Daughter of Smoke & Bone

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

I F F OUND , P LEASE R ETURN

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 fu

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.