Then, as delicately as she could with her jittery fingers, she lifted the cap aside.
She strained, listening with her senses. Reaching, hoping. It was like leaning forward and breathing deeply—without leaning, without breathing. Some unknowable part of herself shifted forward, unwound, reached. What had Akiva said? A scheme of energies, more than mind and more than soul. She reached with it, whatever it was, and felt…
… home.
That was what came to her. Her home and Ziri’s. Maybe all of theirs now. She would gladly share. They could be a big, crazy tribe, come one, come all, angels and devils at rest and in love, or arguing, or sparring, or learning the violin from Mik, or teaching their half-caste babies to fly on wings that were neither Kirin nor seraph, but some kind of feather-bat-fire wings. Or else it would be like eye color; you’d inherit one or the other. Was she thinking about babies? Karou was laughing, and nodding, and Liraz was sobbing and laughing, and they fell against each other, the canteen between them, its precious cap replaced, and their relief was a shared country, because against her senses Karou had felt the stir of stormhunters’ wings, and the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains, the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that filled their caves with music, and also: a note that she didn’t remember from before. It was fire, held in cupped hands, and she thought she knew what it meant.
Liraz may have captured Ziri’s soul like a butterfly in a bottle, but that was only a formality. It was already hers.
And, clearly, judging by the state of her, laugh-sobbing in Karou’s arms, hers was his, too.
74
CHAPTER ONE
So. Jael was deposed, and the portals closed with no weapons brought through them to wreak new havoc. The Dominion were vanquished, leaving the Second Legion, or so-called common army, as the dominant force in the land. They were the largest army, and had always occupied a middle ground between the high-bred Dominion and the bastard Misbegotten, and if they had to choose—as they had found themselves in the unthinkable position of doing—they would side with the bastards.
Under the auspices of a commander named Ormerod whom Akiva knew and respected, they had done so, de facto nullifying the Misbegotten death sentence and declaring an end to hostilities.
Declaring an end and achieving an end were different animals, and aside from tensions that existed between the seraph armies, the Second Legion were a long way from considering their chimaera foes to be companions in arms. For now, they had grudgingly made the same promise that the Misbegotten had made days earlier, and Karou hoped it would not have to be tested in the same way. They would not strike first.
A détente is not an alliance, but it’s a start.
Elyon, it transpired, had—after the mystifying Adelphas victory—been the one to go to Cape Armasin in Akiva’s stead and plead the rebel cause, and he had clearly done well. Now he and Ormerod would escort Jael back to Astrae to begin a new era in his life. From captain to emperor to… exhibit.
The Several Days’ Emperor was going to star in his own zoo.
No one would have faulted Liraz for killing him, and none would have mourned him. But as she stood over the writhing, screaming heap of him, she had discovered that she lacked the will for it. Not just for the sake of her tally, and to be done with killing, but also for the simple reason that he clearly wanted her to.
In the Tower of Conquest, it had been she who’d courted death rather than face the fate he had picked out for her. “Kill me with my brothers, or you’ll wish you had,” she had spat at him, and he had feigned offense. “You would die with them, sooner than scrub my back?”
“A thousand times,” she had choked out. And he? He had pressed a hand to his heart. “My dear. Don’t you see? Knowing that is what makes it sweet.”
Now it was she who knew the sweetness of denying death rather than granting it. “I was thinking,” she had mused, standing over him, “that it would do the people good to see with their own eyes the tyranny they’ve been freed of. It’s one thing to hear about the horror of you, and another to experience it firsthand.”
He’d stopped his writhing to stare up at her, aghast.
“Come and see, this is what an emperor is,” she’d said, warming to her idea. Now she was remembering what she had witnessed in the Hintermost, when Jael had skewered Ziri’s palms through with swords and force-fed him the ashes of his comrades. “Come and take a peek, see what we’ve saved you from, and you’ll be down on your knees thanking us. And possibly vomiting.”
To his savage response—a stream of spittle-flecked invectives and a series of facial contortions that achieved for him new heights of monstrosity—she had replied only, mildly, “Yes, that. Do exactly that when they come to look at you. Perfect.”
As for true justice, the Empire had no system in place for it, and none knew how to undertake building one, not to mention a new system of governance to take the place of the wretched one they had just toppled. And then there was the work of freeing the slaves, as well as finding occupation for the many men and women who knew no livelihood but war.
If there was one thing they did know on this night in the foothills of the Veskal Range, it was how much they did not know. In essence, they had written “Chapter One” on the first page of a new book, and everything—everything—remained to be written. Karou hoped that it would be a long book, and dull.
“Dull?” Akiva repeated, skeptical. They sat together at the edge of the firelight, eating Dominion rations. Karou was intrigued to see Liraz between Tangris and Bashees on the far side, and she thought they were good company for one another.
“Dull,” Karou affirmed. History conditioned you for epic-scale calamity. Once, when she was studying the death tolls of battles in World War I, she’d caught herself thinking, Only eight thousand men died here. Well, that’s not many. Because next to, say, the million who died at the Somme, it wasn’t. The stupendous numbers deadened you to the merely tragic, and history didn’t average in the tame days for balance. On this day, no one in the world was murdered. A lion gave birth. Ladybugs lunched on aphids. A girl in love daydreamed all morning, neglecting her chores, and wasn’t even scolded.
What was more fantastical than a dull day?
“Good-dull,” she clarified. “No wars to spice it up. No conquests or slave raids, only mending and building.”
“And how is that dull?” asked Akiva, amused.