Текст книги "Days of Blood & Starlight"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

She held it ready. Hesitated. What if it wasn’t?

Her thoughts were scattershot; they came and cascaded away, but one came and came again. Akiva had brought her the thurible. Thiago—her ally—lied to keep her isolated and alone. Akiva—her enemy—brought her the thurible that might… that might… that might contain… Brimstone.

Did it?

A twist of the wrist and Karou opened the vessel. Half a second. The soul skimmed against her senses.

And she knew.

55

T

HE

E

MPEROR’S

P

ROWESS

A bare foot, highly arched. A slender ankle festooned in golden bangles.

Nevo didn’t mean to see, but the music of the bangles drew his attention at the moment the girl stepped through the door and he glimpsed this secret sight before he could jerk his chin down and pin his gaze to the ground.

The concubine of the night, leaving the harem to be escorted across the skybridge to the emperor’s inner sanctum. She was veiled and cloaked as the women always were, in a hooded robe that concealed even her wings, and she would scarcely have registered as a person at all but for that glimpse of foot. It was the most Nevo had ever seen of one of Joram’s concubines, and he was caught off guard by its effect on him.

Instantly he wanted to help her.

Help her what? Escape? That was rich. It was his duty to ensure that she didn’t. He was part of the Silversword escort standing ready to deliver her across the bridge. They were six, a virtual parade. It was ludicrous: six guards to walk a girl across a bridge.

A girl—not a woman? Nevo couldn’t have said why he thought so—it was hardly the foot—but he guessed that she was young. And then, she hesitated.

When the harem doors clanged shut behind her, she stood frozen in place.

Nevo sensed frantic energy beneath all that gauzy cloth. He could see her veil stirred by too-quick breathing, and her cloak by courses of shivers, not from cold, but terror. It had to be her first time making this walk.

The thought pierced him.

Several times a week he drew parade duty, as they called it, and he had learned that you could infer a lot from the manner of a woman’s bearing, even beneath so much concealment. Slow, steady steps, short quick frantic steps; head held high or darting left and right, peering through the screen of her veil at the world outside her prison. He had seen—or guessed at—weariness and resignation, pride, dejection, but he had never seen a girl freeze before, and he tensed, thinking she was going to bolt.

The skybridge was a slender span of glass, the city far below, and sometimes the women chose to leap rather than be delivered across it. Under those cloaks their wings were pinioned, and to fall was to die—or try to die. A guard would leap after her. If he caught her, she was punished; if he didn’t, he was.

It had happened before, though not in his own time here. Nevo was only twenty; he had had his silver sword only two years, and been promoted to the emperor’s personal detail just two months ago. He didn’t know what to do in a situation like this.

Not a one of his fellow guards moved or spoke. They waited, and so he waited, too, unaccountably nervous. And when the girl began, finally, to propel herself so-slowly forward, trembling, Nevo came to understand something. He had thought the six-guard parade a ridiculous display: Lest anyone fail to take note of the emperor’s prowess, or to count the women who were his and the bastards he sired, here were six guards standing each over eight feet tall in their extravagant helmet plumes to draw all eyes to the spectacle.

But maybe there was more to it than that. Because in this moment, if Nevo alone were this girl’s escort, he couldn’t swear that he would do his duty. As powerful as his loyalty to the emperor was, there were stronger impulses, like the urge to protect the helpless.

Fool, Nevo, he chastened himself with an inward snarl. Some said Joram’s magi could read thoughts, and he hoped it wasn’t true, because in the space of seconds he had allowed such ridiculous visions to flit through his head—saving this girl, taking her somewhere safe. Godstars, there was even a lean-to dwelling in the picture, a garden behind it, and a great overarching sky with no spires as far as the eye could see, no Tower of Conquest, no Astrae, no Empire. Just a small, safe place, and himself hero to an unknown, faceless girl.

All because of a glimpse of foot?

Pathetic. Maybe his bunkmates were right, that Nevo needed some “tending to” in the soldiers’ comfort house. He told himself he would go, resolved on it as he marched, his boot heels too slow on the glass walk. The escort was grouped in two triads with the girl between, so that Nevo walked right behind her, adjusting his steps to match her mincing pace. She looked so small—they always did, framed by the giants of the guard. He could hear her uneven breathing—the high, fluting gasps of near-hysteria—and feel the waves of heat rolling off her cloaked wings.

Her perfume was so delicate it might almost have been her natural scent.

He wondered what color her hair was, and her eyes.

Stop it. You’ll never know.

The march was short over that span of glass, Astrae opening beneath them and closing again when they came to the other end. The girl was delivered. A steward met her at Alef Gate and she went in and was gone without a glance at her escort.

Absurdly, that stung. As if she should have taken note of him, somehow understood that he felt sorry for her?

Nevo knew that in his Imperial Guard uniform he was as anonymous to her as she should have been to him, and the thought made him restless and angry. He had lost himself to a uniform—this shining silver costume of a uniform with its bouffant plumage and its overlong bell sleeves that would interfere with a clean draw, if ever he were called on to draw his sword, which he never was, except in the training arena, and even that was more dancing lesson than fighting. The Silverswords were not what he had thought when he was selected from the ranks of the common army to join them. He’d been chosen for his height, not even for his swordsmanship, which he had once been proud to know was exceptional. But the recruiter hadn’t seen him fight. He had been interested only in his look, the upshot of which was that in all his finery Nevo was indistinguishable from any other Silversword in Astrae. Maybe his own mother could pick him out, but certainly the emperor’s terrified concubine wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him again, two times or two hundred.

And why should he care if she did?

He didn’t care.

Alef Gate closed, and the concubine’s perfume was too frail to linger on the air. She was gone to her duty, and Nevo would go to his and think no more about her.

As it happened, his post was here at Alef Gate. With another of his triad, he relieved the standing guard and took their places. The other guards of the parade went on to their own posts, most of them farther inside the great glass tower than Nevo had ever been. The emperor’s private quarters had been described to him as a kind of castle-within-a-castle, occupying the deep inner core of the Tower of Conquest. Alef Gate was the outermost entrance; inside it, corridors branched labyrinthine, so that there was no direct conduit to successive gates—Beit, Gimel, Dalet, and on through the alphabet. Nevo had been only as far as Beit, but the other guards said that it tested the memory to find one’s way within. It was all clouded glass, so much glass, thick and rich with a sheen like honey, and strong. In training they were invited to test it with their swords, and strong as Nevo was, he’d been unable to breach the walls even with his booted foot, even with the hilt of his sword. The corridors curved, layer upon layer of that glossy unbreakable glass, and were riddled with false doors and dead ends, all of it designed to confuse and trap invaders or assassins.

Good luck to them, thought Nevo. Ten guarded gates stood between himself and the emperor; no one was getting through there. Tonight he himself was glad to be as far from the center as possible. Guards on Samekh Gate sometimes heard… weeping.

Weeping.

The women at the comfort house might not weep, but Nevo knew he would not be going there, and as he stood at his post through the long, dull night, it felt as if his true work and challenge—other than standing still for long stretches of time—was in keeping himself from wondering what was happening within. It was ridiculous, how that merest of glimpses had made this girl real in a way that all the women and girls of the past two months had not been. Well, they had been, certainly, but he had managed to overlook it. Would that he could now.

He indulged in a different folly to distract himself. It was equally futile but less likely to drive him mad, and it was: wishing that he had never been plucked from the army to join the Silverswords.

It was not a rational wish. The guards’ pension was better—it went to his family—and the chances of survival much better than in the army, but unlike most Silverswords, Nevo had been a soldier first and knew the difference, and the difference was profound.

Out beyond Astrae, across this land and the next, soldiers had kept the beasts at bay for centuries, fighting and dying and finally winning. There was honor in that, even glory, though Nevo would have given up the glory for simple honor—to feel right in his days and nights, to do something….

Of course, it was more complicated now. The Chimaera War was over and a new one was brewing, but it was hard to feel the simple righteousness there had always been when fighting beasts.

The Stelians were seraphim. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about them; no one did. The Far Isles were, quite literally, on the far side of the globe, trading suns and moons with the Empire in turn, never sharing day or night or anything else; if they had wronged the Empire in some way, it had not been felt by ordinary folk, who bore no animosity toward their distant, mysterious cousins. Nevo’s gauge was his own family, and he could well imagine the talk there would be when it got out that Joram had declared war.

“On who?” his father would demand, looking dumbstruck. “On a people whose king he doesn’t even know the name of?”

“If there is a king.” His mother. “I’ve heard they have a queen.”

“Oh, have you now. And that the air elementals are her spies?”

“Indeed. And she can kill with a look, and cooks up storms in a great pot to send out over the seas.” She would be smirking. His mother had a laughing smirk and a love of nonsense, and his father had a booming laugh, but a dark furrow of worry, too.

“What a fight to pick,” Nevo imagined him fretting. “It’s like pelting stones into a cave and waiting to see what comes barreling out.”

And Nevo was waiting to see. Envoys had been dispatched with Joram’s declaration two weeks ago and hadn’t returned or been heard of. What did it mean? Perhaps they’d gotten lost searching for the Far Isles and hadn’t delivered the scroll at all. Saved from war by poor navigation?

Wishful thinking.

He stifled a yawn. It was finally morning, or nearly. His relief would be here soon—

Alef Gate crashed open.

Nevo leapt airborne. Chaos poured out. Noise and wings and sparks and rushing and shouting and… what was the protocol? He protected the gate from without. What did he do when chaos burst from within? No one had ever said, and who was this? Stewards and servants, and a handful of Silverswords, too.

“What’s happened?” Nevo barked, but no one heard him over the roaring coming from within.

The bellowing, the fury.

Joram.

The girl, thought Nevo. And while stewards and servants stumbled over each other trying to escape the path of the emperor’s rage, he pushed inside. Beit Gate was abandoned; where was Resheph? Had he been one of those to flee? Flee? Unbelievable.

Nevo rushed through the door and was deeper in the inner sanctum than he had ever been. He didn’t know the way, but Joram’s rage was like a river he traced upstream. When he took a wrong turn, he doubled back and found the right way. Minutes were lost to the glass labyrinth. The emperor’s voice came and went now. The howling gave way to words, though Nevo couldn’t make them out.

Gimel Gate, Dalat, Hei, Vav, all unguarded; the Silverswords had either rushed out or in, leaving their posts. Nevo’s first thought was to be appalled by the lack of discipline, but then he realized that he, too, had left his post, and he began to be afraid. It was the only time he wavered; he could still go back—maybe in the madness his breach would be overlooked.

Later, it would be some consolation to know that it wouldn’t have mattered. By now, nothing he said or did could matter. All was done and decided long before he burst at a flying run into the emperor’s bedchamber.

Plashing fountains, orchids, the chatter and squawk of caged birds. The ceiling seemed leagues overhead—all glittering glass spangled by constellations of lights that gave the illusion of the night sky. In the middle of it all, the bed was raised on a dais, like some monument to virility. It was empty.

Joram stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips. He was powerful, thickened by age but toughened, too, and marked with old battle scars. His jaw was square, his face red with rage and hard with scorn. He wore a robe; it showed a triangle of chest, and seemed somehow vulgar.

A handful of other guards were here, standing around looking—Nevo thought—stupid and large. Eliav was one of them. The Captain of the Silverswords had himself been on Samekh Gate, and would have been the first on the scene—save Namais and Misorias, of course, Joram’s personal bodyguards, who slept by turns in the antechamber. They stood just paces from their master, their faces seeming chiseled from wood. Byon, the head steward, was leaning heavily on his cane, his palsy much more pronounced than usual.

“You didn’t place it there?” Joram demanded of the old seraph.

“No, my lord. I would have woken you at once, of course. For something like this—”

“A basket of fruit?” Joram was incredulous, and then—“A basket of fruit!”—his fury returned and flashed through the chamber as heat and light.

Nevo took a step back. He scanned for the girl. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, or thinking at all; it hadn’t even occurred to him until this moment that he would see her unveiled, and certainly not that she, like Joram’s chest, might be… exposed. As soon as he caught sight of her—peripherally, a blur of flesh on the far side of the dais—he realized this was the case, and his instinct was not to look, not to turn toward her, but only to back out to the door and be away from here.

“Explain to me how it came to be here.” Joram’s fury turned to ice. “Through so many guarded doors to arrive at the foot of my bed.”

It was her stillness that made Nevo turn his head.

She was young; he had been right. And she was exposed. Naked. There was a girlish fullness to her face, but her breasts were full, too, nothing girlish there. Her hair was red and wild, and her eyes were brown. She was slumped against the wall, making no effort to cover herself, staring at him—at him—without expression.

Without motion.

Almost as soon as Nevo settled his eyes on her, she tipped slowly sideways. He watched it happen, remembering how slowly she had walked across the skybridge. This was like that, his mind tried telling him, just like that. But then: the rubbery jounce and splay of limbs as she subsided to the floor, the tinkle of her bangles settling, and stillness. The fire of her wings dimmed. Died. On the wall behind her was a streak of blood which, traced upward by the eye, led to a red stain on the glass.

Her head had done that.

She had been thrown.

Nevo was hot and cold and sick. He thought of the Shadows That Live—his instinct was to blame beasts, and he knew the fabled assassins were at large again, somehow still alive—but this wasn’t what they did. The Shadows slit throats.

And, of course, he knew who had done it. His eyes roved wild over the lavish room as snatches of conversation penetrated his dismay. He knew who, but not why.

“Every guard who was on duty,” he heard Joram say.

Eliav, in horror: “My lord! Every—?”

“Yes, Captain. Every. Guard. Did you think, after a lapse like this, that you might live?”

“My lord, there was no lapse. Your doors never opened, I swear it. It was some sorcery—”

“Namais?” Joram said. “Misorias?”

“Sir?”

Joram said, “See it done before the city wakes,” and the guards replied, “Of course.”

The emperor kicked out at something—a basket—and it tipped and sent pink orbs spinning, and one struck the bed dais and burst with a sound such as the girl’s skull may have made on the wall. Nevo looked at her again. He couldn’t help himself. The sight of her there, dead, and no one else seeming even to notice, made the whole scene feel like a vivid hallucination. It wasn’t, of course. It was all happening, and he understood with a kind of seeping clarity that he was going to hang.

But not why.

Only that it had something to do with a basket of fruit.

56

A S

URPRISE

Shaken awake, Zuzana sat up and didn’t know where she was. It was dark; the air was thick and the smells were pungent—earth and sharp animal scents with an undertone of decay. A touch, gentle on her shoulder, and Karou’s voice. “Wake up,” she was saying softly. Zuzana became aware of her aching muscles and remembered everything.

Oh, right. Monster castle.

She blinked her friend into focus in the dim candlelight. “Hell time is it?” she muttered. Her mouth was so dry it felt like the desert itself had curled up and spent the night in there. Karou put a bottle of water into her hands.

“It’s early,” she said. “Not yet dawn.”

“Early’s stupid,” groaned Zuzana. At her side, Mik still slept. She took a swig of the water and swished it around. Better. She blinked in the dim and focused on Karou. She felt a small jolt, and her sluggishness slid away. “You’re crying,” she said.

Karou’s eyes were wet; there was an unblinking brightness to them, and a hard set to her jaw. Zuzana tried to interpret the look but failed. She couldn’t tell if her friend was happy or sad, only that she was intent. “I’m fine,” Karou said. “But I need your help again.”

“Yeah, okay.” Zuzana hoped it wouldn’t entail cleaning hideous wounds. “What with?”

“A resurrection. I have to finish before Thiago or Ten come up.” Karou smiled, but again it was impossible to interpret, neither happy nor sad, but steely. “I want it to be a surprise.”

57

A B

ASKET OF

F

RUIT

“A basket of fruit,” repeated Akiva, incredulous.

When Joram had declared war on the Stelians, he must have prepared for many scenarios, but Akiva doubted it had ever entered the emperor’s mind that his chosen foe might… turn him down.

He was back in Cape Armasin with his regiment, where the news had traveled on the tongues of scouts and soldiers and in small scroll missives tied to the legs of squalls; it came in scraps and whispers, lies and truth and guesses mixed with official dispatches that were just as full of lies as the gossip was, and it was a few days before Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz had enough pieces to make a puzzle.

It had not been Joram’s envoys, it seemed, who delivered the Stelian response. Indeed, the envoys had not returned at all, on top of which communication with advance troops staging in Caliphis had been severed, and a reconnaissance mission had likewise fallen off the map. Every seraph sent in the direction of the Far Isles had vanished. That news alone chilled Akiva, and also stirred his fascination. What was happening over the edge of the world?

And then… a basket of fruit.

Such was their reply. Truly, it was nothing more sinister than that. It wasn’t a basket of envoys’ heads or entrails; the fruit wasn’t even poisoned. It was just fruit, of some tropical variety unknown in the Empire. The emperor’s tasters had declared it “sweet.”

There was a note. Of its message, reports differed, but the report Akiva believed came from a nephew to an imperial steward, and it was this, in archaic Seraphic, in a feminine hand, and stamped with a wax seal depicting a scarab beetle: Thank you, but we must respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.

The nerve of it, the staggering gall. It took Akiva’s breath away.

“I still don’t understand,” Liraz said, after the initial shock wore off. “How does this explain the Breakblades?”

“Breakblades” was what Misbegotten called Silverswords, after their elegant weapons that would never withstand a blow in real combat—not that they ever saw any. The only indisputable fact of the entire mystery was this: Two days past, Astrae had awakened to the sight of fourteen Silverswords swinging from the Westway gibbet.

“Well,” said Hazael, “that would be the manner of delivery of the basket of fruit. You see, when our father woke in the morning, it was simply sitting at the foot of his bed, and no one could tell him how it had gotten there. Through ten guarded gates, into the heart of the inner sanctum where he believed himself safe from all comers, even the Shadows That Live.”

“Even the Shadows That Live could not have done this,” said Akiva, and he tried to fathom what magic could account for it. Invisibility alone was no help against closed doors. Had the Stelian emissary passed through walls? Beguiled each guard in turn? Simply wished the gift there? That was a thought. Just what were the Stelians capable of? Sometimes, when he was deep inside himself working a manipulation, Akiva imagined skeins of connection tracing across the great dark surfaces of oceans and coming at length to islands—islands green in honeyed light, morning air ashimmer with evaporating mist and the wings of iridescent birds, and he wondered: Did his blood make him Stelian? Joram’s blood didn’t make him his; why should his mother’s make him hers?

“Fourteen Breakblades swinging on the Westway.” Hazael let out a low whistle. “Imagine the sight, all that silver blinding in the sun.”

“Can the gibbet hold fourteen Breakblades, giants that they are?” Liraz wondered.

“Maybe it will collapse under their weight, and good riddance,” said Akiva—meaning the gibbet, not the guards. He had no love of Breakblades, but he couldn’t wish them dead. He shook his head. “Can the emperor believe he’s safer now?”

“If he does he’s a fool,” said Hazael. “The message is clear. Please enjoy this lovely fruit while contemplating all the ways we might kill you in your sleep.”

Grim as it all was—as bleak the picture of the gibbet bowed by the weight of fourteen guards—the most upsetting news came as an afterthought, and from a Misbegotten. Indeed only a Misbegotten would have taken note of it, or cared.

Melliel was the older half sister who had spoken up on behalf of the Misbegotten at the end of the war. She was thick, scarred, and inked; she fought with an ax and kept her gray hair hacked short as a man’s. There was nothing feminine about Melliel except her voice, which even in barked greeting had a ring of music to it. She had sometimes sung at campfires on campaign, and her song-stories had been transporting as few things ever were in a battle camp. She was posted in the capital, or had been until the day before. Now she was with a detachment of Misbegotten going west, into the mists and mysteries of the vanished troops. As if the Empire hadn’t lost enough soldiers in the final battles of the war. All of its armies had bled, but none more than the Misbegotten.

“Of course he would send Misbegotten,” Liraz had hissed, hearing their mission. “Who cares if bastards come back?”

Melliel, though, said she was glad to go—glad to be free of the spider’s web that was Astrae. It was she who told them what else had happened at the Tower of Conquest while the Breakblades swung.

“A shrouded body was… released… through Tav Gate that same morning.” Tav was the last of the Tower’s gates. It was the gutter door, belowground and egress-only; it was where waste was flushed out to sea.

Akiva steeled himself. “Who?”

Melliel’s jaw worked. “There’s no way to know for certain, but… apparently no one thought to dismiss the harem escort. They waited two hours at Alef before a steward noticed and sent them away.”

Akiva felt the news in his gut first and his fists an instant later—a hot surge that made them clench so tight his forearms burned. From Liraz came a choked noise; Hazael’s breathing grew hoarse and he turned abruptly to pace away trailing sparks. Turned and paced back. His fair face was red. Liraz was shaking, her fists clenched as tight as Akiva’s.

The harem escort was the procession of Silverswords that marched the concubines to and from the emperor’s bed. “Parade duty,” they called it. Akiva’s mother had made that walk years ago, who knew how many times—on one return with himself beginning in her belly. Liraz’s and Hazael’s mothers, too, and Melliel’s, and untold other girls and women. And the morning of the hangings, it would seem, the concubine who should have emerged from Alef had been sent out Tav instead, along with the night’s refuse.

“Terrible what happened to her,” Akiva heard in his head—the cruel, goading voice of his father the first time he had ever deigned to speak to him. Had his mother’s body been sent out Tav Gate, too?

A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly? The war was over, but both sides were still slaughtering civilians; the emperor casually killed concubines in his bedchamber and sent his bastards into the unknown to die drumming up more war. There was nothing good in the world, nothing at all. And now that even his memories of happiness were corrupted, Akiva found himself in freefall.

Had she meant it? Had she truly never trusted him? He wanted to deny it; he remembered. He remembered those days—those nights—more clearly than any others in his life, and how she had curled into him in sleep, and how, when she woke to the sight of him, her brown eyes had come alive with light. Even on the scaffold, and again in Marrakesh, after the wishbone was snapped but before she understood…

Before she knew what he had done.

Maybe he had seen only what he wanted to see. It didn’t matter now, anyway. There was no more light in her eyes, not for him and, worse: not at all.

In the morning, when Melliel departed with her troops, Akiva stood on the rampart with Liraz and Hazael and saw them off. A part of him wished he were going, too, mists and mysteries and vanished troops and all, to see the Far Isles, and maybe meet the one who had written such a mad message to the emperor.

But his place was here, on this side of the world. His challenge was here, and his penance: to do what he had told Karou he would, which was anything and everything.

What was anything? What was everything?

He knew, but it seemed to loom before him as huge and insurmountable as the mountains of the south.

Rebellion.

With Madrigal, in the temple, everything had seemed possible. Was it? Would he find any sympathy in the ranks? There was a restiveness there, he knew, and a quiet desperation. He thought of Noam at the aqueduct, asking wildly when it would all end. There would be more like him, but there were those, too, who would claim women and children in their tally and laugh as the ink dried. That would always be true; there would always be both kinds of soldiers. How was he to find the good, recruit them, trust them to secrecy while he went about the slow and scraping work of building a rebellion?

Melliel’s troops were just a shimmer on the horizon now. The rocky swell of the cape headland blocked the view of the sea from here, but its clean scent was in the air, and the sky was great and endless. Finally, their Misbegotten brethren vanished into it.

“What now?” asked Liraz, turning to him.

He didn’t know what she meant. Liraz. He still didn’t know what to make of his sister. She had gone along with the bird summoning warily, and freeing the Kirin, but she had seemed more narrow-eyed and watchful than ever since his return from the rebel camp. With the news that the chimaera had taken to returning the civilian attacks, he feared that she would argue for giving up their location to their superiors.

There was a restless energy in her, her wings kicking off sparks as she paced. “How does one begin?” she asked. Stopped, fixed him with a stare, and held up her hands. Her black hands. “You said one has only to begin. So how do we?”

Begin? Mercy breeds mercy, Akiva had told her. He hardly knew what to say. “Do you mean…?”

“Harmony with the beasts?” she supplied. “I don’t know. I know that I’m through taking orders from men like Jael and Joram. I know that every night a girl must cross the skybridge knowing that no one will help her. Those are our mothers.” Her voice was raw. “We’re swords, they tell us, and swords have no mother or father, but I did have one once, and I can’t even remember her name. I don’t want to be this anymore.” Again, she lifted her hands. “I’ve done things—” Her voice cracked.

Hazael drew her against him. “We all have, Lir.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and bright. No tears, not Liraz. “Not like me. You couldn’t. You’re good. Both of you, you’re better than me. You were helping them, weren’t you? While I was… while I…” She trailed off.

Akiva took her hands in his, covered up the black marks so she didn’t have to look at them. He remembered what Madrigal had told him, years ago, with her hand on his heart and his on hers. “War is all we’ve been taught, Lir,” he told his sister now. “But we don’t have to be that anymore. We’ll still be us, just—”

“A better us?”

He nodded.

“How?” Her restlessness overcame her. She shook him off to pace again. “I need to do something. Now.”

Hazael spoke. “We start to gather others. That’s our first step. I know who to start with.” Yes, Akiva realized. He would.

“It’s too slow,” Liraz said fiercely.

And Akiva agreed. The idea of steps—of a careful progression of plans and recruitment and scheming and subterfuge—it was far too slow.