Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

29

A DREAM COME TRUE

“Things canbe different,” Karou had told Ziri just before the war council. “That’s the whole point.”

Wasthat the point? To build a world in which she could have her lover? Seeing the look that passed between her and Akiva across the cavern, Ziri wondered if that was what he’d given up his own life for.

“For all of us,” she’d said.

For him, too? What could be different for him? He’d be free of this body someday, in resurrection or evanescence, one way or the other. There was always that to look forward to.

He watched Akiva leave and was unsurprised when, a short while later, Karou left, too. Separately, and by different doors, but he had no doubt that they would find each other. He thought back to the Warlord’s ball, all those years ago, and what he’d witnessed then. He’d been just a boy, but it had been as plain as moonlight to him: the way Madrigal’s dancing body had curved awayfrom the Wolf’s but towardthe stranger’s. And even if the full, heady complexity of adult intrigues had been a mystery to him, he’d gotten a sense of it—his first, like a hint of fragrance, exotic, intoxicating… frightening.

Adult intrigues weren’t a mystery to him anymore. They were still intoxicating, and still frightening, and watching Karou and Akiva leave, Ziri felt like a boy again. Left out. Left behind.

Maybe he would he always feel that way with her, no matter the age of the bodies they wore.

A figure appeared in the doorway—the one Karou had taken—and for an instant he thought it would be her returning, but it wasn’t. It was Lisseth.

Ziri hadn’t realized that the Naja wasn’t here with the rest of them, and his first, half-formed thought was one of mild self-disparagement. The real Wolf would have known if any of his troops were unaccounted for. But that thought melted away when he caught the look on Lisseth’s face. It was an unpleasant face at the best of times, crude and broad and host to a limited repertoire of nasty expressions ranging from sly to vicious, but now she looked… stricken.

The wings of her nostrils flared white, and her lips were pressed to a bloodless crease. Her eyes were unexpectedly unguarded, vulnerable, and there was a stony dignity in the lift of her shoulders, the jut of her blunt chin. She gave him a curt nod, and he rose, curious, and went to her.

Nisk, the other Naja, saw it all, and joined them in the doorway.

“What is it?” Ziri asked.

Her words came out… pinched. She sounded affronted. “Sir, have I done something to displease you?”

Yes, Ziri wanted to reply. Everything.But though he strongly suspected that she was the oath-breaker who’d raised hamsas to the Misbegotten, she had denied it, and he had no proof. “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “What’s this about?”

“This command should have been mine. I’ve been waiting for this, and I have more tactical experience. I’m stronger, and when it comes to stealth there’s no contest. To not even be told what you were planning—”

“What I was—? Soldier, what are you talking about?”

Lisseth blinked, glanced from him to Nisk and back. “The attack on the seraph, sir. It’s under way now.”

Did he blanch? Did they see him pale? It was the wrong response. He should have sharpened to cold fury and bared his fangs the instant he realized that his soldiers were, at this very moment, acting without his orders. “This is no plan of mine,” he said, and he saw her face transform. Her indignation vanished. With the understanding that he hadn’t slighted her, she was her vicious self again. “Take me there,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” she said, turning, and, serpent-smooth, she led the way. Ziri followed, with Nisk coming behind.

Who was it?Ziri asked himself. Lisseth herself with all her acid scrutiny would have been his first guess for a mutineer. Was she? Was this a trap?

Maybe. And yet he had no choice but to follow. Belatedly it struck him that he should have summoned Ten, and it seemed strange to him that the she-wolf hadn’t followed of her own accord.

They descended one of the cave system’s many down-wending passages, going beyond the ones he knew, deeper and deeper still. Every time they came around a corner with their torches, big pallid insects skittered away ahead of them, squeezing improbably into cracks in the walls. The caverns were pervaded by a heavy, wet-mineral smell, as oppressive a sensory cloak as the wind music was, but as they progressed, new odors filtered through it, traces teased from the darkness. Animal scents, musky and ripe. Chimaera, a group of them. And a cooked-meat scorch, complete with acrid burning hair, that cramped Ziri’s gut with foreboding. Any chimaera who had gone to battle against seraphim knew the tang of a burning body.

Ziri’s sense of smell in this body was far better than his natural one had been, but he was still learning to unweave the information it gave him and identify the world’s many reeks. Its perfumes, too. More smells were bad than good, in his few days of experience, at least, but the good ones were better than he’d ever realized.

Here was one now, weaving through the others like a single gold thread in a tapestry, wisp-thin but bell-bright. Spice, he thought. The kind that burns the tongue and leaves in its wake a kind of purity.

Whoever it was—that it was seraph, he was certain—it was all but blotted out by the overwhelming fug of chimaera musks. Ziri experienced a tightening at the base of his skull. Dread. It was dread.

What—and who—was he going to find up ahead?

Karou moved unseen through the passages of her ancestral home. She passed from chimaera domain into seraph. She didn’t know where to look for Akiva, but assumed he would make himself easy to find. If she was right, anyway, that he wanted her to find him.

A shiver passed through her. She hoped she was right.

The caverns grew cooler as she moved out toward the entrance hall, and soon she could see her breath cloud before her. One last seraph to get past—it was Elyon, looking weary and hopeless when he thought no one was watching—and she held her breath until he was out of sight so its cloud wouldn’t give her away.

There were no other seraphim; they were all together, behind her now. There was only Akiva.

An open door, and there he was. Waiting.

For a moment Karou couldn’t move. This was the nearest she’d been to him—and the first time they’d been alone—since… since when? Since the day hecame to herglamoured, beside the river in Morocco, and gave her the thurible that held Issa’s soul. She’d said terrible things to him that day—that she’d never trusted him, for a start, what a lie—and she had yet to unsay them.

Still glamoured, she went through the door and saw him raise his head, aware of her. A flush crept up her neck as his searching look swept over her, even if he couldn’t see her. He was so beautiful, and so intent. She could feel the heat coming off him.

She could feel the longing coming off him.

“Karou?” he asked, very softly.

She pushed the door closed and released her glamour.

It was almost a relief to have her anger vindicated. Even on her knees, sick from the sustained assault of close-range hamsas, Liraz was able to think, without passion or triumph, that the world made sense again. This was why the beasts had left her alone that night in the open, when she’d stayed behind with them of her own free will. Because they’d been biding their time.

There were four of them. Three stood with hamsas upheld, assaulting her with magic. The fourth hefted a big, double-sided ax.

Of course, that didn’t include the three who lay dead between them—so freshly dead their hearts didn’t know it yet and their blood was still escaping in arterial spurts, like water from a hand pump.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the leader of this little band of assassins, stepping over the corpses of her comrades, her wolfish grin unwavering.

Ten.

Liraz didn’t know why she should be surprised that Thiago’s she-wolf lieutenant was her attacker, but she was. Had she actually begun to believe that the White Wolf had found honor? What idiocy. She wondered where he was now, and why he was missing out on the fun. “Believe it or not,” drawled Ten, “we weren’t going to kill you.”

“I have to go with or noton that.” They’d stalked her in the dark, and Liraz had no doubt that her life was at stake.

“Ah, but it’s true. We just wanted to play your game.”

For a beat, Liraz didn’t know what she was talking about. It was hard to think through the thrum and drub of magic, but then it came to her. Her getting-acquainted game. Which of us killed which of you in previous bodies.The sickness in her gut deepened, and it wasn’t just because of the hamsas. Of course, she thought. Wasn’t this exactly what she’d imagined would happen? This had been her point, imagining the game, which she’d certainly found no humor in. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I killed you once. Or was it more than once?”

“Once was enough,” said Ten.

“So what now? Am I supposed to apologize?”

Ten laughed. Her smile glittered. “You should. You really should. However, since I can’t imagine you give apologies, I’ll just have your trophies instead. You might still live a long and happy life without them. Probably not, but that’s your own affair.”

Her hands, she meant. They were going to cut off her hands. Well, they were going to try.

“So come do it,” said Liraz, spitting derision.

“There’s no hurry,” was Ten’s reply.

Not for them, maybe. Liraz was getting weaker with every second they held their hamsas out to her, and that was the point. Damned devil’s eyes. This was their coward plan: weaken her before they hacked her up.

It wasn’t their original plan, but three dead in under a minute had prompted them to reconsider.

Three bodies. A stupid, bloody waste. The sight of them made Liraz want to scream. Why did you make me do this?

Ten closed in. Flanking her were two Dracands, lizard aspect, with great ruffs of scaled flesh flaring from their necks like grotesque courtier’s collars. Their hands were upheld, hamsas pounding misery into the base of Liraz’s skull, and it was taking all of her focus to keep her trembling from entirely overtaking her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to for very much longer. Soon, the magic would have her juddering like palsy.

The powerlessness was infuriating, and humiliating, and dire. Now, she told herself. If she was to have any chance of getting out of this, she had to act now. The magic of the three pairs of hamsas pulsed at her like sledgehammers.

A single clear thought filtered through her pain: My hands are weapons, too.

She lunged.

Ten blocked, catching her by one wrist, and the magic, it shriekedinto Liraz from the point of contact, screaming sickness into her sinews, her flesh and bone and mind. Relentless. Crashing waves of shuddering. White-hot as flaying. Weakness like a scouring wind. Godstars.Liraz thought it would eat her alive, reduce her to ashes or to nothingness.

Ten held her wrist, but Liraz’s other hand made it through. She pressed her own palm flat to Ten’s chest, screaming back, a wordless roar right in the chimaera’s face as… the fire stoked. And smoked.

And charred.

The lank gray fur at the she-wolf’s chest caught fire. The smell was immediate and foul, and called Liraz straight back to the corpse bonfires in Loramendi. She almost lost her concentration, but managed to just hold on as her hand scorched through the chimaera’s fur and into her flesh.

Ten’s grimace widened, and she let loose a roar to match Liraz’s. They were eye-to-eye and hands to flesh, roaring their fury and agony right in each other’s faces until another set of hands seized Liraz and ripped her away, throwing her so hard into a stone wall that she blinked in and out of darkness and found herself flat on her back, gasping.

That was the end of her chance.

In and out of darkness, she felt hands seize her arms before she glimpsed the faces bent over her—the two Dracands. Their mouths were open and hissing, deeply red and reeking, as they muscled her upright once more, the fabric of her long sleeves making a poor barrier between their palms and her flesh.

Her inked flesh, her terrible hidden tally.

Once again she was eye-to-eye with Ten. The she-wolf had lost her grin and was spectacular with hatred—her wolf muzzle ruched in a snarl that no human or seraph visage could ever match for viciousness. She said, “We’re not done with the game yet. So far I’m winning, and if you don’t have a turn, it’s hardly a game, is it? I remember you, angel, but do youremember me?”

Liraz didn’t. All the kills she’d sliced into her arms with campfire soot and a hot knife—at the best of times they were a blur, and now was not the best of times. How many wolf-aspect chimaera might Liraz have slain in the decades of her life? The godstars only knew. “I never said I’d be any good at the game,” she choked out.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Ten. The hint was a single word, riding a snarl of hate. It was a place.

“Savvath.”

The word sliced Liraz’s memory open, and blood spilled out. Savvath. It was a long time ago, but she hadn’t forgotten it—not the village, or what had happened just outside it. She’d just hidden it from herself, like a torn-out page—except that if it werea torn-out page, she’d have burned it.

You couldn’t burn memories.

There was the memory of what she’d done to a dying enemy long ago, and there was the memory of how her brothers had looked at her after. For a long time after.

“That was you?” she heard herself ask, her voice hoarse. She hadn’t meant to speak. It was the sickness. Her defenses were down. And… it was Savvath. If the great bulk of the obscene hundreds of chimaera Liraz had slain in her life were a blur, that one wasn’t, and the simple word, Savvath, brought it all back.

But something didn’t match. “It wasn’tyou,” Liraz said, shaking her head to clear it. “That soldier was—”

Fox aspect, she was going to say, but Ten cut her off. “That soldier was me. It was my first death, did you know that? It was my natural flesh you desecrated, and this, of course, is just a vessel. Your game favors us, angel. How could you know who we are by looking? You don’t stand a chance.”

“You’re right,” agreed Liraz, and her head felt like a kaleidoscope of ground glass—churning, churning.

“New game,” said Ten, taunting. “If you win, you keep your hands. All you have to do is tell me who every single one of your marks is for.”

And Liraz imagined telling Hazael she’d solved the puzzle of her recurring dream. How do you cut off both of your own arms?

Easy. Give a chimaera an ax.

Because there was no way she was winning this game.

Ten looked to the big beast with the ax and beckoned him forward as she said to the Dracands, “Push up her sleeves.”

They obeyed, and Liraz witnessed only the first gut-wrench of their stares—Ten actually flinchedat the sight of her full tally revealed—and the rest was lost to crashing darkness, like an avalanche of ash, when the Dracands seized her bare arms with their hands. Four hamsas full against her flesh. It almost meant mercy. Liraz saw the nothingness she was to become. She tipped toward it. No seraph could sustain this. She would miss her own death and that wasn’t such a bad thing in the end—

It cleared.

No mercy, then. Ten must have ordered the Dracands to keep her conscious, because the avalanche abated and Liraz found herself staring, up close, at the ruined skin of the handprint she’d burned in the center of the she-wolf’s chest. It was blistered black and seeping, the char beginning to slough off and reveal the red meat beneath. Hideous.

“Go ahead,” Ten commanded in a seethe of malevolence. “I’ll make it easier for you. Start at the end and go backward. Surely you remember the recent ones.”

Liraz’s answering whisper was pathetic. “I don’t want to play your game,” she said. Something inside her was giving way. Her heartbeat felt like a child’s helpless fists. She wanted to be rescued. She wanted to be safe.

“I don’t care what you want. And the stakes have changed. If you win, I’ll have Rark make a clean cut. If you lose…” She bared and snapped her long yellow fangs in an exaggerated grimace that left no doubt as to her meaning. “Less clean,” she said. “More fun.”And she seized Liraz’s hands and pulled her arms out taut. “Let’s start with me. Which one, pretty angel? Which mark is mine?”

“None of them,” gasped Liraz.

“Liar!”

But it was true. If the Savvath kill wereinked on her, it would be on her fingers, it was that long ago. But at the end of that day, Hazael had made a point of weighing the tattoo kit heavy in his hand and looking at her—a look too long and too flat for Haz, like she’d changed not just herself that day by what she’d done, but him as well—and then shoving it back into his pack before turning away from her.

Liraz had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original—one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn’t love—not that she had any experience of that one—and it wasn’t hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.

It was shame. Shame never faded, and Liraz realized only now that this was the baseline of her emotions—her bitter, curdled “normal”—and that her soul was poisoned soil in which nothing good could grow.

I can’t imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she’d been right, but Liraz thought that she would now. She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn’t reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might—if she weren’t Liraz and it weren’t unthinkable—have been sobbing.

In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here’s where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.

30

NEARER AND TOUCHING

First there was no one.

Then the sense of her, nothing Akiva could pinpoint. He just knew he wasn’t alone anymore.

Then the door creaked closed and the air gave her up. A glimmer and Karou stood before him like the fulfillment of a wish.

Don’t hope, he warned himself. You don’t know why she’s come.But just being this near her, his skin felt alive, and his hands, his hands had their own memories—silk and pulse and flutter—and their own will. He clasped them behind his back to have something to do with them besides reach for her, which of course was out of the question. Just because she’d looked at him back in the cavern—it was the wayshe’d looked, he argued with himself, like she’d given up trying not to—didn’t mean that she wanted anything more from him than this temporary alliance.

“Hello,” she said. Her gaze dropped to the floor as a blush crept up her cheeks, and Akiva’s battle against hope was lost.

She was blushing. If she was blushing…

Godstars, she’s beautiful.

“Hello,” he said, low and raw, and now his hope exceeded itself. Say it again, he willed her. If she did, maybe she remembered the temple of Ellai, when they’d removed their festival masks and seen each other’s faces for the first time since the battlefield at Bullfinch.

Hello, they’d said then, like a whispered incantation. Hello, like a promise. Hello, breath to breath.

The last breath before their first kiss.

“Um,” she said now, darting a quick glance up to meet his eyes, then veering it wide again, flushing even deeper. “Hi.”

Close enough, Akiva thought, a buoyancy cautiously rising in him as he watched her take a step and then another into this room he’d claimed for himself. They were alone, finally. They could talk, free of the watchful eyes of all their comrades. That she was here at all, it meant something. And with the blaze of the look they’d shared in the cavern, he couldn’t help but hope that it meant… everything.

Having hope was like dangling himself over a chasm and putting the rope in her hands. She could annihilate him if she wanted to.

She was looking around, though there wasn’t much to see. It was a small chamber, bare but for a long stone slab in its center and a few ledges holding very old candles. The slab was, Akiva supposed, unusual. It was cut more precisely than the rest of the rock surfaces here. It was smooth, its hard corners rare in a world of curves.

“I remember this room,” Karou said in a remote voice. “This is where the dead were prepared for burial.”

That was vaguely unsettling. Hours Akiva had lain here in his dreaming, in the place inside his pain. He had lain here like a corpse, where how many corpses had lain before him? “I didn’t know,” he answered, hoping it wasn’t offensive, him being here.

She trailed her fingertips over the slab. She was faced away from him, and he watched her shoulders rise and fall with her breathing. Her hair hung in a braid, blue as the heart of a flame. It wasn’t neat. The soft hairs at her nape had all come unbound and tufted out like down. Longer loose strands of blue were tucked behind her ears, all except one stray that lay curved against her cheek.

Akiva felt, in his fingers, the desire to brush it back for her. To brush it back and linger, and feel the warmth of her neck.

“We’d dare one another to come in and lie here,” Karou said. “The kids, I mean.” She made a slow circle around the table, stopping to face him from the far side of it so it made a kind of barrier between them. She looked up at the ceiling. It was high, rising to a peak and funneling to a shaft in the center, like a chimney. “That’s for the souls,” she told him. “To release them to the sky so they wouldn’t be trapped in the mountain. We used to say that if you fell asleep in here, your soul would think you were dead, and up it would go.” Akiva heard the smile in her voice just before he saw it flicker over her face, fleet and fond. “So I pretended to fall asleep one time, and I acted like I lost my soul and I made all the other kids help me look for it. All day, all over the peaks.” She let the smile come out now, slow, extraordinary. “I caught an air elemental and pretended itwas my soul. Poor thing. What a little savage I was.”

Her face, this face, Akiva realized, was still a mysterious land to him, and the smile almost made her a stranger.

If he’d known Madrigal for a month of nights, he’d known Karou for… two nights? Or was it really one, through much of which he’d slept, and two days in scattered pieces? Their few fraught meetings since, all he’d seen of her was her rage, her devastation, her fear.

This was something else entirely. Smiling, she was as radiant as moonstone.

It struck him with force that he didn’t really know her. It wasn’t just her new face. He kept thinking of her as though she were Madrigal in a different body, but she was more than that. She’d lived another life since he knew her—in another world, no less. How might it have changed her? He couldn’t know.

But he could learn.

The pain of longing felt like a hole in the center of his chest. There was nothing in the worlds he wanted more than to start at the beginning and fall in love with Karou all over again.

“That was a good day,” she said, still lost in her long-ago memory.

“How do you act like you’ve lost your soul?” Akiva asked. He meant it as a lighthearted question about a children’s game, but when he heard himself say the words, he thought, Who knows better than I?

You betray everything you believe in. You drown your grief in vengeance. You kill and keep killing until there’s no one left.

His expression must have betrayed his thoughts, because Karou’s smile shrank away. She was quiet for a long moment, meeting his look. Akiva had a lot to learn about her eyes, too. Madrigal’s had been warm brown. Summer and earth. Karou’s were black. They were sky-dark and star-bright, and when she looked at him like this, piercing, they seemed all pupil. Nocturnal. Unnerving.

She said, “I can tell you how you act when you get your soul back,” and he knew she wasn’t talking about a game now. “You save lives,” she said. “You let yourself dream again.” Her voice dropped to a wisp. “You forgive.”

Silence. Held breath. Beating hearts. Was… was she talking about him? Akiva felt the tilt of the world trying to tip him forward: to be nearer to her—nearer and touching—as though that were the only state of rest, and every other action and movement were geared to achieving it.

She looked down, shy again. “But you know better than I do. I’m just starting.”

“You? You never lost your soul.”

“I lost something. While you were saving chimaera, I was making monsters for Thiago. I didn’t know what I was doing. The same things I hated youfor doing, but I couldn’t see it…”

“It’s grief,” said Akiva. “It’s rage. It makes us into the thing we despise.” And he thought, AndI was the thing you despised. Am I still?“It’s the fuel for everything our people have done to each other since the beginning. That’s what makes peace seem impossible. How can you blame someone for wanting to kill the killer of their loved ones? How can you fault people for what they do in grief?”

As soon as he spoke the words, Akiva realized it sounded like he was excusing his own vicious grief spiral and its terrible toll on her people. Shame seized him. “I don’t mean… I don’t mean me. What I did, Karou, I know I can never atone for.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asked. Her look was sharp, as though she were seeking through his shame for the truth.

Didhe really believe it? Or was he just too guilt-ridden to admit he hoped that someday, somehow, he couldatone? That someday he could feel that he’d done more good than evil, and that by living he hadn’t brought his world lower than if he’d never been. Was thatatonement, the tilt of the scales at the end of life?

If it was, then it might be possible. Akiva might, if he lived many years and never stopped trying, save more lives than he had destroyed.

But that wasn’t what he believed, he realized, faced with the sharpness of Karou’s question. “Yes,” he said. “I do. You can’t atone for taking one life by saving another. What good does that do the dead?”

“The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements.” She looked up at the chimney overhead, as though she were imagining the souls it had conducted in its time. “They’re gone, they can’t be hurt anymore, but we drag their memory around with us, doing our worst in their name, like it’s what they’d want, for us to avenge them? I can’t speak for all the dead, but I know it’s not what I wanted for you, when I died. And I know it’s not what Brimstone wanted for me, or for Eretz.” Her gaze was still sharp, still piercing, nocturnal, black. It felt like recrimination—of course she’d wanted him to carry their dream forward, not find a way to destroy her people—so when she said, “Akiva, I never thanked you for bringing me Issa’s soul. I… I’m sorry for the things I said to you then—” it struck him with horror. The idea of herapologizing to him.

“No.” He swallowed hard. “There was nothing you said that I didn’t deserve. And worse.”

Was that pity in her eyes? Exasperation? “Are you determined to be unforgivable?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing I’m doing is for me, Karou, or for any hope I have for myself, of forgiveness or anything else.”

And under that black-eyed scrutiny, he had to ask himself: Was thistrue?

It was and wasn’t. No matter how much he tried not to hold out hope, hope surfaced, persistent. He had no more control over it than he did over the drone of the wind. But was it the reason he was doing any of this? For the chance of a reward? No. If he knew absolutely that Karou would never forgive him and never love him again, he would still do anything in his power—and beyond his power, it seemed, in the mind-bending light of sirithar—to rebuild the world for her.

Even if he had to stand back and watch her walk through it at the White Wolf’s side?

Even then.

But… he didn’tknow absolutely that there was no hope. Not yet.

I forgive you. I love you. I want you, at the end of all this. The dream, peace, andyou.

This is what Karou wished to say, and it’s what she wished to hear, too. She didn’t want to be told that Akiva had given up the hope of her, and that whatever his motivation was now, it was no longer the fullness of their dream, which had been not merely peace, but themselves together in it. Had he cut the dream up for kindling? Had she? Had it already been fed to the fire?

“I believe you,” she said. No hope for himself. It was noble, and it was bleak, and it wasn’t the conduit her own unspoken words needed. They were heavy in her, and clinging. How do you just thrust “I love you” out into the air? It needs waiting arms to catch it. At least, right now, Karou’s unpracticed, unspoken “I love you” did. After months of its being crushed down into the recesses of her fury and warped out of all natural shape, she could no more blurt it out than she could grab Akiva’s face and kiss him.

Kiss him. Thatfelt a million miles from possible.

Her eyes did their timid dance of glances again, taking him in in snapshots. A freeze-frame of his face, and then dropping her gaze again to the stone slab or her own hands, she held the glimpse in her mind. Akiva’s golden skin, his full lips, his taut, haunted expression and the… retreatin his eyes. Back in the cavern, his eyes had reached for her like the rays of the sun. Now they shrank from hers, reticent and guarded. Karou wanted to feel the sun again. But when she lifted her eyes from her restless hands, Akiva was staring down at the stone slab.

Between the pair of them, you’d think this table was one fascinating artifact.

Well. It wasn’t only “I love you” that she had come to say. She took a deep breath, and got on with the rest.

“I need to tell you something.”

Akiva looked up again. Instantly, something new in Karou’s tone set him on edge. Her hesitation, the catch in her voice. He didn’t have to struggle now to keep his hope at bay. Hope deserted him.