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And then Karou is there with blood on her blades and Virko is folding his spikes back down—they interweave, Zuzana sees, and the elegance of it… the symmetry almost overwhelms her with its perfection, and that’s the thing that she’ll remember most, not the dismemberment, her mind is already pulling a curtain on that, but the symmetry—and Virko’s spikes aren’t padded now with a smelly blanket, and there’s no harness to hold on to when when Mik boosts her up, but Zuzana’s not afraid, not of this. In the middle of this very bad dream, she’s glad to have a friend with a lion’s mane made of knives. Mik mounts behind her and Virko’s muscles bunch beneath them. He gives a great, labored heave and they leave the ground and then… vanish.
Ziri sees Virko wink out—gone—and Karou is turning, searching. Not for him; Ziri knows that, and he minds less than he did before. A great gust that can only be the draft of Virko’s invisible wingbeats blows her hair back like a battle standard, silken blue and streaming, and in the screaming maelstrom of battle, she is surrounded by a curious cushion of stillness.
Because she’s being protected, Ziri sees, by both chimaera and Misbegotten. Because she’s the resurrectionist, and because she has another, more immediate job to attend to. The realization kicks him forward. Whatever happens here, Karou’s plan must go ahead. Jael must be stopped.
Ziri looks for Liraz and she’s there, and so is Akiva. They’re fighting back-to-back, lethal. Akiva wields a pair of matched swords, Liraz a sword and an ax, and her smile seems a third weapon, almost. It’s the same smile from the war council, where she’d scoffed at the odds of the fight. “Three Dominion to one Misbegotten?” she’d said, with eagerness. And Ziri sees that before him: three to one and more. And more, and more, but something’s happening. There’s Nisk and Lisseth. Astonishingly, they’re backing Akiva and Liraz up. Each has a blade drawn but a hamsa outheld, too, and against the pulse of weakness, the Dominion can’t match the speed and force of the pair of Misbegotten.
Ziri feels a lift of hope. It’s a hope he knows well and despises: the ugly, black hope that one might, by killing, stay alive awhile longer.
Kill or die, no other choice.
Bodies litter the crater and more are falling. Ziri has a flash image of how it will be filled with corpses as though the mountains have cupped their hands to offer up the dead to Nitid, goddess of tears and life, and to the godstars, and to the void.
The bodies are chimaera, too, and Misbegotten, and then—
—a second darkness falls.
Overhead, a second sky of fire is falling, wing to wing to wing, and even the ugly, black hope can’t outlast this. Another wave of Dominion as great as the first, and today Nitid is the goddess of nothing but tears.
“Karou!” Ziri calls, and it doesn’t surprise him anymore to hear the Wolf’s tenor come from his own lips—a voice to cut through battle clangor and rally tired soldiers to keep on, and keep on, as though life is a prize to be won by bloodletting. Kill and kill and kill to live. How many, and for how long? It’s just a calculus in the end, and though the real Thiago had surmounted impossible odds in battle, none of them had been thisimpossible.
And besides, he isn’t Thiago.
He calls out orders; chimaera and Misbegotten alike take heed. By the time he reaches Karou, there’s a buffer of soldiers forming with Karou, Akiva, Liraz, and Thiago at its center.
“You two need to go,” the Wolf says. His voice is raised above the chaos, and his eyes are intent but not cold, not mad. This White Wolf will tear out no throats with his teeth today. “Get clear of this. Use the glamour. You have a job to do.”
Karou objects first. “We can’t leave you now—”
“You have to. For Eretz.” For Eretz.It’s understood that this means: If not for us.
Because we’ll be dead.
“I’ll only go if you designate a safety,” Karou says in a choked voice. “Someone. Anyone.”
Someone to wait out the killing in safety and come back to glean souls after it’s all over. It’s pointless. Now that the seraphim know about resurrection, they take measures to prevent it. They burn the dead, and guard the ashes until evanescence is certain. But Ziri nods anyway.
It’s time to part. The reluctance that envelops them all is a complex web—a cat’s cradle of loves and longings and… even the earliest tender unfurlings of a possibility so remote it should have been laughable. Ziri glances to Liraz as she glances to him, and both look swiftly away again: Ziri to Karou, Liraz to Akiva. A second only—an eternity—do they permit themselves for farewells. They wish pointless wishes, and let their what-ifs fall to the ground with the corpses.
In the legends, chimaera were sprung from tears and seraphim from blood, but in this moment they are, all of them, children of regret.
As Karou and Akiva begin to turn toward each other for their last look, both their faces falling blank with unfathomable loss— no please no not now please oh—the Wolf speaks up. “Akiva,” he says. “Take them. Get them to the portal. See to it.”
Akiva blinks twice rapidly. He doesn’t want to refuse, but he’s going to. He should be here, fighting—
“It may be guarded,” says the Wolf, anticipating his argument. “They may need help.” The battle around them is reaching a fever pitch. “Go!”
Akiva nods, and they go.
It’s Liraz’s gaze that Ziri holds as they vanish. There’s no period of transparency, only a sudden lurch from thereto not-there, and at the hard and final edge of there, Liraz wears no killing, cutting smile, no scorn or coldness or lust for vengeance. Her features are soft with sorrow and her beauty takes his breath away.
And then she’s gone. Within the center of the sphere of soldiers, the White Wolf is left alone. Lucky Ziri, he thinks, gutted, hollowed. Not today, and not tomorrow.
He looks up. The passage of armies has chased back the mist and he sees ranks of soldiers.
And soldiers, and soldiers, and soldiers.
He laughs. He gathers his stolen body, bares his fangs, and leaps.
He climbsthem. They’re thick enough; they make it easy. He has only to leap and catch one in the air and, catching, kill him. Leap to the next as the body falls. To the next, to the next, until the ground is far below and they’re tangling their wings in a rush to escape him. Still more are closing behind, and he has no shortage of prey. No shortage of blood to spill, and his laughter sounds like choking.
He is the White Wolf.
And Liraz is flying, fast, racing toward the portal. The battle rings behind her, and then fades into the rushing of the air, the air that’s stinging her eyes. That’s all it is, the sting: the air, and speed.
“We haven’t been introduced. Not really.” That was what he’d said to her in the thermal pools before giving her his secret like a knife. You could kill me with this. But I trust that you won’t.
Trust. Did she trust him because he’d saved her life, or because he’d trusted her with his secret, or both? Seeing him fight, his style was efficiency with panache; he was brutal and graceful, but it was nothing like the grace she’d beheld in the Hintermost when he wore his true body and danced the Kirin spin of crescent-moon blades. They had seemed an extension of himself. These swords didn’t. This body didn’t, either. Since he told her who he is, his White Wolf form has seemed to her like a costume, as though he might unfasten it and step out, long and lean, dark and horned and winged. In her mind’s eye, he’s a silhouette. She only ever saw him at a great distance, and doesn’t even know what his true face looked like.
She wishes she did.
And in the next second the wish seems stupid and petty. What does it matter what his face looked like before? Behind her he could be dying—again and forever. What does “true” even mean when it comes to a face? Only souls are true, and when you spill them to the air they melt away, as Haz’s had, and countless others, and the loss… The loss.Liraz clutches her hand to her stomach. Fires go out, and the world grows dim.