The smirking soldier. “They put up a valiant defense,” he had said, and so it would seem. Of the troops hovering overhead, a fair swath were clad in Misbegotten black. And the rest? Chimaera were among them, yes. They didn’t keep the same steady formation as seraphim, but were just what could be expected of them: wild beasts, no uniformity in shape or size or dress. They were a bestiary shaken open, and godstars help the angels who allied with them.
Godstars help the Second Legion, then, for Jael saw, through a haze of fury, that they made up the bulk of this sky-borne force, steel-clad and plain in their standard-issue armor, no colors, no standards, no crests or coats of arms. Only swords and shields. Oh so many swords and shields.
And there, from up the mountains, came his own white-clad Dominion, overmatched, and caught off guard, and Jael had no choice but to stand on the ground and watch as the two forces faced each other across a gulf of sky. Emissaries ventured out from both sides to meet in the middle and Jael spat in the grass, laughing in the faces of bastards and beasts, and declared, “Dominion never surrender! It is our creed! I wrote it myself!”
Let them fight, he willed now with a fervor that verged on prayer. Let them die, and whether they win or not, take traitors and rebels with them to their graves.
They were too distant for him to see who spoke for them, let alone guess what was said, but the result became clear when the Dominion dropped low in the sky—beyond a rise in the swaying grass and out of his sight—and came to ground in the mode of… surrender.
“Maybe they’re not surrendering,” said the smirking soldier in false consolation. “Maybe they all just really had to piss.”
Jael didn’t see them lay down their swords. He didn’t have to. He knew he had lost.
His Eminence, Jael Second-born, Jael Cut-in-Half—the Several Days’ Emperor—had lost his army and his empire. And surely now his life.
“What are you waiting for?” he screamed, launching himself at Liraz. With a neat step and parry she sent him face-first into the ground, and with one well-placed kick turned him over, gasping, onto his back. “Kill me!” he coughed out, lying there. “I know you want to!”
But she just shook her head and smiled, and Jael wanted to howl, because her smile had… plans in it, and in those plans, he saw, there would be no easy death.
A BUTTERFLY IN A BOTTLE
Karou and Liraz met, without prearrangement, to take Thiago’s body off the palisade.
There had been a great deal of activity in the camp since the Dominion surrender, and there just hadn’t been time to see to it earlier. Reunions and introductions, exclamations and explanations, logistics and strategies to debate and implement, and celebration, too—though cut with a fair portion of grief, because there had been losses in the Adelphas, many of them irretrievable.
There were some thuribles, and Karou had opened every one of them and let the impression of souls brush against her senses, but in none of them had she found what she was looking for.
She came with heavy steps to the body that she had such reason to hate, and found that she couldn’t. Was it all for Ziri, her grief, or was some small measure of it for the true Wolf, who, for all his great faults, had given so much—so many years, so many deaths, and so much pain—for his people?
To her surprise, Liraz was there, facing the palisade and the corpse that dangled from it. “Oh,” said Karou, caught off guard. “Hi.”
No hi in return. “I put him here,” said Liraz without turning her head. Her voice was tight.
Karou understood that she mourned him—Ziri—and though she didn’t know how it had happened, how any feeling had had time to grow between them, she wasn’t surprised. Not by Liraz, not anymore.
“It was for Jael, in case he was suspicious, coming into camp.” She cut Karou a tense look. “It wasn’t… disrespect.”
“I know.”
This seemed inadequate, so Karou added, softly, “It isn’t him. Not in any way.”
“I know.” Liraz’s voice was gruff. They didn’t speak again until they’d cut the ropes and lowered the body to the ground. They tore the gonfalon down, too. Those words— victory and vengeance—belonged to another time. Karou laid it over the body, a shroud to conceal the desecration of violent death.
“Would you burn it?” she asked. It, not him, she said, because that’s all it was. An empty thing, as a shell left on a beach.
Liraz nodded, and knelt beside it to touch fire to the broad, dead chest. Wisps of smoke curled up around her hand, and—
“Wait,” said Karou, remembering something. She knelt, too, on his other side, and reached into the general’s pocket. What she withdrew was a small article the length of her little finger. It was black and smooth, coming to a point on one end. “From his true body,” she said, and handed it to Liraz. The tip of his horn. “That’s all.”
Then, he burned. The fire reached high, clean and splendid and unnaturally hot, leaving only ash that the wind carried away even before the flames had died.
Only then did Karou notice the silence that had fallen inside the camp, and turn to the gate to see the host clustered there, watching. Akiva stood in front, and so did Haxaya, and she looked at Liraz, and Liraz looked back, and there was no more enmity between them.
“Come,” Akiva said, and he turned the watchers aside, and then it was just Karou and Liraz again. No corpse. Not even ash. Karou lingered. There was a question she wanted desperately to ask, but she fought against it.
“I didn’t see him die,” said Liraz. She clasped the horn tip in her fist, tight against her ribs.
Karou held her silence, and held a stillness with it, sensing that it was coming: the thing that she wanted greatly to know. “Coming back from the portal, it was chaos. Once, I saw him but couldn’t reach him, and when I looked again, he wasn’t there. After…” She looked troubled, cast Karou a sidelong glance, and said, plainly, “I don’t know how it happened. How we won. There is no explanation. I saw soldiers fall from the sky, no arrows, no injury, and no one near to have hurt them. Others fled. More fled, I think, than fell. I don’t know.” She shook her head as if to clear it.
Karou had heard much this same account already, from Elyon’s initial report to Akiva, seconded by Balieros. A mysterious—an impossible—victory. What could it mean?
“I found his body, finally. It had fallen into a ravine. Into a stream.” She cut Karou a glance, and everything about her was wary and on guard. She seemed to be waiting for Karou to say something.
Did she think that Karou would blame her? “It’s not your fault,” Karou said.
Whatever it was Liraz wanted her to say, that wasn’t it. She let out a short huff of impatience. “Water,” she said. “Does water, moving water, does it… hasten… evanescence?”
Karou looked at Liraz as her words sank in. Her stillness deepened. She was caught between breaths. This was what she hadn’t been able to ask. Did she mean…? So clearly Karou remembered the devastation on Liraz’s face when she’d had to tell her, as gently as she could under the circumstances, that Hazael’s soul was lost. How, for nothing, she had hauled his corpse through two skies, and how, in the process of bringing him to a resurrectionist, instead cast his soul adrift.
Surely that wasn’t why she’d dragged Thiago’s body all this way?
Karou’s glance flickered to where the corpse had been, which did not go unnoticed by Liraz. “You think I didn’t learn?” the angel asked, incredulous.