Daughter of Smoke & Bone

53





LOVE IS AN ELEMENT



In the patterns of the Furiant, no one bypassed Madrigal’s hand as they had in the Serpentine—it would have been too obvious a slight—but there was a formal stiffness in her partners as she passed from one to the next, some barely skimming her fingertips with their own when they were meant to be clasping hands.

Thiago had come up and stood watching. Everyone felt it, and the gaiety of the dance was tamped down. It was his effect, but it was her fault, Madrigal knew, for running from him and trying to hide here, as if it were possible to hide.

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.

Nwella and Chiro crowded behind her, and Thiago smiled, lupine, the tips of fangs appearing between his full red lips. His eyes were bold. They didn’t meet hers, but roved lower, with no effort at subtlety. Madrigal’s skin went hot as her heart grew cold, and she dropped into a curtsy from which she wished that she never had to rise and meet his eyes, but rise she must, and did.

“You’re beautiful tonight,” said Thiago. Madrigal needn’t have worried about meeting his eyes. If she had been headless, he would not yet have noticed. The way he was looking at her body in the midnight sheath made her want to cross her arms over her chest.

“Thank you,” she said, fighting the impulse. A return of compliment was called for, so she said simply, “As are you.”

He looked up then, amused. “I am beautiful?”

She inclined her head. “As a winter wolf, my lord,” she said, which pleased him. He seemed relaxed, almost lazy, his eyes heavy-lidded. He was entirely sure of her, Madrigal saw. He wasn’t looking for a gesture; there was not the smallest kernel of uncertainty in him. Thiago got what he wanted. Always.

And would he tonight?

A new tune struck up, and he tilted his head to acknowledge it. “The Emberlin,” he said. “My lady?” He held out his arm to her, and Madrigal went still as prey.

If she took his arm, did that mean it was done, that she accepted him?

But to refuse it would be the grossest of slights; it would shame him, and one simply did not shame the White Wolf.

It was an invitation to dance, and it felt like a trap, and Madrigal stood paralyzed a beat too long. In that beat she saw Thiago’s gaze sharpen. His easy lethargy fell away to be replaced by… she wasn’t sure. It didn’t have time to take form. Disbelief, perhaps, which would have given way in its turn to ice-cold fury had not Nwella, with a panicked squeak, placed her palm in the small of Madrigal’s back and shoved.

Thus propelled, Madrigal took a step, and there was nothing for it. She didn’t take Thiago’s arm so much as she collided with it. He tucked hers beneath his own, proprietary, and escorted her into the dance.

And certainly, as everyone thought, into the future.

He grasped her by the waist, which was the proper form of the Emberlin, in which the men lifted the ladies like offerings to the sky. Thiago’s hands almost completely encircled her slim midriff, his claws on her bare back. She felt the point of each one on her skin.

There was some talk between them—Madrigal must have asked after the Warlord’s health, and Thiago must have answered, but she could scarcely have related what was said. She might have been a sugared shell, for all that she was present in her skin.

What had she done? What had she just done?

She couldn’t even fool herself that it was the product of an instant and Nwella’s tiny shove. She had let herself be dressed like this; she had come here; she had known. She might not have admitted to herself that she knew what she was doing, but of course she had. She had let herself be carried along on the certainty of others. There had been a piquant satisfaction in being chosen… envied. She was ashamed of it now, and of the way she had come here tonight, ready to play the trembling bride, and accept a man she did not love.

But… she had not accepted him, and she thought now that she wouldn’t have. Something had changed.

Nothing had changed, she argued with herself. Love is an element, indeed. The angel coming here, the risk of it! It stunned her, but it changed nothing.

And where was he now? Each time Thiago lifted her she glanced around, but she saw no horse or tiger mask. She hoped he had gone, and was safe.

Thiago, who up until now had seemed satisfied with what his hands could hold, must have sensed that he was not commanding her attention. Bringing her down from a lift, he intentionally let her slip so he had to catch her against him. At the surprise, her wings spontaneously sprang open, like twin spinnakers filling with wind.

“My apologies, my lady,” Thiago said, and he eased her down so her hooves found the ground again, but he didn’t loosen his hold on her. She felt the rigid surface of his muscled chest against her own chest. The wrongness of it stirred a panic that she had to fight down to keep from wrenching herself from his arms. It was hard to fold her wings again, when what she really wanted to do was take flight.

“This gown, is it cut from shadow?” the general asked. “I can barely feel it between my fingers.”

Not for want of trying, thought Madrigal.

“Perhaps it is a reflection of the night sky,” he suggested, “skimmed from a pond?”

She supposed that he was being poetic. Erotic, even. In return, as unerotically as possible—more like complaining of a stain that wouldn’t come out—she said, “Yes, my lord. I went for a dip, and the reflection clung.”

“Well. Then it might slip away like water at any moment. One wonders what, if anything, is beneath it.”

And this is courtship, thought Madrigal. She blushed, and was glad of her mask, which covered all but her lips and chin. Choosing not to address the matter of her undergarments, she said, “It is sturdier than it looks, I assure you.”

She did not intend a challenge, but he took it as one. He reached up to the delicate threads that, like gossamers of a spider’s web, secured the gown around her neck, and gave a short, sharp tug. They gave way easily to his claws, and Madrigal gasped. The dress stayed in place, but a cluster of its fragile fastenings were severed.

“Or perhaps not so sturdy,” said Thiago. “Don’t worry, my lady, I’ll help you hold it up.”

His hand was over her heart, just above her breast, and Madrigal trembled. She was furious at herself for trembling. She was Madrigal of the Kirin, not some blossom caught in a breeze. “That’s kind of you, my lord,” she replied, shrugging off his hand as she stepped away. “But it is time to change partners. I’ll have to manage my gown on my own.”

She had never been so glad to be handed on to a new partner. In this case it was a bull-moose of a man, graceless, who came near to treading on her hooves any number of times. She barely noticed.

A different sort of life, she thought, and the words became a mantra to the melody of the Emberlin. A different sort of life, a different sort of life.

Where was the angel now, she wondered. Yearning suffused her, full as flavor, like chocolate melting on her tongue.

Before she knew it, the bull-moose was returning her to Thiago, who claimed her with his clutching hands and pulled her into him.

“I missed you,” he said. “Every other lady is coarse next to you.”

He talked to her in that bedroom purr of his, but all she could think was how clumsy, how effortful his words seemed after the angel’s.

Twice more Thiago passed her to new partners, and twice she was returned to him in due course. Each time was more unbearable than the last, so that she felt like a runaway returned home against her will.

When, turned over to her next partner, she felt the firm pressure of leather gloves enfold her fingers, it was with a lightness like floating that she let herself be swept away. Misery lifted; wrongness lifted. The seraph’s hands came around her waist and her feet left the ground and she closed her eyes, giving herself over to feeling.

He set her back down, but didn’t let her go. “Hello,” she whispered, happy.

Happy.

“Hello,” he returned, like a shared secret.

She smiled to see his new mask. It was human and comical, with jug ears and a red drunkard’s nose. “Yet another face,” she said. “Are you a magus, conjuring masks?”

“No conjuring needed. There are as many masks to choose from as there are revelers passed out drunk.”

“Well, this one suits you least of all.”

“That’s what you think. A lot can happen in two years.”

She laughed, remembering his beauty, and was seized by a desire to see his face again.

“Will you tell me your name, my lady?” he asked.

She did, and he repeated it—“Madrigal, Madrigal, Madrigal”—like an incantation.

How odd, Madrigal thought, that she should be overcome by such a feeling of… fulfillment… from the simple presence of a man whose name she didn’t know and whose face she couldn’t see. “And yours?” she asked.

“Akiva.”

“Akiva.” It pleased her to say it. She may have been the one whose name meant music, but his sounded like it. Saying it made her want to sing it, to lean out a window and call him home. To whisper it in the dark.

“You’ve done it, then,” he said. “Accepted him.”

Defiantly, she replied, “No. I have not.”

“No? He’s watching you like he owns you.”

“Then you should certainly be elsewhere—”

“Your dress,” he said, noticing it. “It’s torn. Did he—?” Madrigal felt heat, a ripple of anger flashing off him like a draft off a bonfire.

She saw that Thiago was dancing with Chiro, and was staring right between Chiro’s sharp jackal ears at her. She waited until the revolutions of the dance brought Akiva’s broad back between them, shielding her face, before answering. “It’s nothing. I’m not used to wearing such fragile fabric. This was chosen for me. I crave a shawl.”

He was tense with anger but his hands remained gentle at her waist. He said, “I can make you a shawl.”

She cocked her head. “You knit? Well. That’s an unusual accomplishment in a soldier.”

“I don’t knit,” he said, and that’s when Madrigal felt the first feather-soft touch on her shoulder. She didn’t mistake it for Akiva’s touch, because his hands were at her waist. She looked down and saw that a gray-green hummingbird-moth had settled on her, one of the many fluttering overhead, drawn to the expansiveness of lantern light that must seem like a universe to them. The feathers of its tiny bird body gleamed, jewel-like, as its furred moth wings fanned against her skin. It was followed shortly by another, this one pale pink, and another, also pink, with orange eyespots on its lacework wings. More floated out of the air, and in a moment, a fine company of them covered Madrigal’s chest and shoulders.

“There you are, my lady,” said Akiva. “A living shawl.”

She was amazed. “How—? You are a magus.”

“No. It’s a trick, only.”

“It’s magic.”

“Not the most useful magic, herding moths.”

“Not useful? You made me a shawl.” She was awed by it. The magic she knew through Brimstone had little whimsy in it. This was beautiful, both in form—the wings were a dozen twilight colors, and as soft as lamb’s ears—and in purpose. He had covered her. Thiago had torn her dress, and Akiva had covered her.

“They tickle.” She laughed. “Oh no. Oh.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, make them go.” She laughed harder, feeling tiny tongues dart from tiny beaks. “They’re eating my sugar.”

“Sugar?”

The tickling made her wriggle her shoulders. “Make them go. Please.”

He tried to. A few lifted away and made a circle around her horns, but most stayed where they were. “I’m afraid they’re in love,” he said, concerned. “They don’t want to leave you.” He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, “I know just how they feel.”

Her heart, like a fist clenching. The time had come for Akiva to lift her again, and he did, though her shoulders were still cloaked in moths. From above the heads of the crowd, she was grateful to see that Thiago was turned away. Chiro, though, whom he was lifting, saw her and did a double take.

Akiva brought Madrigal back down, and just before her feet touched ground they looked at each other, mask to mask, brown eyes to orange, and a surge went between them. Madrigal didn’t know if it was magic, but most of the hummingbird-moths took flight and swirled away as if carried by a wind. She was down again, her feet moving, her heart racing. She had lost track of the pattern, but she sensed that it was drawing to its conclusion and that, any second, she would come around again to Thiago.

Akiva would have to hand her back into the general’s keeping.

Her heart and body were in revolt. She couldn’t do it. Her limbs were light, ready to flee. Her heartbeat sped to a fast staccato, and the remnants of her living shawl burst from her as if spooked. Madrigal recognized the signs in herself, the readying, the outward calm and inner turmoil, the rushing that filled her mind before a charge in battle.

Something is going to happen.

Nitid, she thought, did you know all along?

“Madrigal?” asked Akiva. Like the hummingbird-moths, he sensed the change in her, her quickened breath, the muscles gone taut where his warm hands encircled her waist. “What is it?”

“I want…” she said, knowing what she wanted, feeling pulled toward it, arching toward it, but hardly knowing how to say it.

“What? What do you want?” Akiva asked, gentle but urgent. He wanted it, too. He inclined his head so that his mask came briefly against her horn, sparking a flare of sensation through her.

The White Wolf was only wingspans away. He would see. If she tried to flee, he would follow. Akiva would be caught.

Madrigal wanted to scream.

And then, the fireworks.

Later, she would recall what Akiva had said about everything lining up, as if it were meant. In all that was to happen, there would be that feeling of inevitability and rightness, and the sense that the universe was conspiring in it. It would be easy. Starting with the fireworks.

Light blossomed overhead, a great and brilliant dahlia, a pinwheel, a star in nova. The sound was a cannonade. Drummers on the battlements. Black powder bursting in the air. The Emberlin broke apart as dancers shucked masks and threw back their heads to look up.

Madrigal moved. She took Akiva’s hand and ducked into the moil of the crowd. She kept low and moved fast. A channel seemed to open for them in the surge of bodies, and they followed it, and it carried them away.





55





CHILDREN OF REGRET



Once upon a time, before chimaera and seraphim, there was the sun and the moons. The sun was betrothed to Nitid, the bright sister, but it was demure Ellai, always hiding behind her bold sister, who stirred his lust. He contrived to come upon her bathing in the sea, and he took her. She struggled, but he was the sun, and he thought he should have what he wanted. Ellai stabbed him and escaped, and the blood of the sun flew like sparks to earth, where it became seraphim—misbegotten children of fire. And like their father, they believed it their due to want, and take, and have.

As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimaera, children of regret.

When the sun came again to the sisters, neither would have him. Nitid put Ellai behind her and protected her, though the sun, still bleeding sparks, knew Ellai was not as defenseless as she seemed. He pled with Nitid to forgive him but she refused, and to this day he follows the sisters across the sky, wanting and wanting and never having, and that will be his punishment, forever.

Nitid is the goddess of tears and life, hunts and war, and her temples are too many to count. It is she who fills wombs, slows the hearts of the dying, and leads her children against the seraphim. Her light is like a small sun; she chases away shadows.

Ellai is more subtle. She is a trace, a phantom moon, and there are only a handful of nights each year when she alone takes the sky. These are called Ellai nights, and they are dark and star-scattered and good for furtive things. Ellai is the goddess of assassins and secret lovers. Temples to her are few, and hidden, like the one in the requiem grove in the hills above Loramendi.

That was where Madrigal took Akiva when they fled the Warlord’s ball.





They flew. He kept his wings veiled, but it didn’t prevent his flying. By land, the requiem grove was unreachable. There were chasms in the hills, and sometimes rope bridges were strung across them—on Ellai nights, when devotees went cloaked to worship at the temple—but tonight there were none, and Madrigal knew they would have the temple to themselves.

They had the night. Nitid was still high. They had hours.

“That is your legend?” Akiva asked, incredulous. Madrigal had told him the story of the sun and Ellai while they flew. “That seraphim are the blood of a rapist sun?”

Madrigal said blithely, “If you don’t like it, take it up with the sun.”

“It’s a terrible story. What a brutal imagination chimaera have.”

“Well. We have had brutal inspiration.”

They reached the grove, and the dome of the temple was just visible through the treetops, silver mosaics glinting patterns through the boughs.

“Here,” said Madrigal, slowing with a backbeat to descend through a gap in the canopy. Her whole body thrilled with night wind and freedom, and with anticipation. In the back of her mind was fear of what would come later—the repercussions of her rash departure. But as she moved through the trees, it was drowned out by leaf rustle and wind music, and by the hish-hish all around. Hish-hish went the evangelines, serpent-birds who drank the night nectar of the requiem trees. In the dark of the grove, their eyes shone silver like the mosaics of the temple roof.

Madrigal reached the ground, and Akiva landed beside her in a gust of warmth. She faced him. They were still wearing their masks. They could have stripped them off while flying, but they hadn’t. Madrigal had been thinking of this moment, when they would stand face-to-face, and she had left her mask on because in her imagining, it was Akiva who took hers off, as she did his.

He must have imagined the same thing. He stepped toward her.

The real world, already a distant thing—just a crackle of fireworks at horizon’s edge—faded away entirely. A high, sweet thrill sang through Madrigal as if she were a lute string. Akiva took off his gloves and dropped them, and when he touched her, fingertips trailing up her arms and neck, it was with his bare hands. He reached behind her head, untied her mask, and lifted it away. Her vision, which had been narrowed all night to what she could see through its small apertures, opened, and Akiva filled her sight, still wearing his comical mask. She heard his soft exhalation and murmur of “so beautiful,” and she reached up and took off his disguise.

“Hello,” she whispered, as she had when they had come together in the Emberlin and happiness had bloomed in her. That happiness was like a spark to a firework, compared with what filled her now.

He was more perfect even than she remembered. At Bullfinch he had lain dying, ashen, slack, and still beautiful for all that. Now, in the full flush of health and the blood-thrum of love, he was golden. He was ardent, gazing at her, hopeful and expectant, inspired, beguiled, glad. He was so alive.

Because of her, he was alive.

He whispered back, “Hello.”

They stared, amazed to be facing each other after two years, as if they were figments conjured out of wishing.

Only touching could make the moment real.

Madrigal’s hands shook as she raised them, and steadied when she laid them against the solidity of Akiva’s chest. Heat pulsed through the fabric of his shirt. The air in the grove was rich enough to sip, full enough to dance with. It was like a presence between them—and then not, as she stepped close.

His arms encircled her and she tilted up her face to whisper, once more, “Hello.”

This time when he said it back, he breathed it against her lips. Their eyes were still open, still wide with wonder, and they only let them flutter shut when their lips finally met and another sense—touch—could take over in convincing them that this was real.





56





THE INVENTION OF LIVING



Once upon a time, there was only darkness, and there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it. They were the Gibborim, and they loved the darkness because it concealed their hideousness. Whenever some other creature contrived to make light, they would extinguish it. When stars were born, they swallowed them, and it seemed that darkness would be eternal.

But a race of bright warriors heard of the Gibborim and traveled from their far world to do battle with them. The war was long, light against dark, and many of the warriors were slain. In the end, when they vanquished the monsters, there were a hundred left alive, and these hundred were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.

They made the rest of the stars, including our sun, and there was no more darkness, only endless light. They made children in their image—seraphim—and sent them down to bear light to the worlds that spun in space, and all was good. But one day, the last of the Gibborim, who was called Zamzumin, persuaded them that shadows were needed, that they would make the light seem brighter by contrast, and so the godstars brought shadows into being.

But Zamzumin was a trickster. He needed only a shred of darkness to work with. He breathed life into the shadows, and as the godstars had made the seraphim in their own image, so did Zamzumin make the chimaera in his, and so they were hideous, and forever after the seraphim would fight on the side of light, and chimaera for dark, and they would be enemies until the end of the world.





Madrigal laughed sleepily. “Zamzumin? That’s a name?”

“Don’t ask me. He’s your forefather.”

“Ah, yes. Ugly Uncle Zamzumin, who made me out of a shadow.”

“A hideous shadow,” said Akiva. “Which explains your hideousness.”

She laughed again, heavy and lazy with pleasure. “I always wondered where I got it. Now I know. My horns are from my father’s side, and my hideousness is from my huge, evil monster uncle.” After a pause, Akiva nuzzling her neck, she added, “I like my story better. I’d rather be made from tears than darkness.”

“Neither is very cheerful,” said Akiva.

“I know. We need a happier myth. Let’s make one up.”

They lay entwined atop their clothes, which they had draped over a bank of shrive moss behind Ellai’s temple, where a delicate rill burbled past. Both moons had slipped beyond the canopy of the trees, and the evangelines were falling silent as the requiem blooms closed their white buds for the night. Soon Madrigal would have to leave, but they were both pushing the thought away, as if they could deny the dawn.

“Once upon a time…” said Akiva, but his voice trailed off as his lips found Madrigal’s throat. “Mmm, sugar. I thought I got it all. Now I’ll have to double-check everywhere.”

Madrigal squirmed, laughing helplessly. “No, no, it tickles!”

But Akiva would retaste her neck, and it didn’t really tickle so much as it tingled, and she stopped protesting soon enough.

It was some time before they got back around to their new myth.

“Once upon a time,” Madrigal murmured later, her face now resting on Akiva’s chest so that the curve of her left horn followed the line of his face, and he could tilt his brow against it. “There was a world that was perfectly made and full of birds and striped creatures and lovely things like honey lilies and star tenzing and weasels—”

“Weasels?”

“Hush. And this world already had light and shadow, so it didn’t need any rogue stars to come and save it, and it had no use for bleeding suns or weeping moons, either, and most important, it had never known war, which is a terrible, wasteful thing that no world ever needs. It had earth and water, air and fire, all four elements, but it was missing the last element. Love.”

Akiva’s eyes were closed. He smiled as he listened, and stroked the soft down of Madrigal’s fur-short hair, and traced the ridges of her horns.

“And so this paradise was like a jewel box without a jewel. There it lay, day after day of rose-colored dawns and creature sounds and strange perfumes, and waited for lovers to find it and fill it with their happiness.” Pause. “The end.”

“The end?” Akiva opened his eyes. “What do you mean, the end?”

She said, smoothing her cheek against the golden skin of his chest, “The story is unfinished. The world is still waiting.”

He said wistfully, “Do you know how to find it? Let’s leave before the sun rises.”

The sun. The reminder stilled Madrigal’s lips from their new course up the curve of Akiva’s shoulder, the one scarred with the reminder of their first meeting, at Bullfinch. She thought how she might have left him bleeding, or worse, finished him, but some ineluctable thing had stopped her so that they might be here, now. And the idea of disentangling, dressing, leaving, gave rise to a reluctance so powerful it hurt.

There was dread, too, of what her disappearance might have stirred up back at Loramendi. An image of Thiago, angry, intruded into her happiness, and she pushed it away, but there was no pushing away the sunrise. In a mournful voice, she said, “I have to go.”

Akiva said, “I know,” and she lifted her face from his shoulder and saw that his wretchedness matched her own. He didn’t ask, “What will we do?” and she didn’t, either. Later they would talk of such things; on that first night, they were shy of the future and, for all that they had loved and discovered in the night, still shy of each other.

Instead, Madrigal reached up for the charm she wore around her neck. “Do you know what this is?” she asked him, untying the cord.

“A bone?”

“Well, yes. It’s a wishbone. You hook your finger around the spur, like this, and we each make a wish and pull. Whoever gets the bigger piece gets their wish.”

“Magic?” Akiva asked, sitting up. “What bird does this come from, that its bones make magic?”

“Oh, it’s not magic. The wishes don’t really come true.”

“Then why do it?”

She shrugged. “Hope? Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”

“And what do you hope for most?”

“You’re not supposed to tell. Come, wish with me.”

She held up the wishbone.

It was part whimsy and part impudence that had made her put the thing on a cord. She had been fourteen, four years in Brimstone’s service, but also now in battle training and feeling full of her own power. She’d come into the shop one afternoon while Twiga was plucking newly minted lucknows from their molds, and she had wheedled for one.

Brimstone had not yet educated her about the harsh reality of magic and the pain tithe, and she still regarded wishing as fun. When he refused her—as he always did, not counting scuppies, which cost a mere pinch of pain to create—she’d had a small, dramatic meltdown in the corner. She couldn’t even remember now what wish had been of such dire importance to her fourteen-year-old self, but she well remembered Issa extracting a bone from the remains of the evening meal—a grim-grouse in sauce—and comforting her with the human lore of the wishbone.

Issa had a wealth of human stories, and it was from her that Madrigal came by her fascination with that race and their world. In defiance of Brimstone, she took the bone and made an elaborate show of wishing on it.

“That’s it?” Brimstone asked, when he heard what petty desire had inspired her tantrum. “You would have wasted a wish on that?”

She and Issa were on the verge of breaking the bone between them, but they stopped.

“You’re not a fool, Madrigal,” Brimstone said. “If there’s something you want, pursue it. Hope has power. Don’t waste it on foolish things.”

“Fine,” she said, cupping the wishbone in her hand. “I’ll save it until my hope meets your high expectations.” She put it on a cord. For a few weeks she made a point of voicing ridiculous wishes aloud and pretending to ponder them.

“I wish I could taste with my feet like a butterfly.”

“I wish scorpion-mice could talk. I bet they know the best gossip.”

“I wish my hair was blue.”

But she never broke the bone. What started as childish defiance turned into something else. Weeks became months, and the longer she went without breaking the wishbone, the more important it seemed that when she did, the wish—the hope, rather—should be worthy of her.

In the requiem grove with Akiva, it finally was.

She formed her wish in her mind, looking him in the eyes, and pulled. The bone broke clean down the middle, and the pieces, when measured against each other, were of exactly the same length.

“Oh. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it means we both get our wishes.”

“Maybe it means that we wished for the same thing.”

Madrigal liked to think that it did. Her wish that first time was simple, focused, and passionate: that she would see him again. Believing she would was the only way she could bring herself to leave.

They rose from their crushed clothes. Madrigal had to wriggle back into the midnight gown like a serpent back into a shed skin. They went into the temple and drank water from the sacred spring that rose in a fount from the earth. She splashed her face with it, too, paid silent homage to Ellai to protect their secret, and vowed to bring candles when she came again.

Because of course she would come again.

Parting was almost like a stage drama, an exaggerated physical impossibility—to fly away and leave Akiva there—the difficulty of which she would not, before this moment, have believed. She kept turning and returning for one last kiss. Her lips, unaccustomed to such wear, felt mussed and obvious, carnal, and she imagined herself red with the evidence of how she had spent her night.

Finally she flew, trailing her mask by one of its long ribbon ties like a companion bird winging at her side, and the dawn-touched land rolled beneath her all the way back to Loramendi. The city lay quiet in the aftermath of celebration, pungent and hazy with the residue of fireworks. She went in by a secret passage to the underground cathedral. Its interlocking gates were keyed by Brimstone’s magic to open to her voice, and there was no guard to see her come in.

It was easy.

That first day she was hesitant, cautious, not knowing what had passed in her absence, or what wrath might await her. But the fates were weaving their unguessable threads, and a spy came that morning from the Mirea coast with news of seraph galleons on the move, so that Thiago was gone from Loramendi almost as soon as Madrigal returned to it.

Chiro asked her where she’d been and she gave a vague lie, and from then on her sister’s manner toward her changed. Madrigal would catch her watching her with a strange, flat affect, only to turn away and busy herself with something as if she hadn’t been watching her at all. She saw her less, too, in part because Madrigal was adrift in her new and secret world, and in part because Brimstone had need of her help in that time, and so she was excused from her other duties, such as they were. Her battalion was not mobilized in response to the seraph troop movements, and she thought, ironically, that she had Thiago to thank for it. She knew that he’d been keeping her from any potential danger that might relieve her of her “purity” before he had a chance to marry her. He must not have had time to countermand the orders before his departure.

So Madrigal spent her days in the shop and cathedral with Brimstone, stringing teeth and conjuring bodies, and she spent her nights—as many as she could—with Akiva.

She brought candles for Ellai, and cones of frangible, the moon’s favorite spice, and she smuggled out food fit for lovers, which they ate with their fingers after love. Honey sweets and sin berries, and roasted birds for their ravenous appetites, and always they remembered to take the wishbone from its place in the bird’s breast. She brought wine in slender bottles, and tiny cups carved from quartz to sip it from, which they rinsed in the sacred spring and stored in the temple altar for the next time.

Over each wishbone, at each parting, they hoped for a next time.

Madrigal often thought, as she sat quietly working in Brimstone’s presence, that he knew what she was doing. His gold-green gaze would rest on her, and she would feel pierced, exposed, and tell herself that she couldn’t go on as she was, that it was madness and she had to end it. Once she even rehearsed what she was going to say to Akiva as she flew to the requiem grove, but as soon as she saw him it went out of her mind, and she slipped without struggle into the luxury of joy, in the place they had come to think of as the world from her story—the paradise waiting for lovers to fill it with happiness.

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.