Days of Blood & Starlight(77)

Melliel was the older half sister who had spoken up on behalf of the Misbegotten at the end of the war. She was thick, scarred, and inked; she fought with an ax and kept her gray hair hacked short as a man’s. There was nothing feminine about Melliel except her voice, which even in barked greeting had a ring of music to it. She had sometimes sung at campfires on campaign, and her song-stories had been transporting as few things ever were in a battle camp. She was posted in the capital, or had been until the day before. Now she was with a detachment of Misbegotten going west, into the mists and mysteries of the vanished troops. As if the Empire hadn’t lost enough soldiers in the final battles of the war. All of its armies had bled, but none more than the Misbegotten.

“Of course he would send Misbegotten,” Liraz had hissed, hearing their mission. “Who cares if bastards come back?”

Melliel, though, said she was glad to go—glad to be free of the spider’s web that was Astrae. It was she who told them what else had happened at the Tower of Conquest while the Breakblades swung.

“A shrouded body was… released… through Tav Gate that same morning.” Tav was the last of the Tower’s gates. It was the gutter door, belowground and egress-only; it was where waste was flushed out to sea.

Akiva steeled himself. “Who?”

Melliel’s jaw worked. “There’s no way to know for certain, but… apparently no one thought to dismiss the harem escort. They waited two hours at Alef before a steward noticed and sent them away.”

Akiva felt the news in his gut first and his fists an instant later—a hot surge that made them clench so tight his forearms burned. From Liraz came a choked noise; Hazael’s breathing grew hoarse and he turned abruptly to pace away trailing sparks. Turned and paced back. His fair face was red. Liraz was shaking, her fists clenched as tight as Akiva’s.

The harem escort was the procession of Silverswords that marched the concubines to and from the emperor’s bed. “Parade duty,” they called it. Akiva’s mother had made that walk years ago, who knew how many times—on one return with himself beginning in her belly. Liraz’s and Hazael’s mothers, too, and Melliel’s, and untold other girls and women. And the morning of the hangings, it would seem, the concubine who should have emerged from Alef had been sent out Tav instead, along with the night’s refuse.

“Terrible what happened to her,” Akiva heard in his head—the cruel, goading voice of his father the first time he had ever deigned to speak to him. Had his mother’s body been sent out Tav Gate, too?

A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly? The war was over, but both sides were still slaughtering civilians; the emperor casually killed concubines in his bedchamber and sent his bastards into the unknown to die drumming up more war. There was nothing good in the world, nothing at all. And now that even his memories of happiness were corrupted, Akiva found himself in freefall.

Had she meant it? Had she truly never trusted him? He wanted to deny it; he remembered. He remembered those days—those nights—more clearly than any others in his life, and how she had curled into him in sleep, and how, when she woke to the sight of him, her brown eyes had come alive with light. Even on the scaffold, and again in Marrakesh, after the wishbone was snapped but before she understood…

Before she knew what he had done.

Maybe he had seen only what he wanted to see. It didn’t matter now, anyway. There was no more light in her eyes, not for him and, worse: not at all.

In the morning, when Melliel departed with her troops, Akiva stood on the rampart with Liraz and Hazael and saw them off. A part of him wished he were going, too, mists and mysteries and vanished troops and all, to see the Far Isles, and maybe meet the one who had written such a mad message to the emperor.

But his place was here, on this side of the world. His challenge was here, and his penance: to do what he had told Karou he would, which was anything and everything.

What was anything? What was everything?

He knew, but it seemed to loom before him as huge and insurmountable as the mountains of the south.

Rebellion.

With Madrigal, in the temple, everything had seemed possible. Was it? Would he find any sympathy in the ranks? There was a restiveness there, he knew, and a quiet desperation. He thought of Noam at the aqueduct, asking wildly when it would all end. There would be more like him, but there were those, too, who would claim women and children in their tally and laugh as the ink dried. That would always be true; there would always be both kinds of soldiers. How was he to find the good, recruit them, trust them to secrecy while he went about the slow and scraping work of building a rebellion?

Melliel’s troops were just a shimmer on the horizon now. The rocky swell of the cape headland blocked the view of the sea from here, but its clean scent was in the air, and the sky was great and endless. Finally, their Misbegotten brethren vanished into it.

“What now?” asked Liraz, turning to him.

He didn’t know what she meant. Liraz. He still didn’t know what to make of his sister. She had gone along with the bird summoning warily, and freeing the Kirin, but she had seemed more narrow-eyed and watchful than ever since his return from the rebel camp. With the news that the chimaera had taken to returning the civilian attacks, he feared that she would argue for giving up their location to their superiors.

There was a restless energy in her, her wings kicking off sparks as she paced. “How does one begin?” she asked. Stopped, fixed him with a stare, and held up her hands. Her black hands. “You said one has only to begin. So how do we?”