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It was Liraz who responded "No," she said, in the way she had of laying down a truth and standing over it like a lioness guarding a kill "You don’t" And she drew her sword and faced the Stelians

"Lir, no" Akiva raised his hands, urgent "Please Put that away You can’t beat them"

She looked at him like she didn’t know him

"You don’t understand," he said "In the battle It was the on the older woht our enemy for us"

She shook her head "No We didn’t," she said, and Akiva blinked in confusion But then she added, with a gesture to the fierce young woman at her side, "Scarab did"

And no one spoke They remembered the way their enemies had fallen limp in battle and plummeted from the sky One woman One woman had done that

Liraz let her sword slip back into its sheath

"Please tell ain to the older wo her plea In fact, he wasa plea of his own

"Would you?" he asked "Please?" And Karou had no idea what hepassed between the toument Afterward she would understand that they’d debated telling theale had won Because afterward Karou would understand all of it

Into herso co Karou wished to live She knehy Akiva had asked his grandrandmother--to answer them in this way, because no told truth could match this It enveloped her and entered her: a history of tragedy and unspeakable horror, relentless and complex and yet soiven to her mind, compressed and precise, like a universe contained within a pearl Or like ht But this history was so much deeper and htmarish

And she understood what had happened to Akiva since she saw hiuttered fire, too, and all things lost and hollow

How do you take in so so asping, and wonder how you ever found it in yourself to i mo louder than it should have been There had been, briefly, in Nightingale’s sending, a sensation of great weight and savage, quaking hunger, and now that they knew it, none of theainst the skin of their world

Karou stood but a pace away froulf, already His own part in the story had been , and there could be no question: He had to go The reshaping of an ee to them, and noas only a side note to the question of Eretz’s very survival Karou reeled Akiva looked into her eyes, and she sahat he wanted to ask but wouldn’t, because her own destiny was not soo with him Without her, there could be no rebirth for the chimaera people

It was he as meant to stay with her--"a prior commitment," as he had told Ormerod--but now he couldn’t, and their story was, after all, not to be the story of all Eretz: seraphi" It was only one flutter out of ed, and once more, they were torn apart

It was Liraz who broke the silence at last "What about the godstars?" she asked, like a plea "In the story, they battle the beasts and win"

"There are no godstars," said Scarab, and with her words ca: just a sundered sky and the understanding that there was nothing out there in all the vastness to watch over theods they had named and worshiped in three worlds and more, when had help ever come? Scarab said, in a voice to match her words for bleakness, "And there never were"

It was the worst, the lowest moment of all, and Karou would always remember it as the blackest of shadows--the kind of black that shadows can only achieve when they lie alongside the brightest light

Because another sending cah the other, brilliant and blinding It was light, reeling and abundant A sensation of light An arolden and many, and Karou kneho and what they were They all knew, though the silhouettes didn’tThese were the bright warriors

The godstars

Karou saw Scarab’s head snap up, and Nightingale’s, too, and she read their shock and knew that this sending was not theirs, nor the other Stelians’, either, who looked as staggered as they did

So where did it come from?

"Yet"

One word, from behind Karou, from within her own party, and the voice was familiar but too wholly unexpected for her to place it in that first instant She had to turn and see with her eyes, and blink, and see again, before she could believe it

"People with destinies shouldn’t ht nohat she said was, "There never were godstars yet"

Because it was her Eliza She ca She had been all but forgotten aled creatures of this world, and no surprise, because none knehat she was, not really She had told Mik and Zuzana that she was a butterfly, but they had no context for what this meant--the ramifications of it--and anyway, she was more than that She was an echo, andfrom her skin; she was suffused with it like a black pearl There were no ebon seraphie; those of Chavisaery had perished with Meliz, and so the Stelians gazed at her, amazed

She was fixed on Scarab, and Scarab on her "Who are you?" asked the queen, her severity already softening into wonder

Eyes bright with invitation, Eliza gave a nod, calling to Scarab to know her--to touch the thread of her life--and Scarab did, with a single fingertip of her anith of it Eliza shivered The sensation was new, and gave her goose bumps, and she was able to think that it was funny, that her body should respond in so ordinary a way as goose buolden seraph queen at the thread of her very life