“Are you two all right in there?” asked Virko. His voice was cast low, not quite a whisper, and Karou imagined the hotel clerk hearing it and wondering who was hiding in the bathroom. With that, the scenario hit a new level of absurdity. In the midst of everything that was going on and the great weight of the mission they were on, they were squished into a bathroom, hiding from a hotel clerk.
“Fine,” she said, sounding choked, and it was such a lie. She was anything but fine. It struck her that even to say so in that offhand way was… glib. Careless. She hazarded a glance at Akiva, afraid that he could think she meant it. Oh sure, fine, and nice weather we’re having. What’s new with you?And it was a fresh scrape of anguish to see, again, the pain in his eyes, and the anger. She had to look away. Akiva, Akiva.Back in the caves, when their eyes had at last met across the breadth of the great cavern—across all the soldiers between them, both sides, and the weight of their treacherous enmity, across the secrets they both carried, and the burdens—even at such a distance, their look had felt like touch. Not so now. A wisp of space between them only, and the meeting of their glances felt like… regret.
“Children of regret,” she said aloud. Well, she whispered it, and stole another look up at him. “Do you remember?”
“How could I forget?” was Akiva’s answer, an ache in his heart and a scrape in his voice.
She had told him the story—she, Madrigal—the night they fell in love. He remembered every word and touch of that night, every smile and gasp. Looking back at it was like peering down a dark tunnel—all his life since—at a bright place of light on the far side, where color and feeling were amplified. It seemed to him that that night was a place— theplace—he’d kept all his happiness, bundled up and stowed away, like gear he’d never need again.
“You told me it was a terrible story,” she said.
It was the chimaera legend of how they’d come to be, and it was nothing less than a rape myth. Chimaera were sprung of the tears of the moon, and seraphim from the blood of the brutal sun. “It isterrible,” Akiva replied, hating it even more now than he had then, in light of what Karou had endured at Thiago’s hands.
“It is,” Karou agreed. “And so is yours.” In the seraph myth, chimaera were shadows come to life, wrought by huge world-devouring monsters who swam in darkness. “But the tone is right,” she said. “I feel like both now: a thing of tears and shadow.”
“If we’re going by the myths, then I would be a thing of blood.”
“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—”