Dreams of Gods & Monsters

And he was through it, past it, into silence and the aftershock colors of his violent passage, and… his self. He felt himself. His edges where they pressed on rock. He was lying on the ground, and it was not into silence that he had spilled, but only into a pause between voices, the air taut with the tug of their discord.

“It’s the wrong way.”

It was a woman’s voice, strange to him, its inflections softer than the Seraphic he knew, though not altogether unfamiliar.

“We’ve wasted enough time here.” Sharper, this voice, and younger. Also a woman. “Should I have let him keep his appointment? Do you think it would be easier for him to leave afterhaving his taste of her?”

“His taste? He’s in love, Scarab. You must let him choose.”

“There is no choice.”

“There is. You’re making it.”

“By letting him live? I should think you’d be glad.”

“I am.” A sigh. “But it must be hisdecision, can’t you see that? Or he’ll always be your enemy.”

“Don’t tempt me, old woman. Do you know what I could do with an enemy like that?”

Another silence fell and echoed, dissonant with shock. Akiva understood that they were speaking of him, but that was all he understood. What choice? What enemy?

Scarab, the one was called. There was something there. Something he should know.

When the other spoke, her voice was thin, rising out of the pit of her shock. “Make a harp string of him, is that what you mean? Is that what you would do with my grandson?”

Grandson.Only for a moment, hearing this, did Akiva think, It isn’t me, then, that they’re discussing.He was no one’s grandson. He was a bastard. He was—

“Only if I had to.”

“How could you possibly have to?” This came out as a cry. “It’s a dark thing that you’ve begun, Scarab. You must end it. That isn’t who we are. We’re not warriors—”

“We should be.”

Concussionsof shock.

“We were,” continued Scarab. There was a tone of stubbor

“What are you saying?”Akiva’s defender—his… grandmother?—was aghast. Staggered. Akiva knew because he felt her turmoil enter him, and he understood. It entered him and became his own, just as he had pushed his despair into every soldier in the Kirin caves, and it had become theirs. This woman had called him grandson, and there was another vital piece to this puzzle. Scarab.

Accompanying the audacious basket of fruit the Stelians had sent to answer Joram’s declaration of war had been a note, unsigned but for a wax seal depicting a scarab beetle.

Stelians.

Akiva opened his eyes and came upright in one movement. They were in a cave, and it looked and felt like the Kirin caves, and sounded like them, too, eerie with wind flutes, and he registered relief in the back of his mind. He hadn’t been taken away, then. Karou wouldn’t be far off. He would be able to find her, and make things right.

The two women were before him, and gave a start at his sudden lurch. It meant something that neither leapt back, nor even stepped back. Scarab’s eyes didn’t even widen, but only fixed on him and he was still again, held frozen in the act of rising to his feet, and suddenly intensely aware, as he had been before, when he felt an unseen presence in the cave, of the discrete entity that was his life.

And of its fragility.

They held him motionless and stared at him. All he could do, because he couldn’t move, and because it was all he wanted to do anyway, was stare back.

He hadn’t seen a Stelian since he was five years old and had taken one last desperate look over his shoulder at his mother as he was dragged from her. Here were two women, and the older of them… Akiva couldn’t say that she looked like Festival, because he didn’t remember his mother’s face, but looking at this woman made him feel as though he did. Scarab had called her “old,” but she wasn’t, nor young, either. Cares had touched her, deepening the set of her eyes, etching the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a braid wound as a crown and shot through with silver bright enough to seem like ornament. In her eyes still echoed tremors of her recent shock, and a deep, a very deep pathos. Toward her, from first sight, Akiva felt kinship.

The other, though.

Her black hair was unbound and wild. She wore a storm-gray tunic that wrapped her slim form in slanting folds, fastening at her shoulder to leave bare her brown arms that were ringed wrist to shoulder with evenly spaced golden bands. Her face was severe. Not like Liraz’s, or Zuzana’s, made so by expression only, but sculpted for it from the start. Sharp, with the hard, hunting brow of a hawk, shadowing her eyes in a line. The way her cheekbones and jaw cut to edges seemed the work of a chisel, but her mouth was full and dark, her only softness.

Until she smiled at him, that is, and he saw that her teeth were shaved to points.

Akiva recoiled.

He saw then, for the first time, that there were more besides the two women: another woman and two men, for five in all. The others had been silent and remained so, but watched them with burning intensity.

“Clever you,” said Scarab, pulling Akiva’s attention back to her. And now he saw that her teeth were normal, white and straight. “We mustn’t underestimate you, I suppose.” She turned on the other woman. “Or did yourelease him, Nightingale?”

Nightingale. She shook her head without once taking her eyes off Akiva. “I did not, Queen.” Queen? “But I won’t bind him again. This is where we grant him the dignity due his birth and talk to him.”

“Talk to me about what?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”

It was Scarab who answered, with a dark sideward glance to Nightingale. She was regal in her arrogance, so that Akiva thought he would have known now, if he hadn’t already heard, that she was queen. “A choice has been made on your behalf. By me.”

“And that is?”

“Not to kill you.”

It wasn’t a complete surprise, given what he had overheard, but there was a force to it, so bluntly spoken. “And what have I done to call my life into question?” Being certain of his own i

“ Much,” she snapped, biting a piece off the air. “Never doubt it, scion of Festival. By rights you’re dead already.”

He tried to rise to his feet, but found himself still constrained. “Can you let me go?” he asked, and to his surprise, she did.

“Because I don’t fear you,” she said.

He stood. “Why should you? Why should I threaten you, even if I could? How many times have I wondered about the people of my mother’s blood? And never once with a thought to hurtyou.”

“And yet no one has come so close to destroying us in over a thousand years.”

“What are you talking about?” he burst out. He’d never even been near the Far Isles, nor seen a Stelian. What could he have done?

Nightingale cut in. “Scarab, don’t taunt him. He doesn’t know. How could he?”

“Know what?” he asked, quieter now, because when they came from Scarab, in anger, the accusations seemed absurd, but from Nightingale, in sadness, they did not. The intrusion in his mind. The tide of power sweeping through him. The way he felt… discardedafter, as though it had used him, and not the other way around. Faltering, he asked, “What have I done?”

81

THE WISH POLICE