Not a fairy tale, but Ill take it. A noble thief.
Jack and the Beanstalk. He stole all that stuff from the giant.
Right. Less noble. I always felt bad for the giant. He flicked open the clasp on the case. But I dont feel bad about this. He paused. I hope we can count this as one of my tasks. Retroactively.
And he flipped up the lid and the case was filled with medallions. Filled. They varied in size from a quarters span to a saucers, in an array of patinas of bronze from brassy bright to dull dark brown. Some were entirely engulfed in verdigris, and all were roughly minted and graven with the same image: a rams head with thick coiled horns and knowing, slit-pupiled eyes.
Brimstone.
So, said Mik in a faux-lazy drawl, when fake grandma said she didnt have any more wishes? She lied. But look. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Now she really doesnt.
60
NO ONE DIES TODAY
The doors crashed open. Dominion flooded in.
Karous first impulse was to reach for pain to tithe for a glamour, and the pain was all too easy to find, because Razgut caught her wrist in his crushing grip and held her, so that it didnt matter.
Visible or not, she was caught.
She flickered in and out, struggling with the Fallen. His chuckling sounded like a purr, and his grip was unbreakable. She had her crescent-moon blades to fall back on, but they had determined to shed blood only as a last resort, and so her hand paused on her hilt as she watched the soldiers, implacable and many, swords drawn and faces blank, file into the room. Once again, as had happened and happened over these past days, the turn of time went thick as resin. Viscous. Sluggish. How much can happen in a second? In three? In ten?
How many seconds does it take to lose everything you care about?
Esther , she thought, and in the midst of her frantic scuffle she was bitter but unsurprised. They had been expected here. This wasnt the personal guard of six that Jael kept to guard his chamber. Here were thirty soldiers at least. Forty?
And there. Through the open doors, unhurried, to take up a position behind a deep buffer of soldiers, sauntered Jael. Karou saw him before he saw her, because he was looking straight ahead, unwavering. His ugliness was all shed heard and more: the knotty rope of scar tissue and the way the wings of his nostrils seemed to creep out from beneath it like they were trapped thereas trampled mushrooms going softly to rot. His mouth was its own disaster, collapsing in on scraps of teeth, his breath coming and going through it like the squelch of steps in mud. But that wasnt the worst thing about the emperor of seraphim. His expression was. It was intricate with hate. Even his smile was party to it: as malicious as it was exultant.
Nephew, he said, and the single wet word was layered with enmity and triumph.
Jael peered out between the shoulders of his soldiers at Akiva. Beasts Bane, so-called, whose death hed first argued for when the fire-eyed bastard was just a brat crying himself to sleep in the training camp. Kill him, hed advised Joram then. He remembered the taste of those words in his mouthkeenly, because theyd been among the first he spoke when the bandages were removed from his face. The first hed tried to speak, anyway, when it was agony, his mouth a red, wet wreck, and the revulsion he saw in his brothers eyesand everyone elseshad still had the power to shame him. He had let a woman cut him. Never mind that he lived and she didnt. He would wear her mark forever.
If youre smart, youll kill him now, hed told his brother. Looking back, it was so clearly the wrong tactic. Joram was
emperor, and did not respond well to commands.
What, still trying to punish her? Joram had scoffed, dragging the specter of Festival between them. Both of them had tried and failed to humble the Stelian concubine; she might be dead, but she had never broken. Killing her didnt scratch the itch, you have to have the boy, too? What, do you think shell know it somehow, and suffer more?
Hes her seed, Jael had persisted. She was a spore , drifted here. An infection. Nothing safe can grow of her.
Safe ? What use have I for a safe warrior? Hes my seed, brother. Do you mean to suggest that my blood isnt stronger than some feral whores?
And there was Joram for you: blind, incurious. The lady Festival of the Far Isles had been many things, but whore wasnt one of them.
Prisoner wasnt, either.
However shed come to be in the emperors harem, and why ever she had chosen to stay, it could not believably have been against her will. She was Stelian, and though shed never revealed it, Jael was certain that shed had power. The design, he had always thought, must have been her own. So why would a daughter of that mystical tribe have put herself in Jorams bed?
Slowly, Jael blinked at Akiva. Why indeed? You had only to look at the bastard to see whose blood was stronger. Black hair, tawny skinnot as dark as Festivals had been, but closer to it than to Jorams fair flesh. The eyes, of course, were purely hers, and sympathy for magic? In case there had still been doubt.