It was a beautiful room, or had been once. The high ceiling glinted with mosaics, and faded silk panels lined the walls. A pair of windows with carved shutters stood open to the night, their ledges three feet deep, revealing the fortress thickness of the walls. It wasn’t very big; there were other rooms that would be more suitable to Karou’s work, but she had claimed this one because of the crossbar at the door and the feeling of safety it gave her—though a fat lot of good that did her now that Thiago was on the wrong side of it.

Stupid, she thought. Hanging back at the open door, she told him, “I’d rather work alone.”

He approached her worktable. Setting the tiger molar down with a click, he looked at her. “But you are not alone. We are in this together.” His intensity—his seeming sincerity—was piercing. “We are the inheritors, Karou. What my father and Brimstone were to our people, you and I are to those who remain.”

And what a heavy inheritance it was: no less than the fate of the chimaera races and all their hopes for survival.

The chimaera were barely clinging to the world. Thiago’s band of soldiers was all that remained of the chimaera army, and only through Karou’s collaboration did they have any hope of mounting a real opposition.

When she’d joined them they were hardly more than sixty: a handful of wounded survivors of the defense of Cape Armasin, who had escaped through the mine tunnels, along with others they had met as they moved across the ravaged land. They were mostly soldiers, with a few useful civilians such as the smith Aegir and a pair of farmwives to see to the cooking. And though sixty was a paltry number for a rebel force, they did have more hope than that.

They had thuribles. They had souls.

Karou’s best guess: Several hundred slain soldiers waited in stasis in the silver vessels, and it was up to her to bring them back to the fight.

“We are in this together,” Thiago had said. She looked at him hard and waited for the usual revulsion to rise, but it didn’t. Perhaps she was just too tired.

Or… perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Across the room, he had found her case of tools. It was a pretty thing, embossed leather the color of saffron, and looked like it might be a cosmetics case.

It was not.

He spilled its contents onto the table. There were some everyday objects—straight pins, a small blade, a hammer, pliers, of course—but mostly there were vises. They weren’t flashy: just plain brass screw clamps like the ones Brimstone had used. It was amazing the pain you could cause with such simple objects, if you knew what you were doing. Karou had had them handmade to order by a smith in the medina of Marrakesh who hadn’t asked questions but had guessed their purpose and smirked at her with a knowingness that had made her feel dirty. As if she enjoyed this.

“I’ll tithe,” said the Wolf, and Karou felt, in the void of her curiously absent revulsion, relief rush in.

“Really?”

“Of course. I would have before, if you had ever let me come in. Do you think I like knowing that you’re locked in here alone, suffering?”

Yes, she thought, but at the same moment she experienced a twinge of doubt for all her suspicion, and all the nights of barred doors. Thiago would give his pain to her magic so that she didn’t have to. How could she say no to that? Already he was stripping off his impeccable white shirt. “Come.” He smiled, and she saw in him a fatigue to mirror her own. “Let’s do it and be done.”

Karou gave in. She pushed the door closed with her foot and went to him.

17

T

HE

P

AIN

T

ITHE

There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it—the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain.

Karou did not comfort Thiago. She didn’t touch him more than she had to as the pain invaded his body. But she was alone with him in the candlelight, and he was half-clad and subdued, his handsome face grave with endurance, and while she certainly felt what she expected—a grim pleasure to give back some small measure of the anguish he had once caused her—it wasn’t all she felt.

There was gratitude, too. A new body lay on the floor behind them, freshly conjured from teeth and pain, and for a change, the pain had not been her own. “Thanks,” she said grudgingly.

“My pleasure,” replied Thiago.

“I hope not. That would be sick.”

He gave a tired laugh. “The pleasure is not in the pain. It’s in sparing you the pain.”

“How noble.” Karou was removing the vises and his arm was heavy in her hand, his muscle so dense that she’d had trouble fitting the clamps, and was having trouble again, wrenching them off. She cringed as she torqued his triceps out of shape, leaving an angry welt. He winced, and an apology slipped automatically from her lips. “Sorry,” she said, and wanted to bite it back. He had you beheaded, she reminded herself. “Actually, I’m not. You had that coming.”

“I suppose I did,” he agreed, rubbing his arm. With a hint of a smile, he added, “Now we’re even.”

A small bark of a laugh, almost but not entirely without mirth, burst from Karou. “You wish.”

“I do, Karou. Karou.”

The laugh died quickly; Thiago said her name too much. It was like he was claiming it. She started to draw away, her hands full of vises, but his voice stopped her. “I’ve had this thought that if I could tithe for you, I could… atone… for what I did to you.”

Karou stared at him. The Wolf, atone?

He looked down. “I know. There’s no atoning for it.”

I can think of a way, thought Karou. “I’m… I’m surprised that you think you have anything to atone for.”

“Well.” He spoke softly. “Not for everything. You gave me no choice, Karou, you know that, but I might have done things differently, and I know that. The evanescence… it was beyond the pale.” He looked at her, beseeching. “I wasn’t myself, Karou. I was in love with you. And to see you with… him, like that. You drove me a little mad.”

Karou flushed and felt laid bare all over again. At least, she thought, struggling to maintain her composure, this human flesh had never been exposed to him the way her natural body had. Still, the way he was looking at her, she gathered that he’d forgotten nothing of that night in the requiem grove.

She fumbled with the vises, returning them to their case.

“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you, but I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.” A drop in his voice alarmed her. He sounded… confessional.

“I really should finish—” she tried to say, but he cut her off.

“It’s about Brimstone.”

The mention of Brimstone gripped Karou as it always did: like hands at her throat; a throttling, breathless assault of grief.

“He and I had our differences,” Thiago admitted. “That’s no secret. But when I found out that he had saved you, that your soul wasn’t lost… Perhaps you think I was furious that he had defied me, but nothing could be further from the truth. And now… Believe me when I say that every day I wake filled with gratitude for his mercy.” He paused. “Every time I look at you, I bless him.”

Look who’s become a fan of mercy, Karou thought. “Yes, well. It was good luck for you that a spare resurrectionist happened along.”

“I won’t lie. When I saw you in the ruins, I almost fell to my knees. But luck is too small a word for it, Karou. It was salvation. I had been praying to Nitid for hope, and when I opened my eyes and saw you there—you—like a beautiful hallucination, I thought she had answered me, and delivered to me the only person Brimstone ever trained.”