Chapter 22 Cero
Cero
By the time the day’s shadows had lengthened, Karinna could walk again, and her pain had decreased significantly.
Cero knew this not because she told him, but because she’d called him sky-dog twice, ordered him to wake the hells up and get us moving, and managed to bathe and rinse out her clothes in the spring with minimal complaint.
“It will be safer when it’s fully dark,” Cero said when she harassed him yet again about leaving. “Besides, I don’t need your regurgitated dinner all over my Sail.”
In truth, Cero wanted to give her as much time off her feet as possible. Once they got to Jibaut, he’d have to move quickly, and he didn’t want her slowing him down.
Karinna’s cheeks flushed, and Cero found it fascinating that she didn’t bother to hide her anger. He admired her for it, in a way. He had spent his life burying all his feelings in the darkest corner of his mind.
“We ate an hour ago,” she said. “You’re doing this because of my ankle, and you needn’t.” She rolled it pointedly. “I can take care of myself.”
“That’s not what you were saying this morning when you were screaming in pain.”
“I was not screaming—”
“You”—broke, he was about to say, amending it at the last second—“twisted your ankle. Screaming in pain is perfectly understandable. No reason to be ashamed.”
“I’m not ashamed, either.” She stood up, and there was a dagger in her hand. “Say that again, and see what happens, sky-dog!”
Cero sighed. If this was all it took to get Karinna to pick a fight, it was no wonder the rest of the Resistance goaded her. They probably had a betting pool on how fast she would whip out that dagger and stab someone.
“Rebel, it’s not shameful to feel pain or to express it,” he said, refusing to budge, even as she approached with the dagger.
From a distance, someone watching might find the entire tableau entertaining: a tiny, limping girl waving a dagger at a dour-faced Kegari pilot, a striped cat watching them with interest from the shadows. “You needn’t get violent.”
The wrath drained from Karinna’s face, and she spun her dagger back into its hilt. “Now you’re against violence. After murdering thousands with your accursed bombs.” Her voice trembled, perhaps with the memory of what she’d seen; Cero looked away in shame.
He refrained from telling her that he’d never dropped those bombs.
It didn’t matter, really, because he may as well have.
Instead, he crossed his arms and remained silent.
He knew what it was to live with anger that singed your chest like you’d swallowed coals.
The hotter it burned, the quicker it would flame out.
She stepped back from him, her expression confused that he didn’t rise to her bait. “It’s dark enough,” she finally said before striding—with only a minor limp now—toward the Sail. “We’re leaving.”
“I don’t care if you loathe me, rebel,” he retorted. “But we have a job, and Musa said you were to follow my orders. I’m ordering us to wait. Aiz will no doubt have sent scouts out looking for us. Let’s not make it easy for them.”
“You’re making excuses—”
Even as she shouted at him, Cero’s senses tingled. A shift in the wind currents above them that meant one thing.
“Scouts,” he hissed. He had no time to hide the Sail—all he could do was remove the Loha so that it went limp, and hope that from above, in the dim light of dusk, the canvas would blend into the dun-colored earth. He pulled Karinna back into the trees, though she quickly threw his arm off.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Well, then move faster!”
“I would if you—”
Cero held his finger up to her lips, hoping she would shut the hells up for just a few moments.
“Don’t you dare tell me—”
Cero briefly considered using his magic on her, but he’d have to render her unconscious to get her to stop snarling at him. He didn’t know how long it would take her to wake, and they needed to get out of here quickly.
He grabbed her, putting his hand over her mouth and binding her to his chest with his other arm so she wouldn’t rip his face off. She was much shorter than him and slighter, but still nearly impossible to hold.
Seconds later, voices echoed behind them, and she finally stilled. After a few moments, Cero could make them out. His heart sank. Kegari.
“Don’t think they came this way.” Cero didn’t recognize the voices, but their accents marked them as Snipes. Perhaps, if they caught him, he could talk his way free.
“Why does she want to kill him, anyway? Thought they were tupping.”
“Maybe that’s what they’re fighting about.” One of them chuckled, and Cero grimaced at the series of lewd comments that followed. Spires, but men were idiots. He was relieved Karinna couldn’t understand Kegari. She’d probably have tried to gut them both.
The voices, thankfully, moved on. When Cero was certain Karinna wouldn’t give away their position, he let her go.
And found himself promptly on his back with Karinna straddling his chest, her knife against his throat.
She was light, as if her bones were made of feathers, and he was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the heat of her body.
He tried to move, but her knees poked painfully down into his biceps, and he ceased.
“Grab me like that again, sky-dog,” she said, “and I’ll slit your throat.”
“First of all,” he said, “I like dogs. If you want to insult me, pick a different animal. A carp, maybe, though sky-carp doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Second, if you’d kept shouting, they’d have found us. I didn’t know how else to shut you up.”
While he was talking, he manipulated a bit of wind around the hilt of her blade. With one quick yank, he disarmed her and pushed her off.
“How did you—”
“Magic,” he said. “Something our pursuers possess in abundance. So, the next time I tell you to shut it, please do as I say. If you don’t trust me, I understand. But you did trust Musa. And he told you to follow my orders.”
Karinna stood, dusting herself off with a scowl. “Musa only likes you because your former lover the Tel Ilessi is a murderess and a madwoman.”
The thought of Aiz made Cero smolder with anger.
“First of all, don’t call her the Tel Ilessi,” he bit out. “That’s a fabricated religious term with no practical meaning. She’s a charlatan. Second, Aiz isn’t and has never been my lover. She’s a monster, which is why I agreed to help Musa in the first place. And in any case, why would Musa care?”
Karinna pawed at the Sail fruitlessly, attempting to find her seat amid the limp canvas and passive reeds. Worried she’d stick a hole in it, he walked over and activated the Loha with one hand.
“Musa’s former wife, Princess Nikla, was a monster of similar stripe,” Karinna said. “He let her get away with all sorts of things before finally realizing her awfulness.” She glanced at Cero pointedly. “Too late by then, though. She’d already wreaked havoc. Sound familiar?”
“Former wife, you said.”
“She’s dead,” Karinna said. “Twenty years, nearly. My grandmother stuck a spear through her.”
She said the words with a grim sort of satisfaction, and Cero could hear the weight behind them.
He’d heard about Keris Veturia, Karinna’s grandmother.
Among the Martials she was legend and nightmare rolled into one.
He remembered, too, what the Resistance called Karinna behind her back: Keris-spawn.
Something that clearly bothered the girl.
“Your grandmother wasn’t particularly friendly, I heard. She killed a lot of people.”
The Sail was innervated now, enough that Cero could show Karinna how to buckle in. He pulled the straps forward, and as he did, her scent washed over him, raat raani, a flower that bloomed only at night and only in the high mountains.
Surprising. He’d assumed with her temperament she’d smell of sulfur.
Not that he should be noticing her smell. Or the way her eyes, more blue now than gray, looked so sad.
“She killed many,” Karinna said finally. “Too many. Sometimes I—”
Cero didn’t need to hear the words to know them.
Sometimes I think I’m like her. He was sure that’s what she was thinking.
He met her gaze and held his breath at the storm there, the uncertainty, the sadness.
All the things she rolled up into rage and pelted at anyone who got too close.
He’d only ever seen despair like that when he looked in the mirror.
Then she frowned, gaze flattening, dark brows and high cheekbones giving her a severity that made Cero take a quick step back.
“Sometimes.” Karinna leaned forward. “I think I know exactly how she must have felt before stabbing Princess Nikla. Like it couldn’t come fast enough.”
Spires, no wonder she didn’t have any friends. Karinna sat back, pleased by his obvious disquiet.
“Well, Keris is dead too, right?” Cero said. “Unless you want to join her from three thousand feet up, maybe stop spitting venom at me long enough to listen.”
She paled, and whatever insult had been at the tip of her tongue fled.
“You’re afraid of heights,” he said. “I was too when I started flying. Focus on where you’re going. When you’re tempted to look down, make yourself look up instead.”
Cero showed her how every buckle worked, how to escape them quickly, how, in case the comms tube failed, she could communicate with him properly in the air, which involved patterned shoulder taps instead of panicked shouting.
When she finally appeared to understand all of it, he glanced around the clearing, looking for the cat who had stowed away with them.
He’d noticed her about an hour into the flight, when he realized the weight of the Sail was disproportionate.
She’d made herself a little home in a canvas pouch beneath his seat; he couldn’t very well move her when he was thousands of feet in the air.
Besides which, he liked cats. They kept away the rats in Kegar, and there were some nights when he’d wake up warm, only to find one of the cloister’s cats curled near his head, fast asleep.