Karou’s hand trembled, holding her tea, and she steadied it with the other, to little effect. “When did you get back?” she asked him, changing the subject. He had been to Astrae in his capacity as representative of the Stelian court. Liraz and Ziri had gone, too, to meet with Elyon and Balieros and discuss plans for the coming winter.
“Last night,” Carnassial told her. “Some of yours came back with us. Ixander is furious to have missed the chance, in his words, to become a god.”
A god. A godstar.
There had been plenty of discussion of what this meant since the night of Eliza’s sending, and for the most part, they agreed that by no feasible interpretation were they going to become “gods.” There was an extraordinary unity and solemnity among them, though, in accepting their fate. They would play a part in the realization of myth. It might have been a seraph myth before, but now it belonged to all of them. Mortal or immortal was beside the point. A war loomed, of such epic scope as made knees buckle and minds go dim, and they were the bright warriors who would banish the darkness.
“I’m going to just go ahead and consider myself a god,” Zuzana had said. “You guys believe what you want.”
Karou enjoyed the idea that you could “believe what you want,” as though reality were a buffet line. If only.
Triple helpings of cake, please.
Carnassial went on about Ixander. “He says by right he should be one of the godstars, since he wanted to return to the Kirin caves with you, but was ordered to Astrae instead. I was afraid he was going to challenge me for my place.” He smiled.
Karou found her own smile, imagining the big ursine soldier arguing loopholes with fate. “Who knows,” she said. “It’s not like we could freeze Eliza’s sending and make a list of names.” They couldn’t see the sending again, either, because Eliza had gone to the Far Isles with the Stelians and Akiva. “Maybe we all saw what we wanted to see.”
“Maybe,” Carnassial agreed. “I saw you, though.”
Karou couldn’t reply in kind. She hadn’t seen him. She had seen herself in the radiance of that vision, and she had seen Akiva at her side. The sight had been like a buoy to one drowning, and she clung to it still.
She did believe that the time would come when their duties would free them to be together—or at least a time when they could twist and bend and wrestle their duties into alignment. If they were bound to be dutiful fate-slaves forever, then mightn’t they at least be dutiful fate-slaves on the same continent, perhaps even under the same roof?
Someday.
And hopefully before Scarab’s war called them all to meet the nithilam.
And when would it? Not soon. This wasn’t a confrontation to rush into. The very idea of it had met with violent opposition when the Stelians returned home, according to Carnassial, who received sendings from his people.
The opposition wasn’t universal, though. Apparently, many stood with their queen in hoping for a future free of their duty to the veil.
“Have you heard from home?” Karou allowed herself to ask. There had been some messages from Akiva, and she was hoping today might bring another.
Carnassial nodded. “Two nights past. Everyone is well.”
“Everyone is well?” she repeated, wishing for Zuzana’s eyebrow prowess to express just what she thought of the extent of this news. “Is that seriously all?”
“More than well, then,” he allowed. “The queen is home, the veil is healing, and it’s nearly the dream season.”
Karou understood that the veil was healing because Akiva was no longer draining it, and that ordinary stability was returning, but she didn’t know what the dream season was. She asked.
“It’s… a good time of year,” Carnassial replied with a roughened voice, and looked away.
“Oh,” she said, not yet understanding. “How good?”
His voice was still rough when he said, “That entirely depends on who you share it with,” and this time it was Karou who looked away.
Oh.
She pulled on her boots and gathered her hair back, tying it with a strip of cloth she’d torn from one of her two shirts. Fancy. Get rubber bands, she willed Zuzana, wishing for telesthesia of her own.
She was dressed already. This was not a life for pajamas, even if she’d had them. She alternated two sets of clothes, sleeping and waking in one set until it failed the sniff test—though, in all honesty, it was quite the lenient sniff test these days. It was a little funny to imagine the boutique in Rome where Esther’s shopper had purchased these, and under what conditions, say, the next shirt in the stack found itself on a normal day. Some Italian girl was wearing it on a moped, maybe, with a boy’s arms looped lightly around her waist. Give her an Audrey Hepburn haircut, because why not? Rome daydreams deserved Audrey Hepburn haircuts. One thing was sure: That imagined other girl’s shirt might have started out identical to Karou’s, but it could bear no resemblance to the ash-darkened, river-wash-roughened, sun-bleached, sweat-stiffened article that Karou wore now.
“Okay,” she said, draining her tea and taking the bread from Carnassial to eat en route. “Tell me what’s happening in Astrae.”
And he did, and the morning air was sweet around them, and there were sounds of laughter in the awakening camp—even children’s laughter, because refugees had begun to find them here—and at this time of day, when the land was bathed in the sherbet glow of dawn, you couldn’t really tell that the distant hills were colorless and dead. Karou could see all the way to the ridge where the temple of Ellai stood, a blackened ruin, though she couldn’t make out the ruin itself.
She had been there to retrieve Yasri’s thurible. She’d gone alone, prepared to be cut to the bone by memories of that month of sweetest nights, but it hadn’t even looked like the same place. If the requiem grove had regrown since Thiago put it to the torch eighteen years ago, it had been burned again last year, along with everything else. There was no canopy of ancient trees, and no evangelines—the serpent-birds whose hish-hish had been the sound track to a month of love, and whose burning screams marked the end of it all.
Well, but not the end. More chapters had been written since then, and more would be, and Karou didn’t think, after all, that they would be dull, as she had hoped aloud at the Dominion camp that night with Akiva. Not with nithilam out there, and a bold young queen gripping fate by the throat.
Karou and Carnassial crested the rise that hid the ruined city from the view of the camp, and there it was before them, no longer quite as it had been when Karou had flown here from Earth months earlier to find it scraped free of all life, no souls to brush at her senses, and no hope. The bars of the cage lay just as they had then, like the bones of some great dead beast, but below them, figures moved. Teams of chitinous, many-legged myria-oxen strained before blocks of black stone that had made up the ramparts and towers of a hulking black fortress. Down under it all, Karou knew, there was beauty hidden. Brimstone’s cathedral had been a wonder of the world, a cavern of such splendor it was half the reason he and the Warlord chose to site their city here a thousand years ago.
It was a mass grave now, but from the moment she found out what the people of Loramendi had done at the end of the siege, Karou hadn’t thought of it like that. She’d thought of it as Brimstone and the Warlord had intended it: as a thurible, and a dream.
She spent her days here, helping with the excavation, but mostly roaming the dead landscape, senses attuned to the brush of souls, alert for the moment when the shifting of rubble would open a crack to what lay buried beneath their feet. No one else could feel them; only she. Well, she didn’t feel them yet, but she would, and she would glean them, every one, and not let a single one slip through her fingers. And then?
And then.
Karou took a deep breath and looked up. The sky would be blue today. Chimaera and seraphim would work beneath it, side by side. Word spread in the south that Loramendi was being rebuilt, and more refugees found them every day. Soon, freed slaves would be coming from the north, most of them born and raised there, in servitude. In Astrae, too, chimaera and seraphim were working together, at labor more suffocating than backbreaking. Making over an empire. What a thing. And on the far side of the world, where hundreds of green islands speckled the sea in queer formations, looking more like the crests of sea serpents than any inhabited land, fire-eyed folk prepared for a sweeter season.
Well, Karou supposed they deserved it. She understood now what work shaped their lives, and what they fed of themselves to the veil that held Eretz intact. She didn’t know why they called it the “dream” season, but she closed her eyes and let herself imagine that she could meet Akiva there, if nowhere else, in that golden place inside her sleep, and share it with him.
Akiva never knew if his sendings reached Karou, but he kept trying, as weeks turned into months. Nightingale had warned him that great distance required a level of finesse he was unlikely to achieve for years. She dispatched some messages on his behalf, but it was hard to know what to put into words. It was feelings he wanted to send—though he was told feelings were master-level telesthesia, and not to expect success—and those could only come from himself.
The Far Isles were strewn across the equator, so the sun set in early evening, at the same hour all year round. It was at the gloaming that Akiva took some time to himself each day to try to send to Karou. For her, on the far side of the world, it would be the hour just before dawn, and he liked the idea that in some way he was waking up with her, even if he couldn’t experience it himself.
Someday.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Akiva turned. He’d come to the temple at the top of the island, as he did most evenings, for solitude. One hundred thirty-four days and counting, and this was the first time he’d encountered anyone besides one of the wizened elders who tended the eternal flame. The flame honored the godstars, and the elders refused to acknowledge that their deities did not exist. Scarab didn’t press the issue, and the flame continued to burn.
But here was Akiva’s sister Melliel, whom he’d found imprisoned here on his arrival. She and the rest of her team had been freed that day, as had a number of Joram’s soldiers and emissaries who had been held in separate confinement. All had been given the option to stay or go, and the Misbegotten, having no families to return to, had remained, at least for now.
A few of them, including Yav, the youngest, had powerful incentive in the form of the dream season, which would soon come to its end and quite likely see the introduction of blue eyes to the Stelian bloodline. For her part, Melliel claimed that her reason was the nithilam, and to be where the next war would stage. But Akiva thought she looked less martial every day, and he’d noticed that she spent more time singing than sparring. She’d always had a beautiful voice, and now her accent had softened to something close to the Stelians’ own, and she was learning old songs out of Meliz, with magic in them.
He greeted her, and didn’t ask why she was looking for him. They would see each other at dinner in an hour, and so he thought that if she was seeking him now, it must be to speak in private. If there was something she wanted to say, though, she didn’t get to it right away.
“Which one is it?” she asked him, standing by his shoulder and gazing outward with him over the vista. On a clear day, from up here, nearly two hundred islands were visible. Some ninety percent of them were uninhabited, and perhaps scarcely habitable, and Akiva had claimed one for himself. And for Karou, though he never spoke this aloud. He pointed out an island cluster to the west, the sun setting behind it.
“The small one that looks like a turtle,” he said, and she made a noise like she had picked it out, though he thought it unlikely. It wasn’t one of the sharp-featured islands, all upthrust and ancient lava extrusions, and it wasn’t one of the calderas, either, with their perfect hidden lagoons.
“Does it have fresh water?” Melliel asked.
“Whenever it rains,” he said, and she laughed. It rained ruthlessly at this time of year—every few hours, a kind of downpour such as they’d never experienced in the north: brief but torrential. The waterfalls that descended from this peak would swell and turn from blue to brown in a matter of minutes, and then shrink back to normal almost as quickly. The air was heavy, and clouds drifted low and slow, burdened by bellies full of rain. One of the eeriest things Akiva had ever seen was the shadows of those clouds hunting across the surface of the sea, looking so much like the silhouettes of submerged sea creatures that at first he hadn’t believed they weren’t, and was still teased for it.
“Look, a rorqual!” Eidolon would say, pointing at a cloud shadow bigger than half the islands, and laugh at the idea that there could ever be a leviathan so large.
A nithilam is what it put Akiva in mind of. They were never very far from his thoughts.
“And the house?” Melliel asked.
He shot her a sideward glance. “It’s a stretch to call it that.”
It was something, though. Hope kept Akiva sane, and the thought of Karou kept him working, day by day, at foundational lessons in the anima that was the proper name for his “scheme of energies,” and which was the root not only of magic but of mind, soul, and life itself. Only when it was certain he was master of himself and his terrifying ability to drain sirithar would he be free to go where he wished. As for whether Karou might come here and see what he busied himself with in his spare hours, her own duty would keep her away for a long time to come. It was some consolation to him to know that Ziri, Liraz, Zuzana, and Mik were with her, to make sure she took care of herself. And Carnassial, too, who had promised to tutor her in a finer tithe method than pain.