Chapter 38 Cero
Cero
The morning after Cero brought back supplies from the Imaani city, he finished fixing the Sail. During that time, he’d kept far from Karinna, unwilling to answer the questions she’d pelted at him, furious at her duplicity and his foolishness.
Spires, a secret he’d kept for more than a decade. Undone by one ill-begotten kiss.
What in the hells had he been thinking? You weren’t doing the thinking, idiot, he told himself savagely. You were letting other, stupider parts of you do the thinking.
Karinna might be arrogant and occasionally insufferable, but she was also observant and far more clever than he’d given her credit for. He hadn’t even suspected she was trying to puzzle out his true abilities.
But now she knew what he was. Windsmither.
Bloodsmither. Mindsmither. That was the secret reason Musa had sent Karinna with Cero.
The Resistance leader wanted to understand Cero’s power and, if it was more potent than expected, make sure Cero didn’t go and get himself killed.
After all, he might be the true leader of the Kegari.
Even as he tied off the last few stitches on the Sail canvas, Cero seethed. Whatever his powers, he couldn’t lead anyone. He didn’t even like most people. They were selfish and cruel and vicious to each other. The Kegari were no different.
As he innervated the Sail, he wondered if Noa had suspected what he was.
I don’t believe in the Return, he’d told her just weeks ago.
Even now? Noa had said. Even after all that you saw in the dark?
She knew about Aiz’s miraculous resurrections, but not that Cero was there for all of them. Noa knew about the aaj. But not that Cero had melded bloodsmithing and mindsmithing to create it. Nor that it had taken months to get it right.
She’d known that Cero helped Aiz escape Kegar.
But not that he’d sat outside the Tohr prison day after day, trying to send his mind through that mountain of magic-dulling rock to find Aiz, help her, do something for her.
Until one night, when he realized Aiz was fighting her way out.
He’d waited in a snowstorm long after he should have been back at the Aerie, just so that he could get Aiz off the mountain.
Noa couldn’t have known any of it, but if she did suspect he was the true Tel Ilessi, she must think him miserly. To be the custodian of such power and not use it in service of his people was the height of selfishness.
But Cero was selfish. He had never wanted to save anyone. He’d just wanted to escape the lot he’d been born to. Until recently, anyway. This war—what he’d done and seen and heard—had changed him.
The wind off the Imaani coast buffeted him, and he dragged himself from his brooding.
“Rebel,” he called to her. “Let’s go.”
But instead of getting in the Sail, she marched over to him, a bowl of stew in hand.
“No thanks,” he said. Piss off, he thought.
She grabbed his hand and put a spoon in it, then took his other hand and put the bowl in it.
He looked down at her, expecting her to be glaring at him, but instead, she was chewing on her lip and regarding Cero with something close to thoughtfulness.
Her expressive dark brows were lowered, and small bits of sand were stuck to her face, like little freckles.
Cero wanted to brush them off but tightened his hand around the bowl instead.
“I don’t know what you did with Abzi,” she said. “I don’t know how to begin to understand it. What I do know is that you’re tired. And I don’t want to crash. So, you will eat.”
He smoldered in silent irritation for a long moment. And then he ate. After, he was glad, though he refused to tell her as much.
Within the hour they were flying south, first, to the Mehbahnese coast, and then west, to Walibar. The Sail held beautifully, better for Cero’s attentions.
Karinna mostly kept to herself—other than at mealtimes. Twice, he heard her chittering, and at his quizzical look, she rather stiffly informed him she was sending a missive to Musa via a wight—one of the tiny winged creatures that Musa used as messengers.
Which explained how the Resistance leader had always acted on Cero’s information so quickly.
At midafternoon a few days after they’d escaped the Jaduna, Cero brought them down in a high mountain meadow split by a winding blue river, on the westernmost isle of Walibar.
There didn’t appear to be any settlements nearby, which was just as well. Cero knew little about the islands but didn’t want to waste time by tangling with the residents.
From Walibar, they would enter the unknown. The map Karinna stole showed whirlpools, enormous sea creatures, and a wind rose that warned of powerful storms out of the south and west. It also showed islands dotting the sea, some quite large and others nothing more than specks.
Cero could maneuver the Sail in storms. He could find the islands that did exist using his understanding of the wind. But there was a long stretch of ocean with what looked like no land.
After they arrived in Walibar, Cero forced himself to stay awake and examine the map by lamplight.
He’d been at it for an hour, Abzi curled up beside him, when Karinna approached with food in hand.
He’d noticed her leave when they landed a few hours earlier but hadn’t bothered asking where she was heading.
“Pilot,” she said now, thrusting a steaming loaf of bread at him. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Karinna said. “Nearly got caught stealing it. You might as well enjoy it.”
Cero looked up at that, frowning. “You stole it?”
She snorted. “Don’t tell me the man who helped to thieve an entire empire has a moral objection to stealing.”
Spires, but she was infuriating. He took the flatbread so he wouldn’t have to deal with her snark.
“I didn’t see any settlements.”
“You didn’t look very hard.” She sat beside him, her leather armor creaking as she leaned forward to peer at the map. Her scent wafted over him, a floral softness utterly at odds with her spiky nature. “Did you learn anything?”
He shrugged, took a bite of the bread, and had to silence a groan of delight. The bread was hot and soft and perfectly baked. He hadn’t had proper food since Karinna’s stew.
“Where will we land tomorrow?” Karinna asked.
“No idea,” he said. “We might not land at all. We might crash into the water.”
Karinna paled. “You don’t mean that.”
“If you want me to drop you off in Mehbahn, now’s your chance.”
“And risk Abzi abandoning me? No thanks,” she said, and he observed her for a moment, trying to assess if this was her attempt at a joke. But she was scowling, so he turned back to the map.
“Have you ever flown without knowing if you have a place to land?” she asked.
“No,” Cero said. “But I’m going, no matter what. If I crash into the sea, at least it was in pursuit of something worthy.”
“Whereas I’ll be one more Martial dying because of a Kegari.”
“I didn’t ask you to come, rebel.”
“And I don’t want to bleeding be here, pilot,” she snapped. “But if I am here, then I want to at least make sure I don’t die! Haven’t you killed enough people? You really want to kill me, too?”
He didn’t trust himself to answer her, instead seething in silence. He knew she was afraid, but she didn’t have to be so miserable. He was about to say so when he sensed a shift in her weather.
“I know why you’re so upset,” she said. “The kiss. You feel like a fool. Because you enjoyed it. And then I rejected you.”
He might hate her. “That kiss,” he said, “was mediocre and unmemorable.”
Absolute rubbish, of course. He thought of the damned kiss when he woke up in the morning, when he fell asleep at night, and a thousand moments in between, even when he tried to shove it from his mind.
He thought of her skin, warm beneath his hands, and her hair, soft as feathers, the way her body had melted into his as if she, too, had wanted more—
Stop, you twit. Enough.
“It was a pathetic kiss,” he said. “It’s clear you’ve never had a lover.”
Her face went red so fast she might have been splattered with paint.
“Oh, and you’re so experienced because of your stupid pretty face?
I might have never had a lover, but you don’t have a bleeding spine, sky-dog.
You’re nothing but a murderer. A monster of the air, watching from on high as your ilk destroyed my people.
You Kegari are disgusting and greedy and soulless and—”
“And starving!” Cero’s temper, leashed for weeks, snapped like an oud string.
His face heated and he found that he was on his feet, though he didn’t remember standing.
“We were starving. Do you know what that means? Have you ever been hungry? Ever felt that gnawing in your gut and your chest, like your organs are eating themselves? Have you ever watched child after child die because there simply isn’t enough food?
And it’s not a famine of months or even years, but decades? ”
Some tiny part of him wondered if he should calm down. Walk away. But now that he’d begun, the words roared out of him, held back for too long.
“My people turned to Ankana,” he said. “To Mehbahn. We tried to trade, but the Ankanese gave us barely enough and the Mehbahnese nothing at all. Your empress wanted the Sails, and no matter how we explained that they required magic to work, she didn’t listen. No one did. So, we kept starving.
“Do you know how many children told the clerics they wanted to die because at least they wouldn’t be hungry?
Do you know how many times I wanted to die so I wouldn’t be hungry?
Do you know what I did to get food when the cloisters had none and children were piling up at the door?
I sold myself, rebel, to whichever highborn would take me.
For a bag of lentils or a pot of grain. That’s what I did with my pretty face. ”
Karinna didn’t look angry anymore. Her hands were clasped tight together, face stricken with shock. And he knew he should stop. He knew it and still, he went on.