, highly arched. A slender ankle festooned in golden bangles.

Nevo didn’t mean to see, but the music of the bangles drew his attention at the moment the girl stepped through the door and he glimpsed this secret sight before he could jerk his chin down and pin his gaze to the ground.