“What are you doing here?” he asked them. His arms were still around Karou, who had lifted her head from his shoulder to stare at the intruders.
“What are we doing here?” repeated Liraz. “I think, all things considered, that question belongs to us. What in the name of the godstars are you doing here?” She looked dumbfounded, and Akiva saw himself as she was seeing him: on his knees, weeping, entwined with a human girl.
And it struck him how important it was that they think Karou was just that: a human girl. However strange it might seem, it was only that: strange. The truth would be much worse.
He straightened, still on his knees, and turned, ushering Karou behind him. Quietly, so his brother and sister wouldn’t hear him speak the language of the enemy, he murmured, “Don’t let them see your hands. They won’t understand.”
“Understand what?” she murmured back, not taking her eyes from them, as they didn’t take theirs from her.
“Us,” he said. “They won’t understand us.”
“I don’t understand us, either.”
But thanks to the wishbone, fragile in his fist, Akiva finally did.
Karou lapsed into tense silence, keeping her eyes on the two seraphim. They had their wing glamours in place, but even so, their presence on the bridge seemed unnatural, and not a little unnerving—Liraz especially. Though Hazael was more powerful, Liraz was more frightening, she always had been; perhaps she’d had to be, being female. Her pale hair was scraped back in severe plaits, and there was something coolly sharklike about her beauty: a flat, killer apathy. Hazael had more life in his eyes, but just now it was mostly a frank bafflement as he regarded Akiva before him, still on his knees.
“Get up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t stand the sight of you like that.”
Akiva rose, drawing Karou up with him and keeping her behind the shield of his wings.
“What’s going on?” Liraz demanded. “Akiva, why did you come back here? And… who is that?” She made a wild gesture of disgust toward Karou.
“Just a girl.” Akiva heard himself echo Izîl, sounding just as unconvincing as the old man had.
“Just a girl who flies,” amended Liraz.
A heartbeat’s pause, and then Akiva said, “You’ve been following me.”
“What did you think,” Liraz spat, “that we’d let you vanish again? The way you were acting after Loramendi, we knew something was coming. But… this?”
“What exactly is this?” Hazael asked, clearly still hoping for some explanation that would make it all okay. Akiva felt split down the middle. Here before him were his closest allies, and they felt like enemies, and it was his fault.
If Akiva had a family, it was not his mother, who had turned away when the soldiers came to take him; and it was certainly not the emperor. His family was these two, and there was no answer he could give them to make this make sense. There was nothing he could say to Karou, either, who stood behind him desperate to know what had been kept from her all her life—a secret so big and so strange he couldn’t begin to find words to frame it. So he stood there mute, the languages of two races useless to help him explain anything.
“I don’t blame you wanting to get away,” said Hazael, always the peacemaker. He and Liraz bore a sibling resemblance they didn’t share with Akiva. They were fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a blush to their honey skin. Hazael had an ease to him, almost a slouch, and for a resting expression a lazy smile that could almost fool you into misjudging him. He was, always, a soldier—reflexes and steel—but at heart he had managed somehow to retain something childlike that training and years of war worked hard to stamp out. He was a dreamer. He said, “I had thoughts myself, of coming back to this world after everything—”
“But you didn’t,” snapped Liraz, who had within her no dreamer at all. “You didn’t vanish in the night, leaving others to make up stories to cover for you, not knowing when or even if you’d come back this time.”
“I didn’t ask you to cover for me,” said Akiva.
“No. Because then you’d have had to tell us you were going. Instead you snuck off, just like before. And were we to wait for you to come back broken again, and never tell us what had broken you?”
“Not this time,” he said.
Liraz gave him a brittle smile, and Akiva knew that under her iciness she was hurt. He might never have returned; they might never have known what had happened to him. What did that say for the decades they had protected one another? Hadn’t it been Liraz, years ago, who had risked her life to return to the battlefield at Bullfinch? Against any expectation that he might still be alive, and with chimaera crawling over their victory and spitting the wounded on pikes, she had returned and found him, and borne him away. She had risked her life for him, and would again without hesitation, and so would Hazael, and Akiva would for them. But he couldn’t tell them why he’d come here, or what he’d found.
“Not this time what?” Liraz demanded. “You’re not coming back broken? Or you’re not coming back at all?”
“I didn’t plan anything. I just couldn’t stay there.” He groped to explain; he owed them the effort, at least. “After Loramendi, an end was reached, and it was like the edge of a cliff. There was nothing else I wanted, nothing except…” He left the rest unsaid. He didn’t need to say it; they’d seen him on his knees. They fixed their eyes on Karou.
“Except her,” said Liraz. “A human. If that’s what she is.”
“What else would she be?” he said, covering a spark of fear.
“I have a theory,” she said, and Akiva’s heart lurched. “Last night, when she attacked you, there was something strange about that fight, wasn’t there, Hazael?”
“Strange,” agreed Hazael.
“We weren’t close enough to feel any… magic… but it certainly seemed as though you were feeling it.”
Akiva’s thoughts spun furiously. How could he get Karou away from here?
“You seem to have forgiven her for it, though.” Liraz came a step closer. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”
Akiva retreated, keeping Karou behind him. “Leave her alone,” he said.
Liraz advanced. “If you have nothing to hide, let us see her.”
In a sorrowful voice that was worse than Liraz’s sharp tone, Hazael said, “Akiva, just tell us it isn’t what it looks like. Just tell us she isn’t…”
Akiva felt a kind of rushing around him, years of secrets catching him up like a wind—a wind, he wished with a wild kind of surrender, that could just bear him away, with Karou, to a place without seraphim and chimaera and their talent for hate, without humans to stand around and gape, without anyone to come between them, ever again. “Of course she isn’t,” he said. It came out as a snarl, and Liraz took it as a challenge to prove it—what Karou was and what she wasn’t—and her eyes flashed with a look Akiva knew too well, a hard fury she harnessed on the battlefield. She came closer.
Adrenaline surged hot as his hands seized into fists, the wishbone bowing under the pressure, and he braced himself for what must come next. Sick incredulity washed over him, that it had come to this.
But whatever he expected to happen, it was not for Karou to speak up in a clear, cool voice and ask, “What? What am I not?”
Liraz halted, her fury blinking to shock. Hazael looked startled, too, and it took Akiva a beat to realize why, but, with a start, he did.
Karou’s words. They were as smooth as falling water. They were in his language. She had spoken the tongue of angels, which she had no way, earthly or elsewise, of knowing. In the hesitation wrought by her question, she stepped out from the shelter of his wings and stood exposed before Liraz and Hazael.