Though somehow the thought of Karou in daily lessons with the Stelian magus was less than pure consolation to Akiva.
“It’s coming along, though?” Melliel asked.
He shrugged. He didn’t want to tell her that the house was ready, that it had been ready, that every morning when he woke in the longhouse he shared with his Misbegotten brothers and sisters, he lay still for a moment with his eyes closed, imagining morning as it might be, rather than as it was.
“Is there anything you need for it? Sylph gave me a beautiful kettle, and I haven’t used it once. You could have it.”
It was a simple offer, but it caused Akiva to cut Melliel a suspicious glance. He didn’t have a kettle, or much of anything else, but he didn’t know how she could know this. “All right, thank you,” he said, with an effort to be gracious. Kind as the offer was, it felt intrusive. For the most part, Akiva’s life since coming here had been an open book. His routine, his training, his progress, even his moods seemed to be up for general discussion at any time. One of the magi—most often Nightingale—kept contact with his anima at all times, a monitoring process that had been compared to holding a thumb to his pulse. His grandmother assured him that no one was reading his thoughts, and he hoped this was true, and he also hoped that in his inexperience he wasn’t scattering his attempted sendings like confetti over the entire population.
Because that would be embarrassing.
Anyway, what with feeling like the communal project of the Stelians, he wanted to keep this to himself. He never spoke of it—the island, the house, his hopes—though apparently they knew everything anyway. And of course he had never taken anyone there. Karou would be the first. Someday. It was a mantra: someday.
“Good,” said Melliel, and Akiva waited a moment to see if she would say whatever she might have come here for, but she was quiet, and the look she gave him was almost tender. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said finally, and touched his arm in parting. It was an odd interaction, but he put it out of his mind and focused on shaping the day’s sending for Karou. It was only later, when he descended the peak, returning to the longhouse on his way to dinner, that the oddness struck a chord, because more oddness awaited him there, in the thatched-roofed gallery that ran the length of the structure.
He saw the kettle first, and so he understood the rest were offerings, too. He mounted the steps and looked over all these things that hadn’t been here an hour earlier. An embroidered stool, a pair of brass lanterns, a large bowl of polished wood full of the mixed fruits of the island. There were lengths of diaphanous white cloth, neatly folded, a clay pitcher, a mirror. He was examining it all in puzzlement when he heard an arrival on wing behind him and turned to see his grandmother descending. She held a wrapped parcel.
“You, too?” he asked her, mildly accusing.
She smiled, and her tenderness was a match for Melliel’s. What are the women up to? Akiva wondered, as Nightingale mounted the steps and handed him her gift. “Perhaps you should take them over to the island directly,” she said.
For a moment, Akiva just looked at her. If he was slow in grasping her meaning, it was only because he kept his hope as carefully contained as his unruly magic. And when he did think he understood her, he didn’t speak a word. He only pushed a sending at her that exited his mind like a shout. It was nothing but question, the essence of question, and it hit her with a force that made her blink, and then laugh.
“Well,” she said. “I think your telesthesia is coming along.”
“Nightingale,” he said, tense, his voice little more than breath and urgency.
And she nodded. She smiled. And she sent to his mind a glimpse of figures in a sky. A stormhunter. A Kirin. A half-dozen seraphim and an equal number of chimaera. And with them one who flew wingless, gliding, her hair a whip of blue against the twilight sky.
Later, Akiva would think that it was Nightingale who’d come to give him the news in case, in his joy, he unknowingly tapped sirithar. He didn’t. They were training him to recognize the boundaries of his own anima and hold himself within them, and he did. His soul lit up like the fireworks that had burst over Loramendi long years past, when Madrigal had taken him by the hand and led him forward into a new life, one lived by night, for love.
Now night was coming, and, unwatched for, serendipitous, and sooner than he’d let himself dream, so was love.
It was Carnassial who had sent ahead to tell of their approach, but the women arranged everything else. Yav and Stivan of the Misbegotten, and even Reave and Wraith of the Stelians, argued that it was cruel to send Akiva away when they did, but the women didn’t listen. They only gathered on the terrace of Scarab’s modest cliff-face palace, and waited. By then night was upon them, and one of the quick squalls of ruthless rain was, too, so that the newcomers were landing even before the wing-glimmer of the seraphim among them could be seen in the storm.
They were received without fanfare. The men were separated out like wheat chaff and left where they stood. Carnassial and Reave shared a look of long-suffering solidarity before leading Mik and Ziri, along with Virko, Rath, Ixander, and a few wide-eyed Misbegotten, out of the downpour.
Scarab, Eliza, and Nightingale, meanwhile, guided Karou, Zuzana, Liraz, Issa, and the Shadows That Live through the queen’s own chambers and into the palace bath, where fragrant steam enveloped them in what they all agreed was the best of all possible welcomes.
Well, except for one. Karou had scanned for Akiva in those seconds between landing and being spirited away, and she hadn’t seen him. Nightingale had squeezed her hand and smiled, and there was some comfort in that, though nothing would be true comfort until she saw him and felt the connection between them unbroken.
She believed it was. Unbroken. Every morning she woke with the certainty of it, almost as though she had been with him in her sleep.
“How is it you’ve come?” Scarab asked, when they had all disrobed and settled into the frothy water, earthen goblets of some strange liquor in all their hands, its cooling properties offsetting the almost unbearable heat of the bath. “Have you already finished your work?”
Karou was grateful to Issa for answering. She didn’t feel up to faking her way through any normal social interaction.
Where is he?
“The gleaning is done,” said Issa. “The souls are gathered and safe. But the winter is expected to be difficult, and more refugees arrive every day. It was deemed best to wait until a fairer season to begin the resurrections.”
It was a nice way of saying that they’d chosen not to bring the dead of Loramendi back to life just so they could huddle and hunger through a gray season of ice rain and ash mud. There wasn’t enough food to go around as it was, or shelter, either. It wasn’t what Brimstone and the Warlord had envisioned when they crushed the long spiral stair that led down into the earth, trapping their people belowground. And it wasn’t what those who stayed above had sacrificed themselves for, either—that others might one day know life in a better time.
The day had not yet come. The time was insufficiently better.
It was the right decision, Karou knew, but because it freed her to do what she most wanted, she had held herself out of all debate and left the decision to others. She couldn’t help but view her own desires as selfish, and all of her hoarded hope as a bounty she had no business carrying away with her around the curve of the world, to spend on just one soul, while so many others lay in stasis.
As though sensing the conflict in her, Scarab said, “It was a brave choice, and I imagine not an easy one. But all will come well. Cities can be rebuilt. It’s a matter of muscle, will, and time.”
“And on the subject of time,” said Nightingale, “how long will you stay?”
Liraz replied, “Most of us only a couple of weeks, but it has been decided”—she gave Karou a stern look—“that Karou should stay with you until spring.”
This was Karou’s deepest conflict. As much as she wanted it—the whole winter here with Akiva—she couldn’t help thinking of the bleak conditions the others would endure. When the going gets tough, she thought, the tough do not go on vacation.
“The health of your anima is of paramount importance to your people,” said Scarab. “Never forget that. You need to heal and rest.”
Nightingale added, “As pain makes for a crude tithe, so does misery yield crude power.”
“In happiness,” said Eliza, looking as though she knew what she was talking about, “the anima blooms.”
Issa nodded along with everything the women said, I told you so fixed firmly on her face. Of course she’d said the same thing herself, if not in quite the same terms. “It is your duty, sweet girl,” she chimed in now, “to be well in body and soul.”
Happiness has to go somewhere, Karou remembered, and she settled deeper into the water with a sigh. Some fates were difficult to accept, but this wasn’t one of them. “Well, okay,” she said, with mock reluctance. “If I have to.”
They washed, and Karou emerged from the pool feeling purified in body and spirit. It was good to be cared for by women, and what a group they were. The deadliest of all the chimaera alongside the deadliest of seraphim, with a Naja, a ferocious neek-neek in deceptively adorable human form, a pair of fire-eyed Stelians of unfathomable power, and Eliza, who had been the answer. The key that fit the lock. And also, just a really cool chick.
They brushed Karou’s hair and twisted it, still damp, into vine-tied coils down her bare back. They brought out light, silken raiments in the Stelian style and held lengths of cloth against her skin. “White won’t do for you,” said Scarab, tossing a dress aside. “You’ll look like a phantom.” She produced, instead, a whisper of midnight-dark silk, aglimmer with clusters of tiny crystals like constellations, and Karou laughed. She let it pass through her hands like water, and the past with it.
“What?” asked Zuzana.
“Nothing,” she replied, and let them dress her. It was a kind of sari gathered over one shoulder, leaving her arms bare, and Karou almost wished for a bowl of sugar and a puff with which to dust herself. An echo of another first night. The gown was so like the one she’d worn at the Warlord’s ball, when Akiva had come to find her.
“Do you want to keep your clothes?” Eliza asked, nudging the discarded pile with her foot.
“Burn them,” said Karou. “Oh. Wait.” She delved into a trouser pocket for the wishbone she’d carried with her all these months. “Okay,” she said. “Now burn them.”
She felt like a bride as they led her back outside. The rain had stopped, but the night was alive with its memory in drips and rivulets, and with creature trills and honey scents, the air balmy and rich with mist.
And there was Akiva.
Soaked to the skin and haloed in vapor where the heat of his body was cooking away the rain. His eyes were ablaze, he was furious with waiting. His hands shook and clenched, and then stilled when he saw Karou.
Time stuttered, or else it only felt like it did. No use, any longer, for those invasive seconds in which they weren’t touching. They’d had too many of them already, and made short work of these final few.
They flew together. Time itself leapt out of the way, and Karou and Akiva were spinning, and the ground was falling away. The island was falling away. The sky drew them up and the moons hid in the clouds, keeping their tears to themselves, and their regret, which belonged to the ended age.
Lips and breath and wings and dance. Gratitude, relief, and hunger. And laughter. Laughter breathed and tasted. Faces kissed, no spot neglected. Lashes wet with tears, salt kissed lips to lips. Lips, at last, soft and hot—the soft, hot center of the universe—and heartbeats not in unison but passed back and forth across the press of bodies, like a conversation made up only of the word yes.
And so it was. Karou and Akiva held on to each other and didn’t let go.
It was not a happy ending, but a happy middle—at last, after so many fraught beginnings. Their story would be long. Much would be written of them, some of it in verse, some sung, and some in plain prose, in volumes to be penned for the archives of cities not yet built. Against Karou’s express wish, none of it would be dull.
Which she would have cause to be glad of a million times over, beginning that night.
Flight through sifting mists, hands joined. An island among hundreds. A house on a small crescent beach. Akiva had spoken truly when he told Melliel it was a stretch to call it a house. He’d imagined a door once to shut out the world, but there was no door here, so that the world seemed an extension of the house itself: sea and stars forever.
The structure was a pavilion: a thatched roof on posts, snug against the cliff and sheltered by it, its floor of soft sand, with living vines trailing down from the cliff to make green walls on two sides. That much Akiva had done before today. And there were a table and chairs. Well, they were hewn driftwood, but the “table” had a cloth on it, finer than it deserved. And now a wooden bowl of fruit sat atop that, and a beautiful kettle, too, with a box of tea and a pair of cups. Lanterns hung from hooks, and lengths of diaphanous fabric made a third, gently billowing wall, transparent as sea mist.
Nightingale’s gift had been unwrapped and given its proper place, and when Akiva brought Karou to the home he’d made for her—a place out of fantasy, so perfect that she forgot how to breathe and had to learn again in a hurry—his wish had all but come true already.
On the bed: a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together. And some time in the night they met on it and faced each other across lessening space, knees curled beneath themselves and wishbone held between.