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Eliza looked at them, perplexed. “You’re going back to Prague?”
Zuzana shrugged, ready to sink into a good, slumpy self-pity jag. Maybe I’ll even cry,she thought. “What are you going to do?”
“I can tell you what I’m notgoing to do,” she said. Her wings were glamoured, which she’d somehow figured out how to do on her own, and her torn shirt didn’t even look that weird. It could practically have been fashion. “I’m not going to finish my dissertation. Sorry, Danaus plexippus.”
“Who?” asked Mik.
Eliza smiled. “Monarch butterfly. That’s what I research.” She paused, corrected herself. “Researched. I can’t go back to that life, not now, as much as I yearn to demolish Morgan Toth with the most excruciating forehead smack of all time. What I want to do?” She looked at them intently, her eyes so big and bright. “Is go to Eretz.”
Zuzana and Mik just looked at her. Zuzana cut a significant glance at the TV screen, where they’d all just watched the portal burn.
Eliza, cottoning to this nonverbal language, raised eyebrows and shoulders in a fully committed Yeah, so?
Mik released an even breath. Zuzana scarcely dared to hope, but when Eliza started talking again, it wasn’t about Eretz.
“Did you know, monarch butterflies migrate five thousand miles, round-trip, every year? No other insect does anything like it. And the most amazing thing about it is that the migration is multigenerational. The ones who return north aren’t the same ones that went south the year before. They’re several life cycles removed, but somehow they retrace the route.”
She was silent for a moment, a weird little smile playing at her lips, like she couldn’t tell if something was fu
“I don’t really remember how I first got interested in them. It was definitely the migration, though, and it makes so much sense now. I guess I always knew more than I knew I knew, if that makes sense.”
“Not really,” said Zuzana, flat.
“I’m a butterfly,” Eliza said, as if that explained it. “Several life cycles removed. Well, except more than several. A thousand years. I don’t know how many generations.”
Zuzana frowned, waiting for her to say something that made sense. Mik, though, in much the same blasé way as he’d reacted to Karou telling them, months ago, that she was a chimaera, said only, “Cool.”
Eliza laughed, and then she told them about Elazael. The real Elazael, and what she had been and done, and about the dream that had plagued Eliza all her life, and what it meant, and Zuzana had thought she’d lost her capacity for surprise, but she found it again in a corner bar in Rome. No, it wasn’t surprise. It was bigger than that.
Zuzana found flummox in a corner bar in Rome. Universes. Many. And split seams in the linings of the space-time continuum. Or something. And angels who were like space explorers without ships, like science fiction but with magic in the place of science.
“The magi did something to the Faerers’ minds,” Eliza explained. “Their anima, actually. It’s more than mind; it’s self. Part of their duty was to bear children on their journey, who would be born with all their maps and memories… coded into them. Like genetically coded ancestral knowledge. Crazy. So one day they could find the way home.”
“And you’re one of the children,” said Mik.
“Many-greats, or something.”
“And you have the maps,” he said. “The memories.”
Eliza nodded. It was Mik’s intensity that clued Zuzana in that something more than storytime was going on here. Maps, memories.
Maps. Memories.
“There’s a lot of information in here,” Eliza said, tapping her head. “I haven’t processed it yet. Throughout my family history there’s been madness. I think it’s too much for the human mind to take. It’s like an overloaded server. It just crashes. I was crashed. You uncrashed me. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”
Zuzana’s slumpy self-pity jag was already over. She sat up straight. “If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you can totally thank us enough.”
Eliza skewed her lips into a contemplation pucker. “That depends. What do you think I’m saying?” Mischief gleamed in her eyes.
Zuzana wrapped her hands lightly around Eliza’s throat and mimed throttling her. “Tell. Us.”
“I know another portal,” said Eliza. “Duh.”
70
WHITE NO LONGER
Jael’s wingbeats were clipped with fury, anything but smooth as he returned to Eretz. He practically tore his way through the portal, wishing he could damage it, damage something. Akiva.Yes. See the bastard shot full of arrows like an archery-range dummy, dancing from the Westway gibbet for all to come and goggle at.
He looked around uneasily. Damn the bastard, he could be anywhere. Had he preceded Jael through the portal? Would he come behind? By the terms of their agreement, the moment Jael passed back into Eretz, Akiva was free to kill him in any ma
And Jael had just as many. More, because he wasn’t held back by honor, which does shorten a list of ways to kill your enemy.
It was not lost on him that his very survival depended upon his enemy having honor, but this did not in any way oblige him to play by the same rules. On the contrary, it was critical that he draw first blood. He would not be able to rest until the bastard was dead.
Once through the portal, Jael didn’t stay to oversee the tedious return of his army but flew straight on to camp in the center of a phalanx of guards, with archers wide at their flanks in case Akiva should make an appearance.
The landscape here was much the same as the one they’d just left behind: dun-colored mountains and nothing to see. The camp was in the foothills, some half hour distant. In a field of grasses flattened by the wind, rows of tents stood orderly in a rough quadrangle with guard towers at its corners, ma
And how had they fared? He should know soon enough.
Sooner even than expected.
The camp was scarcely in his sights when saw what awaited him on the piked palisade.
Karou saw it, too, though from a greater distance, and she couldn’t stifle her gasp. From the palisade, billowing in the wind, hung a ba
But it wasn’t the gonfalon that had made Karou gasp. If the ba