Daughter of Smoke & Bone

40





ALMOST LIKE MAGIC



Back then, it had been Madrigal’s existence that had called to him across space. Now it was Karou’s. Then, Loramendi had been his destination, the caged city of the beasts. Now it was Marrakesh. Once again he left Hazael and Liraz behind, but this time he didn’t leave them in ignorance. They knew the truth about him.

What they would do about it, he couldn’t guess.

Liraz had called him a traitor, said he made her sick. Hazael had just stared, pale and repulsed.

But they had let him go without bloodshed—his or theirs—and that was the best he had hoped for. Whether they would tell their commander—or even the emperor—come back hunting for him, or cover for him, he couldn’t know. He couldn’t think about it. Flying over the Mediterranean with the wishbone in his hand, his thoughts belonged to Karou. He imagined her waiting for him at the mad Moroccan square where he’d first locked eyes with her. He could picture her so clearly, down to the way she would keep lifting her hand to her throat, reaching for the wishbone before she remembered, with a fresh pang every time, that she didn’t have it.

He had it. Everything it meant, to the past, to the future, was right here in his hand—almost like magic, as Madrigal had told him once.

Until the night that he had finally seen Madrigal again, he hadn’t even known what a wishbone was. She wore one on a cord around her neck, so incongruous a thing against her silk gown, her silken skin.

“It’s a wishbone,” she’d told him, holding it out. “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 had asked. “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.”

He was lost in her. The radiance of her eyes kindled something in him that made him aware he had passed his life in a haze of half-living, at best half-feeling. “And what do you hope for most?” he asked, wanting—whatever it was—to give it to her.

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

Akiva reached out and hooked one finger around the bone’s slender spur. The thing he wished for most was a thing he had never wished for at all, not until he had discovered her. And it came true that night, and many nights after. A brief and shining span of happiness, it was the pivot point around which his whole life spun. Everything he had done since, it had been because he had loved Madrigal, and lost her, and lost himself.

And now? He was flying toward Karou with the truth in his hand, this thing so fragile, “almost like magic.”

Almost? Not this time.

This wishbone seethed magic. Brimstone’s signature was as powerful on it as on the portals that set Akiva’s teeth on edge. In the bone was the truth, and with it, the power to make Karou hate him.

And if it were to vanish—such a tiny thing to drop in an ocean—what then? Karou never needed to know anything. He could have her then; he could love her. More to the point, if there were no wishbone, she could love him.

It was a poisonous thought, and it filled Akiva with self-loathing. He tried to quell it, but the bone taunted him. She never has to know, it seemed to say, lying there on his open hand. And the Mediterranean far below, dappled and sun-dazzled and fathoms deep, affirmed it.

She never has to know.