The next ten seconds felt as dense as folded iron.
Issa reached them at the same moment that Lisseth spoke up. “What orders, sir, for us?”
Issa embraced Mik and Zuzana, and shot Karou a look that glittered with some bright meaning. She looked excited, Karou saw. She looked vindicated.
“I’ve given my order,” Thiago told Lisseth, cool. “Was I less than perfectly clear?”
Vindicated? About what? Karou’s mind leapt at once to the previous night. After she had dismissed Akiva with a cool finality she certainly didn’t feel, and sent him away for what she’d guessed would be the last time, Issa had told her, “Your heart is not wrong. You don’t have to be ashamed.”
Of loving Akiva, she’d meant. And what had Karou’s answer been? “It doesn’t matter.” She’d tried to believe it: that her heart didn’t matter, that she and Akiva didn’t matter, that there were worlds at stake and that was what mattered.
“Sir,” argued Nisk, Lisseth’s Naja partner. “You can’t mean to let these angels live—”
Let these angels live. That this could even be in question: Akiva’s life, and Liraz’s. They had come back here to warn them. The real Thiago wouldn’t have hesitated to gut them for their trouble. Akiva didn’t know this wasn’t the real Thiago, and he’d come back anyway. For her sake.
Karou looked to him, found his eyes waiting for hers, and met them with a sting of clarity that was the final dissolution of the lie.
It mattered. They mattered, and whatever it was that had made them not kill each other on Bullfinch beach all those years ago… mattered.
Thiago didn’t answer Nisk. Not with words, anyway. The look he turned on him scythed the rest of the soldier’s words into silence. The Wolf had always had that power; Ziri’s appropriation of it was startling.
“To the court,” he said with soft menace. “Except for Ten. We will have words about my… expectations… when I’m done here. Go.”
They went. Karou might have enjoyed their shame-faced retreat, but that the Wolf turned his gaze on Issa next, and on her. “You, too,” he said.
As the Wolf would. He had never trusted Karou, but only manipulated and lied to her, and in this situation he absolutely would dismiss her along with the rest. And just as Ziri had his part to play, she had hers. In secret she might be the guiding strength of this new purpose, anointed by Brimstone with the Warlord’s blessing, but in the eyes of the chimaera army, she was still—at least for now—the girl who had stumbled back blood-soaked from the pit.
Thiago’s broken doll.
They could only work from the starting point they had, and that was the pit—gravel, blood, death, and lies—and she had no choice in this moment but to uphold the charade. She nodded her obedience to the Wolf, and it was acid in the pit of her belly to see Akiva’s eyes darken. By his side, Liraz was worse. Liraz was contemptuous.
That was a little hard to take.
The Wolf is dead! She wanted to scream. I killed him. Don’t look at me like that! But of course, she couldn’t. Right now, she had to be strong enough to look weak.
“Come on,” Karou said, urging Issa, Zuzana, and Mik forward.
But Akiva didn’t let it go so easily. “Wait.” He spoke in Seraphic, which none but Karou would understand. “It’s not him I came to talk to. I would have sought you alone to give you the choice if I could. I want to know what you want.”
What I want? Karou quelled a ripple of hysteria that felt dangerously like laughter. As if this life bore any resemblance to what she wanted! But, given the circumstances, was it what she wanted? She’d scarcely considered what it might mean. An alliance. The chimaera rebels actually joining with Akiva’s bastard brethren to take on the Empire?
Simply put, it was crazy. “Even united,” she said, “we would be massively outnumbered.”
“An alliance means more than the number of swords,” Akiva said. And his voice was like a shadow from another life when he added, softly, “Some, and then more.”
Karou stared at him for an unguarded second, then remembered herself and forced her eyes down. Some, and then more. It was the answer to the question of whether others could be brought around to their dream of peace. “This is the beginning,” Akiva had said moments earlier, his hand to his heart, before turning to Thiago. No one else knew what that meant, but Karou did, and she felt the heat of the dream stir in her own heart.
We are the beginning.
She’d said it to him long ago; he was the one saying it now. This was what his offer of alliance meant: the past, the future, penitence, rebirth. Hope.
It meant everything.
And Karou couldn’t acknowledge it. Not here. Nisk and Lisseth had halted on the hill to peer back at them: Karou the “angel-lover” and Akiva the very angel, speaking quietly in Seraphic while Thiago just stood there and let them? It was all wrong. The Wolf they knew would have had blood on his fangs by now.
Every moment was a test of the deception; every syllable uttered made the Wolf’s forbearance less tenable. So Karou dropped her gaze to the baked, stony earth and rounded her shoulders like the broken doll she was supposed to be. “The choice is Thiago’s,” she said in Chimaera, and tried to act her role.
She tried.
But she couldn’t leave it at that. After everything, Akiva was still chasing the ghost of hope. Out of more blood and ash than they had ever even imagined in their days of love, he was trying to conjure it back to life. What other way forward was there? It was what she wanted.
She had to give him some sign.
Issa was holding her elbow. Karou leaned into her, turning so that the serpent woman’s body came between herself and the watching chimaera, and then, so quickly that she feared Akiva might miss it, she raised her hand and touched her heart.
It pounded in her chest as she moved away. We are the beginning, she thought, and was overcome by the memory of belief. It came from Madrigal, her deeper self, who had died believing, and it was acute. She bent into Issa, hiding her face so that no one would see her flush.
Issa’s voice was so faint it almost seemed like her own thought. “You see, child? Your heart is not wrong.”
And for the first time in a long, long time, Karou felt the truth of it. Her heart was not wrong.
Out of betrayal and desperation, amid hostile beasts and invading angels and a deception that felt like an explosion waiting to happen, somehow, here was a beginning.