Chapter 11 Karinna
Karinna
The night before Karinna left her parents’ caravan for the Resistance, she’d gone looking for Aba. She wanted to ask him a question about a defensive stance that had never made sense to her. When she got close to her parents’ fire, a gentle desert wind picked up and carried their words to her.
“She reminds me of your mother,” Ama said. “Not—not in Keris’s cruelty, of course. But in her arrogance. In the way her first response to the tiniest slight is violence.”
Karinna’s fingers went numb with dismay at her mother’s candor.
Maybe she’s right, a small voice whispered deep within. Maybe you are like Keris.
“Last week that Illustrian boy made some comment to her about the Tribes. She could have let it go,” Ama said. “Instead she broke his nose.”
“You say she reminds you of my mother,” Aba said. “I say she reminds me of yours.”
“Neither is a good thing, Elias.” Ama paced back and forth before their fire, twisting the armlet on her bicep round and round. “My mother is coldhearted and yours became a monster.”
“Your mother is the bravest woman we know, if a bit vengeful,” Aba went on. “And mine was a demon, yes, but she was also wily as a tiger. Courage and cleverness aren’t bad qualities if we can teach Karinna to harness them for good.”
“But can we? She is so…”
Karinna’s face burned with shame as she listened to Ama cast around for a word to describe her secondborn. Karinna had always been closer to Aba, true. But she’d assumed she had her mother’s love too, even if Ama didn’t always know how to show it.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have made that assumption.
“She’s so unknowable,” Ama finally said. “She doesn’t have any friends—”
“She has Quil. She was close with Ruh.”
“But she’s—she’s different—”
“She’s Karinna.” Aba paused as he oiled one of the saddles. Karinna heard a touch of fire in his voice. “She’s our daughter and she’s perfect.”
Karinna slipped away into the dark then. The next morning, she woke up well before dawn, hoping to leave without a fuss. But her parents were awaiting her by Serra’s stables.
“I’ll escort you to Antium,” Aba said. “Else your mother’s promised to chain herself to you so you can’t go without her.”
Perhaps it was a joke, but Ama didn’t smile. She hugged her daughter tight, her body shaking with tears. Karinna patted her stiffly, still smarting from what she’d heard the night before.
She longed for Ruh then. For his bright eyes and light step, for the way he’d have said goodbye, with a gift in her pack and a yank of her braid. A quick story, perhaps, for he knew she got antsy during the long ones.
“Come back safe, daughter,” Ama whispered.
Why? Karinna thought. You don’t even like me, Ama. She held her tongue and managed a nod.
Karinna and Aba made good time, and the night before they reached Antium, he gave her two gleaming new Teluman blades and a bow, just her size.
As they sat at a fire hidden in a cave in case of any Kegari patrols, Karinna took a deep breath.
She planned to ask her father if he had any advice about being a Resistance fighter.
Instead, she blurted out something else.
“What will it feel like to kill, Aba?”
Aba held up his hands to the fire and tilted his head. They had the same dark hair. The same pale irises, gold-brown skin, and quick instincts.
“Sometimes it is a relief,” he said. “Because it’s either you or them, and their death means your survival. Sometimes, killing is satisfying, because the battle rage takes over and all you want to do is destroy your enemy.”
Karinna nodded. She knew that feeling. She reveled in it—especially after Ruh had died. The battle rage ate her grief. It gobbled up everything but the fight.
“What it feels like in the moment never mattered as much to me as how it felt after. And after…” Aba grimaced, fists clenched. “It was horrible. Even when I was defending myself. For most people, killing feels wrong.”
“But…” Karinna thought of Ama’s words. She reminds me of your mother. “Not everyone feels that way. Some people seem to…enjoy it. Like…your mother.”
“Keris?” Aba dug around in his pack for the dinner they’d scrounged at a friendly Martial village a few miles south. “Yes, I suppose she did. She was in pain, and pain is always hungry, Kari. No matter what she fed it, it was never enough. But this is why we heal pain with love.”
“Am I…Am I like her, Aba?” Karinna asked.
Her father didn’t hesitate. “In her strengths, perhaps,” he said.
“Strong like her. Clever like her. You’re a survivor, and thank the skies for it.
” He looked up at the bloody red horizon, the air tainted by smoke and fire, altered irrevocably by the sky-rats’ hellish missiles.
“Right now, our people need strength,” he said.
“Cleverness. We need survivors. But”—he gave Karinna a warning look—“we also need mercy, something Keris never offered. Don’t lose yourself in vengeance like she did.
Our goal is to drive the Kegari out. Not become them. ”
“But what if I’m too much like her? What if I like killing?”
“What makes us good or evil, Kari?” he asked softly, a question he posed to his students all the time.
“Our choices,” she said.
He nodded. “Make good choices, daughter,” he said. “And you’ll be fine.”
She thought of that now as she watched the sky-dog get mauled by his own people.
As she watched Noa, who had doubled back after getting the children safe, scream in anguish, “Cero!” Musa had told her all about him, of course.
Cero bet-Dafra. One of the Tel Ilessi’s mutts, who’d had a change of heart after all the carnage he’d helped unleash.
Recently, he’d turned spy for the Resistance.
He was tall, pale, and dark-haired, with a face that was all sharp slashes other than his lips. He had a body lean and hard from years as a pilot and a haughty mien that got her back up.
She’d met men like him before. Beautiful and strong and possessing the delusion that the world belonged to them.
Kari wanted to kill him. To succeed where her brother Sufiyan had failed. But Musa’s orders were clear.
After you establish contact with Noa, you’ll undertake the first major part of your mission: to bring Cero bet-Dafra to base safely.
Fail and I send you straight back to your parents.
Cero got us valuable information at extreme personal risk.
He’s the reason the Empress and Quil aren’t dead right now.
The Tel Ilessi is out for Cero’s blood. Extract him and don’t kill anyone in the process.
A wight drifted near Karinna. She thought, at first, that the little winged creature was one of Musa’s spies, but he said he’d leave Karinna be, and he wouldn’t break his promise.
“Piss off.” She waved the creature away. It chittered and slapped her with its wings before disappearing, just as the sky-dog dropped to the ground.
As Karinna watched him try to defend himself against his countryman—he was called Ghaz, but Karinna decided she’d called him Dungface—she toyed with doing nothing. It looked like Dungface would kill the sky-dog quickly. Karinna could say she didn’t get to him in time.
But then she heard her father.
Make good choices, daughter. In this case, that meant following Musa’s orders, much as it might vex her.
She did wonder why the sky-dog wasn’t using his wind magic against Dungface. Musa said he was powerful. But right now he lay still, body jerking as Dungface kicked him.
Karinna considered. A skilled warrior couldn’t fight off magic and blades. Not unless they were a Mask, anyway.
Or trained by one.
She took a defensive position near the exit, then drew out two knives, aimed, and let them loose.
Karinna’s first kills had been in a raid only weeks ago. She’d not been able to sleep after. She didn’t like killing Kegari soldiers. Nor did she cringe from it. During the raid, it simply felt necessary.
Now, however, it was not. She focused on disabling, not killing, and aimed for the stomach and the shoulder. She swiftly took out two fighters. Then two more. In the space of a few seconds, six of the seven soldiers on guard outside the building were down and the seventh had fled.
Dungface hadn’t noticed. He was too fixated on kicking the life out of the sky-dog.
Karinna hurtled three knives into his back.
The first one bounced off his shoulder, the second grazed his neck, but the third got him right in the buttock.
Karinna smirked in triumph, rushing forward as Dungface screamed and dropped his wind.
She spun into a kick aimed at Dungface’s temple, dropping him like a stone. Then she grabbed the sky-dog, who staggered to his feet, unsteady. Until he saw Karinna, anyway. His eyes sharpened and he shook off her hand like it was covered in thorns.
“You—” he said. “Why did you—”
“Move, stupid!” she said, impatient. “Or I’ll have hung around for nothing!”
“Quickly, Cero!” Noa, waiting by the exit with Olnas, called out. “There’ll be more soldiers coming!”
“If you want to live, follow me.” Karinna took the sky-dog’s arm and pulled him after her, lest another Kegari appear to take him down.
She hurried through Antium’s back allies and into a park, the others trailing. The park was blessedly empty, so it was easy enough to disappear into the trees. Within minutes, they’d left the commotion of the kitchen behind.
“Move faster!” Karinna hissed at the three Kegari, forcing herself not to prod them along with her scim. She needed to get them safely out of the city and to the Resistance fighters waiting for her there. If she did them any harm, it would mean failure and Musa would cast her out.
On the other side of the park, Karinna headed down a path, beneath a bridge, and through a door. They all emerged a few minutes later into a building that from the outside appeared abandoned. Almost the moment they stepped into the dusty, cavernous room, they were surrounded.
“So the sand-rat has some use after all.” Khunnor emerged from the shadows, gesturing to a few of his underlings, who swiftly bound and blindfolded the Kegari and then marched the clerics out of the room and through another passage.
“Wait,” the sky-dog said, looking around as if trying to see through his blindfold. Khunnor circled him silently. “Where are you taking them? Let them g—”
Without warning, Khunnor punched the sky-dog in the stomach and then kneed him in the forehead so he dropped to the floor, unconscious.
“Stop!” Karinna tried to lunge between Khunnor and the sky-dog, but hands grabbed her—Bhadboo and five others—holding her back.
“You idiot!” she snapped at Khunnor. “Musa wants him alive and unharmed!”
“Or you’ll get kicked out of the Resistance?” Khunnor grinned. “Counting on it, Keris-spawn.” As Bhadboo gagged Karinna, Khunnor nodded to the sky-dog.
“He’s knocked out,” he said. “So he won’t know who left bruises all over him. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he can walk after it’s over. And we’ll all tell Musa how brutal you were when you lost your temper and attacked him.”
Karinna roared through the gag, straining against the hands holding her, but she couldn’t break free. All she could do was watch as Khunnor rolled up his sleeves, circled the sky-dog, and got to work.