by Laini Taylor
“What?”
“Just take a bow, okay? Let them think this was a performance. It’ll be easier to get away. Leave them trying to figure out how we did it.”
He gave an approximation of a bow and the applause thundered.
“Can you walk?” Karou asked.
He nodded.
It still wasn’t easy getting away. People stood in their way, wanting to talk to them. Karou spoke; he didn’t know what was said, didn’t understand the language, but her answers were clipped. The onlookers were awed and delighted — except one of them, a young man in a tall hat who glared at Akiva and tried to take Karou’s elbow. His proprietary air stirred old wrath in Akiva and made him want to throw the human into a wall, but Karou didn’t need his intervention. She brushed the man aside and led Akiva out of the crowd. Her fingers were still in his; they were cool and small, and he was sorry when, turning a corner into a plaza of empty market stalls, she pulled away.
“Are you okay?” she asked, putting distance between them.
He steadied himself against a wall in the shadows beneath an awning. “Not that I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “But I feel as though an army has marched over me.”
She paced, anxious energy fairly vibrating in her. “Razgut said you were looking for me. Why?”
“Razgut?” Akiva was startled. “But I thought he was—”
“Dead? He survived. Not Izîl, though.”
Akiva looked at the ground. “I didn’t know he would jump.”
“Well, he did. But that doesn’t answer my question. Why were you looking for me?”
Again, the helplessness. He groped for meaning. “I didn’t understand who you were. Are. A human, marked with the devil’s eyes.”
Karou looked at her palms, then up at him, a confused vulnerability in her expression. “Why do they… do that? To you?”
He narrowed his eyes. Could she not know?
The eye tattoos were just one example of Brimstone’s deviltry. The magic hit like a wall of wind, one that carried a fury of sickness and weakness, and Akiva had trained to resist it — all seraph soldiers did — but there was only so much he could take. If he’d been in battle, he’d have sliced off the enemy’s hands before letting them focus so much of their evil energy at him. But Karou… the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her again, so he had endured as much as he could.
Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale — a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion. The scorch of her touch on his neck felt like an acid splash, accompanying the dull, roiling nausea from her relentless assault. He felt enfeebled, and feared he might collapse again.
He said carefully, “They’re the revenants’ marks. You must know that.”
“Revenant?”
He studied her face. “Do you really not know?”
“Know what? What’s a revenant? Isn’t it a ghost?”
“It’s a chimaera soldier,” he said, which was part of the truth. “The hamsas are for them.” Pause. “Only.”
She made tight, sudden fists. “Obviously not only.”
He didn’t answer.
Everything was between them, everything he’d felt suffuse the air while they faced each other over the rooftops. Being near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision.
He’d felt this before and never wanted to feel it again. It could only diminish the memory of Madrigal; it already was. Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played. Karou’s face was all he could see — shining eyes, smooth cheeks, the arc of soft lips pressed together in consternation.
He’d cut out feeling; it shouldn’t even have been possible to feel this — this welter, this urgency and tumult, this thrum. And under it all, a crippled twist of thought he held prisoner in the shadows of his mind, so warped he didn’t recognize it for what it was: a hope. A very small hope. And at its center: Karou.
She was a wingspan away, still pacing. They were prowling on the edges of their mutual compulsion, both afraid to draw nearer together. “Why did you burn the portals?” she asked.
He let out a deep breath. What could he say? For vengeance? For peace? Both were true in their way. Warily, he said, “To end the war.”
“War? There’s a war?”
“Yes, Karou. War is all there is.”
She was taken aback, again, by his use of her name. “Are Brimstone and the others… are they okay?” There was a breathlessness in her voice Akiva realized was fear — fear of what his answer would be.
Under the roiling nausea from the hamsas, he felt another, deeper sickness — the beginnings of dread. “They’re in the black fortress,” he said.
“Fortress.” Her voice lifted in hope. “With the bars. I was there, I saw it, the night you attacked me.”
Akiva looked away. A wave of nausea went through him. The throbbing in his head was getting hard to focus past; only once before had he taken such sustained trauma from the devil’s marks, a torture he had not expected to survive, and still didn’t understand why he had. He was having a hard time holding his eyes open, and his body felt like an anchor trying to drag him down.
Voices.
Karou’s head snapped around. Akiva looked. Some of their audience had traced them here and were pointing.
“Follow me,” said Karou.
As if he could have done anything else.
30
YOU
She led him to her flat, all the while thinking, Stupid, stupid, what are you doing?
Answers, she told herself. I’m getting answers.
She hesitated at the elevator, unsure about being in so small a space with the seraph, but he wasn’t in any state to climb stairs, so she pushed the button. He followed her in, seeming unfamiliar with the principle of elevators, and startled slightly when the mechanism chugged to life.
In her flat, she dropped her keys in a basket by the door and looked around. On the wall: her Angel of Extinction wings, uncannily like his wings. If he noticed the similarity, his face gave away nothing. The space was too small for the wings to be spread to their full span, so they were suspended like a canopy, half-sheltering the bed, which was a deep teak bench piled princess-and-the-pea with feather mattresses. It was unmade and lost in an avalanche of old sketchbooks that Karou had been leafing through the night before, keeping company in the only way she could with her family.
One lay open to a portrait of Brimstone. She saw the angel’s jaw clench at the sight of it, and she grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. He went to the window and looked out.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Akiva.”
“And you know mine how?”
A long beat. “The old man.”
Izîl. Of course. But… a thought struck her. Hadn’t Razgut said Izîl leapt to his death to protect her? “How did you find me?” she asked.
It was dark outside, and Akiva’s eyes reflected orange in the window glass. “It wasn’t difficult,” was all he said.
She was going to ask him to be specific, but he closed his eyes and leaned his brow against the glass. She said, “You can sit down,” and gestured to her deep green velvet armchair. “If you’re not going to burn anything.”
His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile. “I won’t burn anything.”
He loosed the buckle on the leather straps that crossed his chest, and his swords, sheathed between his shoulder blades, fell to the floor with two thunks that Karou did not think her downstairs neighbor would appreciate. Then Akiva sat, or rather collapsed, in the chair. Karou shoved her sketchbooks aside to make a space for herself on the bed, and seated herself in lotus position facing him.
The flat was tiny — just room for the bed and the chair and a
set of carved nesting tables, all atop Karou’s splurge of a Persian carpet, haggled for while it was still on the loom in Tabriz. One wall was all bookcases, facing one all of windows, and off the entry hall: a tiny kitchen, tinier closet, and a bathroom roughly the size of a shower stall. The ceilings were a fairly preposterous twelve feet, making even the main room taller than it was wide, so Karou had built a loft above the bookcases, which she had to climb to reach it, just deep enough to lounge on Turkish cushions and take in the view out the high windows: a direct line over the rooftops of Old Town to the castle.
She watched Akiva. He had let his head drop back; his eyes were closed. He looked so weary. He was rolling one shoulder gingerly, wincing as if it pained him. She considered offering him tea — she could have used some herself — but it felt too much like playing hostess, and she struggled to remember the dynamic between them: They were enemies.
Right?
She studied him, mentally correcting the drawings she’d done from memory. Her fingers itched to snatch up a pencil and draw him from life. Stupid fingers.
He opened his eyes and caught her looking. She blushed. “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said, discomposed.
He struggled upright. “I’m sorry. It’s like this, after battle.”
Battle. He watched guardedly as she processed the idea. She said, “Battle. With chimaera. Because you’re enemies.”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeated, as if the notion of enemies needed no justification.
“Yes. Why are you enemies?”
“We have always been. The war had been going on for a thousand years—”
“That’s weak. Two races can’t have been born enemies, can they? It had to start somewhere.”
A slow nod. “Yes. It started somewhere.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “What do you know of chimaera?”
What did she know? “Not a lot,” she admitted. “Until the night you attacked me, I didn’t even know there were more than the four of them. I didn’t know they were an entire race.”
He shook his head. “They aren’t one race. They’re many, allied.”
“Oh.” Karou supposed that made sense, with how unalike they were. “Does that mean there are others like Issa, like Brimstone?”
Akiva nodded. The idea gave new shades of reality to the world Karou had glimpsed. She imagined scattered tribes in vast landscapes, a whole village of Issas, families of Brimstones. She wanted to see them. Why had she been kept from them?
Akiva said, “I don’t understand what your life has been. Brimstone raised you, but just in the shop? Not in the fortress itself?”
“I didn’t even know what was on the other side of the inner door until that night.”
“He took you inside, then?”
Karou pursed her lips, remembering the Wishmonger’s fury. “Sure. Let’s say that’s what happened.”
“And what did you see there?”
“Why would I tell you that? You’re enemies, in which case, you’re my enemy, too.”
“I’m not your enemy, Karou.”
“They’re my family. Their enemies are mine.”
“Family,” Akiva repeated, shaking his head. “But where did you come from? Who are you, really?”
“Why does everybody ask me that?” Karou asked, animated by a flash of anger, though it was something she had wondered herself almost every day since she was old enough to understand the extreme oddness of her circumstances. “I’m me. Who are you?”
It was a rhetorical question, but he took it seriously. He said, “I’m a soldier.”
“So what are you doing here? Your war is there. Why did you come here?”
He took a deep, shuddering breath, sank back once more into the chair. “I needed… something,” he said. “Something apart. I have lived war for half a century—”
Karou interrupted him. “You’re fifty?”
“Lives are long, in my world.”
“Well, you’re lucky,” said Karou. “Here, if you want long life, you have to yank out all your teeth with pliers.”
The mention of teeth brought a dangerous flicker to his eyes, but he said only, “Long life is a burden, when it’s spent in misery.”
Misery. Did he mean himself? She asked him.
His eyes fluttered shut as if he’d been struggling to keep them open and abruptly abandoned the fight. He was silent for so long that Karou wondered if he’d fallen asleep, and gave up on her question. It felt intrusive, anyway. And she sensed he had meant himself. She thought of the way he’d looked in Marrakesh. What made the life go out of somebody’s eyes like that?
Again the caretaker impulse came to her, to offer him something, but she resisted it. She let herself stare at him — the cut of his features, the deep black of his brows and lashes, the bars inked on his hands, which were splayed open on the chair arms. With his head tilted back, she could see the welt on his neck and, a little higher up, the steady pulse of his jugular vein.
Once more his physicality struck her, that he was a flesh-and-blood being, though unlike any she had ever seen or touched. He was a melding of elements: fire and earth. She would have thought an angel would have something of air, but he didn’t. He was all substance: powerful and rugged and real.
His eyes opened and she jumped, caught staring once again. How many times was she going to blush, anyway?
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice faint. “I think I fell asleep.”
“Um.” She couldn’t help it. “Do you need some water?”
“Please.” He sounded so grateful she felt a pang of guilt for not offering sooner.
She untangled her legs from their lotus, rose, and brought him a glass of water, which he drained in a draft. “Thank you,” he said in a weirdly heartfelt way, as if he were thanking her for something much more profound than a glass of water.
“Uh. Uh-huh,” she said, awkward. She felt like she was hovering, standing there. There was really nowhere in the room to go except the bed, so she scooted back onto it. She kind of wanted to take off her boots, but that was something you didn’t do if there was any chance you might have to quickly flee or kick someone. Judging from Akiva’s plain exhaustion, she didn’t think she was in danger of either. The only danger was of foot smell.
She kept her boots on.
She said, “I still don’t get why you burned the portals. How does that end your war?”
Akiva’s hands tightened on the empty water glass. He said, “There was magic coming through the doorways. Dark magic.”
“From here? There’s no magic here.”
“Says the flying girl.”
“Okay, but that’s because of a wish, from your world.”
“From Brimstone.”
She acknowledged this with a nod.
“So you know that he’s a sorcerer.”
“I… Uh. Yeah.” She’d never really thought of Brimstone as a sorcerer. Did he do more than manufacture wishes? What did she know, really, and how much did she not know? Her ignorance was like standing in pure dark that could be either a closet or a vast, starless night.
A kaleidoscope of images whirled in her mind. The fizz of magic when she stepped into the shop. The array of teeth and gems, the stone tables in that underground cathedral, laid out with the dead… the dead who were not, as Karou had learned the hard way, actually dead. And she remembered Issa admonishing her not to make Brimstone’s life any harder — his “joyless” life, as she had said. His “relentless” work. What work?
She picked up a sketchbook at random, fanning past drawings of her chimaera so that they made a jerky kind of animation. “What was the magic?” she asked Akiva. “The dark magic.”
He didn’t answer, and she expected when she looked up to see that he had fallen asleep again, but he was watching the images flash past in her sketchbook. She snapped it closed, and his eyes fixed on her instead. Again, that vivid searching.
“What?” she asked, disco
mfited.
“Karou,” he said. “Hope.”
She raised her eyebrows, as if to say So?
“Why did he give you that name?”
She shrugged. It was getting tiring, not knowing anything. “Why did your parents name you Akiva?”
At the mention of his parents, Akiva’s face hardened, and the vivid watchfulness of his gaze glazed back to fatigue. “They didn’t,” he said. “A steward named me from a list. Another Akiva had been killed. The name opened up.”
“Oh.” Karou didn’t know what to make of that. It made her own strange upbringing seem cozy and familial by comparison.
“I was bred to be a soldier,” Akiva said in a hollow voice, and he closed his eyes again, tightly this time, as if gripped by a wave of pain. He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke again, he said far more than she expected.
“I was taken from my mother at five years old. I don’t remember her face, only that she did nothing when they came for me. It’s my earliest memory. I was so small that they were just legs, these looming soldiers surrounding me. They were the palace guard, so their shin plates were silver, and I could see myself mirrored in them, in all of them, my own terrified face over and over. They took me to the training camp, where I was one of a legion of terrified children.” He swallowed. “Where they punished our terror and taught us to conceal it. And that became my life, the concealment of terror, until I didn’t feel it anymore, or anything else.”
Karou couldn’t help imagining him as a child, afraid and forsaken. Tenderness welled up in her like tears.
In a fading voice, he said, “I exist only because of war — a war that began a thousand years ago with a massacre of my people. Babies, elders, no one spared. In Astrae, the capital of the Empire, the chimaera rose up to massacre the seraphim. We are enemies because the chimaera are monsters. My life is blood because my world is beasts.
“And then I came here, and humans…” A dreamlike wonder shaded into his tone. “Humans were walking freely, weaponless, gathering in the open, sitting in plazas, laughing, growing old. And I saw a girl… a girl with black eyes and gemstone hair, and… sadness. She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought… I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling. She was connected to the enemy, and though the only thing I wanted to do was look at her, I did what I was trained to do and I… I hurt her. And when I went home, I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and I was so grateful that you had defended yourself. That you didn’t let me kill you.”
