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.

“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.

And whether it was Liraz’s intervention, or the strength of that look, no one bothered arguing further. And under what chain of command did he fall, anyway? Who could tell Akiva what to do? He would, of course, accompany Karou.

Once upon a time,

there was only darkness.

And there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it.

75

WANT

They were two score Misbegotten and as many chimaera. All the others—the joined force that had so darkened the skies of the Veskal Range—would fly south to introduce themselves to Astrae.

“We’ll need thuribles and incense,” said Amzallag, who would lead the excavation of Brimstone’s cathedral. He had lost his family in Loramendi, and was eager to be off and begin. Shovels and picks, tents and food they liberated from the Dominion camp, but these more specialized supplies would be harder to come by, and so it was decided, for this reason and others, that they would fly first to the Kirin caves, which were, in any case, almost on the way.

Karou was eager to see Issa, and she was conscious, too, that those left behind at the caves hadn’t had food to sustain them for long, nor—being wingless, for the most part—the means to leave and seek it.

In addition, though she and Liraz and Akiva had kept this news contained among themselves for now, there was the question of Ziri. None but they—and Haxaya—knew that a soul had been gleaned from the White Wolf’s body, and so Karou had hope that the entire episode of the deception might be swept under the carpet of history. It was Thiago, the Warlord’s firstborn, fiercest enemy of seraphim, who had changed his heart and banded together with the Empire’s outcast bastards to forge a new way forward. Did that rob Ziri of the glory due him for his very great role in their victory?

Maybe. But Karou thought it would sit just fine with him. Maybe, in time, the truth could even be told. As for the last son of the Kirin, Karou knew they would have to concoct some good story to explain his abrupt return to them, keeping it free of any association with the White Wolf’s death. But as his end had been a mystery—he had simply never returned from Thiago’s last mission of massacre—and none but Karou had ever seen his body, she thought it could be managed. It seemed right that he should make his reappearance among them at the home of his ancestors—and her own.

Perhaps Karou would even find the time, now, to return to her own childhood village deep inside the mountain.

And there was one more reason for her eagerness to return to the caves, of course—last but not least—and that was their dark and branching ways, where those with a will for it could easily slip away for an hour or three. Or seven.

She had a will for it.

Liraz had her own sharp hope. It dug at her heart like a spike, and she didn’t speak it aloud. She had the horn tip pressed deep in her pocket, but Karou carried the canteen now, and Liraz missed the weight of it at her hip. When would she resurrect him? Liraz wouldn’t ask her. It was just that they had never said, outright. At the time, outside the palisade, it hadn’t seemed in any way necessary. The tears and laughing! If anyone had tried telling her that she would ever sob into that blue hair… well. She would have given them a very icy look. No more than that, because that would be brutish.

You wouldn’t want to be brutish, she imagined Hazael’s voice in her head, the lazy, laughing cadence of it. You’ll scare all your suitors away.

It was a subject only he would have dared to broach. Liraz had never looked at a man—or a woman—not like… that. If he’d known that the very thought terrified her, he’d certainly never let on. Always, he had built up her strength.

“Anyone who takes on my sister,” he had postured once, all puffed-out bravado, “will have to deal with… my sister.” And then he’d dived behind her and cowered.

Haz. And what would he make of her now, pining for… for the air inside a canteen? Was that what this was, pining? She’d witnessed her brothers’ passions—so very different, the pair of them. Haz’s were mercurial things, frequent, and played for humor. The Misbegotten may have been forbidden the pleasures of the flesh, but it had never stopped him. He’d fallen in love like it was a hobby—and out of it the same way. Liraz supposed that meant it wasn’t love.

Akiva, though. Once only, and forever.

Silent, suffering Akiva. Liraz thought that she had never felt a closer kinship with him than she did now. She knew it wasn’t because he had changed, but she had. It was curious. To feel longing like this, with all the fear that went with it. She should have hated it. And part of her did. Feelings are stupid, a voice in her still insisted, but it was a diminishing voice. The louder one she scarcely recognized as her own.

I want, it said, and it seemed to come from deep within her, from a place, perhaps, where many things were patiently waiting to be discovered. Real laughter, for one. Haz’s kind: tumbling, easy, loose-muscled, and free. Touch, for another, though just the thought of it set her heart racing.

She knew what Haz would say. He’d give her a smug look and say, “You see? There’s a much better way to get your blood moving than battle.” And he would add, she didn’t doubt, because he had said it enough times, “And please unbraid your hair. It hurts me just to look at it. What did it ever do to deserve such punishment?”

Liraz laughed a little, imagining him, and she might have cried a little, too, missing him, but no one saw, and her tears froze before they hit the mountains, because they had climbed high into the Adelphas now, and she cast Karou a glance, just enough to catch the glint of silver at her hip where the canteen swayed.

When? she wondered.

And What then?

Akiva, for the duration of the journey, felt divided in two.

There was the memory of kissing Karou, and everything he’d said to her, and everything he’d thought but hadn’t said—which was the far greater portion—and every stir in him, when his eyes traced the lines of her in flight, his hands aching to trace them, too… She should have been all he could think of. They would spend a night at the Kirin caves to break their journey, and he knew that it would not be another night spent apart. They had come to the end of those, at last, and it felt like a bubble inside him, this great pressure in his chest: joy and hunger and a shout building, a wordless cry of gladness ready to burst from him and echo.

He wanted only to set down in the entrance cavern, call hasty greetings to those who awaited them, drop his gear on the ice-rimed floor and let it lie there. Seize Karou’s hand, and draw her, running, away with him. Into the caves, and in, and in, and take her, and hold her, and laugh against her neck in disbelief that she was finally his, and that the world was finally theirs, and this was all he wanted.

Or rather, it was all that he wanted to want.

But there was an intrusion in his mind. It had been there for some time. Most recently: hearing the accounts of victory in the Adelphas, and seeing the vague puzzlement of those who did the telling. The dream logic of it, and how they all accepted it because it had happened. The way they accepted what had happened in the caves when they first faced one another, blooded, ready to kill and die—and hadn’t.