and out of his sight—and came to ground in the mode of… surrender.
“Maybe they’re not surrendering,” said the smirking soldier in false consolation. “Maybe they all just really had to piss.”
Jael didn’t see them lay down their swords. He didn’t have to. He knew he had lost.
His Eminence, Jael Second-born, Jael Cut-in-Half—the Several Days’ Emperor—had lost his army and his empire. And surely now his life.
“What are you waiting for?” he screamed, launching himself at Liraz. With a neat step and parry she sent him face-first into the ground, and with one well-placed kick turned him over, gasping, onto his back. “Kill me!” he coughed out, lying there. “I know you want to!”
But she just shook her head and smiled, and Jael wanted to howl, because her smile had… plans in it, and in those plans, he saw, there would be no easy death.
73
A BUTTERFLY IN A BOTTLE
Karou and Liraz met, without prearrangement, to take Thiago’s body off the palisade.
There had been a great deal of activity in the camp since the Dominion surrender, and there just hadn’t been time to see to it earlier. Reunions and introductions, exclamations and explanations, logistics and strategies to debate and implement, and celebration, too—though cut with a fair portion of grief, because there had been losses in the Adelphas, many of them irretrievable.
There were some thuribles, and Karou had opened every one of them and let the impression of souls brush against her senses, but in none of them had she found what she was looking for.
She came with heavy steps to the body that she had such reason to hate, and found that she couldn’t. Was it all for Ziri, her grief, or was some small measure of it for the true Wolf, who, for all his great faults, had given so much—so many years, so many deaths, and so much pain—for his people?
To her surprise, Liraz was there, facing the palisade and the corpse that dangled from it. “Oh,” said Karou, caught off guard. “Hi.”
No hi in return. “I put him here,” said Liraz without turning her head. Her voice was tight.
Karou understood that she mourned him—Ziri—and though she didn’t know how it had happened, how any feeling had had time to grow between them, she wasn’t surprised. Not by Liraz, not anymore.
“It was for Jael, in case he was suspicious, coming into camp.” She cut Karou a tense look. “It wasn’t… disrespect.”
“I know.”
This seemed inadequate, so Karou added, softly, “It isn’t him. Not in any way.”
“I know.” Liraz’s voice was gruff. They didn’t speak again until they’d cut the ropes and lowered the body to the ground. They tore the gonfalon down, too. Those words—victory and vengeance—belonged to another time. Karou laid it over the body, a shroud to conceal the desecration of violent death.
“Would you burn it?” she asked. It, not him, she said, because that’s all it was. An empty thing, as a shell left on a beach.
Liraz nodded, and knelt beside it to touch fire to the broad, dead chest. Wisps of smoke curled up around her hand, and—
“Wait,” said Karou, remembering something. She knelt, too, on his other side, and reached into the general’s pocket. What she withdrew was a small article the length of her little finger. It was black and smooth, coming to a point on one end. “From his true body,” she said, and handed it to Liraz. The tip of his horn. “That’s all.”
Then, he burned. The fire reached high, clean and splendid and unnaturally hot, leaving only ash that the wind carried away even before the flames had died.
Only then did Karou notice the silence that had fallen inside the camp, and turn to the gate to see the host clustered there, watching. Akiva stood in front, and so did Haxaya, and she looked at Liraz, and Liraz looked back, and there was no more enmity between them.
“Come,” Akiva said, and he turned the watchers aside, and then it was just Karou and Liraz again. No corpse. Not even ash. Karou lingered. There was a question she wanted desperately to ask, but she fought against it.
“I didn’t see him die,” said Liraz. She clasped the horn tip in her fist, tight against her ribs.
Karou held her silence, and held a stillness with it, sensing that it was coming: the thing that she wanted greatly to know. “Coming back from the portal, it was chaos. Once, I saw him but couldn’t reach him, and when I looked again, he wasn’t there. After…”