Days of Blood & Starlight

Whenever he would return to Loramendi from a successful campaign—the very hour of return, the moment—his gonfalon would unfurl from the palace facade. Trumpets would blast and he would stride out to the cheering of the city. Runners would have come before him to make the people ready. They didn’t resent it; for all that the cheers were arranged, they were real, and Thiago had reveled in them.

There was a tightness around his mouth now. “All right then, Issa of the Naja, tell me. How did your soul come to be here?”

Issa didn’t hem and haw, or shoot any furtive glances Karou’s way. She said, with perfect honesty, “My lord general, I do not know. I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.” Only then did she turn to Karou, eyebrows raised in question.

“We’re in the human world,” Karou told her, and Issa’s eyebrows climbed a little higher.

“Well, that’s strange news. I’m sure you have much to tell me.”

And you me, thought Karou. I hope. Now, if she could just get rid of the Wolf. And his spy.

“Where did she come from?” Thiago asked in a tone that cut straight to the lie. “Where did she come from really?”

He stared at Karou, and she didn’t flinch. “I told you,” she said, and pointed to the mountain of thuribles.

“That’s not possible.”

“And yet, here she is.”

He just stared at her, as if he could drill the truth from her with his eyes. Karou stared boldly back. You tell your lies, she thought. I’ll tell mine. “And the best part,” she said, “is that I won’t need Ten’s help anymore. I have Issa now. And I have my friends.” She gestured to Zuzana and Mik, who were watching everything from the deep well of the window.

“Well then, this is a happy day,” Thiago replied, his tone conveying anything but happiness.

Karou had known, of course, that he would be displeased—that she had blocked the door, performed a resurrection of her own choosing, introduced a mystery in the person of Issa, and was clearly lying to his face—but still, the look of malice he turned on her struck her as out of all proportion.

Malice. Glittering, poisonous malevolence.

Okay, now Karou flinched. She hadn’t seen that look in his eyes since… since she was Madrigal, and remember how that had turned out. “It is a happy day,” she said, feeling herself backpedaling. Not that she had forgotten that look, but seeing it again, she remembered the heat of the black rock under her cheek, the parting of the air as the blade fell. Issa reached for her hand, and she gripped it tight, so grateful for her presence. “I really will work much faster now,” she said. “Isn’t that what matters?”

That, and the fact that it was Akiva who brought the thurible, that he was here, right under your nose.

“As you say,” Thiago said, and Karou was sure she did not imagine, as he swept her room with a glance, that his head lifted in just the way it had when he had caught her scent across the court. The flare of his nostrils was subtle but unmistakable, and his eyes were narrowed with suspicion.

He would get nothing but incense here, she told herself. Nothing but the sting of brimstone.

At least, so she very much hoped.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what’s at stake,” he told her, and she shook her head no, but as he turned to go, she wondered what he meant. The fate of their people? The success of the rebellion? She had defied him; she couldn’t help thinking he meant something more personal than that.

What was at stake? She felt balanced on a precipice and buffeted by gales. What wasn’t at stake?

And then, in her doorway, the Wolf shared a look with Ten that was so fraught with scheming—with thwarted schemes—that Karou had a flash of insight that chilled her and sent her mind racing back over the past days and weeks.

The constant watching, the questions, all the hints and omens. “You could be Kirin again,” Ten had told her. “I would resurrect you. You’d just need to show me how.”

The suggestion had been repellant: Put her soul in Ten’s hands? Even if the pit didn’t figure into the plan— and it did—it had felt so wrong. And now Karou understood why.

Ten was meant to replace her. Thiago didn’t want to help Karou. He wanted to not need her.

Karou felt as though she were opening her eyes and seeing the White Wolf clearly for the first time since he’d found her wandering in the ruins of Loramendi.

He still wants to kill me.

Heat was building in her chest and radiating out to her limbs, creeping up her neck as a flush. She wanted to scream. She wanted to get right in his face and scream as loud as she could, but even more than that, she wanted to laugh. Did he really think Ten could do this work? It had taken her years to learn it at Brimstone’s side, and even with his guidance, it was as much gift as practice. She would never forget her pride in the first “Well done” she’d earned, or the surprise and respect in Brimstone’s voice when he had seen, against all his expectation, that she had a sympathy for magic.

Ten could no more conjure a body than Virko could play a concerto on Mik’s violin.

Karou understood Thiago’s game now; it had failed, and he still needed her. So his game would have to change.

To what? 

59 Sweet Girl

“Stop looking at her boobs.”

“What?” Mik turned to Zuzana, pink spots blooming on his fair cheeks. “I’m not!”

“Well, I am,” Zuzana declared, regarding Issa. “I can’t help myself. They’re perfect. Nice job, Karou, but couldn’t she maybe wear a T-shirt?”

“Seriously?” said Karou. “How many nude models have you drawn?”

“None,” said Mik.

“Well, okay. Maybe you haven’t, but I’m sure you’ve seen your share of boobs.”

“Not really.” His eyes drifted again toward Issa. “And, you know, never on a snake goddess.”

“She’s not a goddess,” Karou said fondly—though she did look like one. She was still marveling: Issa is alive. Issa is here. “She’s a Naja, and they don’t wear clothes.”

“Right,” said Zuzana. “They just wear snakes.”

“Yep.”

The first thing Issa had wanted to do, after greeting the chimaera host—which had taken a good part of the morning—was go through the kasbah and summon snakes to her. Karou had followed behind, a little disturbed to realize that the serpents had been there all the time, including one highly venomous Egyptian cobra. Now, back up in her room, they were wreathed around Issa’s waist and neck, and one was twining through her hair. While Karou watched, a coil of its body slipped down over her brow to rest on the bridge of her nose. Laughing, Issa lifted it gently back up.

“They tell you anything interesting?” Karou asked her, switching from Czech to Chimaera. She was remembering Avigeth, and how the coral snake had told Issa how the hunter Bain hid his wishes in his beard. If not for that, Karou may never have made it to Eretz.

Issa’s laugh evaporated. Her face grew serious. “Yes,” she said. “They say it stinks of death since you came here.”