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“And of light,” she added, her voice so soft. They were almost whispering, as though Virko couldn’t hear every word, just on the other side of this glass partition. “You were kinder to yourselves in your legend than we were,” Karou continued. “We made ourselves out of grief. You made yourselves in your gods’ image, and with a noble purpose: to bring light to the worlds.”
“A black job we’ve done of it,” he said.
She smiled a little, and gave breath to a rueful laugh. “I won’t argue with that.”
“The legend also says that we’ll be enemies until the end of the world,” he reminded her. When he’d told her that story, they’d been entwined, naked and supple after love—their first, their first lovemaking—and the end of the world had seemed as much a myth as the weeping moons had.
But Akiva could almost feel it now, pressing down on them. It felt like hopelessness. At what point, he wondered, was there nothing left to save?
“That’s why we made up our own myth,” said Karou.
He remembered. “A paradise waiting for us to find it and fill it with our happiness. Do you still believe that?”
He didn’t mean it the way it came out: harsh, as though it were nothing but the fool fantasy of new lovers tangled in each other’s arms. It was himself he wanted to chasten, because he hadbelieved it, as recently as yesterday, when Liraz had accused him of being “preoccupied by bliss.” She’d been right. He’d been imagining bathing with Karou, hadn’t he? Holding her against him, her back to his chest, just holding her and watching her hair swirl on the surface of the water.
Soon, he’d thought, it will be possible.
Flying away from the caves this morning, seeing their armies mixed and moving in effortless flight together, he’d imagined a lot more than that. A place that was theirs. A… a home. Akiva had never had a home. Not even close. Barracks, campaign tents, and, before that, his too-brief childhood in the harem. He’d actually let himself picture this simple thing, as though it weren’t the biggest fantasy of all. A home. A rug, a table where he and Karou could eat meals together, chairs. Just the two of them, and candles flickering, and he could catch her hand across the table, just to hold it, and they could talk, and discover each other layer by layer. And there would be a door to shut out the world, and places to put things that would be theirs. Akiva could scarcely conjure what those things might be. He’d never owned anything but swords. It said so very much that, to flesh out his picture of domestic life, he had to draw from the old, rotted artifacts in the Kirin caves where once upon a time his people had destroyed hers.
Plates and pipes, a comb, a kettle.
And… a bed. A bed and a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together. There was something in the thought of this simple, simple thing that had crystallized all of Akiva’s hope and vulnerability and made him able to see and believe, truly, that he could be a… a person, after the war. It had seemed to him, this morning, in flight, almost within reach.
He hadn’t bothered dreaming of where this home would be, or what you would see when you walked out the door, but now when he imagined it, that was allhe saw: what lay outside the quiet little “paradise” of his daydream.
Corpses were strewn everywhere.
“Not a paradise,” Karou said, faltering, and she flushed and briefly closed her eyes. Akiva, looking down at her, was caught by the sight of her lashes, dusky and trembling against the blue-tinged flesh around her eyes. And when she opened her eyes, there was the jolt of eye contact, the pupil-less black sheen of her gaze, depthless, and all her worry was there, and pain to match his own, but also strength.
“I know there’s no paradise waiting for us,” she said. “But happiness has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? I think Eretz deserves some, and so…” She was shy. There was still the space between them. “I think we should put ours there, and not in some random paradise that doesn’t really need it.” She hesitated, looked up at him. Looked and looked, pouring herself out through her extraordinary eyes. For him. For him. “Don’t you?”
“Happiness,” he said, his voice holding the word so gently, a tinge of disbelief in his tone, as though happiness itself were as much a myth as all their gods and monsters.
“Don’t give up,” Karou whispered. “It isn’t wrong to be glad to be alive.”
A silence, and she could feel him struggling to find words. “I keep getting second chances,” he said, “that aren’t rightly mine.”
She didn’t answer right away. She knew what guilt he shouldered. The magnitude of Liraz’s sacrifice shook her to her core. After another long, deep breath, she whispered, hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to say, “It was hers to give,” feeling that it was a gift not only to Akiva but to herself.
And, if Brimstone was right, that hope was the only hope, and that the two of them were, somehow, hope made real, then it was a gift for Eretz as well.
“Maybe,” he allowed. “You argued before that the dead don’t want to be avenged, and that may be right, sometimes, but when you’re the one left alive—”
“We don’t know that they’re—” Karou broke in, but couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“Life feels stolen.”
“Given.”
“And the only response that makes sense to the heart is vengeance,” he said.
“I know. Believe me. But I’m hiding in a shower with you instead of trying to kill you, so it would seem that the heart can change its mind.”
A ghost of a smile. That was something. Karou returned it, not a ghost but a real smile, remembering every beautiful smile of his, all those lost, radiant smiles, and making herself believe that they weren’t forever ended. People break. They can’t always be fixed. But not this time. Not that.
“This isn’t the end of hope,” she said. “We don’t know about the others, but even if we did, and even if it wasthe worst… we’re still here, Akiva.And I’m not giving up as long as that much is true.” She was serious. Fervent, even, as if she could force him to believe her.
And maybe it worked.
There had always been, from the first—at Bullfinch, in the smoke and fog—an amazement in the way Akiva looked at her, his eyes held wide to take her all in. Afraid to blink, almost to breathe. Something of that amazement came back to him now, and his steeliness and the implacability of his rage surrendered to it. So much of expression is the muscles around the eyes, and Karou saw the tension there let go, and it triggered a relief in her that may have been vastly disproportionate to the small change that brought it about. Or maybe perfectly proportionate. This was no small thing. If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face.
“You’re right,” Akiva said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to be… alive.”
Alive. Heart-beating, blood-moving alive, yes, but more than that. She wanted him to be eyes-flashing alive. Hands-to-hearts and “we are the begi
“I am,” he said, and there waslife in his voice, and promise.
Karou was prey, still, to flashes of remembering him through Madrigal’s eyes. She had been taller in that body, so the sightline was different, but this moment still struck a direct link to memory: the requiem grove for the first time, just before their first kiss. The blaze of his look and the curve of his body toward her. That’s what struck the vibration between then and now, and time cast a loop that brought her heart back to its simpler self.
Some things are always simple. Magnets, for example.
It took hardly any movement at all. It wasn’t the requiem grove, and it wasn’t a kiss. Karou’s cheek was just of a height to let it rest against Akiva’s chest, and she did, finally, and the rest of her body followed her cheek’s good example. The damned wisp of space was abolished. Akiva’s heart beat against her temple, and his arms came around to hold her; he was warm as summer, and she felt the sigh that moved through him, loosening him so that he could meld more fully to her, and she sighed her own loosening sigh and met his meld. It felt so good. No air between us, thought Karou, and no more shame. Nothing more between us.