by Laini Taylor
She thrust it at Brimstone. “Here. Take it, trample it, throw it away. There is no hope.”
“If I believed that,” Brimstone said, “I wouldn’t be here now.”
What did that mean?
“What do I do, child, day after day, but fight against a tide? Wave after wave upon the shore, each wave licking farther up the sand. We won’t win, Madrigal. We can’t beat the seraphim.”
“What? But—”
“We can’t win this war. I’ve always known it. They are too strong. The only reason we’ve held them off this long is because we burned the library.”
“The library?”
“Of Astrae. It was the archive of the seraph magi. The fools kept all their texts in one place. They were so jealous of their power, they didn’t allow copies. They didn’t want any upstarts to challenge them, so they hoarded their knowledge, and they took only apprentices they could control, and kept them close. That was their first mistake, keeping all their power in one place.”
Madrigal listened, rapt. Brimstone, telling her things. History. Secrets. Almost afraid to break the spell, she asked, “What was their next mistake?”
“Forgetting to fear us.” He was silent a moment. Kishmish hopped back and forth from one of his horns to the other. “They needed to believe we were animals, to justify the way they used us.”
“Slaves,” she whispered, hearing Issa’s voice in her head.
“We were pain thralls. We were the source of their power.”
“Torture.”
“They told themselves we were dumb beasts, as if that made it all right. They had five thousand beasts in their pits who weren’t dumb at all, but they believed their own fiction. They didn’t fear us, and that made it easy.”
“Made what easy?”
“Destroying them. Half the guards didn’t even understand our language, were happy to believe it was just grunts and roars we screamed in our agony. They were fools, and we killed them, and we burned everything. Without magic the seraphim lost their supremacy, and all these years, they have not recovered it. But they will, even without the library. Your seraph is proof that they are rediscovering what they lost.”
“But… No. Akiva’s magic, it isn’t like that—” She thought of the living shawl he’d made her. “He would never use it as a weapon. He only wanted peace.”
“Magic isn’t a tool of peace. The price is too high. The only way I can keep using it, cycling souls through death after death, is by believing that we are keeping alive until… until the world can be remade.”
Her words.
He cleared his throat. It sounded like gravel churning. Was it possible, was he telling her that he…?
He said, “I dream it, too, child.”
Madrigal stared.
“Magic won’t save us. The power it would take to conjure on such a scale, the tithe would destroy us. The only hope… is hope.” He still held the wishbone. “You don’t need tokens for it — it’s in your heart or nowhere. And in your heart, child, it has been stronger than I have ever seen.” He slipped the bone into his breast pocket, then rose from his lion-haunched crouch and turned. Madrigal’s heart cried out at the thought that he was leaving her alone.
But he only paced to the small window on the far wall and looked out. “It was Chiro, you know,” he said, an abrupt change of subject.
Madrigal knew.
Chiro, who had the wings to follow her, and who hid in the grove, and saw.
Chiro, who, like Thiago’s lapdog, betrayed her for a pat on the head.
“Thiago promised her human aspect,” Brimstone said. “As if it were a promise he could keep.”
Stupid Chiro, thought Madrigal. If that was her hope, she had chosen her alliance poorly. “You won’t honor his promise?”
With a dark look, Brimstone replied, “She should make best efforts to never need another body. I have a string of moray eel teeth I never thought I would be tempted to use.”
Moray eel? Madrigal couldn’t tell if he was serious. Probably. She felt almost sorry for her sister. Almost. “To think I wasted diamonds on her.”
“You were true to her, even if she was not to you. Never repent of your own goodness, child. To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.”
“Strength,” she said with a little laugh. “I gave her strength, and look what she did with it.”
He scoffed. “Chiro is not strong. Her body may have been wrought with diamonds, but her soul within will be a soft mollusk thing, wet and shrinking.”
It was an unlovely image, but it felt just about right.
Brimstone added, “And easily pushed aside.”
Madrigal cocked her head. “What?”
Out in the corridor: sounds. Was someone coming? Was it time? Brimstone spun toward her. “The revenant smoke,” he said, quick and clipped. “You know what is in it.”
She blinked. Why was he talking about the smoke? There would be none of it for her. But he was looking at her so intently. She nodded. Of course she knew. The incense was arum and feverfew, rosemary, and asafetida resin for the sulfur smell.
“You know why it works,” he said.
“It makes a path for the soul to follow, to the vessel. The thurible, or the body.”
“Is it magic?”
Madrigal hesitated. She’d helped Twiga make it often enough. “No,” she said, distracted, as the sounds in the corridor grew louder. “It’s just smoke. Just a path for the soul.”
Brimstone nodded. “Not unlike your wishbone. It isn’t magic, just a focus for the will.” He paused. “A powerful will might not even need it.”
His look burned at her, steady. He was trying to tell her something. What?
Madrigal’s hands started to shake. She didn’t understand, quite, but something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.
At the door, the bolts drew back. Madrigal’s heart pounded. Her wings made the ineffectual fluttering of a caged bird. The door opened and Thiago framed himself in it like a picture. As ever, he was clad all in white, and Madrigal realized for the first time why he wore white: It was a canvas for the blood of his victims, and now his surcoat was livid with it.
With Akiva’s blood.
Thiago’s face flashed anger when he saw Brimstone in the room. But he didn’t risk a battle of wills he couldn’t win. He inclined his head to the sorcerer and faced Madrigal. “It’s time,” he said. His voice, perversely, was soft, as if he were coaxing a child to sleep.
She said nothing, fought for calm. Thiago wasn’t fooled. His wolf senses could smell the tang of her fear. He smiled, turning to the guards who awaited his command. “Bind her hands. Pinion her wings.”
“That is unnecessary.” Brimstone.
The guards hesitated.
Thiago faced the resurrectionist and the two stared at each other, their enmity confined to the flaring of nostrils, clenching of jaws. The Wolf repeated his order in precise syllables, and the guards scurried to carry it out: into the cell, wrestling Madrigal’s wings together and piercing them through with iron clips to secure them. Her hands were easier; she didn’t struggle. Once she was fully trussed, they shoved her toward the door.
Brimstone had one last surprise. He told Thiago, “I have designated someone to bless Madrigal’s evanescence.”
The blessing was a sacred ritual that she had assumed she would be denied. Thiago, apparently, had assumed the same. He narrowed his eyes and said, “You think you’re getting anyone close enough to glean her—”
Brimstone cut him short. “Chiro,” he said. Madrigal flinched. To Thiago, he said, “I can’t imagine you would object to her.”
Thiago did not. “Fine.” To the guards, he said, “Go.”
Chiro. It was so deeply wrong, so profane, that Madrigal’s betrayer should be the one to grant her soul peace, that for an instant she thought she had misconstrued everything that Brimstone had just said to her, that this was one final punishment heaped upon the others.
Then he smiled. A wily uplift of the line of his stern ram’s mouth, and it struck her. It exploded behind her eyes.
Soft mollusk thing. Easily pushed aside.
The guard gave Madrigal another shove and she was out the door, her mind racing to encompass this wild new notion in the short time that was left to her.
60
IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN
It had never been done, not that she had heard of. Never even speculated on, and it surely would not have been possible with a natural body. A body accretes to its soul like nacre to a grain of sand, forming a perfect, unified entity that only death can unwork. There is no gap within a natural body for guests, or for hijackers. But Chiro’s body was a vessel, as Madrigal well knew, having made it herself.
She might not need smoke to guide her, but she did need proximity. She couldn’t move through space; she had no control or propulsion. Chiro would have to come to her, and, because Brimstone had selected her to perform the blessing, she did. With heavy steps up the scaffold to kneel beside the pieces that had been her sister. Shaking, she raised her eyes to the air above the body.
She whispered, “I’m sorry, Mad. I didn’t know it would be evanescence. I’m so sorry.”
Madrigal, who could not block out the sight of her own severed head or the memory of Akiva’s screams, was unmoved. What had Chiro hoped for? A lesser sentence? Resurrection of low aspect, perhaps? Maybe she hadn’t been thinking of Madrigal at all, except as a means of drawing Thiago’s attention. Love made a person do strange things, as Madrigal well knew. There was nothing stranger than what she was about to do.
There was no smoke to guide her. As Brimstone had said, she wouldn’t need it. With a powerful thrust of will, she funneled herself into the body that she had made with such loving care.
There was even less resistance than she had expected — a sensation of surprise, a feeble struggle. Chiro’s soul was a sullen thing made weak by envy. It was no match for Madrigal’s, and subsided almost at once. It wasn’t expelled, only shoved writhing into its own depths. The vessel remained, to all eyes, Chiro.
She trembled violently, performing the blessing, but no one watching thought it strange — her sister lay dead at her feet. And if she was rigid descending the scaffold, her movements jerky, no one questioned that, either.
There was no suspicion because there was no precedent. After Chiro left, there was nothing tethered to the broken body on the platform. The soldiers who stood watch the next three days guarded only meat and air — no soul.
The only one who could have sensed its lack was Brimstone, and he wasn’t inclined to tell.
* * *
It was through Chiro’s eyes that Madrigal had her last sight of Akiva. He was on a rack of sorts, his wings and arms wrenched back and secured by rings to the wall. His head had fallen forward, and when she entered his cell, he lifted it to look at her with dead eyes.
The whites were full bloodred from the effort at magic that had burst capillaries, but it wasn’t only that. The gold in them — the exquisite fire — had burned low, and Madrigal had the impression of a soul in cinders. It was the worst thing yet — worse even than her own death.
Now, in Marrakesh, as Karou patched together memories of both her lives, she remembered that same deadness from the first time she had seen him. She had wondered what had happened to make him look like that, and now she knew. It was a splinter in her heart to think that all these years that she had been growing up in a new body, a world apart, childish and blithe and spending wishes on foolish things, he had been soul-dead, grieving for her.
If only he could have known.
In the prison cell, she had rushed to free his arms. She was glad then of Chiro’s diamond strength. Akiva’s chains were pulled so taut that his arms must have been straining at their sockets. She feared that he would be too weak to fly, or to craft the glamour that would enable him to make it out of the city unseen, but she shouldn’t have feared. She knew Akiva’s power. When the chains fell slack, he didn’t slump off the rack. He sprang like a predator that had been lying in wait. He turned on her, seeing only Chiro and in no state to wonder why this stranger had set him free. He hurled her against the wall before she had a chance to speak, and she was engulfed in the darkness of unconsciousness.
The memories ended there. Karou wouldn’t know how Brimstone had found and gleaned her soul until she could ask him. She only knew that he had, because she was here.
“I didn’t know,” Akiva said. He was stroking her hair, smoothing it over the contours of her head and neck down to her shoulders, lovingly and lingeringly. “If I had known he saved you…” He clutched her tight against him.
“I couldn’t tell you it was me,” Karou said. “How would you have believed me? You didn’t know about resurrection.”
He swallowed. Said quietly, “I did know.”
“What? How?”
They were still standing together at the foot of the bed. Karou was lost in sensation. The sifting together of memories. The simple, profound joy of being with Akiva. The curious dueling familiarity and… lack. Her body: her seventeen-years skin, utterly hers, and also new. The absence of wings, the flexion of human feet with all their complicated muscles, her hornless head light as wind.
And there was something else, a kind of buzzing, an alarm, an awareness she couldn’t yet quite finger.
“Thiago,” Akiva said. “He… he liked to talk while he… Well. He gloated. He told me everything.”
Karou could believe that. Another set of memories slotted into sense: the Wolf awakening on the stone table as she — Karou — held his hamsa-marked hand in her own. He might have killed her then, she thought, if not for Brimstone. She understood Brimstone’s fury now. All these years he’d hidden her from Thiago, and she had waltzed right down to the cathedral and held his hand. Which had been every bit as beastly as she remembered.
She nestled against Akiva. “I could have said good-bye, then,” she said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I only wanted to see you free.”
“Karou…”
“It’s okay. We’re here now.” She breathed the remembered smell of him, warm and smoky, and set her lips against his throat. It was heady. Akiva was alive. She was alive. So much lay ahead of them. Her lips made a trail up his throat to the line of his jaw, remembering, rediscovering. She was soft in his arms the way she had once known — that marvelous way bodies can melt together and erase all negative space. She found his lips. She had to take his head in her hands to angle it down to hers.
Why did she have to do that?
Why… why wasn’t Akiva kissing her back?
Karou opened her eyes. He was looking at her, not with desire but… anguish.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?” A terrible thought came to her and she stepped back, letting him go and hugging her arms around herself. “Is it… is it because I’m not pure? Because I’m a… a made thing?”
Whatever was plaguing him, her question made it worse. “No,” he said, wretched. “How could you think that? I’m not Thiago. You promised to remember, Karou. You promised to remember that I love you.”
“Then what is it? Akiva, why are you acting so weird?”
He said, “If I’d known… Oh, Karou. If I had known that Brimstone saved you…” He raked his fingers through his hair and began to pace the room. “I thought he was with them, against you, and it was worse, his betrayal, because you loved him like a father—”
“No. He’s like us, Akiva. He wants peace, too. He can help us—”
His look stopped her. So desolate. He said, “I didn’t know. If I’d known, Karou, I would have believed in redemption. I never… I never would have…”
Karou’s heartbeat went arrhythmic. Something was very, very wrong. She knew it, and was afraid of it, didn’t want to hear it, needed to hear it. “Never would have what? Akiva, what?”
He halted his pacing, stood with his hands on his head, gripping it. “In Prague,” he said, forcing ou
t each word. “You asked how I found you.”
Karou remembered. “You said it wasn’t difficult.”
He reached into his pocket and produced a folded paper. With palpable reluctance, he handed it to her.
“What—?” she began, but stopped. Her hands started to shake uncontrollably, so that as she unfolded it, the page tore along a well-worn crease, right down the center of her self-portrait, and she was holding two halves of herself, and the plea, in her own script, If found, please return.
It was from her sketchbook, which she had left in Brimstone’s shop. Comprehension was instant and blinding. There was only one way Akiva could have this.
She gasped. Everything clicked into place. The black handprints, the blue infernos that had devoured the portals and all their magic, putting an end to Brimstone’s trade. And the echo of Akiva’s voice, telling her why.
To end the war.
When she had dreamed with him, long ago, of ending the war, they had meant by bringing peace. But oh, peace wasn’t the only way to end a war.
She saw it all. Thiago had told Akiva the chimaera’s deepest secret, believing it would die with him, but she—she—had turned him loose with it.
“What have you done?” she asked, unbelieving, her voice breaking.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Black handprints, blue infernos.
An end to resurrection.
Akiva’s hands, his hands that had held her in dance, in sleep, and in love, his knuckles that she had kissed and forgiven — they were newly etched. They were full. She cried out, “No!” the word pulled long and pleading, and then she was grabbing his shoulders, nails digging in, grabbing and holding him and forcing him to look at her.
“Tell me!” she screamed.
In a husk of a voice — such pure sorrow, such deep shame — Akiva said, “They’re dead, Karou. It’s too late. They’re all dead.”
