Daughter of Smoke and Bone(36)

Karou saw them and understood. The way to Elsewhere had been severed, and she was cast adrift.





Once upon a time,

a little girl was raised by monsters.





But angels burned the doorways to their world, and she was all alone.





21





HOPE MAKES ITS OWN MAGIC



Once, when Karou was a little girl, she used a handful of scuppies to flatten the wrinkles out of a drawing that Yasri had sat on. Wrinkle by wrinkle, wish by wish—a painstaking procedure accomplished with total concentration, tongue peeking out at the corner of her lips.

“There!” She held it up, proud.

Brimstone made a sound that put her in mind of a disappointed bear.

“What?” she demanded, eight years old, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and skinny as the shadow of a sapling. “It’s a good drawing. It deserved to be rescued.”

It was a good drawing. It was a rendering of herself as a chimaera, with bat wings and a fox’s tail.

Issa clapped with delight. “Oh, you’d look darling with a fox tail. Brimstone, can’t she have a tail, just for today?”

Karou would rather have had the wings, but neither was to be. The Wishmonger, looking put-upon, breathed a weary no.

Issa didn’t beg. She just shrugged, kissed Karou on the forehead, and tacked up the drawing in a place of honor. But Karou was taken with the idea, so she asked, “Why not? It would only take a lucknow.”

“Only?” he echoed. “And what do you know of the value of wishes?”

She recited the scale in a single breath. “Scuppy shing lucknow gavriel bruxis!”

But that was not, apparently, what he meant. More disappointed bear sounds, like growls routed through the nose, and he said, “Wishes are not for foolery, child.”

“Well, what do you use them for?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I do not wish.”

“What?” It had astonished her. “Never?” All that magic at his fingertips! “But you could have anything you wanted—”

“Not anything. There are things bigger than any wish.”

“Like what?”

“Most things that matter.”

“But a bruxis—”

“A bruxis has its limits, just like any wish.”

A moth-winged hummingbird stuttered into the light and Kishmish launched off Brimstone’s horn, plucked it from the air, and swallowed it whole—and just like that, the creature un-was. It was, and then it wasn’t. Karou’s stomach roiled as she contemplated the possibility of being so suddenly not.

Watching her, Brimstone added, “I hope, child, but I don’t wish. There’s a difference.”

She turned this over in her mind, thinking that if she could come up with the difference, it might impress him. Something occurred to her, and she struggled to put it into words. “Because hope comes from in you, and wishes are just magic.”

“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”

She’d nodded as if she understood, but she hadn’t then, and she didn’t now, three months after the portals burned and amputated half her life. She’d been back to the doorway in Josefov at least a dozen times. It had been replaced, along with the wall around it, and they looked too clean, too new for their surroundings. She’d knocked and she’d hoped; she’d worn herself out hoping, and nothing. Again and again: nothing.

Whatever magic there was in hoping, she thought, it had nothing on a good, solid wish.

Now she stood at another door, this one belonging to a hunting cabin in nowhere, Idaho, and she didn’t bother knocking. She just kicked it open. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was bright and hard, and so was her smile. “It’s been a while.”

Inside, the hunter Bain looked up in surprise. He was cleaning a shotgun at his coffee table, and rose swiftly to his feet. “You. What do you want?”

Abominably, he was shirtless, showing an abundance of loose white gut, and his extraordinary beard bushed around his shoulders in clumps. Karou could smell it from across the room, sour as a mouse’s nest.

She stepped uninvited into the cabin. She was dressed in black: slim-fitting wool trousers with boots, and a vintage leather trench belted at the waist. There was a satchel slung across her shoulder, her hair was smoothed back in a single braid, and she wore no makeup. She looked tired. She was tired. “Killed anything fun lately?”

“Do you know something?” Bain asked. “Have the doors opened back up?”

“Oh. No. Nothing like that.” Karou kept her voice light, as if she were paying a social call. It was a farce, of course. Even when she’d been running errands for Brimstone she had never visited here. Bain had always come into the shop himself.

“You weren’t easy to find,” she told him. He lived off the grid; as far as the Internet was concerned, he didn’t exist. Karou had spent several wishes to track him down—low-grade wishes that she’d liberated from other traders.

She looked around the room. A plaid couch, some glazed-eyed elk heads mounted on the wall, and a Naugahyde recliner held together with duct tape. A generator hummed outside the window, and the room was lit by a bare bulb. She shook her head. “Gavriels to play with, and you live in a dump like this? Men.”