Days of Blood & Starlight(99)

“Yes, you’ll do,” said Joram at last. “It’s lucky, after all, that I let you live. If I’d had you killed, who would I send to them?”

Send to them.

“They may choose to kill you; what do I know of Stelians? You should say your good-byes, just in case.”

From across the room, Jael spoke. “It’s bad luck for soldiers to say good-bye, brother. Have you forgotten? It tempts fate.”

Joram rolled his eyes, turning away from Akiva. “Then don’t say it. What do I care?” He walked out of easy reach; Namais and Misorias were right there. Akiva had let an opportunity go by. There would be another. He would make another. “Be ready to go in the morning.” Joram spared Hazael and Liraz a backward glance; if he noted their resemblance to himself, he gave no sign. “Alone.”

“Go where, my lord?” asked Akiva. He had already made his plans for the morning, of course—to vanish without a trace—but the loose thread of a mystery was here just waiting for him to pull it. His mother.

“To the Far Isles, of course. The Stelians believe that I have something of theirs, and they want her back. Jael, you’ll remember. I never bother with their names. What was she called?”

“I do remember,” said Jael. “She was called Festival.”

Festival.

“Festival. A name like that and you’d expect her to be fun.” Joram shook his head. “Can they imagine I’d have kept her all this time?”

Festival.

The name, it was like a key in a lock. Images. Perfume. Touch. Her face. For an instant Akiva remembered his mother’s face. Her voice. It was a long time ago—decades—they were fragments only, but the effect was immediate: it was focus and clarity, like light honed to a beam.

The effect was sirithar.

Akiva had thought he knew sirithar. It was a part of his training; he had done dawn katas for years, seeking the calm center of himself; it was elusive, but he had believed he knew what it was. This was different. This was true and instant and indelible. No wonder he hadn’t understood; no doubt none of his trainers had ever achieved it, either.

It was magic.

Not the magic he had discovered for himself, cobbled together out of guesswork and pain. He may as well have lived his life scraping and scratching in the dirt, only now lifting his head to see the sky and its infinite horizons, its unguessable fathoms. Whatever the source of power or the tithe, it wasn’t pain. In fact, the pain in his shoulder was gone. What is this? Light and lift and weightlessness, a depth of calm that made the world around him seem to slow and crystallize so that he saw everything—Japheth’s jaw straining to stifle a yawn, a flicker of a glance shared between Hellas and Jael, the sphygmic jump of Joram’s jugular. The heat and stir of breath and wings, every movement painted strokes of intention on the air. He knew the servant girl was going to rise from her crouch before she did: her light moved ahead of her, she seemed to follow it. Joram’s hands were going to lift; Akiva anticipated it and then they did. The emperor at last closed his robe, tied its sash. He was still speaking, each word as clear and real as a river stone. Akiva understood that what he heard in this state would be committed perfectly to memory.

That he would never forget his father’s last words.

And that he knew what his last words would be.

“You’ll go to them,” Joram was saying with the disengaged certitude of absolute autocracy. Akiva realized he need never have feared he was suspected. Joram was so swollen with his own legend it would not occur to him that he might be disobeyed. “Show them who you are. If they’ll hear you, give them my promise. If they surrender now and yield up their magi, I will not do to them as I have done to the beasts. The Stelians fare well enough snatching envoys out of the air, but what will they do against five thousand Dominion? Have they even an army? They think they can turn me aside so easily?”

You do not begin to understand how far they are beyond you. A part of Akiva wanted to turn in a circle and marvel at the rivers of light swimming through the layers and layers of glass of the Sword, to hold up his own hands and stare at them as if they had been remade, as if he himself were an entirely new creature built of those same rays of light.

Light veiling fire.

A voice, out of the distant past. “You are not his.” It was her voice, a resonant vibrato, accented and full of power. It was that day. “You are not mine. You are your own.” She hadn’t wept. Festival. She hadn’t tried to hold on to him or grapple with the guards, and she hadn’t said good-bye. Good-byes tempt fate, as Jael had said.

Had she thought she might see him again?

“Did you kill her?”

He heard himself ask the question and was aware of many things at once: the sudden stillness of the counsel; the clench of Namais’s and Misorias’s fists on their hilts; a flare of interest from Japheth, who lost his urge to yawn. Behind him, he didn’t even have to see Hazael and Liraz to know that their muscles relaxed into readiness; he knew Liraz was already smiling her unnerving battle smile. “Did you kill my mother?”

And he saw his father’s eyes, unsurprised and full of contempt. “You have no mother. As you have no father. You are a link in a chain. You are a hand to swing a sword. A hull to dress in armor. Have you forgotten all of your training, soldier? You are a weapon. You are a thing.”