14
THE LONGEST FIVE MINUTES IN HISTORY
Liraz felt… guilty.
It was not her favorite feeling. Her favorite feeling was the absence of feeling; anything else led to turmoil. Right now, for example, she found herself angry at the source of her guilt, and, though aware that this was an improper emotional response, she could not seem to unfeel it. She was angry because she knew she was going to have to do something to… assuage the guilt.
Damn it.
It was the human with his damned imploring eyes and his shivering. What did he mean, asking her to keep him warm—and his girl—as if they were her responsibility? What were they even doing here, traveling with beasts? It wasn’t their world, and they weren’t her problem. This guilt was stupid enough, but oh, it got worse.
It got stupider.
Liraz was also angry at the chimaera, and not for the reason that would have made sense. They were not, for a miracle, aiming their hamsas at her. She hadn’t felt their magic drill its sick ache through her for the entire time that they’d been encamped here. And that was why she was angry. Because they weren’t giving her a reason to be angry.
Feelings. Were. Stupid.
Hurry up, Akiva, she thought to the night sky, as if her brother might rescue her from herself. Small chance of that. He was a wreck of feelings, and that was another reason for fury. Karou had done that to him. Liraz could imagine her fingers around the girl’s neck. No. She’d twist her ridiculous hair into a rope and strangle her with that.
Except, of course, that she wouldn’t.
She would give Akiva five more minutes to arrive, and if he still didn’t come, she would do it. Not strangle Karou. The other thing. The thing that she had to do to put a halt to this absurd spillage of feelings.
Five minutes.
It was her third five minutes already. And each “five minutes” was probably more like fifteen.
Finally, heavily, Liraz started walking, inwardly cursing Akiva with every step. She’d given him the longest five minutes in history, and he still hadn’t arrived to put a stop to this. The camp was asleep, save for a griffon on guard duty, up on a pinnacle. He wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening from up there.
The Wolf had come down from prowling the ledge a half hour ago, and retreated to one of the fires—fortunately, one of the farther ones. His eyes were closed. Everyone’s were. As far as Liraz had been able to determine, no one was awake.
No one would even know what she’d done.
She was silent, prowling slowly. She arrived at the proper… beast huddle… and surveyed it with distaste for a moment before stepping near. The fire was a sad thing, producing almost no heat. There was the pair of humans, sleeping curled into each other like twins in a womb. Fetal, she thought. Pathetic. She stared at them for a long moment. They were shivering.
She looked around once, quickly.
Then she knelt beside them and opened her wings. It was within a seraph’s basic power to burn low or high; a simple thought, and the heat intensified. Within seconds, the warmth spread to the whole huddle, but it took a while, Liraz noted, for the shivering to taper off. She herself had never known cold. It gave every appearance of unpleasantness. Weak, she thought, still watching the human pair, but there was another word lurking, defying it. Fearless.
They slept with their faces touching.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Liraz had never been that close to another living soul. Her mother? Maybe. She didn’t remember. She knew that something in the sight made her want to cry, and so, she thought, she should hate it, and them. But she didn’t, and she wondered why, watching them and keeping them warm, and it was a while before she lifted her eyes to look around the fire. She had wondered something else: whether Akiva and Karou had shared… this? This fearless nearness. But where was Karou? There was Issa, the Naja, resting peacefully, it seemed, but to Liraz’s deep dismay, she saw that Karou was not among these sleepers.
So where was she?
Her heart slammed, and she just knew. Godstars. How could I have been so careless? Suffused with dread—oh, and dread made her angry—Liraz tipped back her head and looked up, and there, of course, was Karou, right above her, perched on the rocky ledge—How long has she been there?—knees tucked up to her chest, arms wrapped around them tight. Awake? Oh yes. Cold, clearly. Watching.
Intrigued.
At the moment that their eyes met, Karou cocked her head to one side, a sudden birdlike motion. She didn’t smile, but there was an open warmth in her look that seemed to reach out toward Liraz.
Who wanted to send it right back at her on the end of an arrow.
And then, simply, Karou tucked her face against her knees and settled in to sleep. Liraz didn’t know what to do with herself, caught in the act. Back away? Burn everyone?
Well, maybe not that.
In the end, she stayed where she was.
But by the time the chimaera host was awakened and Akiva’s return made known—with good news: the Misbegotten promise was given—Liraz was up, and no one knew what she’d done but Karou. Liraz thought of warning her not to tell anyone, but feared that caring that much about it just broached a whole new level of vulnerability and gave Karou even more power over her, so she didn’t. But she did glare at her.
“Thank you,” Akiva said quietly when they had a moment by themselves.
“For what?” Liraz demanded, squinting at him as if he might somehow know how she’d passed the last hours.
He shrugged. “For staying here. Keeping the peace. It couldn’t have been fun.”
“It wasn’t,” she said, “and don’t thank me. I might be the first one to draw my sword, once I have backup.”
Akiva wasn’t fooled. “Mm hmm,” he said, suppressing a smile. “Hamsas?”
“No,” she grudgingly admitted. “Not a touch.”
His brows went up in surprise. “Amazing.”
It was amazing. Liraz grimaced, remembering her absurd anger about it—what did they mean, leaving her in peace like that? It was odd, though. It was off. But saying so would just sound foolish, and maybe it was. Akiva looked hopeful. Liraz hadn’t seen him look like that… ever. It squeezed her heart—a bad and good feeling. How could a feeling be both bad and good? Akiva was happy; that was the good. Hazael should be here; that was the bad.
“Did you tell them?” she asked Akiva. “About Haz?” She was strumming at the bad ache in an effort to blot out the good.
Akiva nodded, and she saw with a mixture of guilt and petty triumph—but mostly guilt—that she’d blotted out his hopeful look, too, lacing it with pain. “Can you imagine how much easier this would all be, if he were here?”
Instead of me, thought Liraz, though she knew that wasn’t what Akiva meant. She meant it, though. Maybe she’d been acting on Hazael’s behalf in the night, sharing her fire, but it was feeble compared to what he would have brought to this bizarre communion of beasts and angels. Laughter and helpless grins, a swift breaking down of barriers. No one could hold out long against Haz. Her own gift, she thought with an inward shudder, was very different, and unwelcome in the future they were trying to build. All she was good at was killing.
For so long it had been a source of pride and boasting, and though the pride was gone, she would wear her boasts forever. Her sleeves were pushed all the way down, as they always were now, hiding the truth of her tally—the awful truth that it wasn’t just her hands that were marked. She might have shoved her hands in the chimaera’s faces back at the kasbah, but she hadn’t flaunted the full and terrible truth.
The campfire tattoos, the columns of five-counts—each one made up of four fine lines with a strike-through—were not confined to her hands. Up her arms they climbed, giving her flesh the look of black lace. No one else had a count like hers. No one.
It ended at the elbows, frittering away in one incomplete count: two fine lines that were the last two kills she’d had the stomach to record. Before Loramendi.
Loramendi.
She’d been having a recurring dream since then, in which, possessed of the belief that they would grow back clean, she… cut her arms off.
Just how she accomplished this, the dream never made clear. Oh, the first arm was easy, sure. The second was the puzzle her mind skipped blithely over.
How, exactly, does one cut off both of her own arms?
The point was, they didn’t grow back. Or at least, she always woke up before they could. She would lie there blinking, and she could never get back to sleep until she imagined an ending, one in which the fountaining blood from her stumps arranged itself into growth—bone, flesh, fingers—solidifying until she was whole again. Whole, and also unmarked.
A clean start.
A fantasy.
She’d never told anyone but Hazael, who had diverted her for a half hour after by trying to solve the puzzle of dual self-arm-severing, ending up sprawled on his back and declaring it impossible. She hadn’t told Akiva because, well, he wasn’t there. After Loramendi, he had left them, and even though he’d come back, he was in a world of his own. Take right now, for example. He was looking past Liraz, and she didn’t have to follow his gaze to know at whom. He was staring; she snapped her fingers in front of his eyes.
“A little subtlety, brother? The chimaera will take it out on her if they think there’s still something between you two. Haven’t you heard what they call her?”
“What?” He looked genuinely surprised. “No. What do they call her?”
“Angel-lover.”
She saw his eyes brighten, and rolled her own. “Don’t look happy. It doesn’t mean she loves you. It only means they don’t trust her.” She was scolding him as if she were the one who understood these things—or cared. What little Liraz knew of feelings was more than enough, thank you, but… well, she wasn’t going to go talking about it or anything, but there was something in the good half of this ache in her heart that made her want to curl her wings around it and guard it from the cold.
ARRIVAL + 18 HOURS