“What? Wake him?” Karou shook her head. “It’s better this way—”
“Karou, what do you think happened to him? He’s been tortured, and I need to know by who, and if he gave anything away.”
“Oh.” She saw the sense in that, and as much as she hated to wake Ziri to his pain, she did, as gently as she could.
It was terrible to see his eyes flutter open and cloud with agony. They sought her face, then flickered to the Wolf and back to her. Again she saw in them the urgency that had been there when he first arrived, and felt sure there was something he wanted to tell her.
Thiago was his best self as he knelt at his soldier’s side to question him. “Who did this?” he asked in a soothing tone, but it quickly became evident that Ziri couldn’t speak, not with the severed muscles in his cheeks. The Wolf had to settle for yes and no questions, which Ziri answered with nods and head shakes that clearly caused him pain.
“Did you tell them anything?” asked Thiago, who had learned no more than that “they” were seraphim.
Ziri gave a head shake, immediate and resolute.
“Well done. And… the rest of the team?”
Ziri shook his head again. Tears gathered in his lashes, and Karou understood that he meant they were dead. She had already supposed so, but the news still hit her like a punch. Five soldiers, dead. Balieros. Ixander. She remembered the unexpected softness of Ixander’s soul and how she’d wished to do better by him than that monstrous body.
“Were you able to glean their souls?” asked the Wolf, and Karou leaned forward, hoping.
Ziri hesitated. His eyes went to her. Despairing. Confused. He neither nodded nor shook his head. What did it mean? Thiago asked him again, but Ziri’s eyes fluttered shut, his lashes releasing tears to track down his ash-smudged face, and he moaned. He was lost in pain, and after a few more attempts, Thiago had to let it go with the reassurance that Ziri had not compromised their position. He stood. “Go ahead,” he told Karou, “and luck to you.”
She wished she could assert that luck had nothing to do with it, but the truth was she was praying for it herself. She was almost ready to ask Nitid for help. “Thank you,” she said, and as he went out, she reached for some vises from her table.
Ziri made an inarticulate sound and she looked to him to find him shaking his head, agitated. She didn’t understand at first, but then he hit himself on the chest with his mangled hands and she got it. He wanted her to use his pain.
“Oh, no. No. You’d have to stay conscious to tithe—”
He nodded, hit his chest again, and tried to speak. His face contorted and fresh blood pulsed from the slashes. “Stop,” Karou cried, reaching out to restrain his hands. Their fingers curled together and he held hers tight in spite of the agony it must be causing him. He nodded again.
There were tears in Karou’s eyes now. “Okay,” she said, wiping them away. “Okay.”
Ten returned with water and cloths, and Karou set about cleaning Ziri’s wounds. She had some antiseptic, and as she dabbed it on she felt Ziri’s pain amplify in the air around him, almost like currents of electricity. It was a terrible waste to let it all dissipate while she cleaned his wounds. She needed help. She turned to Ten, but one look at the she-wolf’s heavy, ungentle hands and she looked away again. She couldn’t entrust Ziri’s wounds to her. She looked over her shoulder. Zuzana and Mik were still in the room, standing against the far wall. Zuzana was wide-eyed, pale, and watching her intently. Surely this was not what she had meant when she had petitioned to be Igor, resurrectionist’s assistant, but she did have fine small hands and years of training at delicate work.
“Zuze, do you think you can help me? You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable—”
“What can I do?” She came at once to Karou’s side.
Ten tried to assert herself, but Karou waved her off and explained to Zuzana what she needed, and though her friend paled further, she took the clean gauze and water basin and antiseptic and turned to Ziri. “Hi,” she said. Aside to Karou: “How do you say hi in Chimaera?”
Karou told her, and she repeated it, and Ziri couldn’t say it back, but he nodded.
“This is the one you drew,” said Zuzana. “From your tribe.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well. Let’s get started.”
Karou nodded encouragement and watched for a moment to make sure Zuzana would be all right, and then, with a deep breath, she sank into the slash-and-burn landscape of Ziri’s pain and began to gather it, and use it.
She didn’t know how long she was within herself, in that strange place where she worked at Brimstone’s magic. This wasn’t the continuous, meditative, and fluid feel of a conjuring, but a faltering, puzzling piecing-together and picking at loose ends, trying to reconstruct what had once been whole. It seemed to take a very long time; she existed in a curious sense of suspension, like she was underwater and should have to surface to take a breath, but didn’t, and when she finally did come up it was like rising from black water. She blinked, breathed. The sun had risen; the shutters were closed but light seeped in around the edges, and though the fortress walls kept out the worst of the heat, the coolness of night had gone; it felt like much of the day had gone with it.
“Karou.” It was Zuzana’s voice, hushed with reverence. “That was… amazing.”
What was? Karou tried to focus her eyes. They were dry, as if she hadn’t blinked in hours, which maybe she hadn’t. She looked around. Ten was gone. Zuzana was still at her side; Mik was on her other side, his arm around her, and she realized with a slumping weariness that he was pretty much all that was holding her upright. Her exhaustion felt like gravity, inexorable. Her head had never been so heavy.
Finally she looked at Ziri, who had kept conscious for hours as well, feeding her his pain, and she found him looking back. He smiled at her. It was a smile full of exhaustion, sorrow, and other unreadable things, but it was a true smile, and not an ugly message carved in flesh.
She had done it.
She drank in the sight of his face. She had mended him, and almost without a trace of scarring. And his hands? That was the true test. She reached for them, held them and looked, and at first her breath caught because the scarring was ugly, knotted, and she thought she had failed, but then he flexed his fingers and the movements were fluid, and she breathed again. She breathed out a laugh and tried to rise. Dizziness broke over her.
The room fell sideways.
And that was all there was for a while.
50
LIKE JULIET
Zuzana perched on the edge of Karou’s bed. Her friend lay asleep, eyes closed, the skin around them deep blue. Her breathing was steady and deep. At her side lay Ziri, also sleeping, and their breathing had fallen into rhythm. Zuzana had bathed her friend’s face with cool water, and her hands and wrists, too, before laying them at her sides. “She needs rest,” she said to Mik. “And I need food. Tell me you’re not starving.”
In response, Mik flipped open his pack and dug something out. “Here,” he said.
Zuzana took it. It was—or had been—a bar of chocolate. “It melted on hell hike.”
“And then unmelted. In a new and exciting shape.”
Zuzana inhaled deeply in the direction of the window, and fanned air at Mik. “Do you smell that? It’s food. Excitingly shaped chocolate can be dessert. We can share it with the chimaera.”
Mik’s concern-crease appeared. “You don’t really want to go down there without Karou.”
“I do.”
“And share your chocolate.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Who are you, and what have you done with the real Zuzana?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, putting on a stiff affect and flat voice. “I am the human called Zuzana, and I am not trying to lure you out to the monsters. Trust me, meaty human—I mean Mik.”
Mik laughed. “I’m only not freaked out by that because you haven’t been out of my sight since we got here.” He took her hand. “Don’t go out of my sight, okay?”
She regarded him mildly. “What about the bathroom?”
“Ah. That.” They had made a pact never to be one of those couples who use the bathroom in front of each other. “I must maintain my mystique,” Mik had told her solemnly, holding her hand in both of his. Now he said, “Well, we should at least have a code word then, to determine whether the other one is an impostor. In case, you know, a monster steals my body in the five minutes I’m peeing.”
“You think they can steal bodies? And more importantly, you can pee for five minutes, and yet you wouldn’t even pee on Kaz for me?”
“I’ll be apologizing for that forever, won’t I? But seriously. Code word.”
“Fine. How about… impostor?”
Mik was expressionless. “Our impostor code word should be impostor?”
“Well, it’s easy to remember.”
“The whole point is to be sly. If I suspect you’re not really you, I need to find out without you knowing I know. Like in movies. I’ll have my back to you, you know, facing the camera, and I casually say, uh, haberdasher in conversation—”
“Haberdasher? That’s our code word?”
“Yes. And you fail to respond to it and my expression goes all bleak and horrible”—he demonstrated bleak and horrible—“because I’ve just found out your body has been taken over by hostile forces, but by the time I turn around I’m cool. I pretend to be fooled while I quietly plot my own escape.”
“Escape?” She stuck out her lower lip. “You mean you wouldn’t try to save me?”
“Are you kidding?” He pulled her against him. “I would stick my head down monster throats looking for you.”
“Yes. And hope that they’d conveniently swallowed me without chewing. Like in fairy tales.”
“Of course. And I cut them open and out you pop. Though they would be missing out on your amazing flavor if they didn’t chew.” He nibbled her neck and she squeaked and pushed him off. “Come on then, brave monster-throat-looker-downer, let’s go get some dinner. I am almost positive it will not be us on the menu.” She sniffed the air. “If only because they’re already cooking it.” When he started to renew his protest, she held up a hand. “What are you more afraid of: them, or me with low blood sugar?”
His stern caution-mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m not sure.”
“Bring your violin,” she said, and with a shrug, he did. Zuzana laid her hand on Karou’s forehead before leaving, and then they were out the door, skipping down the stairs on the trail of food.
Karou’s sleep was haunted and dangerously deep. She lost the thread of her days and nights, or her lives—human and chimaera—and wandered through tableaux of memory like they were rooms in a museum. She dreamed of Brimstone’s shop and her childhood there, of Issa and Yasri and Twiga, scorpion-mice and winged toads and… Brimstone. And even in her sleep she felt as if her vises were clamping down on her heart.