by Jane Kindred
The sword at my throat slipped loosely in his hand as if he’d lost his grip, and Kae fell forward onto his knees, grasping my shoulder as if he were embracing me. I don’t think he quite understood at first that he’d been stabbed, and in the position where he crouched, it had been visible to no one else.
“You’re sorry?” He sounded dazed. “For what?”
“For taking you up the mountain on my seventeenth birthday.” Tears slid down my cheeks in the cold as I hardened my resolve. “For not being able to save you. And for this.” I twisted the knife inside him and dragged it sideways, and his sword dropped from his hand as he fell back onto his heels. I grabbed for his blade before anyone moved, jumping to my feet with it clutched in both hands. “Back away.” I waved it at the Ophanim holding Vasily’s arms, but they were unimpressed.
The soldiers began to move in, but their field marshal rasped out the last order he was likely to give. “Stand down!”
“Sir, you’re wounded.” His captain eyed the blood seeping around the handle of the blade in Kae’s abdomen. “I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly.”
“Am I not—still the field marshal—of the Armies of Heaven?” A weak cough broke up his words. “You—will obey me!” He looked down at last at the knife handle protruding from his flesh and pressed his fingers to the blood, staring at it as if uncertain what it was. His one eye was as wide as a child’s when he raised his head. “Nenny? What have you done to me?” He pulled the knife out and stared at it as his blood began to flow freely from the wound.
He had spoken our special name. It was what my brother Azel had called me when he was too young to pronounce “Nazkia.” Helga had continued to use it throughout my childhood—I’d thought it a sign of her affection, but it was clear now it was a sign of her disdain. Only Kae had used it as a kind of special code between us, spoken with a fondness that conveyed an acknowledgment of our bond, deeper than his love for my sister Ola, though it was not romantic. It was a sign that we understood each other without words, that he knew me better than anyone, and he had used it in his lucid moments in Aeval’s Winter Palace, begging me for help I could not understand how to give. I had left him to her. I had abandoned him to let him become…this.
I fell on my knees before him, the sword gripped at my side. “Don’t,” I pleaded under my breath.
He tilted his head with a sad half-smile that was so fully Kae that my heart stopped for an instant. “I think,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper on the labored edge of a breath, “it’s too late.”
“No.” I dropped the sword and pressed my hand against the wound to stop the blood, but pulled it back as quickly. The blood wasn’t right. It was cold as the ice and snow around us, and it moved like sap dripping from a tapped maple. I covered my mouth with my hand, staring at him, while tears poured down my cheeks.
Kae reached out and startled me by taking my hand away from my mouth. “Ola, darling. I didn’t mean to make you cry.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “Salty,” he said with a smile as he tasted my tears, and then he dropped my hand as if it were a hot coal. “Nazkia?” Though he knelt in Empyrean snow, sweat began to drip from his temples. This had happened before.
He took up his sword and staggered to his feet, shoving his captain backward when he caught him as he stumbled. “You have my orders! Why are your men still—standing about me—like vultures? Keep away! I can’t breathe!”
The captain and his men retreated several steps, exchanging glances.
“Is this mutiny?” Kae accused, gasping for breath. “Put your swords away! Get back!”
They retreated still more, sheathing their swords after the captain nodded. A wide circle had opened around us. Only Vasily and the Ophanim remained within it.
Kae’s eye fixed on Vasily. “You’re the devil—come to finish me.” Cold blood still dripped from his gut like treacle, though his skin was flushed with fever. “What took you so long?” He staggered toward Vasily and raised the sword, and for a terrible instant I thought he meant to run him through, but Kae jabbed it at one of the Ophanim. “I said—get back. Leave him.” When the Ophanim obeyed, he turned the hilt of the sword toward Vasily.
Vasily gave me only the briefest hard glance before he took the sword and moved in with purpose to do what I knew he had long dreamed of. But before he could follow through, Kae’s eye rolled back in his head and he toppled backward and hit the ground. Like Vasily, the soldiers stared dumbstruck as their field marshal shook in the grip of a fit.
“It’s a febrile seizure,” I heard myself say. “We need to cool him down.” My sister’s voice from my own fevered dream echoed in my head. You’d have to bury him in the snow to cool his blood. I dropped to my knees beside him and began unbuttoning his double-breasted coat. “Someone hold him still,” I cried as his thrashing hampered my efforts.
After a stunned moment of inertia, two officers knelt down beside me and held their field marshal while I bared his chest and began covering him in snow. I piled it around his head and pulled his arms from his sleeves to cover them as well, and then packed him in snow from head to foot, as if preserving a corpse.
As his convulsions stopped, his temperature dropped and his erratic breathing steadied, but strangely, his blood seemed to heat even as the rest of him cooled. It flowed more like normal blood, and was now rapidly coloring the snow at his midsection as it poured from the wound. It looked as if the snow itself were bleeding.
The two officers rose and stepped away as they saw there was nothing more they could do.
“Nazkia.” Vasily crouched down beside me. “Let him die.”
I shook my head, my heart aching at how I must be hurting him. “I can’t. He knew me. He knew me and he knew I’d left him to her. What he is—I did this to him.” I pressed the heel of my hand into the snow against the wound, trying to stop it, and a weak bluish trickle of my radiance glowed for a moment.
Vasily yanked my hand back and turned me toward him. His eyes were full of angry heat, but the flame faded as I stared up at him, weeping and mute with guilt. Pale lavender flickered beneath his fingers against my skin.
He slid his hand down to mine and locked our fingers in a painful grip, staring into me as if he might see my soul if he looked hard enough. “Dammit,” he murmured and pressed both our hands against Kae’s bleeding gut.
The lavender flame rose up instantly and flowed from our hands to the blood. It licked across Kae’s body like a hungry fire, as if we’d doused him in lamp oil and he was the wick. The radiance melted the snow as it surrounded him, swirling in a continuous circular path like the boiling surface of the Pyriphlegethon. It was burning brighter now than it had in the world of Man and I looked at Vasily, stunned by its intensity. It surged up as if drawing all the aether together before it flashed in one bright, violet point above Kae’s heart and was gone.
When we pulled our hands away, Kae was whole.
I searched Vasily’s eyes, astounded that he’d helped the man he hated more than anything, and whispered, “Why?”
Vasily let go of my hand. “Because, Nazkia.” He sighed and thumbed a tear across my cheek. “You’ve bewitched me as surely as Aeval has bewitched him.” He took the sword and stood.
Kae had begun to shake once more, but it was from cold now, a natural cold that any man would feel half buried in snow. I brushed the remaining powder away and pulled his coat over his shoulders, and his uncovered eye opened and focused on me. He stared as if at an apparition, shaking his head.
“N-no,” he stammered with the cold. He curled onto his side away from me, so I could only see the mask. “Oh, please, no.” Kae covered his ears as if trying to shut out something he couldn’t bear to hear. “Not this.” He rocked forward. “Not you. Not here.” He shook his head again. “No. No, no, no, no!” He punctuated each denial with a violent blow of his head against the frozen ground, until I thought he would crack open his own skull. “In the name of Heaven, Nazkia,” he moaned at la
st. “Why didn’t you let me die?”
I stood and backed away, nearly falling into Vasily, who put his free arm around me and pulled me close. His fierce grip was a silent I-told-you-so.
The captain was eyeing him warily. “What are your orders, sir?”
Kae slipped his arms back into the sleeves of his shirt and coat, and climbed slowly to his feet, looking down at the bloodstained scar where the garments hung open. He raised his head to the captain and held his arms wide.
“My orders? My orders are to run me through at the end of your sword. I am the enemy of the queen of Heaven.”
The captain moved his hand away from his hilt and stared aghast.
The sound of the portcullis being raised broke the tension of the moment, accompanied by the rumble and jangle of riders on horseback. For a brief instant, my hopes surged, thinking it must be the Virtues Sar Haniel had sent for—but of course the field marshal’s men wouldn’t have simply raised the portcullis for them. It was unlikely they were coming anyway. I’d begun to suspect weeks ago that Helga’s henchmen had followed Haniel’s riders the day we arrived and had them killed.
As the newcomers advanced through the gate tower of the outer ward, it was clear it was more of the Queen’s Army, and on a large white steed at the front of it sat the queen herself. She observed the scene, the field marshal’s soldiers and the Ophanim bowing low before her, and her piercing silver eyes fixed on the three of us who hadn’t bowed.
Though she’d been too far away to have heard him, she focused on Kae with a dark smile and addressed him as if she had. “Are you really, my pet?” Her voice was like the dangerous purr of a large cat. “The enemy of the queen of Heaven?” She signaled to the waiting Ophanim. “Bring Our field marshal to Us.”
Kae didn’t resist or show any sign of discomfort at their touch when they escorted him to her side, though he flinched slightly when the queen reached down and gripped his jaw.
She turned his head, examining him. “You seem to be running a fever, my angel.”
His face remained expressionless. “I feel quite well.”
Aeval looked at me with naked malice. “You mustn’t touch other people’s things. I warned you he would die without me. How far do you think you’d get if you took him from my influence?” She didn’t bother with the supernal “We”; there was no pretense of formality between us.
She snatched Kae’s gloved hand from where he rested it on the horse’s neck. “You may have been able to keep his blood from boiling over for the moment, but it will not last.” Pulling off his glove, she held up his hand and revealed his missing finger. “This is what it takes to soothe him when he is out of sorts. Can you do that? Can you cut your precious cousin?”
Aeval dropped his hand and laid one of her own white-gloved palms against his cheek. “His blood belongs to me.” Her voice was soft and seductive. She kissed him and he recoiled, but she grabbed both sides of his head to keep him from pulling away.
I remembered how her kiss had made him cold once more, his skin pale and bloodless, after his fever had raged out of control the last time. I remembered the look of wild adoration in his eyes her kisses had brought. I remembered how he’d told me—before I ran from him and left him in the burning Winter Palace—that she had kissed him and called his blood.
There was none of this now.
When she released him, Kae pulled away and spat upon the ground. Aeval’s crystalline Virtuous complexion turned red with fury. She removed her right glove and held her cupped palm in Kae’s direction, and it filled with the undulating liquid I’d seen once before when she’d called my element.
“Don’t,” I pleaded. “It’s not his fault.”
Kae stumbled, clutching at his stomach, as Aeval began to squeeze the substance in her hand. Water was pouring from her clenched fist—water she was drawing out of him. Like all Fourth Choir angels, Kae was a waterspirit.
I ran through the snow to where he stood frozen in her grip and put my hands over his as if I could protect him somehow. The ripple of lavender flame that engulfed our hands shocked us both. The pain seemed to have left him and he straightened, clutching my hands, and stared at the radiance that surged between us.
Aeval dropped her hand as if stung. “That is not possible.” For once, I had to agree with her. “Who has tainted you with Seraph blood?” She looked accusingly from one of us to the other.
Vasily stepped forward. “I believe I did. I believe I must have tainted them both.” He looked devastated as he met my eyes. Somehow, I’d given a precious gift to Kae that ought to be ours alone.
I let go of Kae’s hands as if Vasily had caught me in the act of infidelity, severing the conduit of radiance.
“I touched their blood.” Vasily was still staring at me.
“You are the half-Seraph Vasily.” Aeval’s voice was tinged with both fascination and disgust. She dismounted her horse, swinging her leg over it in a pair of wide, voluminous pants made to look like a skirt beneath a silver fur-trimmed coat of palest wool. Beneath the matching fox fur hat, her silver-white hair was done up in a knot behind her head in a manner reminiscent of a Virtue’s queue, but more compact and stylish. She was a woman who never went anywhere, apparently, without considering these things. She certainly didn’t look like someone who’d just ridden for weeks over the permafrost of the Empyrean.
She circled Vasily, studying the wild red locks and the rough beard on his cheeks and jaw that ended at his chin, amused as she took in his spectacles. Her eyes stopped on his neck, and I realized as I followed her gaze that his piercings were gone. Only the rows of small holes with a slight indentation from the spikes remained.
“So you’re the one who made that baby. You’re the ’malchik’ Our pet demon cried out for in his sleep after We exhausted him.”
Vasily’s eyes glowed with anger. “So you’re the bitch who touched my Belphagor.”
Aeval laughed her delicate laugh, like crystal goblets filled with water being jostled together, and then struck him with force. He brought the sword up swiftly, but Aeval’s Ophanim were faster, and as they shocked him with their grip, she took the sword from his hand.
“Now, what can you be doing with this?” She turned it in her gloved palm. “This belongs to Our field marshal, does it not?” She tossed it unexpectedly to Kae, who easily caught it by the hilt with his maimed hand. “Put it away.” The order was curt. “You are still in Our employ.”
He hesitated before sheathing it, his expression grim. Though he was no longer under her control, it seemed he was too accustomed to taking orders from her to disobey.
Something caught the queen’s eye and she walked over to the row of kneeling prisoners. She smiled as she stopped before Belphagor. “So here you are as well. I should have known that where your ’boy’ went, you would be.”
Belphagor said nothing as she nudged the toe of her silver fur boot against his thigh and slid it down between his legs. Vasily jerked beside me in the Ophanim’s grip.
“I do so love to see you on your knees.” Aeval withdrew her foot and looked at Kae. “Pray tell, field marshal, why are all these prisoners kneeling in the snow?”
When Kae didn’t answer, the captain came forward and bowed before her. “They are all to be executed for treason, Your Supernal Majesty. The Virtues were in league with a group of demon revolutionaries who had occupied the citadel.”
“And these are all the demons?” She regarded them doubtfully.
“Most of the demons were killed in the siege, Your Supernal Majesty. We’ve dumped the dead into the Pyriphlegethon. There were nearly a hundred all told, plus a few dozen Virtues.”
Aeval sneered at the group. “Four men and a girl, and a handful of—” Her preternaturally bright eyes fell on the monk kneeling behind the Virtues, his mouth once more bound with the strap of leather, and she scowled with distaste. “Exactly what is that doing here?”
“It’s a human holy man of some kind, Your Supernal Majesty.”
> “We know what it is, fool.” She gave the captain a look that made him take an unconscious step back. “We wish to know why it is in Our Heavens.”
The captain looked to his field marshal, clearly uncertain how to answer, but Kae seemed determined to be of no help to him. “He was with the demons, Your Supernal Majesty.”
“Then it can stay with the demons!” Aeval spat. “Throw it into the Pyriphlegethon.”
No one moved at first, and then the displeasure that emanated from her prompted several officers to step forward at once to take hold of Kirill. I bit my lip and took a step forward myself, though I couldn’t possibly have stopped them, but Kae had moved at the same time, and as he stepped in front of the monk, the officers fell back. He grabbed Kirill by the scruff of his robe and turned toward the gate tower.
Aeval watched him with a pleased look on her face as he marched the monk out through the ward between the lines of her cavalry to the open gate. When he reached the bridge over the Pyriphlegethon, however, he tossed Kirill onto the snowy bank instead of plunging him into the fires, and signaled to the man in the gatehouse to lower the portcullis.
Aeval gave him a dark look as he returned. “That was not the order We gave.”
“What difference does it make?” Kae retorted. “By ice or by fire, he’ll be dead by morning.”
Aeval regarded him, apparently as uncertain of his motives and loyalties as I was by now, before turning away to scan the faces of the kneeling prisoners once more. “A hundred demons and a few dozen Virtues. This cannot be an isolated incident.” She turned to the captain. “Did you interrogate the leader?”
“We did, Your Supernal Majesty. But she’s told us little. The field marshal intended to return her to Elysium to be questioned further.”
“She?” Aeval frowned, looking at the assembled prisoners, and her eyes rested with suspicion on me. “And which is she?”