were forging thuribles now, not weapons—there were fishers, water haulers, growers. Boats had been built and caulked, nets woven. A few late summer crops had been seeded in good land a few miles away, though they all expected hunger this winter, after a year of razed granaries and scorched fields. Fewer mouths to feed, though, and this was not a silver lining, but a truth that would, nevertheless, help get them through.
The rest concerned themselves with the city. What bones had survived the incineration had been buried first of all, and there was nothing to salvage in the ashes. There would be builders eventually, but for now the ruins had to be cleared, and the twisted iron bars of the great cage hauled away. They were still trying to find beasts of burden enough to accomplish this, and they didn’t know what they would do with all the iron once they had the muscle to move it. Some thought that the new Loramendi must be built under a cage as the old had been, and Karou understood that it was too soon for chimaera to feel any safety beneath an open sky, but she hoped that by the time that decision had to be made, they might choose to build a city befitting a brighter future.
Loramendi might be beautiful one day.
“Bring an architect back with you,” she’d told Mik and Zuzana, only half in jest, when they left for Earth astride the stormhunter they’d named Samurai. They’d gone back for teeth, primarily, chocolate secondarily—according to Zuzana—and to see how their home world fared in the aftermath of Jael’s visitation. Karou missed them. Without Zuzana to distract her, she was always a step away from self-pity or bitterness. Though she was far from alone here—and a million miles from the isolation she’d suffered in the early days of the rebellion, when the Wolf had led them into bloodshed and she’d spent her days building soldiers to resurrect a war—the loneliness Karou knew now was like a blanket of fog: no sun, no horizon, just a continuous, creeping, inescapable chill.
Except in dreams.
Some mornings when the hammer woke her with its first ringing strike, she felt herself drop back into her life from some sweet golden sphere that lost all definition with the flood of consciousness—like vision blurred by tears. She was left with a feeling only; it seemed to her the impression of a soul, as she got when she opened a thurible, or went gleaning over the dead. And though she had never felt his soul—as, blessedly, he had never died—it left her awash with a sense of grace, like standing in the sun. Warmth and light, and a feeling of Akiva’s presence so strong she could almost feel his hand to her heart, and hers to his.
This morning it had been especially powerful. She lay still, a phantom heat lingering on her chest and palm. She didn’t want to open her eyes, but only rise back into the golden sphere and find him there, and stay.
Sighing, she remembered a silly song from Earth about how if you want to remember your dreams, as soon as you wake you should call to them as if they were little kittens. Pretty much the entire song went, “Here kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty… and it had always made her smile. Now, though, the smile was more of a twist, because she so wanted it to work, and it just didn’t.
And then, at the flap door of the tent: a softly cleared throat. “Karou?” The voice was pitched low enough not to wake her if she still slept, and when she saw the figure framed in the opening, the dawn sun painting itself along the line of one strong arm as bright as gold leaf on an altarpiece, she was upright like a snapped spring.
Cover thrown aside, to her knees and rising before she realized her mistake.
It was Carnassial.
She couldn’t disguise her anguish. She had to cover her face with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, pushing it all down deep, as she did every morning, in order to get on with her day. She took her hands away and smiled at the Stelian magus. “It really isn’t horrible to see you,” she told him.
“It’s all right.” He stepped inside. She saw that he’d brought tea and her morning ration of bread, so that they might start out directly for the site. “It’s good to know