The emotion was unfamiliar to her. It was defeat.
In under an hour, Zuzana had perfected the art of the angry sigh. The sky remained resoundingly empty, and that wasn’t a good sign. Enough time had passed since Karou, Akiva, and Virko left the St. Regis for them to have routed Jael, but there was no evidence of it, and Zuzana’s phone screen remained as blank as the sky. Of course she’d texted warnings, and had even tried calling, but the calls went straight to voice mail and it reminded her of the awful days after Karou left Prague—and left Earth—when Zuzana hadn’t known if she was alive or dead.
“What are we going to do?”
They’d ducked into a narrow alley, Mik acting strangely furtive, and Zuzana seated Eliza on a stoop before slumping down beside her. This was one of those intensely Italian nooks—tiny, as if once upon a time all people had been Zuzana’s size—where medieval nudged up against Renaissance on the bones of ancient. On top of which some knob had contributed twenty-first century to the party by way of sloppy graffiti enjoining them to “Apri gli occhi! Ribellati!”
Open your eyes! Rebel!
Why, Zuzana wondered, do anarchists always have such terrible handwriting?
Mik knelt before her and laid his violin case on her lap. As soon as he released it, its weight sunk into her.
Its… weight? “Mik, why does your violin case weigh fifty pounds?”
“I was wondering,” he said, instead of answering. “In fairy tales, are the heroes, um, ever… thieves?”
“Thieves?” Zuzana narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “I don’t know. Probably. Robin Hood?”
“Not a fairy tale, but I’ll take it. A noble thief.”
“Jack and the Beanstalk. He stole all that stuff from the giant.”
“Right. Less noble. I always felt bad for the giant.” He flicked open the clasp on the case. “But I don’t feel bad about this.” He paused. “I hope we can count this as one of my tasks. Retroactively.”
And he flipped up the lid and the case was filled with… medallions. Filled. They varied in size from a quarter’s span to a saucer’s, in an array of patinas of bronze from brassy bright to dull dark brown. Some were entirely engulfed in verdigris, and all were roughly minted and graven with the same image: a ram’s head with thick coiled horns and knowing, slit-pupiled eyes.
Brimstone.
“So,” said Mik in a faux-lazy drawl, “when fake grandma said she didn’t have any more wishes? She lied. But look. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Now she really doesn’t.”
60
NO ONE DIES TODAY
The doors crashed open. Dominion flooded in.
Karou’s first impulse was to reach for pain to tithe for a glamour, and the pain was all too easy to find, because Razgut caught her wrist in his crushing grip and held her, so that it didn’t matter.
Visible or not, she was caught.
She flickered in and out, struggling with the Fallen. His chuckling sounded like a purr, and his grip was unbreakable. She had her crescent-moon blades to fall back on, but they had determined to shed blood only as a last resort, and so her hand paused on her hilt as she watched the soldiers, implacable and many, swords drawn and faces blank, file into the room. Once again, as had happened and happened over these past days, the turn of time went thick as resin. Viscous. Sluggish. How much can happen in a second? In three? In ten?
How many seconds does it take to lose everything you care about?
Esther, she thought, and in the midst of her frantic scuffle she was bitter but unsurprised. They had been expected here. This wasn’t the personal guard of six that Jael kept to guard his chamber. Here were thirty soldiers at least. Forty?
And there. Through the open doors, unhurried, to take up a position behind a deep buffer of soldiers, sauntered Jael. Karou saw him before he saw her, because he was looking straight ahead, unwavering. His ugliness was all she’d heard and more: the knotty rope of scar tissue and the way the wings of his nostrils seemed to creep out from beneath it like they were trapped there—as trampled mushrooms going softly to rot. His mouth was its own disaster, collapsing in on scraps of teeth, his breath coming and going through it like the squelch of steps in mud. But that wasn’t the worst thing about the emperor of seraphim. His expression was. It was intricate with hate. Even his smile was party to it: as malicious as it was exultant.
“Nephew,” he said, and the single wet word was layered with enmity and triumph.
Jael peered out between the shoulders of his soldiers at Akiva. Beast’s Bane, so-called, whose death he’d first argued for when the fire-eyed bastard was just a brat crying himself to sleep in the training camp. “Kill him,” he’d advised Joram then. He remembered the taste of those words in his mouth—keenly, because they’d been among the first he spoke when the bandages were removed from his face. The first he’d tried to speak, anyway, when it was agony, his mouth a red, wet wreck, and the revulsion he saw in his brother’s eyes—and everyone else’s—had still had the power to shame him. He had let a woman cut him. Never mind that he lived and she didn’t. He would wear her mark forever.
“If you’re smart, you’ll kill him now,” he’d told his brother. Looking back, it was so clearly the wrong tactic. Joram was emperor, and did not respond well to commands.
“What, still trying to punish her?” Joram had scoffed, dragging the specter of Festival between them. Both of them had tried and failed to humble the Stelian concubine; she might be dead, but she had never broken. “Killing her didn’t scratch the itch, you have to have the boy, too? What, do you think she’ll know it somehow, and suffer more?”
“He’s her seed,” Jael had persisted. “She was a spore, drifted here. An infection. Nothing safe can grow of her.”
“Safe? What use have I for a ‘safe’ warrior? He’s my seed, brother. Do you mean to suggest that my blood isn’t stronger than some feral whore’s?”
And there was Joram for you: blind, incurious. The lady Festival of the Far Isles had been many things, but “whore” wasn’t one of them.
“Prisoner” wasn’t, either.
However she’d come to be in the emperor’s harem, and why ever she had chosen to stay, it could not believably have been against her will. She was Stelian, and though she’d never revealed it, Jael was certain that she’d had power. The design, he had always thought, must have been her own. So… why would a daughter of that mystical tribe have put herself in Joram’s bed?