He looks up. The passage of armies has chased back the mist and he sees ranks of soldiers.
And soldiers, and soldiers, and soldiers.
He laughs. He gathers his stolen body, bares his fangs, and leaps.
He climbsthem. They’re thick enough; they make it easy. He has only to leap and catch one in the air and, catching, kill him. Leap to the next as the body falls. To the next, to the next, until the ground is far below and they’re tangling their wings in a rush to escape him. Still more are closing behind, and he has no shortage of prey. No shortage of blood to spill, and his laughter sounds like choking.
He is the White Wolf.
And Liraz is flying, fast, racing toward the portal. The battle rings behind her, and then fades into the rushing of the air, the air that’s stinging her eyes. That’s all it is, the sting: the air, and speed.
“We haven’t been introduced. Not really.” That was what he’d said to her in the thermal pools before giving her his secret like a knife. You could kill me with this. But I trust that you won’t.
Trust. Did she trust him because he’d saved her life, or because he’d trusted her with his secret, or both? Seeing him fight, his style was efficiency with panache; he was brutal and graceful, but it was nothing like the grace she’d beheld in the Hintermost when he wore his true body and danced the Kirin spin of crescent-moon blades. They had seemed an extension of himself. These swords didn’t. This body didn’t, either. Since he told her who he is, his White Wolf form has seemed to her like a costume, as though he might unfasten it and step out, long and lean, dark and horned and winged. In her mind’s eye, he’s a silhouette. She only ever saw him at a great distance, and doesn’t even know what his true face looked like.
She wishes she did.
And in the next second the wish seems stupid and petty. What does it matter what his face looked like before? Behind her he could be dying—again and forever. What does “true” even mean when it comes to a face? Only souls are true, and when you spill them to the air they melt away, as Haz’s had, and countless others, and the loss… The loss.Liraz clutches her hand to her stomach. Fires go out, and the world grows dim.
How could it have taken her so many years to feel the preciousness of life?
They fly, and it’s long minutes at speed before they leave the mountains behind them and course out over the dark water of the bay. It looks like a sea from here, haze shrouding the horizons and the land that hems it in. Karou finally spots Mik and Zuzana on Virko, ahead. The humans are trying to maintain the glamour but it flickers, unreliable, and a Dominion patrol has spotted them. They’re closing in.
Virko wheels and dips. He makes it. He soars through the cut and vanishes in a ripple, and then Karou, Akiva, and Liraz arrive at the flapping loose edges of the slash in the sky, and instead of darting straight through, Karou spins toward Akiva. They’ve let go of their glamours, and when she looks at him, the impossibility of good-bye overwhelms her anew—and worse than before, so much worse, coming in the crush of peril. How can she leave him like this?
“Go!” Liraz screams at her. “Go now!”
Karou grabs Akiva’s hand. Helpless, she tries to forge a final moment with him. A look at least, if not words, if not more. Something to remember. His hand is so warm, and his eyes are so bright—but haunted. He looks aggrieved, heartsick, furious and ready to curse the godstars. He squeezes her hand. “We’ll be okay,” he says, but it’s with desperation. He wants to believe it but doesn’t, quite, and if he doesn’t then Karou can’t, either.
Oh god, oh god.She wants to drag him through the portal with her and never let him go.
Liraz is still screaming at her and the sound fills Karou’s head, fills her with panic—and anger—and Akiva touches her elbow, urging her through, and that’s it. She feels the tatter of the sky brush against her face and she’s not in Eretz anymore, and Liraz’s screams—“Go! Go!”—ring in her head, stoking her panic. She flushes with fury, ready to hate her, if only for a moment, absolutely ready to tell her to shut up, and she swings around to face the portal to wait for her—
—as, on the other side, Akiva turns away from it. He’s empty. He’s just watched Karou disappear, and he turns to meet his sister’s eyes one last time before she follows. Take care of her, he wants to say but won’t. And of yourself. Please, Lir.And their eyes do connect for an instant.
“The urn is full, my brother,” she says.
Urn?Akiva blinks, once; then he remembers. Hazael had told him that. Akiva is the seventh bearer of his name; six Akivas dead before him meant the cremation urn was full. “You have to live,” Hazael had said, silly and matter-of-fact.
Hazael who had died, while Akiva lived.
Akiva’s thoughts are fractured. The Dominion will be on them in seconds. He sees them as hurtling shapes behind Liraz. There’s a thrum of frenzy that his sister’s screams—“Go! Go! Go!”—have built in him, but still the thought finds purchase: that he’s never seen her look more alive than she does right now. There’s purpose and energy and resolve in her expression. She’s focused; she’s alight.
And then her feet connect with his chest.
Heart-bruising, rib-jarring, breath-stealing force. All his air and his thoughts are driven out in a rush, and he’s reeling, unmoored. He can’t breathe and can’t see.
And when he catches himself he’s through the portal.
It flares into flame, and Liraz is on the far side. She’s burning it shut. Akiva thinks he hears a shiver of steel—sword on sword—in the instant before the connection between the worlds is lost.
The slash in the sky is cauterized like a wound. Liraz is still in Eretz and Akiva is here in her place. With Karou.
FIRE IN THE SKY
And silence.
It wasn’t really silence. There was fire and wind, crackle and whisper, and the rasp of their own hard breathing. But it felt like silence in their shock, and they all squinted in the face of the blaze. It flared hot and sudden and died quickly, and there was no smoke and no smell. It was just over, and whatever it was that had burned—whatever held the worlds distinct—it gave off no residue of ash or fume. The portal was simply gone.
Karou scanned for a sign that it had been there. A scar, a ripple, a ghosted image of the slash, but there was nothing at all.
She turned to Akiva.
Akiva. He was here. Hewas here, and not Liraz. What had just happened? He hadn’t looked to her yet; his eyes were horror-wide as he stared at the new absence in the sky. “Liraz!” he called, hoarse, but the way was closed. Not just closed. Gone. The sky was just the sky now, the thin atmosphere above these African mountains, and that anomaly that had made Eretz seem like… like a neighboring country on the other side of a turnstile… it was over, and now Eretz seemed very, very far away, impossibly and fantastically far, like an imaginary place, and the blood that was being shed there—
Oh god.The blood was not imaginary. The blood, the dying. And it was so quiet here, nothing but the wind now, and their friends and comrades and… and family, every remaining Misbegotten soldier, Akiva’s blood brothers and sisters, they were fighting in another sky, and there was nothing to be done about it.