Too close. Only luck had given him the upper hand this time. He wouldn’t be so careless again.
“Prince of Bastards,” he continued, feeling as though he were performing a rite many years delayed: the purging of Stelian infection, the eradication of Festival’s last trace and whatever she had meant by bringing it forth. “Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.” Here he paused, speculative. “No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. ‘Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,’ she told him. ‘My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.’ ”
He studied Akiva closely, scanning for a reaction. “Brave words, no? And how many deaths have you eluded, all told? The curse of your name, and the several deaths I carved out for you. How many more?”
It seemed to him that Beast’s Bane stiffened then. Jael sensed a wound. “Others die, but you live?” he probed. “Perhaps you’ve turned the curse outward. Youdon’t die. Everyone near you does instead.”
Akiva’s jaw was hard-clenched. “It must be a terrible burden,” Jael pressed, shaking his head in mock pity. “Death looks for you and looks for you, but he can’t seeyou. Invisible to death, what a fate! Finally, he grows weary of the search and takes whoever is near at hand.” He paused, smiled, and tried to sound warm and genuine as he said, “Nephew, I have good news for you. Today we break the curse. Today, at last, you die.”
Even braced for the sight of his uncle, Akiva was unprepared for the visceral assault of reliving this moment, and it caught him like a fist to the heart. It was an echo of the Tower of Conquest, when, just like this, Jael and his soldiers had seized control of the room.
“Kill everyone,” Jael had said on that day, and, expressionless, his soldiers had complied, gutting counsellors, butchering the big brute Silverswords that Hazael and Liraz had taken such care to disarm without hurting. They had even cut down the bath attendants. It had been a literal bloodbath, emperor and heir discarded in a pool of red. Blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood everywhere.
The voice, the face, the number of soldiers. Akiva could guess, by the still-healing abrasions on their faces, that some of these men had been at the tower and survived its explosion. In addition to swords, they even leveled at him the same vile weapons that they had surprised him with on that bloody day.
And Jael’s greeting was the same, too. Oh, that slurp of a voice. “Nephew.”He had said it then to Japheth, the witless crown prince, just before he slew him. Now it was all for Akiva, and was followed by a hissed litany of his many names.
Beast’s Bane. The Prince of Bastards. Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.
Akiva listened in silence, hearing them all and wondering: Were any of them him? What had his mother meant, that he wouldn’t be tangled in their feeble fates? It made him feel as though even “Akiva” weren’t his true name, but just another Misbegotten accessory, like his armor or his sword. His name, like his training, was something imposed on him, and hearing Festival’s reaction to it, he wondered: Who else was he? What else?
And the first answer that came to him was simple, as simple as what he had come here to do, as simple as his desires.
I am alive.
He remembered the moment—and it seemed very long ago but wasn’t—when he had lain on his back in the training theater at Cape Armasin, an ax—Liraz’s ax—embedded in the hardpan just inches from his cheek. He’d believed Karou was dead, and then and there, breathing hard and looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.
And he remembered Karou’s plea from just the day before, when they were crushed into that tiny shower. “I don’t want you to be sorry,” she had said. “I want you to be… alive.”
She’d meant something more than life as a tool. Something about the way she’d said it, Akiva had known that, to her, in that moment, life was hunger.
And whatever his name, whatever his past or ancestry, Akiva wasalive, and he was hungry, too. For the dream, for peace, for the feel of Karou’s body pressed against his, for the home they might share, somehow, somewhere, and for the changes they would see—and cause—in Eretz for decades to come.
He was alive and intent on staying that way, so while his uncle taunted him, probing for a weak spot—it wasn’t enough to kill; he had to torment—Akiva heard what he said, but none of it touched him. It was like threatening darkness at the break of day.
“Today we break the curse,” said Jael. “Today, at last, you die.”
Akiva shook his head. Passingly he wondered if he should be pretending weakness he didn’t feel. In Joram’s bath, these gruesome hand “trophies” had given the Dominion the advantage they needed to subdue Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz. Tonight things were different. No rush of weakness assaulted him. He experienced only a sensation of awareness in the new scar at the back of his neck as his own magic met it and turned it aside. He remembered the feeling of Karou’s fingertips tracing the mark, so lightly, when he had shown it to her, and he remembered the press of her palm against his heart, no magic screaming into his blood, and no sickness, only what the touch itself intended.
He was aware of her flickering glamour and her struggle with the thing Razgut. He wanted to surge toward her, smash the bloated purpled face and free her, even twist off that vile stringy arm if he had to. And he wanted to back the creature into a corner and fire questions at him, too. Fallen.What did it mean? He’d had the chance to ask him once before and had thrown it away, and now wasn’t the time, either. He knew Karou could manage the creature.
His own true adversary stood before him. “Not today,” Akiva told Jael. The first words he’d spoken since coming into this room. “No one dies today.”
Jael’s laugh was as nasty as ever. “Nephew, look around. Whatever you meant by creeping to my bedside in the night”—and here he diverted his attention for the first time from Akiva to glance at Karou, and an appreciative light came on in his eyes—“and I expect that it is notthe more pleasant of several possible explanations.…” He paused. Smiled. “I would expect it to run counter to my own intentions.”
He was enjoying himself. This was an echo of the Tower of Conquest for him, too, so much so that he was failing to notice the critical difference: Akiva wasn’t trembling under his assault of magic. “It does,” Akiva acknowledged. “Though I doubt it’s what you expect.”
“What?” Mockery. Hand to his chest. “You mean you haven’tcome to kill me?”
He spoke it like a good joke. Why else, indeed, would they have come? Akiva’s reply was mild. “No. We haven’t. We’ve come to ask you to leave. Leave just as you came, with no blood spilled, and carrying nothing from this world back with you. Go home. All of you. That’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all, is it?” More laughter, spit flying. “You make demands?”
“It was a request. But I am prepared to demand.”
Jael’s eyes narrowed, and Akiva saw the mockery transform first to incredulity and then to suspicion. Did he begin to sense that something was wrong? “Can you count, bastard?” Jael was trying to hold on to his mockery. He wanted this to be funny, but an edge to his voice betrayed him, and when his eyes swiveled suddenly like they were on casters, Akiva saw that he was doing an accounting of his own, and trying to believe in the strength of his position. “You are two against forty,” he said. Two.He discounted Karou. Well, Akiva wasn’t going to correct him. It wasn’t his uncle’s only error; it was only the most obvious. “However strong you are, however cunning, it’s numbers that matter in the end.”