Страница 62 из 77
“Come on,” said Chiro, shaking her head as if Madrigal were a lost cause. “Nwella will have something you can wear, but you’ll have to take what she gives you, and no complaining.”
“All right,” sighed Madrigal. “To the baths, then. To make ourselves shiningly clean.”
Like vegetables, she thought, before they go in the stew.
50
S UGARED
“No,” said Madrigal, looking in the mirror. “Oh no. No no. No.”
Nwella did indeed have a gown for her. It was midnight-blue shot silk, a form-skimming sheath so fine it felt like a touch could dissolve it. It was arrayed with tiny crystals that caught the light and beamed it back like stars, and the whole back was open, revealing the long white cha
“Remember what I said: no complaining.”
“I take it back. I reserve my right to complain.”
“Too late. It’s your fault, anyway. You had a week to get a gown. You see what happens when you dither? Others make your choices for you.”
Madrigal thought that she wasn’t talking about the gown. “What? Is this a punishment, then?”
At her other side, Nwella chuffed. She was a frail thing of lizard aspect who had been with Madrigal and Chiro at school, but parted from them when they went to battle training and she into royal service. “Punishment? Making you stu
Madrigal did look, and what she saw was skin. The most delicate interweaving of individual silk strands climbed around her neck, invisibly holding the gown to her body. “I look naked.”
“You look astonishing,” said Nwella, who was seamstress to the Warlord’s younger wives, the very youngest of whom were, to put it kindly, unyoung. The Warlord had seen fit to stop imposing himself on new brides some centuries earlier. Like Brimstone, he was of natural flesh, and looked it. Thiago, his firstborn, was some hundreds of years old, though he wore the skin of a young man, and the hamsas to go with it.
As Madrigal had said, the general’s fetish for purity was hypocrisy: He himself had been through many resurrections, and his hypocrisy was twofold—not only was he not “pure,” he had not been born high-human.
The Warlord was Hartkind, with a stag’s head: creature aspect, as were his wives, and so had been Thiago, originally. It wasn’t that it was unusual for a revenant to resurrect in a body unlike his or her natural one; Brimstone couldn’t always match them. It was a matter of time and tooth supply. But Thiago’s bodies were another matter. They were crafted to his precise specifications, and even before they were needed, so that he could examine them for flaws and give his approval. She had seen it once: Thiago checking over a naked replica of himself—the husk that would receive him the next time he died. It had been macabre.
She tested her gown with little tugs, feeling certain that too heavy a hand in dancing could pull it clean off. “Nwella,” she implored, “don’t you have something more… substantial?”
“Not for you,” Nwella said. “A figure like that, why would you want to cover it?” She whispered something to Chiro.
“Stop conspiring,” Madrigal said. “Can’t I have a shawl at least?”
“No,” they said together.
“I feel almost as naked as at the baths.”
She had never in her life felt so exposed as when she’d walked through the steam and thigh-deep water with Chiro that afternoon. Everyone knew now that she was Thiago’s choice, and every pair of eyes in the women’s bath had inspected her, so that she wanted to sink down out of sight, leaving just her horns spiking through the surface of the water.
“Let Thiago see what he’s getting,” Nwella said, devilish.
Madrigal stiffened. “Who said he’s getting it?” It, she heard herself say. The word felt appropriate, as if she were some inanimate thing, a gown on a hanger. “Me,” she corrected. “Who said he’s getting me?”
Nwella laughed off the idea that Madrigal might refuse him. “Here.” She came forward with a mask. “We will permit you to cover your face.” It was a bird with its wings spread, carved of lightweight kaza wood, black and embellished with dark feathers that fa
“Ah. Good. No one will know who I am now,” Madrigal remarked, wry. Her wings and horns eluded disguise.
The Warlord’s ball was a masquerade, a “come-as-you-aren’t.” Chimaera of human aspect wore the faces of creatures, while those of beast aspect wore carven human likenesses, exaggerated to ridiculous proportion. It was the one night of the year for folly and pretend, the one night that fell outside normal life, but for Madrigal, this year, it was anything but. It was, rather, a night to decide her life.
With a sigh, she gave in to her friends’ ministrations. She sat on a stool and let them define her eyes with kohl, rouge her lips with rose-petal paste, and string lengths of ultrafine gold chain between her horns in tiers, suspended with tiny crystal drops that winked in the light. Chiro and Nwella giggled as if they were preparing a bride for her wedding night, and it struck Madrigal that it well could be, if not in ceremony, at least in one way.
If she accepted Thiago, it was unlikely she would be returning to the barracks tonight.
She shivered, imagining his clawed hands on her flesh. What would it be like? She had never made love—in that way, too, she was “pure,” as she imagined Thiago must know. She thought about it, of course she thought about it. She was of age; her body coursed with urges, just like anyone’s, and chimaera weren’t puritanical about sex. Madrigal had just never come to a moment when it had felt right.
“There. You’re finished,” said Chiro. She and Nwella pulled Madrigal to her feet and stood back from her to survey their work. “Oh,” breathed Nwella. There was a pause, and when Chiro spoke again, her voice was flat. She said, “You’re beautiful.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment.
After Kalamet, when Chiro had awakened in the cathedral, Madrigal was there beside her. “You’re all right,” she assured her, as Chiro’s eyes fluttered open. It was Chiro’s first resurrection, and revenants said it could be disorienting. Madrigal hoped that in matching the new body so closely to her sister’s original flesh, she could ease her transition. “You’re all right,” she said again, clasping Chiro’s hand with its hamsa, symbol of her new status. She told her, “Brimstone let me make your body. I used diamonds.” Conspiratorial. “Don’t tell anyone.”
She helped Chiro sit up. The fur of her cat haunches was soft, and the flesh of her human arms was, too. Jerkily, Chiro touched her new skin—hips, ribs, human breasts. Her hand climbed eagerly up her neck to her head, felt the fur there, and the jackal muzzle, and froze.
The sound she made was like choking, and at first Madrigal thought it was only the problem of a newly made throat and a mouth that had never yet formed speech. But it wasn’t.