Happiness has to go somewhere, Karou remembered, and she settled deeper into the water with a sigh. Some fates were difficult to accept, but this wasn’t one of them. “Well, okay,” she said, with mock reluctance. “If I have to.”
They washed, and Karou emerged from the pool feeling purified in body and spirit. It was good to be cared for by women, and what a group they were. The deadliest of all the chimaera alongside the deadliest of seraphim, with a Naja, a ferocious neek-neek in deceptively adorable human form, a pair of fire-eyed Stelians of unfathomable power, and Eliza, who had been the answer. The key that fit the lock. And also, just a really cool chick.
They brushed Karou’s hair and twisted it, still damp, into vine-tied coils down her bare back. They brought out light, silken raiments in the Stelian style and held lengths of cloth against her skin. “White won’t do for you,” said Scarab, tossing a dress aside. “You’ll look like a phantom.” She produced, instead, a whisper of midnight-dark silk, aglimmer with clusters of tiny crystals like constellations, and Karou laughed. She let it pass through her hands like water, and the past with it.
“What?” asked Zuzana.
“Nothing,” she replied, and let them dress her. It was a kind of sari gathered over one shoulder, leaving her arms bare, and Karou almost wished for a bowl of sugar and a puff with which to dust herself. An echo of another first night. The gown was so like the one she’d worn at the Warlord’s ball, when Akiva had come to find her.
“Do you want to keep your clothes?” Eliza asked, nudging the discarded pile with her foot.
“Burn them,” said Karou. “Oh. Wait.” She delved into a trouser pocket for the wishbone she’d carried with her all these months. “Okay,” she said. “Now burn them.”
She felt like a bride as they led her back outside. The rain had stopped, but the night was alive with its memory in drips and rivulets, and with creature trills and honey scents, the air balmy and rich with mist.
And there was Akiva.
Soaked to the skin and haloed in vapor where the heat of his body was cooking away the rain. His eyes were ablaze, he was furious with waiting. His hands shook and clenched, and then stilled when he saw Karou.
Time stuttered, or else it only felt like it did. No use, any longer, for those invasive seconds in which they weren’t touching. They’d had too many of them already, and made short work of these final few.
They flew together. Time itself leapt out of the way, and Karou and Akiva were spinning, and the ground was falling away. The island was falling away. The sky drew them up and the moons hid in the clouds, keeping their tears to themselves, and their regret, which belonged to the ended age.
Lips and breath and wings and dance. Gratitude, relief, and hunger. And laughter. Laughter breathed and tasted. Faces kissed, no spot neglected. Lashes wet with tears, salt kissed lips to lips. Lips, at last, soft and hot—the soft, hot center of the universe—and heartbeats not in unison but passed back and forth across the press of bodies, like a conversation made up only of the word yes.
And so it was. Karou and Akiva held on to each other and didn’t let go.
It was not a happy ending, but a happy middle—at last, after so many fraught beginnings. Their story would be long. Much would be written of them, some of it in verse, some sung, and some in plain prose, in volumes to be penned for the archives of cities not yet built. Against Karou’s express wish, none of it would be dull.
Which she would have cause to be glad of a million times over, beginning that night.
Flight through sifting mists, hands joined. An island among hundreds. A house on a small crescent beach. Akiva had spoken truly when he told Melliel it was a stretch to call it a house. He’d imagined a door once to shut out the world, but there was no door here, so that the world seemed an extension of the house itself: sea and stars forever.
The structure was a pavilion: a thatched roof on posts, snug against the cliff and sheltered by it, its floor of soft sand, with living vines trailing down from the cliff to make green walls on two sides. That much Akiva had done before today. And there were a table and chairs. Well, they were hewn driftwood, but the “table” had a cloth on it, finer than it deserved. And now a wooden bowl of fruit sat atop that, and a beautiful kettle, too, with a box of tea and a pair of cups. Lanterns hung from hooks, and lengths of diaphanous fabric made a third, gently billowing wall, transparent as sea mist.
Nightingale’s gift had been unwrapped and given its proper place, and when Akiva brought Karou to the home he’d made for her—a place out of fantasy, so perfect that she forgot how to breathe and had to learn again in a hurry—his wish had all but come true already.
On the bed: a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together. And some time in the night they met on it and faced each other across lessening space, knees curled beneath themselves and wishbone held between.
And they hooked their fingers around its slender spurs, and pulled.
The End