Daughter of Smoke & Bone

41





ALEPH



Karou was exactly where Akiva had imagined her to be, at a cafe table at the edge of the Jemaa el-Fna, and also as he had imagined, she was unquiet in the absence of the wishbone. Once, her fingers would have needed no occupation but the holding of her pencil. Now her sketchbook lay open before her, white pages blinding in the North African sun, and she fidgeted, unfocused, unable to keep her eyes from searching the plaza for Akiva.

He would come, she told herself, and he would bring back the wishbone. He would.

If he was alive.

Would they have harmed him, those other seraphim? It had been two days already. What if…? No. He was alive. To imagine him otherwise… Karou’s mind couldn’t approach it. Absurdly, she kept remembering Kishmish, years ago, gulping down that hummingbird-moth—the stark suddenness of it: alive, not alive. Just like that.

No.

Her thoughts veered away, finding focus on the wishbone. What did it mean, that it had had that effect on Akiva? And… what could he have to tell her that had made him fall to his knees? The mystery of her self took on a dark tint and she felt a shiver of apprehension. She couldn’t help remembering Zuzana and Mik, the looks on their faces—stunned and afraid. Of her. She had called Zuzana from her airport layover in Casablanca. They had argued.

“What are you doing?” Zuzana had demanded to know. “Let’s not regress to the time of mysterious errands, Karou.”

There wasn’t much point being cagey now, so she’d told her. Zuzana, unsurprisingly, had taken Akiva’s line that it was too dangerous, and Brimstone wouldn’t want it.

“I want you to take my flat,” said Karou. “I already called the landlord. He has a key for you, and it’s paid for the rest of—”

“I don’t want your stupid flat,” Zuzana said. Zuzana, who boarded with a cabbage-cooking elder aunt and joked not infrequently about killing Karou just for her flat. “Because you live in it. You are not just going to vanish like this, Karou. This isn’t some goddamn Narnia book.”

There was no reasoning with her. The conversation ended badly, and Karou was left sitting with her phone warm in her hands and no one else to call. It struck her with terrible clarity how few people were in her life. She thought of Esther, her fake grandmother, and that just made her sad, that her mind would default to a stand-in. She almost tossed the phone in the trash right there—she didn’t have the charger, anyway—but was very glad the next morning that she hadn’t. It vibrated in her pocket at the cafe, on the dregs of its juice, and disclosed the message:

No. Food. Anywhere. Thanks a lot for starving me. *croak expire*

She laughed, and held her face, and even cried a little, and when an old man asked her if she was okay, she wasn’t quite sure.

Two days she had been sitting here now; two nights she had tried to sleep in her rented room nearby. She had tracked down Razgut, just to know where he was when she was ready to go, and had left him again, wailing for his gavriel, which she did not give him. She would make his wish for him when the time came to go.

To go. With or without Akiva, with or without her wishbone.

How long would she wait?

Two days and two unending nights, and her eyes were darting, hungry. Her heart was gasping, empty. Whatever resistance had been in her, she gave it up. Her hands knew what they wanted: They wanted Akiva, the spark and heat of him. Even in the warmth of the Moroccan spring she was cold, as if the only thing with a chance of warming her was him. On the third morning, walking through the souks to the Jemaa el-Fna, she made a curious purchase.

Fingerless gloves. She saw them in a vendor’s stall, densely knit things of striped Berber wool, reinforced with leather at the palms. She bought them and pulled them on. They covered her hamsas entirely, and she couldn’t deceive herself that she’d bought them for warmth. She knew what she wanted. She wanted what her hands wanted: to touch Akiva, and not just with her fingertips, and not with caution, and not with fear of causing him pain. She wanted to hold him and be held, in soft perfect unity, like slow-dancing. She wanted to fit herself to him, breathe him, come alive against him, discover him, hold his face as he had held hers, with tenderness.

With love.

“It will come, and you will know it,” Brimstone had promised her once, and though he had surely never dreamed it would come to her as the enemy, she knew now he hadn’t been wrong. She did know it. It was simple and total, like hunger or happiness, and when she looked up from her tea on the third morning and saw Akiva in the square, standing some twenty yards off and looking at her, it thrilled through her like her nerves were channeling starlight. He was safe.

He was here. She rose from her chair.

It struck her, the way he was just standing there at a distance.

And when he came to her, it was with a heavy tread and a closed expression, slowly, reluctantly. Her certainty vanished. She did not reach for him, or even step out from behind the table. All the starlight shrank back up her nerve endings, leaving her cold, and she stared at him—the heavy slowness, the flatness of his look—and wondered if she had imagined everything between them.

“Hi,” she said in a small voice, hesitant and with an uplift of hope that she might be misreading him, that he might still mirror back at her the starburst that the sight of him had ignited in her. It was what she had always wanted and thought that she’d found: someone who was for her, as she was for him, whose blood and butterflies sang to hers and answered them, note for note.

But Akiva answered nothing. He gave a tight nod and made no move to come closer.

“You’re okay,” she said, and her voice didn’t begin to convey her gladness.

“You waited,” he said.

“I… I said I would.”

“As long as you could.”

Was he bitter that she hadn’t promised? Karou wanted to tell him that she hadn’t known then what she knew now—that “as long as she could” was a long time indeed, and that she felt as if she’d been waiting for him all her life. But she was silenced by his closed expression.

He thrust out his hand and said, “Here,” and there was her wishbone, dangling by its cord.

She took it, managing a whispered thank you as she slipped it over her head. It settled back into its place at the base of her throat.

“I brought these, too,” Akiva said, and placed on the table the case that held her crescent-moon knives. “You’ll need them.”

It sounded hard, almost like a threat. Karou just stood there, blinking back tears.

“Do you still want to know who you are?” Akiva asked. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking past her, at nothing.

“Of course I do,” she said, though it wasn’t what she had been thinking. What she wanted right now was to go back in time, to Prague. She had believed then, with a certainty that was both thrill and refuge, that Akiva was coming back from some dark night of the soul for her. Now it was like he was dead again, and though she had her wishbone back, and though she was going to learn, finally, the answer to the question at the core of her being, she felt dead, too.

“What happened?” she asked. “With the others?”

He ignored the question. “Is there somewhere we can go?”

“Go?”

Akiva gestured to the crowds in the square, the vendors building their pyramids of oranges, the tourists toting cameras and parcels of shopping. “You’ll want to be alone for this,” he said.

“What… what do you have to tell me that I’ll want to be alone to hear it?”

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” Akiva had been gazing past her, unfocused, this whole time, so that she’d begun to feel like some kind of blur, but he fixed his eyes on her now. Their brilliance was like the sun in topaz, and she saw, before he looked away again, the bare glint of a yearning so deep it hurt to behold. Her heart leapt.

“We’re going to break the wishbone,” he said.





And then she would know everything, and she would hate him. Akiva was trying to prepare himself for the way she would look at him once she understood. He had watched her from the square for a handful of seconds before she looked up, and he witnessed the way her face was transformed by the sight of him—from anxious, lost expectancy, to… light. It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.

All that he didn’t deserve and could never have was in that instant. All he wanted now was to fold her against him, lose his hands in her hair—which was clean and combed straight as rivers over her shoulders—lose himself in the fragrance and softness of her.

He remembered a story Madrigal had told him once: the human tale of the golem. It was a thing shaped of clay in the form of a man, brought to life by carving the symbol aleph into its brow. Aleph was the first letter of an ancestral human alphabet, and the first letter of the Hebrew word truth; it was the beginning. Watching Karou rise to her feet, radiant in a fall of lapis hair, in a woven dress the color of tangerines, with a loop of silver beads at her throat and a look of joy and relief and… love… on her beautiful face, Akiva knew that she was his aleph, his truth and beginning. His soul.

His wing joints ached with the desire to beat, once, and propel him to her, but instead he walked, heavy and heartsick. His arms felt banded by iron, keeping them from reaching for her. The way the light went out of her at the cold manner of his approach, the hesitation and hope in her voice—it was killing him by degrees. It was better this way. If he gave in and let himself have what he wanted, she would only hate him more once she knew what he really was. So he held himself remote, aching, preparing for the moment he knew must come.

“Break it?” Karou asked now, looking at the wishbone in surprise. “Brimstone never did—”

“It wasn’t his,” said Akiva. “It was never his. He was just keeping it. For you.”

He hadn’t been able to drop it in the sea. That he had even considered it made him sick with himself—more evidence of his unworthiness of her. She deserved to know everything, in all its heartbreak and brutality, and if he was right about the wishbone, she very soon would.

She seemed to sense something of the magnitude of the moment. “Akiva,” she whispered. “What is it?”

And when she looked at him with her bird-black eyes, frightened and imploring, he had to turn away again, so powerful was the longing that twisted through him. Not touching her in that moment was one of the hardest things he had ever done.





And it might have gone on between them in that terrible, false way, but Karou had seen what she had seen, and felt it, too—Akiva’s yearning, meeting her own in a deep place—and when he turned away she experienced a sudden unspooling, like the snap of a cable and all her restraints giving way, and she couldn’t bear it anymore. She reached for him. Her half-gloved hand, hamsa covered, took his arm, gently and full against his skin, and turned him back to her. She stepped close, tipping back her head to gaze up at him, and took his other arm.

“Akiva,” she murmured, her tone no longer fearful, but low and ardent and sweet. “What is it?” Her hands climbed him, over the steel of his arms and shoulders, up ramps of trapezius to his throat, his rough-smooth jaw, and then her fingertips were on his lips, so soft by comparison. She felt them tremble. “Akiva,” she repeated. “Akiva. Akiva.” She seemed to be saying, Enough of this; stop pretending.

And so, with a shudder, he did. He dropped the pretense, and dropped his head, so his brow came to rest against the sun-warmed top of hers. His arms went around her and drew her in, and Karou and Akiva were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight. With a sigh, she softened, and it was pure homecoming to melt against him and rest. She felt the coarseness of his unshaven throat at her cheek as he tested, against his own, the perfect water-smoothness of her hair. They stood like that for a long time, and they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

The wishbone, small but sharp, was trapped between them.