“And why would you do that?”
“Because this is not you. This is not us.” The truth of it came together all at once. The stories she had read in the tower books. Her visions. “As you said, it is our gods who compel us. Who puppet us through these motions. How many times have we fought before, Crow God? How many times will we fight again? It is an endless cycle, light and dark, fire and shadow. We, you and me, Serapio and Naranpa… we need not die for it!”
He was quiet for a very long time. “How do you know my name?”
She realized her mistake, but it was too late to take it back. “Okoa told me.”
“Okoa…” Some emotion flashed across his face. “Funny. He has never called me by my name, even though it was something I wanted very much once.” He smiled. “Is that what you came to tell me? That Okoa has aligned with the Sun Priest?”
“I came to sue for peace.” It was not, in fact, the reason she had come. Sorrow had driven her. Exhaustion. She had come to win, or to die. But hope flared now, as new and promising as the sun above. “I have tried to do what is right for Tova, but I have only failed. The city was dying before you came, the Watchers corrupted, the clans too insular. We lay bloated and rotting under the sun as our people suffered.”
“And now?”
“They suffer still,” she admitted. “Too much darkness destroys as easily as too much light. We must seek the balance between us.”
He seemed to turn inward, as if communing with a presence she could not discern. “My god does not think so. He has been bound for too long, kept from this place and his people by the greed of the sun god.” He spread his hands. “He wishes to rule.” He stood for a moment, arms still wide. A slow-creeping smile blossomed across his face. “He wishes you dead.” Now she heard the god, the terrible voice like the dark shadows of the grave.
He began to run.
Toward her.
She only had time to turn, willing her feet to motion, before he was upon her. He slammed into her back, forcing her down. She hit the ground, face-first, ice cracking under her cheek. His forearm dug into the back of her neck, and his knee pressed against her spine. She sensed more than felt something sharp coming for her throat.
Terror drowned her. She fought to think, but her mind was gibberish. All she had was adrenaline and panic. She struggled, but his grip was stone. Desperate, her vision fading and her mind losing consciousness, she reached for that locked place inside her, her river of choler and grief. She ripped the dam free and let her fear explode in a torrent of rage.
Her body erupted.
He fell back with a curse as she unfurled her wings, twisting her sinuous body to rise.
His lips curled, amused. He lifted his arms, palms up, and exploded.
They collided in the air, firebird and the black-winged flock. Naranpa felt the stab of a hundred beaks, the tearing of talons ripping across her stomach, and she screamed. Flames streaked from her mouth, searing corvids and driving them back. She gripped a bird between her talons and tore it in half. Shrieks shredded the air, and the crows fell. Suddenly, she was free.
She looked down to see the Odo Sedoh in human form again, cradling a bloody hand and wearing a murderous grin.
Flee! She thought but had no sooner conceived it than he shattered, and she was under attack again.
They struggled, light and shadow, fire and ice, each gaining advantage and then losing it. She struck, and he countered. He opened her flesh with his myriad claws, and she crushed a small body between her jaws. And on it went.
She could not last.
Exhaustion beat at her; the god magic that had transformed her was draining her to ash. He was faster, more deadly, well practiced. She was driven by instinct alone, and she was fading. She ducked a blow a fraction too slowly, and a talon slashed across her collarbone. She somersaulted back, losing her balance. Her body shuddered, and she plummeted to earth, a woman.
The impact knocked the breath from her body, and she lay helpless.
He landed heavily beside her, close enough that if she stretched her bloodied arm, she might touch his foot.
She expected him to leer over her, triumphant, to taunt her in that terrible voice. But he collapsed to sitting, fatigue bending his back. Tears of tar blackened his cheeks, and his body bore multiple burns.
Her smile was bittersweet. At least she had done that much.
He laughed, and it sounded like grief.
“Can you truly heal me?” It was the man again. Trembling, unsure.
Naranpa had always been someone who trusted, who believed in the best of people when others were willing only to condemn. Even her recent trials could not wholly destroy her humanity, and her humanity would not leave this man to suffer when she could help him.
Even if he was her enemy.
Especially because he was her enemy.
So she crawled to him. He was only an arm’s length away, but it seemed to take an eternity. Plenty of time for her mind to scream at her to stay as far away from him as possible, to chide her for being a fool again, to remind her that Abah would laugh at her, that Denaochi would scold her for her recklessness. But they were dead, as were so many. If she could perhaps stop one more from dying, she had to try.
A gash in his armor exposed the wound in his side. It festered, but not with infection. With light. Her eyes met his, burnished gold and darkest shadow.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. Did he know? Did he care?
“It hurts.”
His chest rose and fell, and she realized he was scared. She reached for him and paused, hand outstretched. Her nails had been ripped from their beds, and her second finger was warped and broken. “Skies,” she murmured, no longer proud of the damage she had done to him, now revolted at the damage they had done to each other.
She pressed her mangled hand to his side.
Images flashed through her mind. The ancient fight above the lake at the Graveyard of the Gods, when her scales had been peeled from her stomach. Another battle between sun god and crow, this time as a woman in shadow armor and a man cloaked in fire. A third, and she thought she recognized the grasslands of the Meridian. The warriors were reversed, the woman’s golden hair streaming down her back. And last, Eche, on his knees before the Odo Sedoh, breaking the mask and stabbing the crow god at this very place in his side.
“We are meant to be one,” she murmured, but she could not say how. “Our battle is eternal and unwinnable.”
She concentrated, the same way she had before when she had healed her brother. She thought perhaps it would not work, that her palliative powers were as spent as her rage, or that they would refuse to help her god’s immortal enemy. But her hands warmed, and a glow spread along his skin.
She drew the essence of the sun god that had infiltrated his body to her own. Light and matter, and there, in her hand, a thin strip of hammered gold the size of her fingernail materialized. She recognized it immediately. It was the missing piece from the mask of the Sun Priest. It must have lodged in his side when Eche stabbed him.
She held it up to show him and realized something else had come to her hand. Shadow. It blackened her fingertips, crawled up her palm, encircled her wrist. She cried out, her hand suddenly icy with pain. The grain of gold tumbled to the ground.
The shadow ceased to spread and then dissipated, the cold retreating. But the healing glow had faded as well.
“The shadow feeds.” He had opened his eyes, black pools that cut through her. “It always feeds.”