Daughter of Smoke and Bone(102)

“Is it magic?”

Madrigal hesitated. She’d helped Twiga make it often enough. “No,” she said, distracted, as the sounds in the corridor grew louder. “It’s just smoke. Just a path for the soul.”

Brimstone nodded. “Not unlike your wishbone. It isn’t magic, just a focus for the will.” He paused. “A powerful will might not even need it.”

His look burned at her, steady. He was trying to tell her something. What?

Madrigal’s hands started to shake. She didn’t understand, quite, but something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.

At the door, the bolts drew back. Madrigal’s heart pounded. Her wings made the ineffectual fluttering of a caged bird. The door opened and Thiago framed himself in it like a picture. As ever, he was clad all in white, and Madrigal realized for the first time why he wore white: It was a canvas for the blood of his victims, and now his surcoat was livid with it.

With Akiva’s blood.

Thiago’s face flashed anger when he saw Brimstone in the room. But he didn’t risk a battle of wills he couldn’t win. He inclined his head to the sorcerer and faced Madrigal. “It’s time,” he said. His voice, perversely, was soft, as if he were coaxing a child to sleep.

She said nothing, fought for calm. Thiago wasn’t fooled. His wolf senses could smell the tang of her fear. He smiled, turning to the guards who awaited his command. “Bind her hands. Pinion her wings.”

“That is unnecessary.” Brimstone.

The guards hesitated.

Thiago faced the resurrectionist and the two stared at each other, their enmity confined to the flaring of nostrils, clenching of jaws. The Wolf repeated his order in precise syllables, and the guards scurried to carry it out: into the cell, wrestling Madrigal’s wings together and piercing them through with iron clips to secure them. Her hands were easier; she didn’t struggle. Once she was fully trussed, they shoved her toward the door.

Brimstone had one last surprise. He told Thiago, “I have designated someone to bless Madrigal’s evanescence.”

The blessing was a sacred ritual that she had assumed she would be denied. Thiago, apparently, had assumed the same. He narrowed his eyes and said, “You think you’re getting anyone close enough to glean her—”

Brimstone cut him short. “Chiro,” he said. Madrigal flinched. To Thiago, he said, “I can’t imagine you would object to her.”

Thiago did not. “Fine.” To the guards, he said, “Go.”

Chiro. It was so deeply wrong, so profane, that Madrigal’s betrayer should be the one to grant her soul peace, that for an instant she thought she had misconstrued everything that Brimstone had just said to her, that this was one final punishment heaped upon the others. Then he smiled. A wily uplift of the line of his stern ram’s mouth, and it struck her. It exploded behind her eyes.

Soft mollusk thing. Easily pushed aside.

The guard gave Madrigal another shove and she was out the door, her mind racing to encompass this wild new notion in the short time that was left to her.





60





IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN



It had never been done, not that she had heard of. Never even speculated on, and it surely would not have been possible with a natural body. A body accretes to its soul like nacre to a grain of sand, forming a perfect, unified entity that only death can unwork. There is no gap within a natural body for guests, or for hijackers. But Chiro’s body was a vessel, as Madrigal well knew, having made it herself.

She might not need smoke to guide her, but she did need proximity. She couldn’t move through space; she had no control or propulsion. Chiro would have to come to her, and, because Brimstone had selected her to perform the blessing, she did. With heavy steps up the scaffold to kneel beside the pieces that had been her sister. Shaking, she raised her eyes to the air above the body.

She whispered, “I’m sorry, Mad. I didn’t know it would be evanescence. I’m so sorry.”

Madrigal, who could not block out the sight of her own severed head or the memory of Akiva’s screams, was unmoved. What had Chiro hoped for? A lesser sentence? Resurrection of low aspect, perhaps? Maybe she hadn’t been thinking of Madrigal at all, except as a means of drawing Thiago’s attention. Love made a person do strange things, as Madrigal well knew. There was nothing stranger than what she was about to do.

There was no smoke to guide her. As Brimstone had said, she wouldn’t need it. With a powerful thrust of will, she funneled herself into the body that she had made with such loving care.

There was even less resistance than she had expected—a sensation of surprise, a feeble struggle. Chiro’s soul was a sullen thing made weak by envy. It was no match for Madrigal’s, and subsided almost at once. It wasn’t expelled, only shoved writhing into its own depths. The vessel remained, to all eyes, Chiro.

She trembled violently, performing the blessing, but no one watching thought it strange—her sister lay dead at her feet. And if she was rigid descending the scaffold, her movements jerky, no one questioned that, either.

There was no suspicion because there was no precedent. After Chiro left, there was nothing tethered to the broken body on the platform. The soldiers who stood watch the next three days guarded only meat and air—no soul.