The knife was still cool against Akos’s back. If Vakrez hadn’t given it to him, he would be as good as dead right now.
Lazmet spread his hands, gesturing to all the dying leaves that surrounded him. He stood in the middle of the narrow path of stone that ran through the courtyard, to keep the caretakers away from the death-giving blossoms. Hushflower leaves died off in the peak of the Awakening, when the weather was warmest, though the roots stayed viable for a lifetime, if cared for properly. So all the greenery around Akos’s father was limp and smelled like rot and dirt, ready to lie fallow until the next Blooming. There was no poison left to kill Lazmet with.
“That’s inconvenient,” Akos said. “But I do have a backup plan.”
He lifted his shirt, and drew Vakrez’s currentblade.
“Vakrez. Now, that’s a surprise. I didn’t think his heart had gone that soft in my absence,” Lazmet said.
His voice had lost the unctuous quality it usually had when he spoke to Akos, like he was resorting to singsong with a stubborn kid. This was not the Lazmet who found him amusing. It was the one who forced people to cut out their own eyes.
“I will have to punish him as soon as I am finished with you.” He was folding the cuffs of his sleeves over, one turn after another, so they stayed up by his elbows.
“Tell me, Akos,” Lazmet said. “How do you believe this will go for you? You are starved, exhausted, and picking a fight with a man who can control every movement of your body. There is no chance you will emerge from this place alive.”
“Well,” Akos said, “get on with killing me, then.”
He felt the squeeze around his head that meant Lazmet’s currentgift was trying to worm its way in, searching out weak points. But Akos was the Armored One, and there was no getting past his currentgift.
He started toward Lazmet, crushing leaves under his boots as he went. He knew better than to delay any longer. Before the full weight of the situation could hit Lazmet, Akos swung.
His arm collided with Lazmet’s armored wrist. Akos gasped from the pain of the collision, but didn’t relent. He was back in the arena, only there was no jeering crowd this time, no Suzao Kuzar thirsting for his blood. Just the grit of Lazmet’s teeth in the dark, and Cyra’s lessons echoing in his head, telling him to think. To abandon thoughts of honor. To survive.
He felt the pressure of Lazmet’s currentgift again, bearing down harder on both sides of his skull.
They broke apart. Lazmet wore armor on both wrists, chest, back. He would have to aim low, or high.
Akos bent, rushing at his father like he meant to tackle him, and stabbing low, at his legs. He felt a line of heat across the back of his neck as his own knife carved into Lazmet’s thigh. Lazmet had cut him.
He ignored the blood coursing down his back, soaking his shirt, and the pulse of pain. Lazmet was groaning, clutching his leg with one hand.
“How?” the man growled.
Akos didn’t answer. He felt unsteady, the weeks of limited food catching up with him. Not everything could be buried under adrenaline. He followed, stumbling toward Lazmet again, using the unpredictability of his movement to his advantage, the way Cyra had when, suffering from severe blood loss, she had to fight Eijeh in the arena. As his world tilted, so did he, and he thrust up, at Lazmet’s throat.
Lazmet grabbed his arm and yanked it hard to the side. Pain sparked in Akos’s shoulder and spread through his entire body. He screamed, and the knife fell out of his hands and into the rotten leaves. He fell down, too, lying at Lazmet’s feet.
Tears rolled down the sides of his face. All this planning, all this lying—the betrayal of his friends, his family, his country—Cyra—and it had come to this.
“You aren’t the first son to try to kill me, you know,” Lazmet said. He lifted his foot, and pressed it to the joint of Akos’s injured shoulder. Even just the touch of the man’s boot made Akos scream again, but he stepped down, harder, slowly putting all his weight into it. Akos’s vision went black, and he fought to stay present, to stay conscious, to think.
He wished he had thought to ask Cyra how she did it, kept thinking in the midst of pain, because to him it felt impossible—all that was left of him were the white-hot sparks of agony.
Lazmet leaned closer, not moving his foot.
“Ryzek surprised me, too, while we sojourned together. Our holiest of rites, the scavenge, and he dared to attack me, imprison me—” Lazmet paused, his jaw working. “But I didn’t die then—Ryzek was too weak!—and I’m not going to die now, am I?”
He twisted his toe like he was squashing a particularly stubborn bug. Akos screamed again, tears running into his hair, wrapping around his ears. He heard a distant wail, the Hessa siren going off, summoning the army to arms. It was too late, too late for him, too late for the oblate in the hallway and the temple of Hessa.
This moment had all the heft of fate in it, the weight of inevitability, set in motion from the moment Vara the oracle told him his kyerta, his life-altering truth. The revelation of his parentage hadn’t released him from the future, it had guided him to it, pulling him to his father’s side like a fish hooked through the lip. Suffer the fate, his mother’s voice said to him, for all else is delusion.
He understood, now, how Cyra had felt when she demanded that he choose her, even though he hadn’t known, at the time, that he really could. I don’t want to be something you “suffer,” she had told him. There was something powerful in that quality of hers, her refusal to accept what she didn’t choose, the force of her want.
I don’t want, she had said, and he felt it now.
He didn’t want this to be the end, the fate he suffered.
And in the muddle of all that pain, Akos thought.
He pulled his knee high, up against his chest, and kicked hard at the wound in Lazmet’s leg. Lazmet grunted, taken by surprise, and let up just a little on Akos’s shoulder. With a yell, Akos pushed against the ground with his free leg so his back scraped against the ground, half on the leaves and half on the stone path, and he stretched his uninjured arm up, his hand searching through the stems for Vakrez’s knife.
Lazmet had stepped back, grabbing his leg with one hand. Akos felt the metal of the knife handle, and grabbed. He felt his pulse in his throat, his head, his shoulder. And, trembling and throbbing and sagging under his own weight, he pushed himself to his feet.
It wasn’t fate that had brought him here. He had chosen this. He had wanted it.
And now he wanted Lazmet dead.
The Hessa siren wailed. He and Lazmet collided, armor against flesh. They went down, falling with a thump to the frozen ground and the waxy leaves. Akos felt another burst of pain in his shoulder, and dry heaved, his stomach too empty to throw anything up. Their arms were crossed between them, both of Lazmet’s hands around his wrist, trying to push the knife away.
Honor, Akos thought, has no place in survival.
He bent his head and bit Lazmet’s arm. He clenched his teeth as hard as he could, tasting blood, tearing flesh. Lazmet screamed, low. Akos pushed the knife against the pressure that held him away, and jerked his head, ripping skin and muscle from Lazmet’s arm.
The knife went right into Lazmet’s neck.
Everything stopped.
Aoseh Kereseth had broken things with his currentgift. Floater seats. Couch cushions. Tables. Mugs. Plates. One time he broke one of Akos’s toys by mistake, and sat his smallest child in his lap to show him how he could fix it, like magic, with the same gift that had broken it. The toy had never looked right again, but Aoseh had done his best.
He had chased their mother around the kitchen with flour-dusted hands to put fingerprints on her clothes. He was the only one who could make Sifa laugh, a full belly laugh. The one who had kept her present, and grounded—at least, as much as that was possible, for an oracle.
Aoseh Kereseth had been loud, and messy, and affectionate. He had been Akos’s father.