“An alliance means more than the number of swords,” Akiva said. And his voice was like a shadow from another life when he added, softly, “Some, and then more.”
Karou stared at him for an unguarded second, then remembered herself and forced her eyes down. Some, and then more. It was the answer to the question of whether others could be brought around to their dream of peace. “This is the beginning,” Akiva had said moments earlier, his hand to his heart, before turning to Thiago. No one else knew what that meant, but Karou did, and she felt the heat of the dream stir in her own heart.
We are the beginning.
She’d said it to him long ago; he was the one saying it now. This was what his offer of alliance meant: the past, the future, penitence, rebirth. Hope.
It meant everything.
And Karou couldn’t acknowledge it. Not here. Nisk and Lisseth had halted on the hill to peer back at them: Karou the “angel-lover” and Akiva the very angel, speaking quietly in Seraphic while Thiago just stood there and let them? It was all wrong. The Wolf they knew would have had blood on his fangs by now.
Every moment was a test of the deception; every syllable uttered made the Wolf’s forbearance less tenable. So Karou dropped her gaze to the baked, stony earth and rounded her shoulders like the broken doll she was supposed to be. “The choice is Thiago’s,” she said in Chimaera, and tried to act her role.
She tried.
But she couldn’t leave it at that. After everything, Akiva was still chasing the ghost of hope. Out of more blood and ash than they had ever even imagined in their days of love, he was trying to conjure it back to life. What other way forward was there? It was what she wanted.
She had to give him some sign.
Issa was holding her elbow. Karou leaned into her, turning so that the serpent woman’s body came between herself and the watching chimaera, and then, so quickly that she feared Akiva might miss it, she raised her hand and touched her heart.
It pounded in her chest as she moved away. We are the beginning, she thought, and was overcome by the memory of belief. It came from Madrigal, her deeper self, who had died believing, and it was acute. She bent into Issa, hiding her face so that no one would see her flush.
Issa’s voice was so faint it almost seemed like her own thought. “You see, child? Your heart is not wrong.”
And for the first time in a long, long time, Karou felt the truth of it. Her heart was not wrong.
Out of betrayal and desperation, amid hostile beasts and invading angels and a deception that felt like an explosion waiting to happen, somehow, here was a beginning.
5
GETTING-ACQUAINTED GAME
Akiva didn’t miss it. He saw Karou’s fingertips brush her heart as she turned away, and in that instant it all became worth it. The risk, the gut-wrench of forcing himself to speak to the Wolf, even the seething disbelief of Liraz at his side.
“You’re mad,” she said under her breath. “I have an army, too? You don’t have an army, Akiva. You’re part of an army. There’s a difference.”
“I know,” he said. The offer wasn’t his to make. Their Misbegotten brethren were waiting for them at the Kirin caves; this much was true. They were born to be weapons. Not sons and daughters, or even men and women, just weapons. Well, now they were weapons wielding themselves, and though they had rallied behind Akiva to oppose the Empire, an alliance with their mortal enemy was no part of this understanding.
“I’ll convince them,” he said, and in his exhilaration—Karou had touched her heart—he believed it.
“Start with me,” hissed his sister. “We came here to warn them, not to join them.”
Akiva knew that if he could persuade Liraz, the rest would follow. Just how he was supposed to do that, he did not know, and the White Wolf’s approach forestalled him trying.
With his she-wolf lieutenant by his side, he strode forward, and Akiva’s exhilaration withered. He flashed back to the first time he had ever seen the Wolf. It had been at Bath Kol, in the Shadow Offensive, when he himself was just a green soldier, fresh from the training camp. He’d seen the chimaera general fight, and more than any propaganda he’d been raised on, the sight had forged his hatred of the beasts. Sword in one hand, ax in the other, Thiago had surged through ranks of angels, ripping out throats with his teeth like it was instinct. Like he was hungry.
The memory sickened Akiva. Everything about Thiago sickened him, not least the gouge marks on his face, made certainly by Karou in self-defense. When the general came to a halt before him, it was all Akiva could do not to palm his face and slam him to the ground. A sword to his heart, as had been Joram’s fate, and then they could have their new beginning, all the rest of them, free of the lords of death who had led their people against each other for so long.
But that he could not do.
Karou looked back once from the slope, worry flashing across her lovely face—still distorted by whatever violence she’d refused to divulge to him—and then she moved away and it was just Thiago and Ten facing Akiva and Liraz, the sun hot and high, sky blue, earth drab.
“So,” said Thiago, “we may speak without an audience.”
“I seem to recall that you like an audience,” said Akiva, his memories of torture as vivid as they had ever been. Thiago’s abuse of him had been performance: the White Wolf, star of his bloody show.
A crease of confusion flickered and vanished at Thiago’s brow. “Let us leave the past, shall we? The present gives us more than enough to talk about, and then, of course, there is the future.”
The future will not have you in it, thought Akiva. It was too perverse to think that if this somehow came to pass, this impossible dream, the White Wolf should ride it through to its fulfillment and still be there, still white, still smug, and still the one standing at Karou’s door after everything was fought and won.
But no. That was wrong. Akiva’s jaw clenched and unclenched. Karou wasn’t a prize to win; that wasn’t why he was here. She was a woman and would choose her own life. He was here to do what he could, whatever he could, that she might have a life to choose, one day. Whoever and whatever that included was her own affair. So he gritted his teeth. He said, “So let’s talk of the present.”
“You’ve put me in a difficult position, coming here,” said the Wolf. “My soldiers are waiting for me to kill you. What I need is a reason not to.”
This riled Liraz. “You think you could kill us?” she demanded. “Try it, Wolf.”
Thiago’s regard shifted to her, his calm unruffled. “We haven’t been introduced.”
“You know who I am, and I know who you are, and that will serve.”
Typical Liraz bluntness.
“As you prefer,” said Thiago.
“You all look alike anyway,” drawled Ten.
“Well then,” said Liraz. “That might make our getting-acquainted game more difficult for your side.”
“What game is that?” inquired Ten.
No, Lir, thought Akiva. In vain.
“The one where we try to figure out which of us killed which of you in previous bodies. I’m sure some of you must remember me.” She held up her hands to show her kill tally, and Akiva caught the one nearest him, closed his own marked fist over it, and pushed it back down.