Karou’s sob escaped and her face found the place it wanted, against Issa’s neck where human flesh transitioned to cobra hood—the odd mix of warm and cool that Karou had known since she was a child and Issa had held her on one hip, rocked her to sleep, played with her, taught her to speak and sing, loved her and been half a mother to her. Yasri had been the other half; between them the two chimaera women had raised her. Twiga had never taken much of a role, and Brimstone…
Brimstone. The instant Karou had touched Issa’s soul back at the river she had known her, and had felt the queerest split decision of emotions: elation and defeat, love and disappointment, joy and savage despair. Neither side had overtipped the other. Even now the emotions were a balanced scale. Issa was not Brimstone, but… Issa was Issa, and Karou held her and felt her arms, shaky and uncertain and new, climb up and wrap around her in return.
“You found me,” Issa whispered, and from her queer balance of happy and sad, the words tipped Karou into confusion. Because she hadn’t found her.
Akiva had.
But there was no time to think about that now. Karou sat up and back, in the process giving the serpent-woman a clear view of her surroundings. When she saw Mik and Zuzana, her eyes went wide. She smiled, and, oh, her face was so lovely—it was not the face that Karou had known and loved, but it was similar in its quiet Madonna beauty, its flawless skin and sweetness—and her delight was so instant and pure. She knew Zuzana the same way Zuzana knew her: from Karou’s sketchbooks; Mik had not been in the picture yet when the portals burned. Zuze gave a dopey smile and half wave, and Issa let out a rusty little laugh.
Softly, Karou said, “Issa, I have a lot to tell you, as I hope you have a lot to tell me, but that’s Thiago—” She gestured to the door just as it juddered from a low kick.
Issa’s eyes clouded at the mention of the Wolf. “He lives,” she said.
“Yeah. And he’s going to be very surprised to see you.” Hello, understatement. It was imperative that Thiago not find out how Issa came to be here; Karou said as much, and helped Issa to a semisitting position. Then she motioned to Mik to take hold of one of the wood planks while she took the other.
“Karou,” said Thiago, and his false calm had all rubbed off. “Open this door. Please.”
Karou nodded to Mik, and they wordlessly pulled away the boards and stood back so that Thiago’s next kick blasted it open, startling him—and Ten behind him—with its gunshot report.
“Good morning?” said Karou, making it a query as she looked with puzzled innocence at the blasted-open door. “Sorry. I was finishing a resurrection. I didn’t want to be interrupted halfway.” She looked to Ten. “You know how I am about that.”
Thiago’s brow furrowed. “A resurrection? Who?” He cast a glance into the room and saw only Zuzana and Mik. The open door concealed Issa, but Karou shoved it back, and when Thiago saw who was there, his eyes widened, then narrowed. Ten’s, too, before she turned a look of fierce suspicion on Karou.
Before either could speak, Karou said, in a tone of mild reproach, “You never told me Issa’s soul was in there.” She gestured to the pile of thuribles. “Do you know how much faster the resurrections would have been going if I’d had her helping me all along instead of Ten?”
She had the satisfaction of seeing the White Wolf speechless. He opened his mouth to reply and nothing came out. “It isn’t,” he said finally. “It couldn’t be.”
“It is,” said Karou. “As you see.”
There was, of course, no possible way that Issa’s soul could have been in that stash of thuribles, and they both knew it. Those were all soldiers who had been under Thiago’s command and died at the battle of Cape Armasin; Issa would never, could never have been among them. Yet here she was, and Karou watched Thiago’s expression flash from astonishment to confusion to frustration as he tried to come up with a way to account for it.
He settled on disbelief. “Whose soul is it really, and why have you wasted resources on such a body?”
It was Issa herself who answered him. “Such a body?” she asked, looking down at herself. “Since when have Naja been a waste of resources?” It was a fair question; Issa herself was not a warrior, but plenty of her kind were, like Nisk and Lisseth.
Thiago’s reply was curt. “Since we developed the pressing need to fly, and Naja have no wings.”
“And where are your wings?” Issa shot back. She turned to look Ten up and down. “And yours?”
More fair questions. Thiago didn’t answer her. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“I assure you, Thiago, it is as Karou says.” Unsteadily she took possession of her body, raising herself to rear up slowly on her serpent coil, which was banded muscle as thick around as a woman’s hips. Already, the tip of her tail twitched in the way Karou remembered. The marvel of creation struck her as it hadn’t in many weeks; she had gotten so worn down that she’d lost her amazement—for resurrection, for magic, for herself. She had remade Issa. She had done this.
Issa told Thiago, “I am Issa of the Naja, and for eighty-four years I served at Brimstone’s side. In that time how many bodies did he craft for you? The dauntless Wolf. No less than fifteen, surely. And you never once said thank you.” Her beautiful smile made it sound not like a scold, but almost a fond remembrance.
“Thank him? For what? He did his job, and I did mine.”
“Indeed, and you asked no thanks, either. Or adulation.”
There was no sarcasm in Issa’s voice. Her tone was as sweet as her smile, but anyone who knew Thiago at all would understand that she mocked him. Adulation was wine to the White Wolf; more: It was water and air. 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?
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