“I like it,” she whispered, and her hand didn’t stop her from nodding like a fool, but it did muffle her words, so that Ziri didn’t understand.
He inclined his head in query. “What?”
She moved her hand away, and said, as clearly as she could—which wasn’t very—“I like it. You, I mean.” And then she put her hand right back over her mouth and reddened, and was about ready to call on that fell chimaera goddess of assassins to come and put her out of her misery when the flicker of uncertainty vanished from Ziri’s brown eyes.
What his smile did then should have irritated her, because it splayed crooked in amusement—at her expense, at her extreme discomposure, and Liraz had never been able to bear teasing—but it didn’t stop there. It kept going, his smile, from amused to purely pleased to deeply relieved. It was so lovely that she felt it in her heart.
“Good,” he said. “I like you, too.”
And she blushed deeper, but he was blushing, too, now, so it wasn’t so bad.
No, it was still bad. What now? Was she supposed to string more incoherent sentences together? Maybe she could list all the other things she liked, how she imagined a child might, except that—oh, well, she didn’t like many things, so the list would be short, and it would only kill a moment.
She didn’t want to kill a moment. She wanted to liveone. Live many.
So how in the name of the godstars do youdo that?Was it too late to learn?
“Uh,” said Ziri. He moved his shoulders, rolling them, and shook open his wings. They flared, seeming in the close space as vast as a stormhunter’s, and he said, clearing his throat, “One of the worst things about being the Wolf was not being able to fly. I’m going to, now.” He was awkward, his voice halting, as he gestured out through the crescent opening where the time of purest blue had passed to black, and the stars were thick as sugar.
Oh. Okay.Liraz was almost— almost—relieved to have this ended, so that she could slink away. Melt. Curse herself. Die a little.
Ziri cleared his throat and looked at her. So earnest. So hopeful. “Do you… want to come?”
Flying? That was something she could do. She didn’t even have to risk the syllable it would take to say yes. She just had to nod.
(BREATHE)
Karou combed her hair. Calmly. Well, the calm was an exercise. (Breathe.)She laid down the comb. It was a Kirin relic that she’d found: carved bone with a crude silhouette of a stormhunter etched into the handle. She was going to keep it.
(Breathe.)
By the light of a flickering skohl torch, she looked down at herself. She was still in her Esther clothes. They were in a decent enough state, though she didn’t like knowing there was Razgut drool on her sleeve. She’d left a few things here in the caves when she went away, but they were dirtier still. She wondered if she would ever again know the simplicity of a closet full of clothes, and the pleasure of choosing an outfit—a cleanoutfit—in which to go and meet her… what? What could she call Akiva?
Boyfriendsounded too Earth. Loverwas affectation, intended to shock. “Have you met my lover? Isn’t he divine?” Nope. That is, yep, he was divine. Nope, she wasn’t go to call him that, even if she was dizzy with the urgency to makehim that.
(Breathe.)
Partner? Too dry.
Soul mate?
A warmth spread through her. When had it ever been truer than it was for her and Akiva? And yet, as a word, it, too, rang with wan associations. “You like the Pixies? I swear, it’s like we’re soul mates!”
Well, she didn’t have to call him anything right now. She just had to go to him, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t care what she was wearing.
One last breath. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch, getting wind that it was time, really and truly time, at last.
Akiva had helped her conjure Ziri’s body. He’d tithed, at his insistence, and he didn’t need vises, which was good, because she didn’t think she could have touched his bare skin to clamp them on without dissolving back into the state of tremulous hunger that had possessed her in the grand cavern. She’d sunk into her trance state knowing he was there, and then, when it was done—the new body wrought and stretched out on the floor, as yet inanimate—she had come back out of herself to the sight of Akiva watching her. He’d looked kind of dazed with happiness, and immediately the same feeling had bloomed in her.
“That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to look at you,” he’d said.
“I thought you were going to watch the resurrection.” She gestured to the new body, glorying in the sight of it. It looked almost exactly like Ziri’s true flesh had, and she thought that he could pass as his natural self. She’d even left off hamsas, in part because the true Ziri hadn’t had them, and in part because she wanted them to become obsolete.
“I meant to watch,” Akiva said, abashed, and scratched his fingers through his short, thick hair in that way he had. “I got distracted.”
“Well, no fair. I didn’t get to look at you back.”
“I promise to hold still for you later.” Later? After, he meant. After they’d had their fill of notholding still.
(Breathe.)
“I accept.”
And then, and then, oh holy, at last: the smile.
The smile that she had never yet seen with these eyes, but only remembered through Madrigal’s. Warm with wonderment, a smile so beautiful it ached. It crinkled his eyes, and shaped his beauty into another kind of astonishing, a better kind, because it was the astonishment of happiness, and that reshapes everything. It makes hearts whole and lives worth living. Karou felt it fill her, dizzy and delirious, and she fell a little deeper in love.
He’d offered to leave her to finish the resurrection alone, and she’d accepted, because she wanted to have a moment with Ziri, as he’d guessed she must. And seeing Ziri’s new eyes open—brown, and not ice-blue, and with none of Thiago’s arrogance to overcome in letting himself shine through—had been the sweetest moment yet in her career as a resurrectionist. She’d hugged him, and held him, and told him it was all over, he didn’t have to hide anymore, and his relief had been so profound it had deepened her already very deep appreciation of what he’d put himself through for all their sakes.
Between them they’d come up with the simplest explanation they could for his absence and return, and then he’d gone. Karou thought that he’d been so happy to be in Kirin form again that he’d just wanted to fly, though maybe he’d sensed her own distraction. Or it could have been the news of who’d been carrying his soul around in a canteen, and was out there in the caverns somewhere, waiting.
Whatever the reason, he’d gone off quickly enough, and here she was, her last duty fulfilled, her time her own. She paused, took a breath. From the pocket of her bag she collected one small thing that she’d been been carrying since the sultan’s picnic on the floor of the desert hotel in Morocco, a couple of days past. A whim.