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Chiro threw off Madrigal’s hand. “You did this?”
Madrigal backed up a step. “It’s… it’s perfect,” she said, faltering. “It’s almost exactly like your real—”
“And that’s all I merit? Beast aspect? Thank you, my sister. Thank you.”
“Chiro—”
“You couldn’t have made me high-human? What are a few teeth to you? To Brimstone?”
The idea had never even entered Madrigal’s mind. “But… Chiro. This is you.”
“Me.” Her voice was changed; it had a deeper tone than her original voice, and Madrigal couldn’t tell how much of this was its newness, but whatever else it was, it was acid, and ugly. “Would you want to be me?”
Hurt and confused, Madrigal said, “I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Chiro. “You’re beautiful.”
Later, she had apologized. It was the shock, she said. The new body had felt tight, unyielding; she could barely breathe. Once she grew accustomed to it, she praised its strength, its lithe movement. She could fly faster than before; her movements were whip-quick, her teeth and eyesight sharper. She said she was like a violin that had been tuned—the same, but better.
“Thank you, my sister,” she said, and seemed to mean it.
But Madrigal remembered the spiteful way she had said, “You’re beautiful.” She sounded like that now.
Nwella was more exuberant. “So beautiful!” she sang. A frown creased her scaled brow, and she plucked at the charm that hung around Madrigal’s neck. “This, of course, will have to go,” she said, but Madrigal pulled away.
“No,” she said, closing her hand around it.
“Just for tonight, Mad,” coaxed Nwella. “It just isn’t fit for the occasion.”
“Leave it,” said Madrigal, and that was that. The tone of her voice dissuaded Nwella from pressing the issue.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh, and Madrigal spilled her wishbone from her cupped palm so that it settled back in its place, where her clavicles met. It wasn’t beautiful or fine, just a bone, and she saw plainly that it did not do justice to her decolletage, but she didn’t care. It was what she wore.
Nwella regarded it, pained, and then turned to rummage in her drawer of cosmetic tubes and ointments. “Here, then. At the very least.” She came up with a silver bowl and a big soft brush, and before Madrigal knew what was happening Nwella had dusted her chest, neck, and shoulders with something that glittered.
“What—?”
“Sugar,” she said, giggling.
“Nwella!” Madrigal tried to brush it off, but it was dust-fine and it clung: sugar powder, which girls wore when they pla
“You don’t look like a soldier now,” said Nwella.
It was true. She looked like a girl who had made her choice. Had she? Everyone thought she had, which almost felt like the same thing. But it wasn’t too late. She could decide not to go to the ball at all—that would send quite the opposite message of showing up sugared. She had only to decide what she wanted.
She held herself framed in the mirror for a long beat. She felt dizzy, as if the future were rushing at her.
It was, though at that moment, she could have no notion that it was coming for her with invisible wings and eyes that no mask could disguise, and that her choices, such as they were, would soon be swept away like dust on a wingbeat, leaving in their place the unthinkable.
Love.
“Let’s go,” she said, and she linked arms with Chiro and Nwella, and went out to meet it.
51
T HE S ERPENTINE
Loramendi’s main thoroughfare, the Serpentine, became a processional route on the Warlord’s birthday. The custom was to dance its length, moving from partner to masked partner all the way to the agora, the city’s gathering place. The ball was there, under thousands of lanterns strung like stars from the bars of the Cage, making it, for a night, a miniature world with its own firmament.
Madrigal plunged into the crowd with her friends, as she had in years past, but this year, she realized at once, things were different.
She might have been masked, but she was not disguised—her appearance was far too distinctive—and she might have been sugared, but no one took the sparkle of her shoulders as an invitation. They knew she was not for them. In the wild merriment of the street, she was as apart as if she were drifting along in a crystal sphere.
Again and again, Chiro and Nwella were swept into strangers’ embraces and kissed, mask to mask. That was tradition: a spi
She is Thiago’s.
No one touched her. She drifted through the revelry alone.
Where was Thiago, she wondered, her eyes darting from mask to mask. She would get a glimpse of long white hair or wolf aspect and her heart would jump at the thought that it was him, but each time it was someone else. The long white hair belonged to an old woman, and Madrigal had to laugh at her own skittishness.
Every citizen of Loramendi was in the streets, but somehow space opened around her and she moved alone, following in her friends’ wake toward the agora. Thiago would be there, she guessed, probably standing with his father on the palace balcony, watching the crowd surge as the procession spilled wave after wave of chimaera into the square.
He would be watching for her.
Unconsciously, she slowed her steps. Nwella and Chiro went whirling on ahead in their masks, kissing. For the most part they just touched the lips of their masks to the lips—beaks, muzzles, maws—of other masks, but there were real kisses, too, with no regard to aspect. Madrigal knew what it was like from previous festivals, the grasswine breath of strangers, the nuzzle of a tiger’s whiskered jaw, or a dragon’s, or a man’s. But not tonight.
Tonight, she was in isolation—eyes were on her but not hands, and certainly not lips. The Serpentine seemed a very long stretch to go alone.
Then someone took her elbow. The touch jarred her, coming as it did to end her apartness. Thinking it must be Thiago, she stiffened.
But no. The one at her side wore a horse mask of molded leather that covered his true head completely. Thiago would never wear a horse head, or any other mask to conceal his face. He wore the same thing to the ball every year: a real wolf’s head atop his own, its lower jaw removed so that it made a sort of headdress, its eyes replaced with blue glass, dead and staring.
So who was this? Someone foolish enough to touch her? Well then. He was tall, a head above even her own height, so that Madrigal had to tilt her face up, laying her hand on his shoulder, to nudge his horse muzzle with the beak of her bird mask. A “kiss,” to prove that she still belonged to herself.