“This is how,” said Karou, clearing her throat and assuming what she intended to be the stuffy voice of history. “Eleventh January, Year of the… Neek-Neek. The garrison at Cape Armasin is disassembled for timber. A town is plotted on the site. There is indecision as to the height of a proposed clock tower. Council meets, argues…” She paused for suspense, shifting her eyeballs from side to side. “Splits the difference. Clock tower duly built. Vegetables grown and eaten. Many sunsets admired.”
Akiva laughed. “That,” he said, “is a willful failure of imagination. I’m sure a lot of interesting things happen in this imaginary town of yours.”
“Okay then. You go.”
“Okay.” He paused to think. When he spoke, he approximated Karou’s history voice. “Eleventh January, Year of the Neek-Neek. The garrison at Cape Armasin is disassembled for timber. The town plotted on the site is the first of mixed race in all of Eretz. Chimaera and seraphim live side by side as equals. Some even…” His words caught, and when he resumed talking, it was in his own voice, if a tender, careful version of it. “Some even live together.”
Live together. Did he mean—?
Yes. He meant. He held Karou’s gaze steady and warm. She had imagined it, or tried to. Living together. It always had the wordless, golden unreality of a dream.
“Some,” he went on, “lie together under a shared blanket and breathe the scent of each other in their sleep. They dream of a temple lost in a requiem grove, and of the wishes that were made there… and came true.”
She remembered the temple grove—every night, every moment, every wish. She remembered the pull of him, like a tide. The heat of him. The weight of him. But not with this body. To this body every sensation would be new. She flushed, but didn’t look away.
“Some,” he said, soft now, “don’t have much longer to wait.”
She swallowed, finding her voice. “You’re right,” she allowed, practically whispering. “That’s not dull.”
Not much longer to wait. “Not much” was still longer, though, and for the most part it was tolerable.
Not tolerable: the two nights they spent at the Dominion camp, when Elyon, Ormerod, and a cluster of others, including the bull centaur Balieros—stepping into Thiago’s command—kept them engaged in planning until dawn so that Karou, who had determined to steal Akiva somehow into one of the empty campaign tents, never got the chance.
Tolerable: the third morning, leaving—finally—because they were leaving together.
There was some consternation about it. Ormerod held that Akiva would be needed in the capital, which had yet to be brought, gently or otherwise, into this new post-Empire era. Akiva replied that they would be better off without the hysteria his presence would ignite. “Besides,” he said, “I have a prior commitment.”
When his expression softened then, with a look to Karou, the nature of his “commitment” was easily misconstrued.
“Surely it can wait,” protested Ormerod, incredulous.
Karou blushed, seeing what they all thought—and they weren’t wrong to think it. Will it ever be time for cake? Having kissed Akiva at last didn’t make the waiting any easier, but had just served to stoke her hunger for him. But that wasn’t the commitment Akiva was referring to, anyway. “Let me help you,” he had pled back at the caves, when Karou had told him what work lay ahead for her. “It’s all I want, to be beside you, helping you. If it takes forever, all the better, if it’s forever with you.”
It had seemed so far off then, but here they were. Work to do and pain to tithe and cake around the edges.
The edges, she pledged, would be ample. Hadn’t they earned it?
Liraz settled the matter by declaring that the chimaera needed a seraph escort anyway in this critical time, when they were still so far from anything like an easy peace, and their mission was one of such importance. She spoke in the same quiet and unnerving way as she had in the war council, and with the same effect: Liraz spoke, and truth was born.
It was a power, Karou thought, looking at her with ever-increasing respect, that the angel hadn’t begun to explore. And she liked it a lot better when it was used for her, not against her.
And it couldn’t be only the sway Liraz held over them, that once the seraphim were made to understand just what mission of importance the chimaera now undertook, they tried to volunteer for it.
It was then, looking around at their faces, that Karou knew her first draught of easy hope for the future of Eretz. As it had before, when Liraz admitting singing Ziri’s soul into her canteen, her heart felt pulled to pieces.
Every Misbegotten within earshot volunteered to go to Loramendi, and help with the excavation of souls.
They were all of them warriors; each had their haunting memories, and most, their shames. None had ever had the chance to… unmassacre a city before. In some sense, that was what they would do, unearthing the souls buried in Brimstone’s cathedral—those hidden thousands who had chosen their death that day for its hope of rebirth. Brimstone’s hope, and the Warlord’s: that a girl raised human, with no memory of her true identity and no knowledge of the magic she contained, might somehow, someday, find her way to them and bring them out.
And the heavier hope still: that there could be a world worth bringing them out to.
It seemed crazy now, on this side of things, that it could have come to pass, and though Karou stood in the midst of several hundred soldiers of both sides who had had their role in it, it was as though a gleam drew her gaze to Akiva, without whom it never could have. The wishbone. Ziri’s life. Issa’s thurible. The offer of alliance. All of it. Every step of the way, he had been there. But before, long before, there had been the dream. A “life wish,” as he had said once. For a different sort of life.
Every once in a while, back in her human life as an artist, it had happened that Karou would do a drawing that was so much better than anything she’d done before that it would stun her. When that happened, she wouldn’t be able to stop looking at it. She’d come back to it all day long, and even wake in the middle of the night just to gaze at it, with wonder and pride.
It was like that looking at Akiva, too.
He was as fixed on her as she was on him, and there was hunger where their eyes met. It wasn’t passion, simply, or desire, but something bigger that contained those things and many others. It was hunger and satiety at once—“wanting” and “having” meeting, and neither extinguishing the other.