Days of Blood & Starlight

80 The Deception

A sound and it was near and it was wings.

Karou had been sure it must be Thiago’s cohorts returning, and she had neither fled nor hidden. She had frozen like a prey thing, on her knees in the dirt and rocks and blood and vomit and flies and horror, waiting to be found.

And when she saw who it was, when he dropped down before her, his Kirin hooves scattering stones, there had been no room in her shock to be glad—Ziri was alive and he was here—because the undone way he stared at her only sharpened her shock. He looked to the Wolf and back at her. His jaw was loose with disbelief; he actually took a halting step backward, and Karou saw the grotesque tableau as he was seeing it. The indignity of the Wolf’s pose, clothes twisted and wrenched asunder in an unmistakable display, and the little knife lying where he’d dropped it, looking like a letter opener, or a toy.

And her. Shaking. Bloody. Guilty.

She had killed the White Wolf. If she had been thinking at all, she wouldn’t have believed that it could get any worse than that.

But, oh, it had.

Now, in her room, she laid her head on his chest and felt his heart beating against her cheek—fast and faster; she knew it was Ziri’s heart now, not Thiago’s, and she knew, too, that its rushing was for her—and she tried to quell her revulsion for his sake.

She had hoped that her little Kirin shadow might prove an ally, but she had never imagined… this.

After that first instant of slack astonishment he had lunged to her side and he had been so careful with her, so present and good and unfaltering—none of his shyness now; he was all focus and strength. He had held her shoulders, carefully but firmly, and made her look at him.

“You’re all right,” he had told her when he was sure that the blood that painted her wasn’t her own. “Karou. Look at me. You’re all right. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

“He can, he will,” she had said, near hysteria. “He can’t be dead, it can’t stand. They’ll make me bring him back. He’s the White Wolf. He’s the White Wolf.”

That was it, all there was to say. Ziri knew it, too; they didn’t have to talk what-ifs. It was Ziri who saw what to do and who did it. Karou grasped his intent when he drew his crescent-moon blade; she gasped, tried to stop him. He said he was sorry. “But not for myself. That part’s all right. I’m just sorry to leave you alone, for the time between.”

Between. Between bodies.

“No! No!” No no no no no no no. “We’ll think of something else. Ziri, you can’t do this—”

But he did, and with a practiced hand, and his blade was very sharp.

She held him while he died, and his round brown eyes were wide and unafraid, and they were sweet, in the instant before they dulled, they were sweet and hopeful as they’d been when he was a boy following her around Loramendi. That was who she thought of as she held him dead in her arms—the boy he had been—and again now, as he held her in his new arms. She thought of the boy so that she wouldn’t betray him by shuddering. It was so unfair, after the magnitude of his sacrifice, and so cruel, but it was all she could do not to wrench herself away, because though he was Ziri, his arms were the Wolf’s, and his embrace was anathema.

When she couldn’t stand it another moment, she used a pretense to draw back. She reached into her pocket, stepping away, and drew out the thing that she had put there days earlier and half forgotten.

“I have this,” she said. “It’s… I don’t know.” It seemed stupid now. Ridiculous, even—what was he supposed to do with it? It was the tip of his horn, a couple of inches long, that had snapped off in the court when he’d fallen unconscious. She wasn’t sure what had made her take it, and now, as he reached for it, she wished she hadn’t. Because there was a shyness in his voice when he said, “You kept this,” that made it clear he was reading too much into it.

“For you,” she said. “I thought you might want it. That was before…” Before she had buried the rest of him in a shallow grave? Again, her stomach felt like a clenching fist. It had been the best she could do, and at least it wasn’t the pit. Not the pit for the last true Kirin flesh, dear Ellai, be it only so much stardust gathered fleetingly into form. It had been hard enough to shovel dry dirt onto his face. She’d kept thinking she should change her mind. After all, it was up to her. She had two bodies freshly dead. She could mend either one. She could have put Ziri’s soul back where it belonged; he’d done what he’d done and it was so brave, but then it was in her hands. His soul was in her hands.

Ziri’s soul felt like the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains and the beat of stormhunters’ wings, like the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that had filled their caves with music he could not possibly remember. It felt like home.

And she had put it in such a vessel. Because he was right, after all. This was the only way to take control of the chimaera’s fate. Through such a deception.

If they could pull it off.

It wouldn’t be easy even under ordinary circumstances, but so soon, while they were both still reeling and hadn’t even been able to talk or plan, to come to such a test. The angels must be dealt with.

Karou turned away and went to her table. She righted the chair that she had toppled when Akiva fell through her window, and eased herself into it. The backs of her legs were so torn up from thrashing under Thiago’s weight, and her whole body pretty much felt like it had been clamped in vises. But that would all pass in a day or two; the rest was here to stay. The problems, the terrible responsibility, and the lie that at all costs must go no further than this room.

Issa and Ten returned, minus Nisk and Lisseth.

“I want them gone,” said Issa in a dangerous tone, and Karou knew that she meant Nisk and Lisseth, not the angels. “They’re savages, leaving you out there with him like that. The others, too.”

Karou tended to agree, but still. “They were following orders.” She pointed out that they had followed worse orders than that.

“I don’t care,” said Issa. She was even more disgusted with the pair because they were Naja, and she wanted to believe better of her own kind. “There has to be some basic understanding of right and wrong, even when it comes to orders.”

“If we made that a rule, we’d have no one left. Well.” She glanced at the Wolf. At Ziri. “Very few.” Balieros’s team must be resurrected soon, along with Amzallag and the sphinxes, whose souls she had gleaned from the pit. She needed soldiers she could trust. “Anyway, we can’t start disappearing everyone we don’t like. That would be suspicious. And,” she added somewhat after the fact, “wrong.”

In fact, they had disappeared no one, and she didn’t plan to start. Razor didn’t count. He had died attacking a seraph stronghold called Glyss-on-the-Tane—the same engagement in which Ziri had been lost, to the sorrow of all. No one need ever know what had really happened when Razor had tried, and failed, to carry out Thiago’s order, or that one of the two of them had returned—though only to the comfort of a shallow grave and the starring role in this enormous subterfuge.

“Let me have the two Naja,” said Ten, clicking her teeth together. “This wolf mouth has a hunger. I’ll say they asked me to eat them.”

“Don’t be terrible,” Issa protested mildly.

“No?” Ten peered around at Karou. “But wasn’t that the whole inducement?”

Karou couldn’t help but smile, which hurt her raw cheek. Ten was no more Ten than Thiago was Thiago; she was Haxaya, and it was easier with her. As much as Karou had grown to hate the she-wolf, there just wasn’t the same level of physical aversion as with the Wolf. It was good to have Haxaya’s dark humor in the mix—even if one couldn’t quite tell when she was joking. When Karou had awakened her old friend in Ten’s body—Ten having fatally underestimated Issa and her usually docile bands of living jewelry—she had put it to her straight: the terrible situation, and what she must do or else be returned forthwith to her thurible.

Haxaya’s answer, with a smile that seemed made for Ten’s wolf jaws, had been, “I’ve always wanted to be terrible.”

“Can you be slightly less terrible?” she asked her now. “No eating the Naja, or any other comrades, even despised ones.” As an afterthought, she added, “Please.”

“Fine. But if they do ask me—”

“They’re not going to ask you to eat them. Ten.”

“I suppose not,” she conceded with what sounded like true disappointment, and maybe it was.

And here they were, Karou’s allies: Thiago, Ten, and Issa. And they were looking to her. Oh god, thought Karou, feeling tipsy with panic. What now?

“The angels,” she said, willing her pulse to even itself out.

“They escape,” said Issa. “Simple. He’s done it before.”

Karou nodded. Of course, that was it. Get them gone, see the last of Akiva, finally and forever. That was what she wanted.

So what was that ache in her chest?

We dreamed together of the world remade, she kept thinking. It had been the most beautiful dream, and could only have arisen as it did: born of mercy and nurtured in love. And she couldn’t think of the future, and peace, without remembering Akiva’s hand to her heart and hers to his. “We are the beginning,” she had said then, in the temple, and everything had seemed possible with his heart beating under her hand.

And now, his heart was beating right over there, in the dark, in the granary. So near, and yet so very far away. There was no way she could imagine, no collision of impossible events, that would bring his heartbeat under her hand ever again, or join the two of them back together in the dream that was theirs—not hers and Ziri’s, not even hers and Brimstone’s, but hers and Akiva’s.

No way she could imagine.