Daughter of Smoke and Bone(14)
The door closed, and Brimstone gestured Karou forward. She heaved the canvas-wrapped tusks toward him and let the bundle collapse on the shop floor.
“Be careful,” he barked. “Do you know the value of these?”
“Indeed I do, since I just paid it.”
“That’s the human value. The idiots would carve them to bits to make trinkets and baubles.”
“And what will you do with them?” asked Karou. She kept her voice casual, as if Brimstone might forget himself and reveal, at last, the mystery at the core of everything: what in the hell he did with all these teeth.
He only gave her a weary look, as if to say, Nice try.
“What? You brought it up. And no, I don’t know the inhuman value of tusks. I have no idea.”
“Beyond price.” He started sawing at the duct tape with a curved knife.
“It’s a good thing I had some scuppies on me, then,” said Karou, flopping into the chair Bain had just vacated. “Otherwise you’d have lost your priceless tusks to another bidder.”
“What?”
“You didn’t give me enough money. This little bastard war criminal kept bidding them up and—well, I’m not sure he was a war criminal, but he had this certain indefinable war-criminaliness about him—and I could see he was determined to get them, so I… maybe I shouldn’t have, though, since you don’t approve of my… pettiness, did you call it?” She smiled sweetly and dangled the remaining beads of her necklace. It was more of a bracelet now.
She’d used her new itch trick on the man, wishing a relentless onslaught of cranny itches on him until he fled the room. Surely Brimstone knew; he always knew. It would be nice, she thought, if he would say thank you. Instead, he just slapped a coin onto the table.
A measly shing.
“That’s it? I dragged those things across Paris for you for a shing, while beardy gets away with double gavriels?”
Brimstone ignored her and extricated the tusks from their shroud. Twiga came to consult with him, and they muttered in undertones in their own language, which Karou had learned from the cradle in the natural way, and not by wish. It was a harsh tongue, growlsome and full of fricatives, with much of it rising from the throat. By comparison, even German or Hebrew seemed melodious.
While they talked about tooth configurations, Karou helped herself to the scuppy teacups and set about replenishing her string of nearly useless wishes, which she decided to keep as a multistrand bracelet for now. Twiga hauled the tusks over to his corner for cleaning, and Karou contemplated going home.
Home. The word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She’d done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur, and of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for its real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.
She thought of the little cot that used to be hers, tucked behind the tall bookcases in the back of the shop, and wished whimsically that she could stay here tonight. She could fall asleep like she used to, to the sound of murmured voices, Issa’s soft slither, the scritch of wee elsething beasties scampering in the shadows.
“Sweet girl.” Yasri bustled out of the kitchen with a tea tray. Beside the teapot was a plate of the custard-filled pastries in the shape of horns that were her specialty. “You must be hungry,” she said in her parrot voice. With a sideward glance at Brimstone, she added, “It’s not healthy for a growing girl, always running off hither and thither at not a moment’s notice.”
“That’s me, hither-and-thither girl,” said Karou. She grabbed a pastry and slumped in her chair to eat it.
Brimstone spared her a glance, then said to Yasri, “And I suppose it’s healthy for a growing girl to live on pastry?”
Yasri tutted. “I’d be happy to fix her a proper meal if you ever gave me warning, you great brute.” She turned to Karou. “You’re too thin, lovely. It isn’t becoming.”
“Mmm,” agreed Issa, caressing Karou’s hair. “She should be leopard, don’t you think? Sleek and lazy, fur hot from the sun, and not too lean. A well-fed leopard-girl, lapping from a bowl of cream.”
Karou smiled and ate. Yasri poured tea for them all, just how they liked it, which meant four sugars for Brimstone. After all these years, Karou still thought it was funny that the Wishmonger had a sweet tooth. She watched as he bent back to his never-ending work, stringing teeth into necklaces.
“Oryx leucoryx,” she identified as he selected a tooth from his tray.
He was unimpressed. “Antelopes are child’s play.”
“Give me a hard one, then.”
He handed her a shark’s tooth, and Karou was reminded of the hours she’d sat here with him as a child, learning teeth. “Mako,” she said.
“Longfin or shortfin?”
“Oh. Uh.” She went still, holding the tooth between her thumb and forefinger. Brimstone had trained her in this art since she was small, and she could read the origin and integrity of teeth from their subtle vibrations. She declared, “Short.”
He grunted, which was about as close as he came to praise.