Лэйни Тейлор - Days of Blood & Starlight

“Yes, well, don’t sheathe your claws,” said Ten. It was a chimaera expression, roughly equivalent to don’t hold your breath , though more menacing, with the implied necessity of self-defense. Good advice , thought Karou.

Her mouth was full when Ten said, casually, “Thiago suggested that I help you.”

The couscous felt like Play-Doh on Karou’s tongue. She couldn’t answer, and struggled to swallow.

“Well,” said Ten. “It’s an enormous undertaking for one person, isn’t it?”

Karou finally swallowed her Play-Doh. Brimstone was one person , she thought, but she didn’t say it. She knew she didn’t fare well in that comparison. Besides, Brimstone had not been alone, had he?

“I would be your assistant,” Ten went on. “Like the Naja woman, what was her name?” At this blithe mention of Issa, Karou stiffened. Ten didn’t notice, and didn’t wait for a response. “I could take care of the menial things to leave you free for the part only you can do.”

“No,” said Karou, sharp as a bite. You’re not Issa. “Tell Thiago thank you, but—”

“Oh. I believe he meant for you to accept.”

Well, of course Thiago meant for her to accept; he meant for everyone to accept his will and enact it at once. And she did need help. But Ten? Karou couldn’t stand the thought of the she-wolf always at her elbow, watching her.

There was something savage about Ten, about most of the company, in fact, that Karou was having a hard time reconciling with her memories of her chimaera kindred—had they always been like this and she just couldn’t see it? There had been, for instance, the matter of the sweet arza tree, not long after she’d joined with them. Nothing sweet about it anymore, the tree was burned like everything else around Loramendi, huge and skeletal as a great bone hand clawing up from the earth. There had been charred orbs swaying in its boughs, and Karou hadn’t understood what they were until she’d heard some soldiers talking of using “the arza fruit” for archery practice.

She hadn’t even thought— stupid, stupid —before saying, “Oh, that’s fruit? It’s big.”

The way they’d looked at her. She couldn’t recall it without a scald of shame. It was Ten who had said, “They’re heads .”

Karou had blanched. “You’re shooting at heads ?” All she could think was: But they’re ours. They must have been chimaera , and Ten had asked, “What else would we do with them?”

A beat passed in incredulity before Karou said, “We could bury them.”

To which Ten had replied, with vicious zeal, “I’d rather avenge them.”

It was a fearsome thing to say, and Karou had gotten a chill—and a small spark of admiration, she had to admit—but it kept coming back to her later, and her admiration didn’t last. Why not both? Bury the dead and avenge them. It was barbaric to leave corpses lying about, and she knew this wasn’t simply her human feeling.

She experienced a queer collision of reactions these days. Karou’s were foremost, and most immediate, but Madrigal’s were hers, too: her two selves, coming together with a strange kind of vibration. It wasn’t disharmony, exactly. Karou was Madrigal, but her reactions were informed by her human life and all the luxuries of peace, and things that might have been commonplace to Madrigal could still jar her at first. Burnt heads strung from a sweet arza tree? If Madrigal hadn’t seen exactly that, she had witnessed enough horror that it had no power to shock her.

But in Madrigal’s lifetime the chimaera had buried their dead, if they could. It wasn’t always possible; countless times they’d gleaned souls and left the bodies on the battlefield, but that was of necessity. This was… brutish. To take target practice at the dead? It wasn’t only Karou’s human self that shrank from that. What had the past eighteen years been like that the chimaera had given up such a basic hallmark of civilization as burial ?

Now, leaning forward, Ten told Karou, “Thiago needs more soldiers, and faster. It is critical.”

“It would slow things down more to try to teach you what to do.”

“Surely there’s something.”

Surely there was. Plenty of things. She could make and mold the incense, clean the teeth, tithe. But something in Karou clenched at the thought. Not Ten . For years Ten had been attached to the White Wolf—his personal guard, one of a pack that moved always in his shadow, in battle and out of it.

She had been in the requiem grove.

“A smith would be more helpful,” said Karou. “To band the teeth in silver for stringing.”

“Aegir is busy. Forging weapons. ” Ten’s tone suggested that banding teeth was beneath the smith’s dignity.

“And what am I forging, jewelry ?” Karou matched her tone. She met Ten’s eyes, which were golden-brown like a true wolf’s, unlike Thiago’s pale blue, a color never seen on the animal. He should be called the White Siberian Husky , Karou thought pettishly.

“Aegir can’t be spared.” Ten’s voice was getting tight.

“I’m surprised Thiago can spare you .” Who will brush his hair for him?

“He considers this very important.”

Ten’s words were hard and clipped now, and it began to dawn on Karou that she might not win this, and also that her arguments against Ten’s help weren’t sound. She could see Thiago’s point; she was no Brimstone, that was sure. The Wolf was trying to mount a rebellion, and there were still a score of flightless soldiers awaiting their walk to the pit, not to mention the landslide of thuribles in her room that had barely begun to diminish.

And the patrols had not yet returned from the first wave of the rebellion.

If anything had happened to them… Just the thought made Karou want to sag down and weep. Of those thirty soldiers, half were newly wrought—hard-earned flesh-and-blood bodies, her arms still blooming with bruises to show for them.

Of the rest, one was Ziri, the only chimaera in the company who, Karou was reasonably sure, had not cheered at her execution.

Ziri.

As Thiago said, it was early yet. Karou sighed and rubbed her temples, which Ten took as assent, her jaws doing their wolf version of a smile.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll start after dinner.”

What? No. Karou was trying to decide whether to retrieve the threads of the argument when, peripherally, she saw a large figure enter the room and stop hard. She knew that shape, even at the edge of sight. She should; she’d just made it.

It was Razor.

All talk in the hall ceased. Heads swung to look at Razor, poised on the threshold and staring straight at Karou.

Her gut twisted. This was the worst part, always. There were the ones like Amzallag who walked to the pit and woke knowing where they were, with whom, and all that had happened in Eretz. And then there were the souls from the thuribles: the soldiers who had died at Cape Armasin and didn’t even know that Loramendi had fallen, let alone that they were in another world.

Without exception they blinked at Karou dully, not recognizing her. How could they? A blue-haired girl without wings or horns? She was a stranger.

And, of course, she never heard what was said later, when they were told the truth. She liked to imagine someone speaking on her behalf— She’s one of us; she’s the resurrectionist; she brought you back, she brought us here, and look: food! —but thought it was more likely something along the lines of: We have no choice; we need her. Or even, in her darker moments: Much as we’d all love to, we can’t kill her. Yet.