39
BLOOD WILL OUT
After Bullfinch, everything changed for Akiva. When he sent Hazael and his tattoo kit away, an idea took hold: When he saw the chimaera girl again, he would be able to tell her that he had not used the life she had given him to kill any more of her kindred.
That he would ever see her again was extravagantly unlikely, but the notion took up residence in his mind—a darting, fugitive thing he couldn’t seem to chase away—and he became accustomed to its lurking presence. He grew comfortable with it, and the thing morphed from a wild notion into a hope—a sustaining hope, and the one that would change the course of his life: to see the girl again, and thank her. That was all, just thank her. When he imagined the moment, his mind went no further.
It was enough to keep him going.
He wasn’t long in Morwen Bay after the battle. The battle surgeons sent him back to Astrae to see what the healers there could do for him.
Astrae.
Until the Massacre a millennium past, the seraphim had ruled the Empire from Astrae. For three hundred years it had been, by all accounts, the light of the world, the most beautiful city ever built. Palaces, arcades, fountains, all pearl marble quarried in Evorrain, broad boulevards paved in quartz, overreached by the honey-scented boughs of gilead. It perched above its harbor on striated cliffs, with the emerald Mirea coast as far as the eye could see. Like in Prague, spires pointed to the heavens, one for each of the godstars—the godstars that had ordained seraphim as guardians of the land and all its creatures.
The godstars that had looked on as it all fell into chaos.
At three hundred years, Akiva thought, the citizens of Astrae must have felt that it had always been and would always be. Now, ten centuries later, its golden age seemed like the long-ago blink of some dead god’s eye, and little remained of the original city. The enemy had razed it: toppled the towers, burned everything that would catch fire. They would have torn the very stars from the heavens if they could. Such savagery had no precedent in history. At the end of the first day, the magi lay dead, even their youngest apprentices, and their library was swallowed by fire, with every magical text in all of Eretz.
Strategically, it made sense. Seraphim had come to rely so heavily on magic that in the aftermath of the Massacre, with not a single magus left alive, they were very nearly helpless. Any angels who hadn’t escaped Astrae were sacrificed on an altar by the light of the full moon, and the seraph emperor, ancestor of Akiva’s father, was among them. So many angels had bled out their lives on that altar stone that their blood rolled down the temple steps like monsoon rains and drowned small creatures in the streets.
The beasts held Astrae for centuries, until Joram—Akiva’s father—waged an all-out campaign early in his reign and won back all the territory up to the Adelphas Mountains. He had consolidated power and begun to rebuild the Empire, with its heart where, as he said, it belonged: in Astrae.
Where Joram had not made much headway was with magic. With the library burned and the magi dead, the seraphim had been knocked back to the most basic of manipulations, and in all the intervening centuries, they hadn’t progressed much beyond them.
Akiva had never given much thought to magic. He was a soldier; his education was limited. He presumed it a mystery for other, brighter minds. But his sojourn in Astrae changed that. He had the time to discover that his mind, soldier’s though it was, burned brighter than most, and that he possessed something the would-be magi of Astrae did not. In truth, he had two things they didn’t. He had the blood for it, though it took a malicious comment from his father for him to know it. And he had the most critical thing, the crux.
He had pain.
The pain in his shoulder was a constant, and so was his eidolon, the enemy girl, and the two were linked. When his shoulder burned, coming slowly back to life, he couldn’t help but think of her fine hands on it, winching the tourniquet that had saved him.
The healers of Astrae spurned the drugs of the battle surgeons, which didn’t help matters, and they made him use his arm. A slave—chimaera—was employed for the purpose of stretching it to keep the muscles supple, and Akiva was ordered onto the practice field to work his left arm in swordsmanship, in case the right never fully recovered. Against expectation, it did, though the pain did not diminish, and within a few months he was a more formidable swordsman than he had been before. He visited the palace armorer about a set of matched blades, and soon he reigned on the practice field. Fighting two-handed, he drew crowds to the morning bouts, including the emperor himself.
“One of mine?” asked Joram, appraising him.
Akiva had never been in his father’s immediate presence. Joram’s bastards were legion; he couldn’t be expected to know them all. “Yes, my Lord,” said Akiva with bowed head. His shoulders still heaved from the exertion of sparring, his right sending out the flares of agony that were just a part of living now.
“Look at me,” ordered the emperor.
Akiva did, and saw nothing of himself in the seraph before him. Hazael and Liraz, yes. Their blue eyes came straight from Joram, as did the set of their features. The emperor was fair, his golden hair going to gray, and though broad, he was of modest height and had to look up at Akiva.
His look was sharp. He said, “I remember your mother.”
Akiva blinked. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“It’s the eyes,” said the emperor. “They’re unforgettable, aren’t they?”
It was one of the few things Akiva did remember about his mother. The rest of her face was a blur, and he’d never even known her name, but he knew that he had her eyes. Joram seemed to be waiting for him to answer, so he acknowledged, “I remember,” and felt a tug of loss, as if, by admitting it, he was handing over the one thing he had of her.
“Terrible what happened to her,” said Joram.
Akiva went still. He’d had no knowledge of his mother after he was taken from her, as surely the emperor knew. Joram was baiting him, wanting him to ask, What? What happened to her? But Akiva didn’t ask, only clenched his teeth, and Joram, smiling knives, said, “But what can you expect, really, of Stelians? Savage tribe. Almost as bad as the beasts. Watch that the blood doesn’t out, soldier.”
And he walked away, leaving Akiva with the burn of his shoulder and a new urgency to know what he had never cared about before: What blood?
Could his mother have been Stelian? It made no sense that Joram would have had a Stelian concubine; he had no diplomatic relations with the “savage tribe” of the Far Isles, renegade seraphim who would never have given their women as tribute. How, then, had she come to be there?
The Stelians were known for two things. The first was their fierce independence—they were not part of the Empire, having steadfastly refused, over the centuries, to come into the fold with their seraph kindred.
The second was their sympathy with magic. It was believed, in the deep murk of history, that the first magi had been Stelian, and they were rumored still to practice a rarified level of magic unknown in the rest of Eretz. Joram hated them because he could neither conquer nor infiltrate them, at least not while needing to focus his forces on the Chimaera War. There was no doubt, though, in the gossip that swirled through the capital, of where he would set his sights once the beasts were broken.
As for what had happened to his mother, Akiva never found out. The harem was a closed world, and he couldn’t even confirm that there had ever been a Stelian concubine, let alone what had become of her. But for himself, something grew out of his encounter with his father: a sympathy with those strangers of his blood, and a curiosity about magic.
He was in Astrae for more than a year, and besides physical therapy, sparring, and some hours each day in the training camp drilling young soldiers in arms, his time was his own. After that day, he made use of it. He knew about the pain tithe, and thanks to his wound, he now had a constant reservoir of pain to draw on. Observing the magi—to whom he, a brute soldier, was as good as invisible—he learned the fundamental manipulations, starting with summoning. He practiced on bat-crows and hummingbird-moths in the dark of night, directing their flight, lining them up in Vs like winter geese, calling them down to perch on his shoulders, or in his cupped hands.
It was easy; he kept going. He quickly came up against the boundary of the known, which wasn’t saying much—what passed for magic in this age was little more than parlor tricks, illusions. And he never fooled himself that he was a magus, or anywhere close, but he was inventive, and unlike the courtly fops who called themselves magi, he didn’t have to flog or burn or cut himself to dredge up power—he had it, low and constant. But the real reason he surpassed them was neither his pain nor his inventiveness. It was his motivation.
The idea that had grown from a wild thing into a hope—to see the chimaera girl again—had become a plan.
It had two parts. Only the first was magical: to perfect a glamour that could conceal his wings. There was a manipulation for camouflage, but it was rudimentary, only a kind of “skip” in space that could trick the eye—at a distance—into overlooking the object in question. Invisibility it was not. If he hoped to pass in disguise among the enemy—which was exactly what he hoped—he would have to do better than that.
So he worked at it. It took months. He learned to go into his pain, like it was a place. From within it, things looked different—sharp-edged—and felt and sounded different, too, tinny and cool. Pain was like a lens that honed everything, his senses and instincts, and it was there, through relentless trial and repetition, that he did it. He achieved invisibility. It was a triumph that would have garnered him fame and the emperor’s highest honors, and it gave him a cold satisfaction to keep it to himself.
Blood will out, he thought. Father.
The other part of his plan was language. To master Chimaera, he perched on the roof of the slave barracks and listened to the stories they told by the light of their stinking dungfire. Their tales were unexpectedly rich and beautiful, and, listening, he couldn’t help imagining his chimaera girl sitting at a battle campfire somewhere telling the same stories.
His. He caught himself thinking of her as his, and it didn’t even seem strange.
By the time he was sent back to his regiment at Morwen Bay, he could have used a little more time to perfect his Chimaera accent, but he thought he was basically ready for what came next, in all its bright and shining madness.
40
ALMOST LIKE MAGIC
Back then, it had been Madrigal’s existence that had called to him across space. Now it was Karou’s. Then, Loramendi had been his destination, the caged city of the beasts. Now it was Marrakesh. Once again he left Hazael and Liraz behind, but this time he didn’t leave them in ignorance. They knew the truth about him.
What they would do about it, he couldn’t guess.
Liraz had called him a traitor, said he made her sick. Hazael had just stared, pale and repulsed.
But they had let him go without bloodshed—his or theirs—and that was the best he had hoped for. Whether they would tell their commander—or even the emperor—come back hunting for him, or cover for him, he couldn’t know. He couldn’t think about it. Flying over the Mediterranean with the wishbone in his hand, his thoughts belonged to Karou. He imagined her waiting for him at the mad Moroccan square where he’d first locked eyes with her. He could picture her so clearly, down to the way she would keep lifting her hand to her throat, reaching for the wishbone before she remembered, with a fresh pang every time, that she didn’t have it.