Daughter of Smoke and Bone(69)
No, not a lantern. It gave off not light, but smoke.
A few steps, hooves sinking into the sand, then the mist revealed her face to him, and his to her. She stopped abruptly when she saw he was alive. He braced for a snarl, a sudden lunge, and new pain as he was gutted by her blade, but the chimaera girl didn’t move. For a long moment they just looked at each other. She cocked her head to one side, a quizzical, birdlike gesture that spoke not of savagery, but curiosity. There was no snarl on her lips. Her face was solemn.
Unaccountably, she was beautiful.
She took a step closer. He watched her face as she drew nearer. His gaze slipped down her long neck to the ridges of her collarbones. She was finely made, elegant and spare. Her hair was short as swan’s down, soft and dark and close as a cap, so the architecture of her face was unobscured; perfect. Black greasepaint made a mask around her eyes, which Akiva could see were large—brown and bright, vivid and sorrowful.
He knew the sorrow was for her fallen comrades and not for him, but he still found himself transfixed by the compassion in her gaze. It made him think that perhaps he had never really looked at a chimaera before. He saw slaves often enough, but they kept their eyes on the ground, and warriors like this he only ever met while dodging a killing blow or dealing one, half-blind with the blood rage of battle. If he ignored the fact of her bloodied blade and her closely fitted black armor, her devilish wings and horns, if he focused just on her face—so unexpectedly lovely—she looked like a girl, a girl who had found a young man dying on the beach.
For a moment, that’s what he was. Not a soldier, not anyone’s enemy, and the death that was upon him seemed meaningless. That they lived as they did, angels and monsters locked in a volley of killing and dying, dying and killing, seemed an arbitrary choice.
As if they might just as well choose not to kill and die.
But no. That was all there was between them. And this girl was here for the same reason he was: to slay the enemy. And that meant him.
Why, then, didn’t she do it?
She knelt at his side, doing nothing to protect herself from any sudden move he might make. He remembered the knife at his hip. It was small, nothing like her own fantastical double-crescent, but it could kill her. In one motion he could embed it in the soft curve of her throat. Her perfect throat.
He made no move.
He was dream-lost by then. Blood-lost. Gazing up at the face above him, he was beyond wondering whether this was real. It could be a dying dream, or she could be a reaper sent from the next life to cull his soul. The silver censer hung on its crook, exhaling a fume of smoke that was both herbal and sulfurous, and as its scent wafted down to him, Akiva felt a tug, a lure. Dizzy, he thought he wouldn’t mind following this messenger into the next realm.
He imagined her guiding him by the hand, and with that serene image cradled in his mind, he let go of his wound to reach for her fingers, caught them in his, which were slippery with blood.
Her eyes went wide and she snatched her hand away.
He’d startled her; he hadn’t meant to. “I’ll go with you,” he said, speaking in Chimaera, which he knew enough of to give orders to slaves. It was a rough tongue, a cobbling together of many tribal dialects that the Empire had brought under one roof, and which had been melded over time into a common language. He could scarcely hear his own voice, but she made out his words well enough.
She glanced at her censer, then back at him. “That’s not for you,” she said, taking it away and planting it in the mud where the breeze would tease the smoke downwind. “I don’t think you want to go where I’m going.” Even under the animal inflections of the language, her voice was as pretty as a song.
“Death,” said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. “I’m ready.”
“Well, I’m not. I hear it’s dull, being dead.”
She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled.
Smiled.
He did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. “Dull sounds nice,” he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. “Maybe I can catch up on my reading.”
She muffled a laugh, and Akiva, drifting, began to believe that he was dead. It would be less strange than if this were really happening. He could no longer feel his torn shoulder, so he didn’t realize that she was touching him until he felt a tight pain. He gasped as his eyes flew open. Had she stabbed him after all?
No. She had winched a tourniquet above his wound. That was the pain. He looked wonderingly up at her.
She said, “I recommend living.”
“I’ll try.”
Then, voices nearby, guttural. Chimaera. The girl froze, held a finger to her lips and breathed, “Shhh.”
One last look passed between them. The fog diffused the sun behind her, limning her horns and wings in radiance. Her shorn hair was velvet nap—it looked as soft as a foal’s throat—and her horns were oiled, gleaming like polished jet. In spite of her wicked greasepaint mask, her face was sweet, her smile sweet. Akiva was unfamiliar with sweetness; it pierced him in the center of his chest, in some deep place that had never given any hint before that it was a locus of feeling. It was as new and strange as if an eye had suddenly peeled itself open in the back of his head, seeing in a new dimension.