Daughter of Smoke and Bone (36 page)

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
.

41

A
LEPH

Karou was exactly where Akiva had imagined her to be, at a cafe table at the edge of the Jemaa el-Fna, and also as he had imagined, she was unquiet in the absence of the wishbone. Once, her fingers would have needed no occupation but the holding of her pencil. Now her sketchbook lay open before her, white pages blinding in the North African sun, and she fidgeted, unfocused, unable to keep her eyes from searching the plaza for Akiva.

He would come, she told herself, and he would bring back the wishbone. He would.

If he was alive.

Would they have harmed him, those other seraphim? It had been two days already. What if…? No. He was alive. To imagine him otherwise… Karou’s mind couldn’t approach it. Absurdly, she kept remembering Kishmish, years ago, gulping down that hummingbird-moth—the stark suddenness of it: alive, not alive. Just like that.

No.

Her thoughts veered away, finding focus on the wishbone. What did it mean, that it had had that effect on Akiva? And… what could he have to tell her that had made him fall to his knees? The mystery of her self took on a dark tint and she felt a shiver of apprehension. She couldn’t help remembering Zuzana and Mik, the looks on their faces—stunned and afraid. Of
her
. She had called Zuzana from her airport layover in Casablanca. They had argued.

“What are you doing?” Zuzana had demanded to know. “Let’s not regress to the time of mysterious errands, Karou.”

There wasn’t much point being cagey now, so she’d told her. Zuzana, unsurprisingly, had taken Akiva’s line that it was too dangerous, and Brimstone wouldn’t want it.

“I want you to take my flat,” said Karou. “I already called the landlord. He has a key for you, and it’s paid for the rest of—”

“I don’t want your stupid flat,” Zuzana said. Zuzana, who boarded with a cabbage-cooking elder aunt and joked not infrequently about killing Karou just
for
her flat. “Because
you
live in it. You are not just going to vanish like this, Karou. This isn’t some goddamn Narnia book.”

There was no reasoning with her. The conversation ended badly, and Karou was left sitting with her phone warm in her hands and no one else to call. It struck her with terrible clarity how few people were in her life. She thought of Esther, her fake grandmother, and that just made her sad, that her mind would default to a stand-in. She almost tossed the phone in the trash right there—she didn’t have the charger, anyway—but was very glad the next morning that she hadn’t. It vibrated in her pocket at the cafe, on the dregs of its juice, and disclosed the message:

No. Food. Anywhere. Thanks a lot for starving me. *croak expire*

She laughed, and held her face, and even cried a little, and when an old man asked her if she was okay, she wasn’t quite sure.

Two days she had been sitting here now; two nights she had tried to sleep in her rented room nearby. She had tracked down Razgut, just to know where he was when she was ready to go, and had left him again, wailing for his gavriel, which she did not give him. She would make his wish for him when the time came to go.

To go. With or without Akiva, with or without her wishbone.

How long would she wait?

Two days and two unending nights, and her eyes were darting, hungry. Her heart was gasping, empty. Whatever resistance had been in her, she gave it up. Her hands knew what they wanted: They wanted Akiva, the spark and heat of him. Even in the warmth of the Moroccan spring she was cold, as if the only thing with a chance of warming her was him. On the third morning, walking through the souks to the Jemaa el-Fna, she made a curious purchase.

Fingerless gloves. She saw them in a vendor’s stall, densely knit things of striped Berber wool, reinforced with leather at the palms. She bought them and pulled them on. They covered her hamsas entirely, and she couldn’t deceive herself that she’d bought them for warmth. She knew what she wanted. She wanted what her hands wanted: to touch Akiva, and not just with her fingertips, and not with caution, and not with fear of causing him pain. She wanted to hold him and be held, in soft perfect unity, like slow-dancing. She wanted to fit herself to him, breathe him, come alive against him, discover him, hold his face as he had held hers, with tenderness.

With
love
.

“It will come, and you will know it,” Brimstone had promised her once, and though he had surely never dreamed it would come to her as the enemy, she knew now he hadn’t been wrong. She did know it. It was simple and total, like hunger or happiness, and when she looked up from her tea on the third morning and saw Akiva in the square, standing some twenty yards off and looking at her, it thrilled through her like her nerves were channeling starlight. He was safe.

He was here. She rose from her chair.

It struck her, the way he was just standing there at a distance.

And when he came to her, it was with a heavy tread and a closed expression, slowly, reluctantly. Her certainty vanished. She did not reach for him, or even step out from behind the table. All the starlight shrank back up her nerve endings, leaving her cold, and she stared at him—the heavy slowness, the flatness of his look—and wondered if she had imagined everything between them.

“Hi,” she said in a small voice, hesitant and with an uplift of hope that she might be misreading him, that he might still mirror back at her the starburst that the sight of him had ignited in her. It was what she had always wanted and thought that she’d found: someone who was
for her
, as she was for him, whose blood and butterflies sang to hers and answered them, note for note.

But Akiva answered nothing. He gave a tight nod and made no move to come closer.

“You’re okay,” she said, and her voice didn’t begin to convey her gladness.

“You waited,” he said.

“I… I said I would.”

“As long as you could.”

Was he bitter that she hadn’t promised? Karou wanted to tell him that she hadn’t known then what she knew now—that “as long as she could” was a long time indeed, and that she felt as if she’d been waiting for him all her life. But she was silenced by his closed expression.

He thrust out his hand and said, “Here,” and there was her wishbone, dangling by its cord.

She took it, managing a whispered
thank you
as she slipped it over her head. It settled back into its place at the base of her throat.

“I brought these, too,” Akiva said, and placed on the table the case that held her crescent-moon knives. “You’ll need them.”

It sounded hard, almost like a threat. Karou just stood there, blinking back tears.

“Do you still want to know who you are?” Akiva asked. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking past her, at nothing.

“Of course I do,” she said, though it wasn’t what she had been thinking. What she wanted right now was to go back in time, to Prague. She had believed then, with a certainty that was both thrill and refuge, that Akiva was coming back from some dark night of the soul
for her
. Now it was like he was dead again, and though she had her wishbone back, and though she was going to learn, finally, the answer to the question at the core of her being, she felt dead, too.

“What happened?” she asked. “With the others?”

He ignored the question. “Is there somewhere we can go?”

“Go?”

Akiva gestured to the crowds in the square, the vendors building their pyramids of oranges, the tourists toting cameras and parcels of shopping. “You’ll want to be alone for this,” he said.

“What… what do you have to tell me that I’ll want to be alone to hear it?”

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” Akiva had been gazing past her, unfocused, this whole time, so that she’d begun to feel like some kind of blur, but he fixed his eyes on her now. Their brilliance was like the sun in topaz, and she saw, before he looked away again, the bare glint of a yearning so deep it hurt to behold. Her heart leapt.

“We’re going to break the wishbone,” he said.

And then she would know everything, and she would hate him. Akiva was trying to prepare himself for the way she would look at him once she understood. He had watched her from the square for a handful of seconds before she looked up, and he witnessed the way her face was transformed by the sight of him—from anxious, lost expectancy, to… light. It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.