Daughter of Smoke and Bone(90)

She was just buying time, and the Furiant was good for that at least, as it went on a full quarter of an hour, with constant shifts in partner. Madrigal went from a courteous elder soldier with a rhinoceros horn to a centaur to a high-human in a dragon mask who scarcely touched her, and with each revolution she was brought past Thiago, whose eyes never left her. Her next partner’s mask was tiger, and when he took her hand… he actually took her hand. He clasped it firmly in his own gloved hand. A thrill went up Madrigal’s arm from the warming touch, and she didn’t have to look at his eyes to know who it was.

He was still here—and with Thiago so near. Reckless, she thought, electrified by his nearness. After a moment, steadying her breathing and her heart, she said, “Tiger suits you better than horse, I think.”

“I don’t know what you mean, lady,” he replied. “This is my true face.”

“Of course.”

“Because it would be foolish to still be here, if I were who you thought.”

“It would. One might suppose you had a death wish.”

“No.” He was solemn. “Never that. A life wish, if anything. For a different sort of life.”

A different sort of life. If only, Madrigal thought, her own life and choices—or lack of them—hemming her in. She kept her voice light. “You wish to be one of us? I’m sorry, we don’t accept converts.”

He laughed. “Even if you did, it wouldn’t help. We are all locked in the same life, aren’t we? The same war.”

In a lifetime of hating seraphim, Madrigal had never thought of them as living the same life as she, but what the angel said was true. They were all locked in the same war. They had locked the entire world in it. “There is no other life,” she said, and then she tensed, because they had come around to the place where Thiago stood.

The pressure of the angel’s grip on her hand increased ever so slightly, gently, and it helped her bear up under the general’s gaze until she turned away from it again, and could breathe.

“You need to go,” she said quietly. “If you’re discovered…”

The angel let a beat pass in silence before asking, just as quietly, “You’re not really going to marry him, are you?”

“I… I don’t know.”

He lifted her hand so that she could circle beneath the bridge of their arms; it was a part of the pattern, but her height and horns interfered, and they had to release fingers and join them again after the spin.

“What is there to know?” he asked. “Do you love him?”

“Love?” The question was a surprise, and a laugh escaped Madrigal’s lips. She quickly composed herself, not wanting to draw Thiago’s scrutiny.

“It’s a funny question?”

“No,” she said. “Yes.” Love Thiago? Could she? Maybe. How could you know a thing like that? “What’s funny is that you’re the first one to ask me that.”

“Forgive me,” said the seraph. “I didn’t realize that chimaera don’t marry for love.”

Madrigal thought of her parents. Her memory of them was hazed with a patina of years, their faces blurred to generalities—would she even know them, if she found them?—but she did remember their simple fondness for each other, and how they had seemed always to be touching. “We do.” She wasn’t laughing now. “My parents did.”

“So you are a child of love. It seems right, that you were made by love.”

She had never thought of herself in that way, but after he said it, it struck her as a fine thing, to have been made by love, and she ached for what she had lost, in losing her family. “And you? Did your parents love each other?”

She heard herself ask it, and was overcome by the dizzying surreality of the circumstance. She had just asked a seraph if his parents loved each other.

“No,” he said, and offered no explanation. “But I hope that my children’s parents will.”

Again he lifted her hand so that she could circle under the bridge made by their arms, and again her horns got in the way, so they were briefly parted. Turning, Madrigal felt a sting in his words, and when they were facing each other once more, she said, in her defense, “Love is a luxury.”

“No. Love is an element.”

An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on. The steady certainty of his voice sent a shiver through her, but she didn’t get a chance to respond. They had concluded their pattern, and she still had gooseflesh from the effect of his extraordinary statement as he handed her on to her next partner, who was drunk and uttered not a syllable for the entirety of their contact.

She tried to keep track of the seraph. He should have partnered Nwella after herself, but by then he was gone, and she saw no tiger mask in the whole of the array. He had melted away, and she felt his absence like a space cut from the air.

The Furiant wound down to its final promenade, and when it ended in a brazen gypsy tinkling of tambourines, Madrigal was delivered, as if it had been orchestrated that way, virtually into the White Wolf’s arms.





54





MEANT



“My lord,” Madrigal’s throat went dry so her words were a rasp, near enough a throaty whisper to be mistaken for one.