There is a smile a chimaera could improve upon, thought Akiva. But if Jael was trying to taunt him, he would have to do better than this. There was no surprise. Who else could Joram’s next target be but the renegade seraphim whose freedom and mystique had riled him for years?

The Stelians.

To Akiva, his mother’s people were more phantoms than these rebels arisen from nowhere. He gave Jael no satisfaction. At the moment, his concern was the battle at hand, and these southern lands where seraph fire had yet to touch death to every green and growing thing, every flesh and breathing thing. And now? Despair moved through him, restless, refusing to settle. He thought of the folk he had spared and warned. They would be cut off, trapped, captured, killed. What could he do? Several thousand Dominion. There was nothing to do.

“To Joram it may be a bother, but to me it’s a boon, this rebellion,” Jael was saying. “We must have something to do. I believe that an idle soldier is an affront to nature. Don’t you agree, Prince?”

Prince. “I don’t imagine nature spares us a thought except to weep when she sees us coming.”

Jael smiled. “Quite right. The land burns, the beasts die, and the moons weep in the heavens to see it.”

“Be careful,” warned Akiva, finding a thin smile of his own. “The moon’s tears are what created chimaera in the first place.”

Jael gave him a cool and considering look. “Beast’s Bane, spouting beast myths. Do you talk to the monsters before you kill them?”

“One should know one’s enemy.”

“Yes. One should.” Again, that look: direct, amused, and personal. What did it mean? Akiva was nothing to Jael but one of his brother’s legion of bastards.

But when at last the meal came to an end, he had to wonder what more there was to it.

Jael pushed back his chair and stood. “Thank you for your hospitality, Commander,” he said to Ormerod. “We fly in an hour.” He turned to Akiva. “Nephew. Always charming to see you.” He turned to go, stopped, turned back. “You know, I probably shouldn’t admit it now that you’re a hero, but I argued for killing you. Back then. No hard feelings, I hope.”

Back when? Akiva regarded Jael evenly. When had his life been up for discussion?

Ormerod shifted uneasily and sputtered a few words, but neither Akiva nor Jael paid him any mind.

“The pollution of your blood, you know,” said Jael, as if it ought to be obvious. So. His mother, again. Akiva rewarded the quip with no more interest than he had shown earlier for the taunt about the new war. Of his mother he had only snatches of memory and the emperor’s cryptic taunt: Terrible what happened to her. What was Jael’s interest? “My brother had faith his blood would prove the stronger—blood is strength and all that—and now he says he was right. You were a test, and you passed, gloriously, and I suppose there’s no argument to be made against you now. Pity. One does so hate to be wrong about these things.”

With that, Jael of the Dominion, second-most powerful seraph in the Empire, turned to go, pausing just long enough to toss a command back at Ormerod—“Have a woman sent to my tent, would you?”—and kept walking.

Ormerod blanched. His mouth opened but no sound came out. It was Akiva who rose to his feet. Liraz’s words came back to him, and “all the other girls” she’d spoken of. It occurred to him only now that his sister had given voice to a fear. Not directly; she wouldn’t, but now he felt the fear for her, and for “all the other girls,” too. And not only fear. Fury. “We have no women here,” he said. “Only soldiers.”

Jael stopped. Sighed. “Well, one can hardly be choosy in a battle camp. One of them will have to do.”

A world away, the White Wolf readied his troops. He gathered them in the court at darkfall and sent them off in teams, every last one with wings. Nine teams of six, plus the sphinxes, ever their own team. Fifty-six chimaera. It had seemed like so many in the tithing, so many bruises, but Karou, watching from her window, pictured them against a sky full of Dominion and knew that they were nothing. She remembered the shine of the sun on armor, the flaming breadth of seraph wings, and the terrible sight of the enemy arrayed in force, and she felt numb. What did they hope for, going off like this? It was suicide.

They lifted, as squadrons, and flew.

Ziri did not look to her window.

37

S

UICIDE

It was not suicide.

The squadrons did not turn south when they passed through the portal. The fifty-six didn’t fly for the Hintermost to the aid of the creatures who peered up through the forest canopy to see why the sun faltered and what it was that the sky was delivering to them. Truly, what could fifty-six have done against so many? Suicide wasn’t in Thiago’s nature. It would have been a pointless exercise, a waste of soldiers.

The rebels didn’t witness the running and falling of desperate chimaera, the running and falling and pushing up again and clutching at babies and hoisting of elderly by elbows. They didn’t see the anguish of their kindred. They didn’t see them die by the scattered hundreds, chased from burning forests and cut down in sight of safety. And they didn’t die defending them, because they weren’t there.

They were in the Empire, causing anguish of their own.

“Our advantage now is twofold,” Thiago had said. “One, they don’t know where we are, they still don’t know who or what we are. We are ghosts. Second, we are now winged ghosts. Thanks to our new resurrectionist, we have freer movement than we have ever had before, and we can cover much greater distance. They won’t be looking for us to strike at them on their own terrain.” He had let a silence settle before adding, with the perverse gentleness that was his way, “The angels have homes, too. The angels have women and children.”

And now they would have fewer of them.

Only one team leader defied his order: Balieros. The stalwart bull centaur would not turn his back on his people. Once the teams separated to make for their assigned territories, he put it to his soldiers to choose, and they followed him proudly. Bear Ixander; griffon Minas; Viya and Azay, both Hartkind as the Warlord had been; and Ziri. They flew south, their wings churning clouds and pushing the long leagues behind them. As swiftly as they crossed the land they had once defended, it was an epic swath of country, and they were a day in flight before they saw the bastions of the Hintermost in the distance.

A mere six soldiers into a maelstrom of enemy wings—it was suicide, and could end in only one way.

They knew it, they flew toward it, hearts on fire and blood pounding, in their doom infinitely more alive than their comrades who went the other way with every expectation of survival.

“So,” said Hazael, coming quietly to Akiva’s side as they awaited the order to fly. They followed Ormerod today, their patrols combined to follow the Dominion, who had already gone. “What do we do now, brother? Do you suppose there will be many birds out today?”

Birds?

Akiva turned to him. They had never spoken of the chimaera in the gully. “Must have been a bird,” they had agreed at the time, pretending not to see the huddled folk right in front of them.