Days of Blood & Starlight (55 page)

What had happened?

It was said the emperor was dead at the hand of Beast’s Bane, and the crown prince, too. It surprised no one that Beast’s Bane and his bastard cohorts were gone, or that the ragged Silverswords who had survived the night found, on storming the Misbegotten barracks, that it was empty, not hide nor hair of a bastard soldier anywhere in Astrae.

Across the Empire this would prove true. The Misbegotten had gone with the clouds, it was said.

They hadn’t, though. The clouds had fled to the far side of the world, where the young queen of the Stelians had set aside her scarab diadem, bound back her black hair, and set out with her magi to trace the source of the extraordinary disturbance.

As for the Misbegotten, they had gone to gather at the Kirin caves and await their brother Akiva, seventh of the name, to pledge selves and swords to his cause.

74

“I feel like a fly when it’s trapped in the window and almost dead.” Zuzana’s voice sounded as limp as her hair felt.

“That’s it exactly,” agreed Mik. “Fan faster.”

It was Zuzana’s turn wielding the fan, an artifact of crackly palm fronds they had found on the roof of the hotel. Mik, wearing only shorts, was in the chair, tilted back with his feet on the bed and his head back to expose his throat to the breeze. “You are a goddess of air circulation,” he said.

“And
you
are a specimen of glistening maleness.”

Mik’s laugh was dulled by heat coma. “I was surrounded by monster soldier torsos for a week. I know that I am a glistening specimen of
scrawn
.”

“You’re not scrawny.” Up and down went the fan as Zuzana formulated a compliment. It was true that being surrounded by bronze-hard pectorals and biceps bigger than her head cast Mik’s physique in a new light, but really, who needed biceps
bigger than her head? Well, unless their job was
killing angels
, in which case that might come in handy. She told Mik, “You have perfect violin-playing muscles.”

“And you, with your mighty puppeteer arms. We put the chimaera to shame.”

She stopped fanning and fell backward onto the bed. It was a bad bed in a cheap hotel, and the flop jarred her teeth. “Ow,” she said without conviction.

“Hey. Your turn isn’t even half up.”

“I know. I just succumbed to ennui.”

“Just now.”

“Just exactly now. You saw it happen.”

Mik let his chair rock forward, and used the momentum to pitch onto the bed beside her. “Ow,” she said again.

“I know a cure for ennui,” Mik told her, half rolling toward her before giving up and flopping onto his back. “But it’s too hot.”

“It is
way
too hot,” agreed Zuzana, who had no doubt what his cure entailed. “How are there even
people
in this country? Who can make babies in heat like this?”

“So let’s go,” he said. “The coast. Home. Australia. I don’t know. Why are we still here, Zuze?”

“Here” was Ouarzazate, the biggest city in southern Morocco. It looked like a film set for
The Mummy
or something, which it probably was, seeing as how it was a movie studio town at the edge of the Sahara desert. It was a little bland, a lot hot, and though their hotel ostensibly had air-conditioning, it had ceased to function some time in the night, which they had not noticed,
since the nights actually
were
cool enough for curing ennui and populating countries.

Why
were
they still here, a full day after their invisible escape from monster castle, feet freshly blistered from the hike and resulting tithe bruises at the height of their purple glory?

“I don’t want to go,” Zuzana admitted in a small voice. “Back to tourists and angel cults and puppets and real life?” She was whining and she knew it. “I want to make monsters and do magic and help Karou.”

“That’s real life, too,” he said. “And more to the point, real death. It’s too dangerous.”

“I know,” she said, and she did, but it just felt all wrong leaving Karou there. If Thiago had killed her once, how could she know he wouldn’t again? “Damn it, why doesn’t she have a
phone
?” she grumbled. Karou was rich; she couldn’t splurge on a satellite phone or something? Whatever. If Zuzana could just know her friend was okay,
she
would be okay, too.

Which is not to say that she would stop whining.

She’d agreed to leave the kasbah, and here she was. Fine. She hadn’t said she would leave the country. She just couldn’t get over the feeling that if they went any farther away, the whole magical spell of the past week would evaporate and leave her with nothing but a crazy story to tell her grandkids about how, for a week, in a giant sandcastle at the edge of the Sahara desert, she had been a resurrectionist’s apprentice and built great winged soldiers for an otherworldly war.

And they’d make loopy crazy gestures behind her back because hell, it did sound completely insane.

And then? She’d have no choice but to blink invisible—because
oh my god, she could do that now
—and swat their ruffian hides with rolled-up newspaper as they ran screaming from her cabbagey old-lady kitchen.

“I’m going to be the scariest grandma in the world,” she muttered, grouchy and kind of looking forward to it.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She flipped over and buried her face in her pillow. She screamed into it, got a mouthful of musty hotel pillow, and instantly wanted to bathe her tongue in running water. Of course the pillowcase had been washed since the last occupant, she told herself.
Of course.
That was why it tasted like stale stranger head.

Mik’s hand was on her back, making slow circles. She turned her face to him.

“I’m finger-painting with your sweat,” he informed her. “That was a heart.”

“A sweat heart. How romantic.”

“Oh, you want romantic? Okay. What does this spell?”

She felt his fingertip slide over her skin, and spoke each letter as it formed. “Z-U-Z-A-N-A. Zuzana. W-I-L-L. Will. Y-O-U.” She paused. “You.” She lay very still, listening with her skin for the next letter. “M.” Her voice dropped. She watched Mik’s face. He was smiling to himself, mischievous, his eyes on his work. Strawberry stubble covered his jaw. A beam of sunshine slipped through a broken slat in the shutter and glanced across his eyelashes; they looked dusted with light.

“A.” Zuzana said.
Oh god. Zuzana will you M-A—

Her heart pounded. Could he feel it through her back?
When they’d talked about marriage back in Prague she’d been dismissive. Well. She’d been embarrassed to have been caught thinking about it; that wasn’t who she was, some flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns, and she was just way too young.

R
, she felt. “R,” she whispered.

Mik’s hand fell still. “Wrong,” he said. “That was a K.”

“
K?
That’s not how you spell—” She cut herself off.

“How you spell what?” Mik’s voice was teasing. “I was writing
Zuzana will you make me a sandwich?
What did you think?”

She jerked her shirt down over her back. “Nothing,” she said, rolling off the bed.

Mik caught her around the waist and dragged her back. “You didn’t think—?
Oh.
How embarrassing for you.”

Her face was hot. He’d done it again. Jesus. Apparently she
was
a flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns. “Let me go,” she said.

But he didn’t. He held her. “I can’t ask you that yet,” he whispered in her ear. “I still have two tasks left.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not joking.” He sounded serious, and when she looked up at him, at his sweet, earnest face, he
looked
serious. “Were
you
?” he asked.

Well, yes, she
had
been joking about the three tasks. Seriously. She wasn’t a fairy-tale princess. Only, she kind of felt like one right now, and it wasn’t the worst feeling she’d ever had. “No,” she said; she stopped trying to get away. “I wasn’t joking, and here’s your second task. Get the air-conditioning back on, so you can cure my ennui.”

75

Karou was in her room. It was night. Again. A day had passed since the pit. Somehow.

The door was closed, but Mik’s planks were gone. They had taken them, and the shutter bolts, too, and her safety, which, it was now clear, had never been more than an illusion.

She pictured the moon’s racing swerve around the world, and the world’s hurtling course around the sun, and the glitter of the stars in their arcs—but… no. That was illusion, too, just as the rising and setting of the sun was a trick. It was the
world
that moved, not the stars, not the sun. The
sky
moved, panning across that vastness as it rolled through space, hurtling end over end, and that hurtling was what kept her pinned here. One of billions.

It doesn’t matter what happens to me
, she told herself.
I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free. As Brimstone is free.

Stardust. This was science, she had heard it and read it—all matter came from the explosions of stars—but it sounded like the humans’ own version of Eretz myths. A little drier, maybe: no rapist sun, no weeping moon. No
stabbing
moon. That was the Kirin story: The sun had tried to take Ellai by force and she had stabbed him as Karou had stabbed Thiago. Nitid had wept, and her tears became chimaera. Children of regret.

Karou wondered: Had
Ellai
wept? Had she bathed in the sea and tried to feel clean again? That could have been part of the story: Her tears gave the seas their salt, and everything in the world was born of violence, betrayal, and grief.

Karou had bathed in the river. Her tears wouldn’t make it to the sea; they would water date palms in some oasis; they would become fruit and be eaten, and perhaps be wept again through other eyes.

That’s not how it works.