Cruel Beauty (Cruel Beauty Universe #1)(53)

He laughed and went to get me breakfast. I waited until the echo of his footsteps had died away before I broke down sobbing, partly for the horrible truth I could not remember, but mostly for the man I had trusted.


For the next three days, I recovered. Though Ignifex stopped telling me to stay in bed after I threw a water jug at his head—I missed, but on purpose—I mostly obeyed the command anyway. Even a little movement left me exhausted and gasping for breath; if I tried to keep going, I would start to feel hot tremors across my skin and hear a faint crackle of flame in my ears.

Ignifex prowled my room like a cat kept indoors by the rain. He brought me food; every time he offered to spoon-feed me, and every time I smacked his nose with the spoon. He also brought stacks of books from the library—not the histories, which had the most holes burnt in their pages, but books of poetry and, once he learnt that I liked them, volumes of lore and scholarship about the gods.

“There was a country where they burned their children before a bronze statue of their patron god Moloch, whom this scholar suggests is another form of Kronos.” Ignifex turned a page. “There’s a picture too.”

“You always find the most charming stories,” I said, though truthfully he seemed to be fascinated by any tale of foreign lands. Perhaps in nine hundred years, he had started to grow bored.

“The country’s name was Phoinikaea. Do you know where that is? Or was, I suppose, since Romana-Graecia burned it down and salted the earth. Here’s another picture.”

Yes, definitely bored.

“How should I know?” I frowned at a book of children’s rhymes. Several of the pages had been burnt to tatters, though I could not imagine why the Kindly Ones would care about it. “You sundered our world, remember?”

“And your people have spent near on two centuries studying the World Before.”

“We were more interested in killing you than in the location of ancient barbarians.” I dropped the book, giving up on it. “But if you died right now, I’m sure we might find time to research Phoinikaea in a decade or four.”

He smiled at me. “Too bad I’m quite intransigently immortal.”

He still spent the nights with me, huddled against my side. Without Shade, he had to bring and arrange all the candles himself, though he could set them all alight with a wave of his hand.

“Much good it does you to be a demon, when you have to carry your own candles,” I told him the second night.

“Who said there was anything good about being a demon?”

On the third night, I lay awake a long time, staring at his face in the flickering candlelight. I still remembered looking at him and knowing something beyond all doubt: an answer that filled me with hope and despair. But try as I might, I could not remember the secret.

I thought back to the Heart of Fire. I had begged Shade for help—the flames had closed over me—

I remembered the bird in the garden, the half-seen figures in the liquid light. I remembered bright blue eyes and the voice of a desperate young man. But I didn’t remember anything more.

Ignifex made a soft noise and shifted closer. Without thinking, I slid an arm around him. I knew I should draw back, that I should harden my heart and prepare to destroy him, but lost in the endless hours of the night, I was finally able to admit it: I didn’t want to defeat him. I knew what he was and what he had done, and I still didn’t want to hurt him in any way.

The thought should have disturbed me. But instead I drifted into a heavy sleep, and all night long I dreamt of sunlight and birdsong, with no fire or pain anywhere.


On the fourth morning, I woke up before Ignifex, when the sky was dim and colorless, veined with charcoal. I tried to lie still, but my body felt like a clock wound to the point of bursting, and in only a few minutes I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to get up.

The dawn was close enough that the darkness no longer gnawed at Ignifex; I felt no guilt sliding out of his arms and tiptoeing to the wardrobe. I wanted proper clothes, but I couldn’t stand the thought of another layered, buttoned-up dress constricting me. Instead I pulled out a dress of the ancient style: a simple white linen gown belted at the waist and held together with golden clasps at the shoulders.

I eased the door open and ran out into the hallway. My feet whispered against the cool floors; the breath raced in and out of my lungs, but I did not weaken or grow dizzy. I ran through the corridors until finally I caught a pillar to slow myself and, laughing, tried to catch my breath.

I should check on Astraia, I thought, and then I remembered that the mirror was gone, shattered so I could find the Heart of Fire. So that Shade could betray me.

Something touched my neck. I whirled, realizing only after I had moved that it was just wind from an open window, trailing a strand of hair across my neck.

Nobody followed me in the shadows. Nobody waited for me, blue-eyed and solemn, with gentle hands and a quiet voice.

Tears stung at my eyes. I blinked them back, realizing that I was still mourning Shade. I had thought that he loved me, that I might love him. I had certainly trusted him. He had nearly killed me. And now he was surely gone forever.

I tried to show them the truth, he had said. However mad or monstrous he might be, I didn’t think he had become so for little reasons. I remembered knowing that truth, and it had felt like it was tearing my soul apart. I had to remember it again.

Staring at the dawn-dim corridor, however, did not particularly help. I wiped my eyes and went to find the dining room, where platters of breakfast and little pots of steaming coffee awaited me.