Daughter of Smoke and Bone

38 UNGODLY

After Bullfinch, Madrigal’s existence — it would be two years before he learned her name — had called to Akiva like a voice adrift in a great silence. As he lay near death in the battle encampment at Morwen Bay, he dreamed again and again that the enemy girl was kneeling over him, smiling. Each time he woke to her absence, to see instead the faces of his kith and kin, they seemed less real than this eidolon who haunted him. Even as Liraz fended off the doctor who wanted to amputate his arm, his mind was called back to the mist-shrouded beach at Bullfinch, to brown eyes and oiled horns and that shock of sweetness.

He had trained to withstand the devil marks, but not this. Against this, he found he had no defense.

Of course, he told no one.

Hazael came to his bedside with his kit of tattoo tools to mark Akiva’s hands with his Bullfinch kills. “How many?” he asked, heating up his knife blade to sterilize it.

Akiva had slain six chimaera at Bullfinch, including the hyena monstrosity that had taken him down. Six new ticks would fill out his right hand, which, thanks to Liraz, was still attached to his body. The arm lay useless at his side. Severed nerves and muscles had been reattached; he wouldn’t know for some time if it would ever function again.

When Hazael picked up the lifeless hand, knife at the ready, all Akiva could think of was the enemy girl, and how she might end up a black mark on some seraph’s knuckle. The thought was unendurable. With his good hand, he wrested his arm from Hazael and was immediately swamped with pain. “None,” he gasped. “I didn’t kill any.”

Hazael squinted. “You did. I was with you against that phalanx of bull centaurs.”

But Akiva wouldn’t take the marks, and Hazael went away.

Thus, had begun the secret that, over the years, grew into a rift between them, and that, in the skies of the human world, threatened to tear them apart forever.

When Karou exploded off the bridge, Liraz followed, and Akiva surged up to block her. Their blades clashed. He crossed his two swords close to the hilt and put his strength behind them with a steady pressure that forced his sister back. He kept Hazael in sight, afraid he would pursue Karou, but his brother was still standing on the bridge, staring up at the unimaginable sight of Akiva and Liraz with swords crossed.

Liraz’s arms trembled with the effort at holding her ground — her air — and her wings worked at furious backbeats. Her face was livid, clench-jawed and lurid with striving, and her eyes were so wide that her irises were spots in staring white orbs.

With a banshee wail she threw Akiva off, swung her freed sword in a cyclone around her head, and brought it hacking down.

He blocked it. Its force jarred his bones. She wasn’t holding back. The ferocity of her attack shocked him — would she really try to kill him? She hacked again, and he blocked, and Hazael finally came unfrozen and leapt toward them.

“Stop,” he cried, aghast. He started to dart in but had to dodge when Liraz swung wild. Akiva parried the blow, knocking her off balance, and she whirled around before fumbling to a hover. She gave him a look that glittered with malice, and instead of coming at him again, she surged upward. Her wings gave off a fireball burst that brought a collective gasp from the onlookers, and then she was speeding in the direction Karou had gone.

The sky gave no hint of Karou, but Akiva didn’t doubt that Liraz could track her. He sped after her. Precipitously, the rooftops receded, and humanity with them. There was just the rushing air, the flare of wings, and — he caught up to his sister and grabbed her arm — strife.

She spun on him again, slashing, and their swords rang out, again and again. As in Prague, when Karou had attacked him, Akiva only parried, dodged, and did not return attack.

“Stop!” barked Hazael again, coming up on Akiva and giving him a hard shove that put distance between him and Liraz. They were high above the city now, in airy silence echoing with the ring of steel. “What are you doing?” Hazael demanded in a tone of disbelief. “You two, fighting—”

“I’m not,” said Akiva, backing away. “I won’t.”

“Why not?” hissed Liraz. “You might as well slit my throat as stab me in the back.”

“Liraz, I don’t want to hurt you—”

She laughed. “You don’t want to, but you will if you have to? Is that what you’re saying?”

Was it? What would he do to protect Karou? He couldn’t harm his sister or brother; he could never live with that. But he couldn’t let them hurt Karou, either. How could these be his only two choices?

“Just… forget her,” he said. “Please. Just let her go.”

The thick emotion in his voice made Liraz’s eyes narrow with scorn. Looking at her, Akiva thought that he might as well appeal to a sword as to her. And wasn’t that what they were all three bred to be, and all the emperor’s other bastards, too? Weapons forged in flesh. Unthinking instruments of age-old enmity.

He couldn’t accept that. They were more than that, all of them. He hoped. He took a risk. He sheathed his swords. Her eyes like slashes, Liraz watched in silence.

“At Bullfinch,” he said, “you asked who tied my tourniquet.”

She waited. Hazael, too.

Akiva thought of Madrigal, remembered the feel of her skin, the surprising smoothness of her leathern wings, and the light of her laughter — so like Karou’s laughter — and he recalled what Karou had said to him that morning: If he’d ever known any chimaera, he couldn’t dismiss them as monsters.

But he had, both. He had known and loved Madrigal, and still he had become what he had become — the dead-eyed husk that had almost slain Karou on impulse. Grief had grown its ugly blooms in him: hate, vengeance, blindness. The person he was now, Madrigal would have regretted ever saving his life. But in Karou, he had another chance — for peace, that is. Not for happiness, not for him. It was too late for him.

For others, maybe there could still be salvation.

“It was a chimaera,” he told his sister and brother. He gulped a breath of air, knowing that this would sound ungodly to them. They had been taught from the cradle that chimaera were vile, crawling things, devils, animals. But Madrigal… she had managed to unchain him in an instant from his bigotry, and it was time he tried to do the same. “A chimaera saved my life,” he said. “And I fell in love with her.”