She dreamed of the battlefield at Bullfinch, the fog, and her first sight of Akiva as he lay dying.
Of the temple of Ellai. Love and pleasure and hope, the hugeness of the dream that had filled her in those weeks—she had never in either of her lives been as happy as that—and the delicacy of the wishbone that she and Akiva had held between them, their knuckles resting together in the moment before the snap.
And finally, Karou dreamed herself in a crypt, waking like a revenant—or like Juliet—on a stone slab. All around were bodies burned beyond recognition, and in their midst stood Akiva. His hands were on fire and his eyes were pits. He stared across the piled dead at her and said, “Help me.”
She came awake and upright in an instant, and day had again passed to night, and there was a warm presence at her side.
“Akiva,” she gasped. It spilled from the dream, this name that carved a piece out of her when she even so much as thought it. Spoken aloud it was sharp and cruel, a spike, a slap—and not only to herself but Ziri, if he heard. Because it was not Akiva beside her. Of course it wasn’t, and what ran through Karou’s mind in that instant was bitterness, a double pang: one for when she thought it was him.
And one for when she realized it wasn’t.
Akiva started at the sound of his name, the sound of Karou’s voice, the sight of her upright, awake, and so near. He couldn’t stop the surge of heat that answered her cry, a flare that must surely have rolled off his wings and touched her across the room. Touched her and… the one lying beside her, who didn’t move or open his eyes even when she cried out.
Akiva held himself still, glamoured, and Karou didn’t so much as look around; her eyes were on the Kirin, and Akiva couldn’t guess what had made her call his name, but whatever it was, it seemed already forgotten. She stared down at the Kirin and Akiva closed his eyes. He quieted his breathing and reassured himself that she couldn’t hear his heartbeat as he moved toward the window.
He wanted to stay. He never wanted to take his eyes off Karou again, but now that she had awakened—he’d just had to know that she would—he couldn’t stomach spying on her like this. And he wasn’t sure he could handle what might come next, when the Kirin woke.
He wouldn’t wonder what there was between the two of them. He had no right to wonder.
She was alive, that was what mattered.
That, and… she was the resurrectionist. That realization carried a numbness that blotted out nearly everything else.
Nearly.
Seeing her sleeping at another man’s side was too big to blot out. It was too like the sight of her friends through her window in Prague, and Akiva was shaken by the same absurd jealousy as he had been then, when for a moment he’d thought it was her. If he had any decency in him he would wish her happiness with one of her own kind, because whatever else was uncertain in these terrible days, one thing was sure: There was no hope that she could still love him.
Karou reached for the Kirin’s hand and it was more than Akiva could bear. He hurled himself out the window and was gone.
51
THE BETTER TO KILL YOU WITH
Karou bent to examine Ziri’s hands and see more closely the healing that she had worked on them. She felt the disturbance in the air behind her, but Ziri’s fingers closed on hers in the moment she would have turned, and the sparks that gusted in the window skittered across the dirt floor and spent themselves unseen.
“You’re awake,” Karou said. Had he heard what name she called out?
“I’m glad we’re alone,” Ziri said, and her reaction was to pull her fingers free and shift away from him. What did he mean? But he looked stricken by her response and seemed to become aware all at once of the unexpected intimacy of the scene. “No, not…” He broke off, flushed, sat up and back, putting space between them on the bed. His blush made him look very young. He added with haste, “I mean, because I have to tell you what happened. Before he comes back.”
He? Who? For a breathless instant Akiva’s name came again to Karou’s mind and she pushed it away in frustration. “Thiago?”
Ziri nodded. “I can’t tell him what really happened, Karou. But I need to tell you. And I… I need your help.”
Karou just looked at him. What did he mean? What kind of help? She felt slow, still wrapped in the haunting spell of her dreams, and there was something nagging at her that she couldn’t seem to focus on.
Ziri rushed to fill the silence. “I know I don’t deserve your help, not with the way I’ve treated you.” He swallowed, peered down at his hands, and flexed his fingers. “I don’t deserve this. I shouldn’t have listened to him.” Shame weighed heavily on his expression. He said, “I wanted to speak to you, and I should have. He ordered us not to, but it always felt wrong.”
Karou processed this. “You mean… Thiago ordered you not to speak to me? All of you?”
Ziri nodded, tense and miserable.
“What reason did he give?”
With reluctance, he told her, “He said we couldn’t trust you. But I do. Karou—”
“He said that?” She felt slapped. She felt stupid. “He told me he was working on you all, that you’d come to trust me as he did.”
Ziri said nothing, but the message was clear. Thiago had been lying to her all along, and how could it even surprise her? “What else did he say?” she demanded.
Ziri looked helpless. “He reminded us, often, of your… treason.” His voice was soft, his posture hunched. “That you sold our secret to the seraphim.”
She blinked. “Sold—?” What? This did surprise her, the magnitude of this lie. “He said that?”
Ziri nodded and Karou reeled. Thiago had been telling the chimaera that she sold secrets to the seraphim? No wonder they hissed traitor at her. “I never sold anything,” she said, and it occurred to her: She hadn’t sold anything, and she hadn’t told anything, either. She’d been so busy wallowing in her shame these past weeks that she hadn’t even questioned whether it was justified. What exactly was her crime? Loving the enemy, that was a grave thing; setting him free, graver still, but they didn’t know she had done that, and anyway… she had not told Akiva the chimaera’s deepest secret.
Thiago had.
The White Wolf was blaming her for his own breach, keeping her isolated from the rest of the company, feeding steady lies in both directions. All to control her, and her magic, and it had been working neatly for him, hadn’t it? She’d done everything he asked.
Not anymore. Her heart was beating fast. She looked at Ziri. “It’s not true,” she said, and it came out like a twisted whisper. “I didn’t tell… the angel.” She couldn’t say his name again. “I never told him about resurrection. I swear it.” She wanted him to believe her, for someone to know and believe that though she might be a traitor in some measure, she had not done that. And then it came to her that Brimstone might have thought she had.
She felt sick. If he had, he must have forgiven her for it, because he had given her life, safety, and even—though she hadn’t realized it until she lost him—love. And it killed her to think he might have believed she had betrayed his secret, his magic, his pain. Even more, it killed her that she would never be able to tell him the truth. Whatever he had thought, he had died thinking it, and the finality of it brought his death home to her in a way that nothing really had so far.
“I believe you,” Ziri said.
That was something, but not enough. Karou held her stomach, which, in spite of being empty to concavity—or maybe because of it—was rolling with nausea. Ziri reached out an uncertain hand and drew it back. “I’m sorry,” he said, distressed.
She nodded, steadied herself. “Thank you for telling me.”
“There’s more—”
But then, shocking in its volume: a sound from outside. A shriek, a wail. Karou’s heartbeat was midskip when it hit her what it was that had been nagging at her. It was absence. Zuzana’s and Mik’s. Where were her friends?
And who had just screamed?
Out in the court, Zuzana covered her ears and gritted her teeth.
Mik was more diplomatic. He nodded to the chimaera named Virko, who had just drawn an earsplitting skreeek from his violin. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s, um, how it makes sound.”
Virko was holding the instrument more or less correctly. Though it was dwarfed by the jut of his jaw, his big hands managed the bow all right. One thing Zuzana had noticed was that many of the chimaera had human hands—or human-ish—even though the rest of their body might be solidly beast. Judging from the array of swords and axes and daggers and bows and other implements of killing and dismemberment that they carried around, she gathered that manual dexterity was an imperative.
The better to kill you with, my dears.
For all that, though, weapons and claws and such, they weren’t that scary. Oh, well, they were scary as hell to look at, but their manners weren’t menacing. Maybe it was because Zuzana and Mik had crossed paths first with Bast, the one from Karou’s floor, who had understood their pantomime of eating and brought them with her to the food, introducing them around with words Zuzana and Mik could not understand.
“Do you want these humans grilled or minced in a pie?” Mik had translated under his breath, but Zuzana could see that he was in awe more than he was scared. The chimaera had seemed more curious than anything else, really. Maybe a bit suspicious, and there were some who turned her blood cold for no better reason than the unblinkingness of their stares; she stayed away from those, but overall it had been fine. Dinner was bland but no worse than what they’d eaten at a tourist trap in Marrakesh on their way here, and they’d learned a few words of Chimaera: dinner, delicious, tiny, the last—she hoped only the last—in regard to herself. She was quite the object of fascination, and submitted to pats on the head with unusual good grace.
Now, in the court, it was Mik’s violin that was the object of fascination. Virko produced a few more hellish shrieks and a sawing sound before another chimaera shoved him and growled something that must have meant give it back, because Virko handed it over and gestured to Mik to play, which he proceeded to do. Zuzana had learned to recognize his signature pieces, and this was the Mendelssohn that always raised the hairs on the back of her neck and made her feel happy and sad, salty and sweet at the same time. It was big and intricate, kind of… cute in some places, but epic in others, and wrenching, and Zuzana, standing back and watching, saw the change it worked on the creatures arrayed around her.
First: the startle, the surprise that the same instrument that had produced Virko’s skreeek could do this. There was some exchange of glances, some murmurs, but that fell away quickly and there was only wonder and stillness, music and stars. Some soldiers hunkered down on haunches or settled on walls, but most stayed standing. From doorways and windows others peered and slowly emerged, including the unsoldierly stooped figures of the two kitchen women.