They liked music.
And it was officiaclass="underline" Mik’s three fairy-tale tasks were accomplished. And the ring burning a hole in his pocket? The one that had seemed so crude in the light of the Royal Suite’s shining marble bathroom?
It happened to look just perfect on stormhunter-back, with a northerly sea rolling beneath them, dotted with icebergs and breaching sea creatures that were not in any way whales. He couldn’t go down on one knee without risk of falling off, but that was entirely okay, under the circumstances. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
The answer was yes.
“Am Iglad to see you,” Zuzana cried now, crowing at the sight of Liraz and Ziri. Ziri!Not the White Wolf, but Ziri! Oh. That meant he must have… But it was okay, wasn’t it, because here he was in Kirin form again, and he looked pretty nearly exactly the same as he had in his natural flesh. He was smiling broadly, so very handsome, and Liraz at his side was smiling broadly, too, and beautiful, laughing in unbridled amazement, laughing. Laughing like a person who laughs. Liraz.
That seemed almost more amazing than showing up on a freaking stormhunter. But wasn’t.
Because nothingwas as amazing as that.
“Can you tell them,” Zuzana asked Eliza, after the initial jag of laughing and exclaiming in mutually non-understandable languages had begun to subside, “that we can’t find the caves?”
Eliza spoke Seraphic, which was handy, but also mildly irritating, as it undercut any sound argument Zuzana might have made for spending a wish to acquire an Eretz language herself. It would have been Chimaera, though, because come on.
“We’ll just have to learn that, too,” Mik had said with a sigh that didn’t fool her for a second. “Resurrection and invisibility and fighting and now non-human languages, too? What is this, school?”
But Eliza wasn’t translating, and Zuzana realized she was staring at Ziri agog. Oh!Right. His body. She’d seen his body at the pit. That was going to take some explaining. “It’s him,” Zuzana confirmed. “We’ll tell you later.”
And so translations were given—to Liraz, who in turn translated to Ziri in Chimaera—and then they were guiding them back south, asking things like where they’d come from and whether the stormhunter had a name, and when Zuzana spotted the crescent, she realized a flaw in her grand vision of sweeping in and bowling everyone over with amazement and tornado-force wingbeats.
The stormhunter—who did not have a name—wasn’t going to fit through the crescent. Well, damn.
She had to put a halt to small talk and make herself understood. “We need an audience. This needs to be witnessed, and spoken of far and wide. Sung.I want songs to be written about this. Do you mind? Could you go get everyone? And Karou?”
At which point Ziri and Liraz both got all bashful and weird, and Mik suggested, delicately, that perhaps Karou and Akiva were… busy.
Collision of emotions! Thrill at the thought that at lastKarou and Akiva were “busy”! And injustice, that it should coincide with her own moment of glory. “We can interrupt them for this, though, right?” she begged. They were coasting in circles now, forestalling the moment they would have to disembark and enter the caves on foot.
“No,” spake Mik, voice of sanity.
“But—”
“No.”
“Fine. But I want someoneto see us.”
Everyone saw them. Liraz went to fetch them, and they crowded into the crescent, and there were gratifying gasps and shouts. Zuzana heard Virko’s affectionate bellow of “ Neek-neek!” and then felt, finally, that it was okay to bring this ride to an end.
They brought the huge creature as close as they could to the rock face and jump-scrambled from its back, hugging its vast neck first in thanks and farewell. They supposed it would go now and leave them, but hoped that it wouldn’t (“If it doesn’t, we’re naming it.”), and they paused to watch, wistful, as it rose higher and higher until it was just a shape cut from the glittering vault of the sky.
Only then, turning toward the gathered chimaera and seraphim, did they realize that something was wrong. There was a pall over their manner, and… Karou was there. Notbusy. Whynot? And why was she standing way back there? And where was Akiva?
Karou gave them a wave, and a brief marveling smile and head shake, and her eyes popped at the sight of Eliza’s wings, of course, but even that didn’t draw her forward to greet them. She was talking to Liraz, and Liraz was no longer laughing like a person who laughs. She was back to her most terrible self. Tight-lipped and white-nostrilled with ire, more savage than ever the White Wolf had looked.
Zuzana forgot all her glory and rushed to her friend. “What? What what what? God, Karou, what?”
“Akiva.” So lost. Karou looked so lost. That wasn’t how she was supposed to look. “He’s gone.”
ABERRATION
—There is a reason—
(“What have I done?”)
—There is a reason for the tithe.
This wasn’t speech. What Nightingale conveyed to Akiva, she did so in silence, in sending, and it was more than words. It was memory opened to him, in sound and image, and emotion unfolded for him, in horror and heartache. It was not possible to misunderstand. He stood before Nightingale and Scarab and outwardly he saw them, and the other three behind them. But inwardly, he experienced something else, and shrank from it.
—Be calm. You are my child’s child.
Festival. Nightingale gave her to Akiva in a memory so saturated with yearning that he understood, for its duration, what he himself could have no context for: a parent’s love for a lost child.
—I wish to know you. To help you, and not to hurt you. And so you must listen to me. You are my child’s child, but I never knew of you. Festival was lost to us. Vanished. Only because you exist do I know what became of her. I know that my beloved daughter was a concubine in the harem of a warmonger who tore half a world apart.
She didn’t disguise the desolation this caused her, and Akiva felt himself to be the root of it, as though time worked backward, and he had caused his mother to make the choice that would create him.
—I also know that this could not have befallen her… against her will. She was Stelian, and mine. She was strong. And so she must have chosen this.
The memories were as seamless as though they were Akiva’s own. Running beneath the surface of Nightingale’s words: a pure distillation of the woman who had been Festival, beautiful and troubled. Troubled? By a dowser’s sense for the veins of fate, and a compulsion to follow them, even into the dark.
—And so. And so she must have had a reason.
From Nightingale’s mind to Akiva’s passed the understanding that for many Stelians, fate was as real as love or fear—a dimension of their life with weight enough to shape it. It was called ananke, this sensitivity to the pull of destiny. If your anankewas strong, well then, you could follow or resist, but with resistance came an oppressive sense of wrongness that would haunt your every choice.