But the intrusion had been there already. When he had reached for sirithar in the battle of the Adelphas and gotten thunder instead. And before that, when he had sensed a presence in the cave with him, or thought he had. And even before that, from his first attainment of true sirithar, a state of power his mind had no context for and that made him feel, in its aftermath, like an infinitesimal figure pulled along in the wake of some catastrophic force. A flood, or a hurricane. He couldn’t control it. Somehow, he could summon it, and that wasn’t the same thing at all.
He had spoken to Karou of a “scheme of energies,” and that was real—a place that he had navigated, blind, since his first earliest fumblings with magic. He sensed the vastness that was in him, the limitlessness, and was humbled by it, but… this wasn’t that.
This was what troubled him most: the suspicion that when he attained sirithar—that is, this thing which he had chosen to call sirithar, because it was the only word he knew for a state of exceptional clarity—he was not reaching down within himself, but out. Beyond. And that what responded—the source of the power—it was not him, and not his.
So… what was it?
76
WAITING FOR MAGIC
They were watched for.
Those left at the caves must have kept a sentry always posted to look out for their return, because by the time they drew nigh—cautious, in case anything had gone wrong in their absence—everyone had gathered in the entrance cavern to welcome them, and it felt good. Like coming home.
Karou flew straight into Issa’s arms and stayed there long enough that a nest of serpents the Naja had called to herself for company—blind cave snakes from the muggy passages below—wound round her, too, pallid and glimmering, and joined them together.
“Sweet girl,” whispered Issa, “all is well?”
“And more than well,” Karou said, and flushed with emotion, knowing that this was as close as she would ever come to telling Brimstone that it was begun: the unlikeliest dream, and the sweetest.
After the greetings there was news to share, and much of it, though they kept it as brief as they could. There would have been no natural end to the speculation that followed, but that Issa intercepted a glance between Karou and Akiva.
It was the lit-fuse look, the space between them fairly shimmering with heat, and Issa’s lips pressed into a smile. They didn’t see her notice it—they didn’t see anything but each other—and when she said, “Well, I imagine our travelers are weary,” and began to break up the gathering, they didn’t guess that it was on their behalf.
Everyone seemed to share the sense of homecoming, even the Misbegotten, and the whole party moved off together, along with those who’d come out to greet them. And when they reached the grand cavern, where the chimaera might have gone on and down toward the village they had formerly occupied, they didn’t, but stayed with the angels to prepare a meal together, beneath the stalactites.
Karou wasn’t hungry. Not for pilfered Dominion rations, anyway.
A Christmas-morning feeling had come over her. Well, she’d had few enough Christmas mornings in her life. The one with Esther had felt more like a stage play—glittering and special, but as something she was meant to watch, rather than participate in. She’d had two with Zuzana’s family, and those were much better, and though they hadn’t exactly been children, they’d acted like it as much as possible. Holiday rituals in the Novak home were immutable, and even Zuzana’s older brother, who had tried so hard to impress Karou with his dubious manliness, had come scampering down the stairs at dawn on Christmas morning to see what magic had happened in the night.
The feeling, it was the sense of waiting drawing to an end. Not dread waiting, but excited waiting of the best kind: waiting for magic.
And the magic Karou was waiting for now, waiting for and reaching for—and she could feel it reaching right back, like a mirror image at the very instant before your fingertips touch their twins in the glass—was of the decidedly grown-up variety.
She couldn’t stop looking at Akiva. And every time she did, either she found his gaze waiting, or else it sensed hers at once and came around to meet it. Every look was vivid and full and alive. There was laughter in the set of his mouth, because it had become funny, at last, at the tail end of waiting. Only funny because it was almost over, and everything that was… not them… was obstacle. It was a tease now, this lingering, a game, to see who could last another minute, and a dance. Their bodies—two in the midst of many—moved to the pull of the same magnet, no matter who stood between them.
Karou felt as though her skin had been awakened. It had been dormant and she hadn’t even known it, but since the kiss in the sky—more exactly, when Akiva’s lips had touched the place beneath her ear—some switch had been flipped. Small, exquisite currents of electricity were coursing all over her, raising goose bumps, shivers, waves of heat. She couldn’t still her hands. The “love chemicals,” she knew from her school days: dopamine, norepinephrine. She remembered, in their reading, how one scientist had called them the “cocktail of love rapture” and how she and Zuzana couldn’t stop giggling about it. Well, she was flooded with them now. Flushed and trembling, her belly a riot of butterflies. Papilio stomachus. Her heartbeat was a tap dance and her breathing was shallow. She tried to draw deep breaths to settle herself, but every one felt like a buoy refusing to sink. The edge of hyperventilating, but in a good way—which sounded stupid but felt like the full spectrum of excitement, from trills of giddiness to the rich and languid bass note of anticipated pleasure, slow and sweet as syrup.
All of which is to say: Karou was on fire.
Akiva caught her eye again. There was the spark and flash. Light and heat, racing up a fuse. No more laughter. She saw that his hands at his sides could not find stillness. He curled them into fists. Uncurled them, but they would not be at peace until they were allowed to do what they wanted and touch her. His whole body was taut. So was hers. They were violin strings, the pair of them, ready to sing.
A question in his eyes, in the tilt of his head, in the set of his shoulders. His whole being was this question.
And the answer was so easy. Karou nodded, and the unknown switch apparently had a higher setting, because she shifted into it. Her skin practically hummed.
Finally. Finally.
She turned to slip away down the passage that led to the baths—the baths? Where did it come from, this notion? Her face went hot. It was a very fine notion—and, turning, she caught sight of Liraz.
Liraz, standing apart, tall and still and always too damn straight, as though someone—Ellai maybe—had fastened a string to the top of her skull and wouldn’t just let her relax. There was her rigidity, and the look of agonized suspense on her face, and Karou’s switch, newly discovered, gave a twang. Power cut. Electrical currents nil, skin temperature normalizing, cocktail of love rapture neutralized. No more shivers, and her breath sank back into her like an anchor sliding into the sea.
Jesus, what was wrong with her? She blinked. Ziri’s soul was hanging from her belt and she was about to…?
She shook her head, hard, fast, and repossessed herself. Akiva, across the cavern, furrowed his brow. She gave him a helpless look, touched the canteen, and he understood. His gaze flickered to Liraz, who saw everything that passed between them and looked stricken.
They came together at the very door Karou had been headed for, but for a different purpose now, and a different destination.
“It won’t take long,” Karou said.
“I’ll help you,” Akiva replied, and she nodded.
She’d been ready for this since before Ziri ever cut his own throat to become the Wolf. When he’d been missing, when all the patrols had come back except his, she’d gathered what she would need, all the components to conjure a Kirin body as strong and true as she could make it. Human and antelope teeth, tubes of bat bone, iron and jade. Even diamonds, preciously hoarded for him alone. They were all tumbled together in a small velvet jewelry pouch with her resurrection gear, packed away down in the cave with the thuribles and incense.
Ingredients for a Ziri.
Well, the one essential ingredient for a Ziri was in the canteen. She wanted, though, to make this new body as close to his true Kirin flesh as possible. Her head snapped up with a thought. “Wait a second,” she said, and crossed the cavern to where Liraz stood alone.
“You don’t have to, now—” Liraz began.
Karou waved it off. “Do you have that piece of horn I gave you?”
Liraz handed it over, hesitating as though she was sorry to part with it, and Karou found herself hoping, softly and deeply, that this angel’s feelings were shared, not just for her sake, but for Ziri’s, too, whose loneliness was even deeper than her own had once been. She, at least, had had Brimstone, and the memory of her parents and her tribe. Who had Ziri ever had?
Let this be another improbable, glorious beginning, she thought. “Do you want to come?” she asked, but Liraz shook her head and so she left her there, outside the circle of soldiers, and went to do this one last thing.
77
WE HAVEN’T BEEN INTRODUCED
Liraz couldn’t stay in the grand cavern. She felt too transparent, so she wandered and eventually found herself back in the entrance cave. One of the flightless chimaera was standing guard and she took over for him, settling herself on a ledge.
The sun set in due course, and the crescent-moon opening was positioned to catch every ray of it. She watched, and it seemed to melt when it touched the far peaks, spreading molten and golden across the breadth of the horizon. Orange light glazed all the world between, from it to her, and reached behind her, far into the cavern, to light the skims of ice with a blinding shine.
And then it paled and cooled, golds giving way to grays, and it was at that moment of the sky’s deepest blue, in the seconds before it eases to full black and sets forth stars, that she heard a tread behind her, and was afraid to turn.
The tread was slow, a sharp clip, clip. The ring of hooves. That was her first awareness of him—hooves—and she couldn’t help herself, it was too long trained into her, and too deep: She felt a surge of misgiving, almost revulsion. He was a chimaera. What had come over her? Just because someone saved your life didn’t mean you had to fall in love with him.
Love? Godstars. It was the first time the word had dared to form itself, and only this way, in the negation of it. Still, it hit her in the gut: fear and denial and the urge to flee.
It was a struggle, staying still. She had done nothing, she had to remind herself. Said and encouraged nothing. Not before he died in his Wolf skin, not ever. There was nothing between them to regret or back away from, and no reason to flee. He was only a comrade, only a—
“We haven’t been introduced.”
Liraz’s heart gave a slam. She’d gotten used to the Wolf’s voice, but that didn’t mean she’d ever liked it. Even when Ziri had spoken to her as himself—the one time only, the two of them chest-deep in the strange soft water of the baths—there had been a roughness to it, like it could turn to a growl at the edge of a breath. It had been a match for his clawed hands, his fanged mouth. Latent brutality.
This voice, though. It was as sonorous as the Kirin wind flutes, effortlessly rich and smooth.
She knew her own part in this dialogue. Finding her voice, and wincing to hear it shake, she replied, “You know who I am, and I know who you are, and—”
“—that won’t serve.” His voice twined with hers, changing the script. And in the lapse after their words, she heard him waiting. How can you hear waiting? She didn’t know, but you could. She did. He was waiting for her to turn around, and she couldn’t put it off any longer.
She turned, and Ziri of the Kirin was before her, and Liraz could scarcely breathe.
He was tall. She’d known that, having seen him fight in the midst of a cluster of Dominion who had looked undergrown beside him. But seeing it at a distance, and seeing it before you and having to tilt your head up are two different experiences. Liraz tilted her head up. And up, tracing the length of horns that stretched the effect of his height to extremes. They had to be the length of her arms at least, long and straight, black and gleaming. Intact, she noted, fleetingly—no broken point—and she wondered what had become of that token that had fit just so in her palm.
He was lean, long-muscled, less broad than Akiva or most of the Misbegotten, but this served only to accentuate his height, and his shoulders were anything but narrow. Behind them, his wings were folded. Dark. Liraz could guess at their expansiveness, against the length of him. He was wearing white, and this seemed wrong, and he must have seen a wrinkle at her brow because he plucked at his shirt and said, “The Wolf’s. I didn’t have anything of… my own. Except”—he smiled and, with both hands, gestured to himself—“all the rest. I guess.”
It was the smile. Ziri smiled, and Liraz saw him.
Not hooves, not horns, which she’d been examining in pieces, but his self. He was just as he should be, and in every way striking and heart-stopping. His Kirin beauty was of a jagged, wild species. Sharp horns, sharp hooves, and the cut of his wings sharp, too. He was angles and darkness, her opposite—a moon-creature to her sun, a slicing shadow to her glow. But that was all silhouette. It was in his smile, and in his eyes, and in his waiting—he was still waiting—that she saw him, and knew him. Strength and grace and loneliness and longing.
And hope.
And hesitation.
He was standing still to let himself be judged, and it shamed her. She saw it in his stillness. He was afraid that she would think him a beast, and how could she assure him of what she herself, five seconds before, had been uncertain? How could she tell him that he was magnificent, and she was humbled—speechless not with distaste but with awe.