Daughter of Smoke and Bone(97)

And they did fill it. For a month of stolen nights and the occasional sun-drenched afternoon when Madrigal could get away from Loramendi by day, they cupped their wings around their happiness and called it a world, though they both knew it was not a world, only a hiding place, which is a very different thing.

After they had come together a handful of times and begun to learn each other in earnest, with the hunger of lovers to know everything—in talk and in touch, every memory and thought, every musk and murmur—when all shyness had left them, they admitted the future: that it existed, that they couldn’t pretend it didn’t. They both knew this wasn’t a life, especially for Akiva, who saw no one but Madrigal and spent his days sleeping like the evangelines and longing for night.

Akiva confessed that he was the emperor’s bastard, one of a legion bred to kill, and he told her of the day the guards had come into the harem to take him from his mother. How she had turned away and let them, as if he wasn’t her child at all, but only a tithe she had to pay. How he hated his father for breeding children to the task of death, and in flashes she could see that he blamed himself, too, for being one of them.

Madrigal smoothed the raised scars on his knuckles and imagined the chimaera represented by each line. She wondered how many of their souls had been gleaned, and how many lost.

She did not tell Akiva the secret of resurrection. When he asked why she bore no eye tattoos on her palms, she invented a lie. She couldn’t tell him about revenants. It was too great a thing, too dire, the very fate of her race balanced upon it, and she couldn’t share it, not even to assuage his guilt for all the chimaera he had killed. Instead, she kissed his marks and told him, “War is all we’ve been taught, but there are other ways to live. We can find them, Akiva. We can invent them. This is the beginning, here.” She touched his chest and felt a rush of love for the heart that moved his blood, for his smooth skin and his scars and his unsoldierly tenderness. She took his hand and pressed it to her breast and said, “We are the beginning.”

They began to believe that they could be.

Akiva told her that, in the two years since Bullfinch, he had not slain another chimaera.

“Is it true?” she asked, hardly believing it.

“You showed me that one might choose not to kill.”

Madrigal looked down at her hands and confessed, “But I have killed seraphim since that day,” and Akiva took her chin and tilted her face up to his.

“But in saving me, you changed me, and here we are because of that moment. Before, could you have thought it possible?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you think others could be changed, too?”

“Some,” she said, thinking of her comrades, friends. The White Wolf. “Not all.”

“Some, and then more.”

Some, and then more. Madrigal nodded, and together they imagined a different life, not just for themselves, but for all the races of Eretz. And in that month that they hid and loved, dreamed and planned, they believed that this, too, was meant: that they were the blossoms set forth by some great and mysterious intention. Whether it was Nitid or the godstars or something else altogether, they didn’t know, only that a powerful will was alive in them, to bring peace to their world.

When they broke their wishbones now, that was what they hoped for. They knew they couldn’t hide in the requiem grove and daydream forever. There was work to be done; they were just beginning to make it real, with such passion in their hope that they might have wrought miracles—begun something—had they not been betrayed.





57





REVENANT



“Akiva,” breathed Karou with the fullness of her self.

Mere seconds had passed since they had broken the wishbone, but in that space of time, years had come home to her. Seventeen years ago, Madrigal had ended. All that had happened since was another life, but it was hers, too. She was Karou, and she was Madrigal. She was human and chimaera.

She was revenant.

Within her, something was at work: a swift concrescence of memories, two consciousnesses that were really one, coming together like interlacing fingers.

She saw her hamsas and knew what Brimstone had done. In defiance of Thiago’s sentence of evanescence, he had somehow gleaned her soul. And because she could not have a life in her own world, he had given her one here, in secret. How had he extracted her memory from her soul? The life she had lived as Madrigal—he had taken it all and put it in the wishbone, and saved it for her.

It came to her what Iz?l had said the last time she saw him, when he offered her baby teeth and she rejected them. “Once,” he’d said, and she hadn’t believed him. “Once he wanted some.”

She believed it now.

Revenants were made for battle; their bodies were always conjured fully grown, from mature teeth. But Brimstone had made her a baby, a human, named her hope and given her a whole life, far away from war and death. Sweet, deep, fond love filled her. He had given her a childhood, a world. Wishes. Art. And Issa and Yasri and Twiga, they had known and helped; hidden her. Loved her. She would see them soon, and she wouldn’t stand back from Brimstone as she always did, cowed by his gruffness and his monstrous physical presence. She would throw her arms around him and say, finally, thank you.

She looked up from her palms—from one wonder to another—and Akiva was before her. He still stood at the foot of the bed on which, just a moment earlier, they had fallen back together, all of him against all of her, and Karou understood that the aching allness rose from what she had shared with him in another body, another life. She had fallen in love with him twice. She loved him now with both loves, so overpowering it was almost unbearable. She beheld him through a prism of tears.