Days of Blood & Starlight(78)

Begin? Mercy breeds mercy, Akiva had told her. He hardly knew what to say. “Do you mean…?”

“Harmony with the beasts?” she supplied. “I don’t know. I know that I’m through taking orders from men like Jael and Joram. I know that every night a girl must cross the skybridge knowing that no one will help her. Those are our mothers.” Her voice was raw. “We’re swords, they tell us, and swords have no mother or father, but I did have one once, and I can’t even remember her name. I don’t want to be this anymore.” Again, she lifted her hands. “I’ve done things—” Her voice cracked.

Hazael drew her against him. “We all have, Lir.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and bright. No tears, not Liraz. “Not like me. You couldn’t. You’re good. Both of you, you’re better than me. You were helping them, weren’t you? While I was… while I…” She trailed off.

Akiva took her hands in his, covered up the black marks so she didn’t have to look at them. He remembered what Madrigal had told him, years ago, with her hand on his heart and his on hers. “War is all we’ve been taught, Lir,” he told his sister now. “But we don’t have to be that anymore. We’ll still be us, just—”

“A better us?”

He nodded.

“How?” Her restlessness overcame her. She shook him off to pace again. “I need to do something. Now.”

Hazael spoke. “We start to gather others. That’s our first step. I know who to start with.” Yes, Akiva realized. He would.

“It’s too slow,” Liraz said fiercely.

And Akiva agreed. The idea of steps—of a careful progression of plans and recruitment and scheming and subterfuge—it was far too slow.

“Liraz is right. How many more would die while we whisper secrets?”

“What, then?” asked Hazael.

In the deep distance, the sky was cleaved by a line of stormhunters on the move. The massive birds were drawn by some inner compass to knots of gathering wind, to deluge and turmoil and churned seas, hail and shipwreck and knives of lightning; no one knew why, but right now, Akiva felt the same pull in himself—toward the center of his own brewing storm.

“It was always going to be the first step,” he said. “It’s just coming eighteen years late.” He’d known what he had to do then, and he knew it now. As long as Joram remained in power, their world would know war and nothing but war. Hazael and Liraz were furrow-browed, waiting.

Akiva said, “I’m going to kill our father.”





58


HONEY AND VENOM


The body lay on the floor. It was a near-perfect likeness to the one Karou mourned, and when she came out of her trance and saw it there, she gave a little sob and had to fight the urge to drop to her knees and bury her face in the crook of its neck. But it was just that: an it, still a shell, no soul yet animating it to return her embrace. She got a hold of herself, pulled the vises off her arms and hands quickly—too quickly. The sun was up, and Ten was sure to come sniffing around any minute. Karou hadn’t wanted to lose time unscrewing the clamps, and in one or two places they snagged her flesh coming off.

“Ack! Halt!” cried Zuzana. “Stop abusing yourself!”

Karou ignored her fluttering hands and said, “Hurry. Light the incense.”

“I think someone’s coming,” said Mik from the doorway.

Karou nodded. “Boards,” she said, and he closed the door and secured it. They hadn’t replaced the crossbar—it would have made too much noise to hammer those great iron nails back into the wall. Instead, Mik had come up with the idea of gouging a pair of grooves into the dirt floor, into which he now settled planks, propping them at an angle to the door, wedged under handle and hinges. Karou hoped it would hold.

Light pad of footsteps, soft scrape of claws on the stairs.

The incense was lit. Zuzana handed it to her, and Karou’s hand shook setting it on the brow of the body. Smoke made a fluting trail upward before dispersing on a puff of Karou’s breath. The scent of sulfur; this had given Brimstone his name. Karou wondered what it had been before he became the resurrectionist, when he was a thrall in the pain pits of the magi.

The door shuddered lightly as Ten tried pushing it open and met with unexpected resistance. An instant of startled silence, and then a fist thudded on the wood. “Karou?”

She looked up sharply. It wasn’t Ten. It was Thiago. Damn.

“Yes?” she called.

“I’ve just come up to see if you need anything. How is the door blocked?”

How indeed, thought Karou, who had never had the opportunity to ask after her crossbar. He thought he had taken care of her irritating need for privacy? Well, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Or a wolf. She said only, “Just a second.”

A further pause, Karou fumbling with the thurible—she winced when the chain rattled, afraid he would somehow guess what she was doing—and then his fist came down on the door again. “Karou?”

“Juuust a minute,” she sang, her voice covering the scrape of the thurible twisting open.

She dropped to her knees beside the body. Watched, waited.

The soul effused from the vessel, overwhelming her with its presence. It was fireflies in a garden. It was eyes shining from shadows. It was flicker and fork, honey and venom, slit pupils and smooth, sun-warmed enamel.