Daughter of Smoke & Bone

43





SNAP



Such a little thing, and brittle, and the sound it made: a sharp, clean snap.





44





WHOLE



Snap.

Rushing, like wind through a door, and Karou was the door, and the wind was coming home, and she was also the wind. She was all: wind and home and door.

She rushed into herself and was filled.

She let herself in and was full.

She closed again. The wind settled. It was as simple as that.





She was whole.





45





MADRIGAL



She is a child.

She is flying. The air is thin and miserly to breathe, and the world lies so far below that even the moons, playing chase across the sky, are seen from above, like the shining crowns of children’s heads.





She is no longer a child.

She slips down from the sky, through the boughs of requiem trees. It is dark, and the grove is alive with the hish-hish of evangelines, night-loving serpent-birds that drink the requiem blooms. They’re drawn to her—hish-hish—and dart around her horns, stirring the blossoms so pollen sifts down, golden, and settles on her shoulders.


Later, it will numb her lover’s lips as he drinks her in.


She is in battle. Seraphim plummet from the sky, trailing fire.

She is in love. It is bright within her, like a swallowed star.

She mounts a scaffold. A thousand-thousand faces stare at her, but she sees only one.

She kneels on the battlefield beside a dying angel.

Wings enfold her. Skin like fever, love like burning.

She mounts the scaffold. Her hands are tied behind her, her wings pinioned. A thousand-thousand faces stare; feet stamp, hooves; voices shriek and jeer, but one rises above them all. It is Akiva’s. It is a scream to scour ghosts from their nests.

She is Madrigal Kirin, who dared imagine a new way of living.

The blade is a great and shining thing, like a falling moon. It is sudden—





46





SUDDEN



Karou gasped. Her hands flew to her neck and wrapped around it, and it was intact.

She looked at Akiva and blinked, and when she breathed his name, there was a new richness in her voice, an infusion of wonder and love and entreaty that made it seem to rise out of time. As it did. “Akiva,” she breathed with the fullness of her self.

With longing, with anguish, he watched her, and waited.

She dropped her hands from her neck and they trembled as she stripped off her gloves to reveal her palms. She stared at them.

They stared back.

They stared back—two flat indigo eyes—and she understood what Brimstone had done.





She finally understood everything.





Once upon a time,

there were two moons, who were sisters.





Nitid was the goddess of tears and life,

and the sky was hers.

No one worshipped Ellai but secret lovers.





47





EVANESCENCE



Madrigal ascended the scaffold. Her hands were tied behind her, her wings pinioned so she couldn’t fly away. It was an unnecessary precaution: Overhead arched the iron bars of the Cage. The bars were there to keep seraphim out, not chimaera in, but today they would have served that purpose. Madrigal was not going anywhere but to her death.

“That is unnecessary,” Brimstone had objected when Thiago ordered the pinion. His voice had come out as a scraping almost too low to hear, like something being dragged across the ground.

Thiago, the White Wolf, the general, the Warlord’s son and right hand, had ignored him. He knew it was unnecessary. He wanted to humiliate her. Madrigal’s death wasn’t enough for him. He wanted her abject, penitent. He wanted her on her knees.

He would be disappointed. He could bind her hands and wings, he could force her to her knees, and he could watch her die, but it was not in his power to make her repent.

She was not sorry for what she had done.

On the palace balcony, the Warlord sat in state. He had the head of a stag, his antlers tipped in gold. Thiago was in his place at his father’s side. The seat at the Warlord’s left hand belonged to Brimstone, and was empty.

A thousand-thousand eyes were on Madrigal, and the cacophony of the crowd was sharpening to something dark, the voices cresting to jeers. Feet stamped, thunderous. There had not been an execution in the plaza in living memory, but those gathered knew what to do, as if hate were an atavism just waiting to resurface.

A shrieked accusation: “Angel-lover!”

Some in the crowd were stricken, uncertain. Madrigal was a beauty, a joy—could she really have done this unthinkable thing?

And then Akiva was brought out. It was Thiago’s order that he be forced to watch. The guards knocked him to his knees on a platform opposite hers, from which his view would be unobscured. Even bloodied and shackled and weak from torture, he was glorious. His wings flared radiant; his eyes were fire, and they were fierce, and fixed on her, and Madrigal was filled with a warmth of memories and tenderness, and with sharp regret that her body would never again know his, her mouth never again meet his, that their dreams would never come to their fruition.

Her eyes filled with tears. She smiled across space to him, and it was a look of such unmistakable love that no one watching could continue to doubt her guilt.

Madrigal Kirin was guilty of treason—of loving the enemy—sentenced to death and worse, a sentence that had not been handed down for hundreds of years: evanescence.

Unmaking.

She was alone on the scaffold with the hooded executioner. Head held high, she stepped toward the block and sank to her knees, and it was then that Akiva started to scream. His voice soared over the pandemonium—a scream to scour the souls of all gathered, a sound to drive ghosts from their nests.

It drilled through Madrigal’s heart, and she yearned to gather him in her arms. She knew Thiago wanted her to break and scream and beg, but she wouldn’t. There was no point. There was not the slightest hope of life. Not for her.

One last look to her love, and she laid her head down on the block. It was black rock, like everything in Loramendi, and it was hot as an anvil against her cheek. Akiva screamed, and Madrigal’s heart answered it. Her pulse raced—she was about to die—but she kept calm. She had a plan, and it was what she held on to as the executioner raised his blade—a great and shining thing, like a falling moon—because she had work ahead of her, and she couldn’t afford to lose her focus. She wasn’t finished yet.

After she died, she was going to save Akiva’s life.