Liraz snorted, caught off guard, and the tension between them ebbed away. “I’m sorry if my almost dyinginterrupted your almost kissing.”

“I forgive you,” said Akiva. It was hard to joke about the horror so narrowly avoided, but it felt like what Hazael would do, and that was a guiding principle—what Hazael would do—that seemed always to come out right. “I forgive you this time,” he stressed. “Next time, please time your almost dying with more consideration. Better yet, no more almost dying.” Try almost kissing instead, he thought, or actual kissing, but didn’t say it, partly because it was impossible to imagine, and partly because he knew it would annoy her. He wished it for her, though—that Liraz might find herself, someday, preoccupied by bliss.

“I’m going to go wash before we leave,” he told her, pushing off from the cavern wall where he’d been leaning. Several hours of uninterrupted magic had left his body feeling leaden. He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck.

“You should go to the thermal pools,” Liraz said. “They’re… fairly wonderful.”

He halted mid-step and squinted at her. “Fairly wonderful?” he repeated. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Liraz use the word wonderfulbefore, and… was that a hint of a flush rising to her cheeks?

Interesting.

“The healing water, of course,” she said, and her direct, unwavering gaze was too direct and unwavering; she was covering some other feeling with feigned cool, and she was overdoing it. On top of which, there was the flush.

Veryinteresting.

“Well. No time now,” Akiva said. There was water in an alcove just down the passage. “I’ll be right over here,” he told her, departing. He would have liked to go to the thermal pools—he would have liked to go there with Karou—but it was one more item for the wistful list of things to do once his life became his own.

Bathe with Karou.

Heat followed the thought, which, for a wonder, met with no instant barrier of guilt and self-denial. He was so accustomed to running into it that its absence was surreal. It was like rounding a corner one has rounded a thousand times, and finding, instead of the wall one knows is there, an open expanse of sky.

Freedom.

And if they weren’t there yet, Akiva was at least free now to dream, and that in itself was a very great thing.

Karou forgave him.

She loved him.

And they were parting again, and he hadn’t kissed her, and neither of these things was all right. Even if they hadn’t had to hide their feelings from two armies, and even if they might yet have stolen a moment alone, Akiva had a soldier’s superstition about good-byes. You didn’t say them. They were bad luck, and a good-bye kiss was just another form of good-bye. A kiss of beginning shouldn’t be a kiss in parting. They would have to wait for it.

The passage curved into an alcove, where a channel of frigid water spilled from the rough wall, running along at waist height for several meters in a trough before vanishing again into the rock. Like so many of the marvels of these caves, it seemed natural but probably wasn’t. Akiva shrugged out of his sword harness and hung it from a spur of rock, then stripped off his shirt.

He cupped the cold water and brought it to his face. Handful after handful, to his face, neck, chest, and shoulders. He dunked his head into it and straightened, feeling it vaporize against the heat of his skin as it ran down in rivulets between the joints of his wings.

He had agreed to Karou’s plan because it was sound. It was clever, and its risks were far less than the previous plan’s had been, and, if it worked, the threat of Jael to the human world truly would radically diminish, like a hurricane downgraded to a gust. There would still be Eretz to worry about, but there had always been Eretz to worry about, and they would have prevented their enemy from acquiring, as Karou termed them, “weapons of mass destruction.”

Liraz may have mocked her in the first war council, suggesting they simply ask Jael to leave, but that, in essence, was the plan: to ask him to please take his army and go home, without what he came for, thank you, and good night.

Of course, it was the inducementthat was the crux of the plan. It was simple and brilliant—it was not“please”—and Akiva didn’t doubt that Karou and Liraz could pull it off. They were both formidable, but they were also the two people he cared most about in the world— worlds—and he just wanted to carry them safely forward to the future he imagined, in which no one’s life was at stake and the hardest decision of any given day might be what to eat for breakfast, or where to make love.

Liraz was right, Akiva thought. He waspreoccupied by bliss. He wasn’t expecting to have another moment alone with Karou for some time, so when he heard a stir behind him—it sounded like a soft intake of breath—he spun, a surge in his pulse, expecting to see her.

And saw no one.

He smiled. He could feel a presence before him as surely as he had heard a breath. She had come glamoured again, and that meant she had come unobserved. Whatever he’d told himself just minutes ago—how a kiss of beginning should not being a kiss in parting—his resolve couldn’t survive the surge of hope. He needed it. It felt unfinished, the understanding that had passed between them, hands to hearts. He didn’t think he could feel sure of his happiness, or breathe at full depth again, until… and again, astonishingly, there was no barrier of guilt to greet the hope, but only the open expanse of possibilities before them… until he kissed her. Superstition be damned.

“Karou?” he said, smiling. “Are you there?” He waited for her to materialize, ready to catch her in his arms the instant she did. He could do that now. At least, when no one was around.

But she didn’t materialize.

And then, abruptly, the presence—there wasa presence—registered as unfamiliar, even hostile, and there was something else. A feeling came over him—came intohim—and Akiva experienced an entirely newfound awareness of… of his own life as a discrete entity. A single shining tensity in a warp of many, tangible and… vulnerable. A chill gripped him.

“Karou? Is that you?” he asked again, though he knew it was not.

And then he heard footsteps out in the passage, and in a trice Karou did enter. She wasn’t glamoured, but plainly visible—and plainly radiant—and as she drew to a faltering halt, blushing to catch him half-dressed, he saw by her smile that she had indeed come with the same hope that had bloomed in him an instant earlier.

“Hi,” she said, voice soft, eyes wide. Her hope was reaching for his, but Akiva felt something else reaching for it, too, and for his life. It was threat and menace. It was invisible.

And it was in the alcove with them.

AN EXCELLENT ACCIDENT OF STARDUST

In Morocco, Eliza woke with a start. She wasn’t screaming, or even on the verge of screaming. In fact, she wasn’t afraid at all, and that was rather a nice surprise. She had given in to sleep, knowing that she must—sleep deprivation can actually kill you—and had hoped that either a) the dream might, miraculously, leave her alone, or b) the walls of this place would prove thick enough to muffle her screams.

It would seem that ahad come through for her, which was a relief, as bwould clearly have failed. She could hear dogs barking outside, and so it would seem that the walls, thick though they were, would have muffled nothing.