Daughter of Smoke and Bone(84)

How hot the angel’s skin had been, like fever, and his eyes, like fire.

She was haunted with wondering if he had lived. She hoped he had not, and that any evidence of her treason had died right there, in the Bullfinch mist. Or so she told herself.

It was only in moments of waking, with the lace edge of a dream still light in her grasp, that the truth came clear. She dreamed the angel alive. She hoped him alive. She denied it, but it persisted, rising in flashes to startle her, always accompanied by a quickening of the blood, a flush, and strange, rushing frissons of sensation all the way to her fingertips.

She sometimes thought that Brimstone knew. Once or twice when the memory had caught her unaware, that rush and shiver, he had looked up from his work as if something had captured his attention. Kishmish, perched on his horn, would look, too, and both of them would stare at her unblinking. But whatever Brimstone knew or didn’t know, he never said a word about it, just as he didn’t say a word about Thiago, though he had to know that Madrigal’s choice was heavy in her mind.

And that evening, at the ball, it would be decided, one way or the other.

Something is going to happen.

But what?

She told herself that when she stood before Thiago, she would know what to do. Blush and curtsy, dance with him, play the shy maiden while smiling an unmistakable invitation? Or stand aloof, ignore his advances, and remain a soldier?

“Come on,” said Chiro, shaking her head as if Madrigal were a lost cause. “Nwella will have something you can wear, but you’ll have to take what she gives you, and no complaining.”

“All right,” sighed Madrigal. “To the baths, then. To make ourselves shiningly clean.”

Like vegetables, she thought, before they go in the stew.





50





SUGARED



“No,” said Madrigal, looking in the mirror. “Oh no. No no. No.”

Nwella did indeed have a gown for her. It was midnight-blue shot silk, a form-skimming sheath so fine it felt like a touch could dissolve it. It was arrayed with tiny crystals that caught the light and beamed it back like stars, and the whole back was open, revealing the long white channel of Madrigal’s spine all the way to her tailbone. It was alarming. Back and shoulders and arms and chest. Far too much chest. “No.” She started to shrug out of it, but Chiro stopped her.

“Remember what I said: no complaining.”

“I take it back. I reserve my right to complain.”

“Too late. It’s your fault, anyway. You had a week to get a gown. You see what happens when you dither? Others make your choices for you.”

Madrigal thought that she wasn’t talking about the gown. “What? Is this a punishment, then?”

At her other side, Nwella chuffed. She was a frail thing of lizard aspect who had been with Madrigal and Chiro at school, but parted from them when they went to battle training and she into royal service. “Punishment? Making you stunning, you mean? Look at yourself.”

Madrigal did look, and what she saw was skin. The most delicate interweaving of individual silk strands climbed around her neck, invisibly holding the gown to her body. “I look naked.”

“You look astonishing,” said Nwella, who was seamstress to the Warlord’s younger wives, the very youngest of whom were, to put it kindly, unyoung. The Warlord had seen fit to stop imposing himself on new brides some centuries earlier. Like Brimstone, he was of natural flesh, and looked it. Thiago, his firstborn, was some hundreds of years old, though he wore the skin of a young man, and the hamsas to go with it.

As Madrigal had said, the general’s fetish for purity was hypocrisy: He himself had been through many resurrections, and his hypocrisy was twofold—not only was he not “pure,” he had not been born high-human.

The Warlord was Hartkind, with a stag’s head: creature aspect, as were his wives, and so had been Thiago, originally. It wasn’t that it was unusual for a revenant to resurrect in a body unlike his or her natural one; Brimstone couldn’t always match them. It was a matter of time and tooth supply. But Thiago’s bodies were another matter. They were crafted to his precise specifications, and even before they were needed, so that he could examine them for flaws and give his approval. She had seen it once: Thiago checking over a naked replica of himself—the husk that would receive him the next time he died. It had been macabre.

She tested her gown with little tugs, feeling certain that too heavy a hand in dancing could pull it clean off. “Nwella,” she implored, “don’t you have something more… substantial?”

“Not for you,” Nwella said. “A figure like that, why would you want to cover it?” She whispered something to Chiro.

“Stop conspiring,” Madrigal said. “Can’t I have a shawl at least?”

“No,” they said together.

“I feel almost as naked as at the baths.”

She had never in her life felt so exposed as when she’d walked through the steam and thigh-deep water with Chiro that afternoon. Everyone knew now that she was Thiago’s choice, and every pair of eyes in the women’s bath had inspected her, so that she wanted to sink down out of sight, leaving just her horns spiking through the surface of the water.

“Let Thiago see what he’s getting,” Nwella said, devilish.