Scarab shook her head and found her voice, and told Akiva the rest herself.

And she felt it in her chest, when he fell to his knees. She thought of Festival, whom she had never known, called to an ugly fate half a world away: to give up her own sanctity to a tyrant king for the sake of bringing this man into being: Akiva of the Misbegotten, who, for some ineffable reason, was powerful beyond all others.

Well, and it was Scarab’s own ugly fate to fell him to his knees, but she thought that Festival would have understood. Anankedigs grooves so deep you can either follow it or live your life trying to scale the sides and escape. Scarab was not going to try to escape. Always, she had been growing toward this, ever since she heard of a harp strung with taken lives, and before that still, to the earliest moment when energies joined in the making of her. Her path lay before her, and Akiva was entangled in it.

She had come on this journey to hunt and kill a magus.

She would return from it armed to hunt and kill gods.

Once upon a time, there was only darkness, and there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it. They loved the darkness because it concealed their hideousness. Whenever some other creature contrived to make light, they would extinguish it. When stars were born, they swallowed them, and it seemed that darkness would be eternal.

But a race of bright warriors heard of them and traveled from their far world to do battle with them. The war was long, light against dark, and many of the warriors were slain. In the end, when they vanquished the monsters, there were a hundred left alive, and these hundred were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.

Akiva tried to remember the first time he’d heard the myth. World-devouring monsters who swam in darkness. Enemies of light, swallowers of stars. Had it been from his mother? He couldn’t remember. Five years only he’d had her, and so many years since to blot them out. It could have come from the training camp, propaganda to build their hatred of chimaera, because that was how the tale had been twisted in the Empire: into an origin myth so ugly it was silly.

He’d told it to Madrigal their first night together, as they lay atop their clothes on a bank of shrive moss, heavy and lazy with pleasure. They’d laughed at it. “Ugly Uncle Zamzumin, who made me out of a shadow,” she had said. Absurd.

Or not. Scarab called them by another name than the one Akiva knew, but it made its own sense. As siritharhad come to mean, in the Empire, the state of calm in which the godstars work through the swordsman, nithilamhad been its opposite: the godless, thick-of-battle frenzy to kill instead of die. These names had once meant something about the nature of their world. Somehow, the truth had been lost.

Now Akiva learned that the monsters were real.

That every second of every day they battered at the veil of the world.

That the people who were half his blood lived their lives in devotion to shoring up that veil with their own life force.

And that he… he… had nearly torn it wide open.

He was on his knees. He was only dimly aware of getting there. What the Faerers had done was only half a cataclysm. In his ignorance, he had almost finished it.

—Not just ignorance, sent Nightingale, to his mind. She settled to her own knees before him, while Scarab stood where she was, unmoved. Ignorance and power. They’re a poor combination. Power is as mysterious as the veils themselves. Yours more than anyone’s. We can’t take it from you except by killing you, and we don’t wish to do that. Nor can we leave you, and hope that you’ll contain it on your own.

And Akiva understood his choice that wasn’t a choice. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoarse, though he already knew.

“Come with us,” said Nightingale, aloud. Her voice was soft and sad, but Akiva looked over her shoulder at Scarab, and saw no sadness in her and no mercy. His grandmother added, so softly, “Come home.”

Home.It felt like a betrayal even hearing the word, all the more so as he was looking at Scarab when he did. Home was what he would make with Karou. Home wasKarou. Akiva felt his future unraveling in his hands. He thought of the blanket that did not yet exist, the symbol of his simplest and deepest hope: a place to love and dream. Would they have to rip it in two, he and Karou, and carry their ragged halves with them where their fates were determined to lead them? “I can’t,” he said, desperate, not thinking what it meant, or that it might be construed as his choice.

Nightingale just looked at him, a twitch of disappointment at the corners of her mouth. As for Scarab, her face gave away nothing, and yet she made the nature of his choice very clear to him, in case he misunderstood. Twice before, he had been overcome by this sudden, intense awareness of his own life. This was the third time, and with it came a sending, cruder than Nightingale’s, unmistakably Scarab’s, and it wasn’t cruel, only pitiless, and he understood that there was no space for pity, not for her. She was queen of a people enslaved by a burden so great that the entirety of the Continuum depended on them. She couldn’t waver, ever, and didn’t. This was strength, not cruelty. Her sending was an image: a shining filament held between two fingers, and the understanding, with it, that the filament was Akiva’s life, and the fingers were her own, and that she could end him as easily as snapping.

And would.

But he sensed something else in the sending, and it surprised him. It would be safer for everyone, and easier for her, to kill him now. And not only easier, not only safer. There was something he couldn’t quite grasp, there in the image of that shining filament. A harp string. Scarab and Nightingale had argued about it earlier, and Akiva sensed that the queen stood somehow to gainby killing him.

But she didn’t want to.

“Well?” she asked.

And it was an easy choice. Life, first. You have to be alive, after all, in order to figure out everything else.

“All right,” Akiva said. “I’ll come with you.”

And of course, because Ellai walked here—phantom goddess who had stabbed the sun, and who betrayed more lovers than she ever helped—Karou stepped into the cavern at just that moment, and heard him.

85

AN ENDING

“Akiva?”

Karou didn’t understand what she was seeing. The fulfillment of her wish had been simplicity itself. No sooner had the gavriel vanished than she knew where he was: nearby but hidden, deep in a quarter of the Kirin caves that their party had yet to explore. So she’d guided them here, through many turnings, coming finally around this corner to find… Akiva on his knees.

There were five others, black-haired strangers, and she heard what he said to them but it didn’t make sense, and she didn’t run to him. She didn’t run. Her feet never touched stone, but she was there inside a second, drawing him up beside her and looking at him, intohim. Pouring herself into him, and knowing. At once.

Here was an ending.

He seemed to her a guttered fire, and all things lost and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she couldn’t fathom what had happened, in a matter of hours, to do this to him. Where was the waiting gaze, vivid and alive, and the laughter, the tease, the dance, the hunger? What had they done to him? She spun toward the strangers, and that’s when she saw their eyes.