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Karou interrupted him. “You’re fifty?”
“Lives are long, in my world.”
“Well, you’re lucky,” said Karou. “Here, if you want long life, you have to yank out all your teeth with pliers.”
The mention of teeth brought a dangerous flicker to his eyes, but he said only, “Long life is a burden, when it’s spent in misery.”
Misery. Did he mean himself? She asked him.
His eyes fluttered shut as if he’d been struggling to keep them open and abruptly abandoned the fight. He was silent for so long that Karou wondered if he’d fallen asleep, and gave up on her question. It felt intrusive, anyway. And she sensed he had meant himself. She thought of the way he’d looked in Marrakesh. What made the life go out of somebody’s eyes like that?
Again the caretaker impulse came to her, to offer him something, but she resisted it. She let herself stare at him—the cut of his features, the deep black of his brows and lashes, the bars inked on his hands, which were splayed open on the chair arms. With his head tilted back, she could see the welt on his neck and, a little higher up, the steady pulse of his jugular vein.
Once more his physicality struck her, that he was a flesh-and-blood being, though unlike any she had ever seen or touched. He was a melding of elements: fire and earth. She would have thought an angel would have something of air, but he didn’t. He was all substance: powerful and rugged and real.
His eyes opened and she jumped, caught staring once again. How many times was she going to blush, anyway?
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice faint. “I think I fell asleep.”
“Um.” She couldn’t help it. “Do you need some water?”
“Please.” He sounded so grateful she felt a pang of guilt for not offering sooner.
She untangled her legs from their lotus, rose, and brought him a glass of water, which he drained in a draft. “Thank you,” he said in a weirdly heartfelt way, as if he were thanking her for something much more profound than a glass of water.
“Uh. Uh-huh,” she said, awkward. She felt like she was hovering, standing there. There was really nowhere in the room to go except the bed, so she scooted back onto it. She kind of wanted to take off her boots, but that was something you didn’t do if there was any chance you might have to quickly flee or kick someone. Judging from Akiva’s plain exhaustion, she didn’t think she was in danger of either. The only danger was of foot smell.
She kept her boots on.
She said, “I still don’t get why you burned the portals. How does that end your war?”
Akiva’s hands tightened on the empty water glass. He said, “There was magic coming through the doorways. Dark magic.”
“From here? There’s no magic here.”
“Says the flying girl.”
“Okay, but that’s because of a wish, from your world.”
“From Brimstone.”
She acknowledged this with a nod.
“So you know that he’s a sorcerer.”
“I… Uh. Yeah.” She’d never really thought of Brimstone as a sorcerer. Did he do more than manufacture wishes? What did she know, really, and how much did she not know? Her ignorance was like standing in pure dark that could be either a closet or a vast, starless night.
A kaleidoscope of images whirled in her mind. The fizz of magic when she stepped into the shop. The array of teeth and gems, the stone tables in that underground cathedral, laid out with the dead… the dead who were not, as Karou had learned the hard way, actually dead. And she remembered Issa admonishing her not to make Brimstone’s life any harder—his “joyless” life, as she had said. His “relentless” work. What work?
She picked up a sketchbook at random, fa
He didn’t answer, and she expected when she looked up to see that he had fallen asleep again, but he was watching the images flash past in her sketchbook. She snapped it closed, and his eyes fixed on her instead. Again, that vivid searching.
“What?” she asked, discomfited.
“Karou,” he said. “Hope.”
She raised her eyebrows, as if to say So?
“Why did he give you that name?”
She shrugged. It was getting tiring, not knowing anything. “Why did your parents name you Akiva?”
At the mention of his parents, Akiva’s face hardened, and the vivid watchfulness of his gaze glazed back to fatigue. “They didn’t,” he said. “A steward named me from a list. Another Akiva had been killed. The name opened up.”
“Oh.” Karou didn’t know what to make of that. It made her own strange upbringing seem cozy and familial by comparison.
“I was bred to be a soldier,” Akiva said in a hollow voice, and he closed his eyes again, tightly this time, as if gripped by a wave of pain. He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke again, he said far more than she expected.
“I was taken from my mother at five years old. I don’t remember her face, only that she did nothing when they came for me. It’s my earliest memory. I was so small that they were just legs, these looming soldiers surrounding me. They were the palace guard, so their shin plates were silver, and I could see myself mirrored in them, in all of them, my own terrified face over and over. They took me to the training camp, where I was one of a legion of terrified children.” He swallowed. “Where they punished our terror and taught us to conceal it. And that became my life, the concealment of terror, until I didn’t feel it anymore, or anything else.”
Karou couldn’t help imagining him as a child, afraid and forsaken. Tenderness welled up in her like tears.
In a fading voice, he said, “I exist only because of war—a war that began a thousand years ago with a massacre of my people. Babies, elders, no one spared. In Astrae, the capital of the Empire, the chimaera rose up to massacre the seraphim. We are enemies because the chimaera are monsters. My life is blood because my world is beasts.
“And then I came here, and humans…” A dreamlike wonder shaded into his tone. “Humans were walking freely, weaponless, gathering in the open, sitting in plazas, laughing, growing old. And I saw a girl… a girl with black eyes and gemstone hair, and… sadness. She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought… I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling. She was co
You. Karou did not miss the pronoun shift. She sat unblinking, barely breathing.
“I came back to find you,” Akiva said. “I don’t know why. Karou. Karou. I don’t know why.” His voice was so faint she could barely hear him. “Just to find you and be in the world that you’re in…”
Karou waited, but he didn’t say any more, and then… something happened in the air around him.
A shimmer, like an aura at first, brightening to light and becoming wings—open and upthrust from his shoulder blades to sprawl over the armchair and sweep the carpet in great arabesques of fire. His glamour had given way, and Karou almost gasped to see his wings revealed, but the flame didn’t catch. It was smokeless, somehow self-contained. The subtle shifts of the fire-feathers were hypnotic, and Karou breathed again, deeply, and sat watching them for minutes as Akiva’s features relaxed into something like peacefulness. This time he was truly asleep.
She got up and took the water glass from his hands. She turned off the light. His wings were sufficient illumination, even for drawing. She got out her sketchbook and a pencil, and she drew Akiva asleep at the locus of his vast wings, and then from memory, with his eyes open. She tried to capture the precise shape of them; she used charcoal for the heavy black kohl that rimmed them and made him look so exotic, and she couldn’t take leaving his fiery irises colorless. She grabbed a watercolor box and painted. She drew and painted for a long time, and he didn’t move except for the soft rise and fall of his chest and the glimmer of his wings, which cast the room in a firelight glow.