Daughter of Smoke and Bone

awful. She’s unbearable. You take her. I’ve had enough.”

Zuzana batted at him, then squealed as he buried his face in the curve of her throat and made exaggerated kissing noises.

Mik was sandy-haired and fair-skinned, with sideburns and a goatee and the kind of knife-blade eyes that hinted at ancestors invading across the plains from Central Asia. He was handsome and gifted, he blushed easily and hummed when he concentrated, and he was soft-spoken but interesting — a good combination. He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his turn to talk again, the way Kaz had. Best of all, he was entirely dopey for Zuzana, who was dopey right back. They were cartoonish, the way they blushed and smiled — all they needed was hearts for eyes — and watching them made Karou both deeply happy and exquisitely miserable. She imagined she could practically see their butterflies—Papilio stomachus—dancing the sweet tango of new love.

For her own part, it was harder and harder to imagine anything fluttering to life inside herself. More than ever, she was the hollow girl, the emptiness seeming like an entity, malicious, taunting her with all the things she would never know.

No. She banished the thought. She would know. She was on her way to knowing.

Her smile was real when Mik began kissing Zuzana’s neck, but after a moment it began to feel a little like a Mr. Potato Head smile, plastic and stuck on. “Did I mention,” she said, clearing her throat, “that I have presents?”

That worked. “Presents!” squealed Zuzana, disengaging herself. She jumped up and down and clapped. “Presents, presents!”

Karou handed over the shopping bag. In it were three parcels wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with twine. Atop the largest one, a letterpress card on vellum announced, MME. V. VEZERIZAC, ARTEFACTS. The parcels were elegant, and somehow consequential. As Zuzana took them out of the bag, her eyebrow did its thing. “What are these?” she asked, going serious. “Artefacts? Karou. By present, I meant, like, a stacking doll from the airport or something.”

“Just open them,” said Karou. “The big one first.”

Zuzana opened it. And started to cry. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she whispered, gathering it to her chest in a froth of tulle.

It was a ballet costume, but no ordinary ballet costume. “It was worn by Anna Pavlova in Paris in 1905,” Karou told her, excited. Giving gifts was so much fun. She’d never had Christmases or birthday parties when she was little, but once she was old enough to leave the shop on her own, she’d loved to bring back little things for Issa and Yasri — flowers, weird fruit, blue lizards, Spanish fans.

“Okay, I totally don’t know who that is—”

“What? She’s only the most famous ballerina ever.”

Eyebrow.

“Never mind,” sighed Karou. “She was famously tiny, so it should fit you.”

Zuzana held it up. “It’s… it’s… it’s… it’s so Degas….” she stammered.

Karou grinned. “I know. Isn’t it awesome? There’s this woman at Les Puces flea market who sells vintage ballet stuff—”

“But how much did it cost? It must have cost a fortune—”

“Shush,” said Karou. “Fortunes have been spent on stupider things. And besides, I’m rich, remember? Obnoxious rich. Magic rich.”

One upshot of Brimstone’s provisions on her behalf was that she could afford to give presents. She had given herself one in Paris, too, also an artefact, though not of the ballet. The knives had gleamed at her from a glass case and the instant she glimpsed them, she knew she had to have them. They were Chinese crescent-moon blades, one of her favorite weapons. Her own set, the ones she’d trained with, were still in Hong Kong with her sensei, where she hadn’t been since the portals burned. In any case, these put that set to shame.

“Fourteenth-century—” Madame Vezerizac had begun her sales pitch, but Karou didn’t need to hear it. It seemed disrespectful to the knives to haggle, so she paid the asking price without batting an eye.

Each knife was made up of two blades, like crescent moons interlocking, hence the name. The grips were in the middle, and when wielded the knives provided a number of piercing and slicing edges and, perhaps most important, blocking points. The crescent moons were an optimal weapon for taking on multiple opponents, especially opponents with long weapons like swords. If she’d had them in Morocco, the angel would not have overpowered her so easily.

She’d also bought Zuzana a pair of vintage toe shoes and a lovely headdress of forlorn silk rosebuds, also from the turn-of-the-century Paris stage. “Want to get ready?” Karou asked her, and Zuzana, verklempt, nodded yes. They squeezed inside the puppeteer and tossed her other, unremarkable costume aside.

An hour later tourists were trooping across the bridge, questing toward the castle with their guidebooks under their arms, and a not-insignificant number of them had formed an anticipatory half circle around the giant puppeteer. Karou and Zuzana huddled inside it.

“Stop squirming,” said Karou, pausing with her makeup brush as Zuzana engaged in an unladylike tug-of-war beneath her tutu.

“My tights are crooked,” Zuzana said.

“Do you want your cheeks to be crooked, too? Hold still.”

“Fine.” Zuzana held still while Karou painted perfect pink rouge circles onto her cheeks. Her face was powder-white, and her lips had been transformed to a doll’s tiny Cupid’s bow, with two fine black lines out from the corners of her mouth, simulating a marionette’s hinged jaw. False eyelashes fringed her dark eyes, and she was dressed in the tutu, which did indeed fit, and the toe shoes, which had seen better days. Her white tights were laddered with runs and patched at the knees; one of the straps of her bodice hung broken; and her hair was a messy chignon crowned with faded rosebuds. She looked like a doll that had lain unloved in a toy chest for years.

A toy chest, in fact, stood open and ready to receive her as soon as her costume was squared away.

“All done,” said Karou, surveying her work. She clapped her hands once in delight and felt like Issa when she fixed Karou with temporary horns fashioned of parsnips, or a tail out of a feather duster. “Perfect. You look adorably pathetic. Some tourist is sure to try to carry you home as a souvenir.”

“Some tourist will rue the day,” Zuzana said, upending her tutu and pursuing the tights tug-of-war with surly determination.

“Would you leave those poor tights alone? They’re fine.”

“I hate tights.”

“Well, let me add them to the list. This morning you hate, let me see, men in hats, wiener dogs—”

“Wiener-dog owners,” Zuzana corrected. “You’d have to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.”

“Wiener-dog owners, hairspray, false eyelashes, and now tights. Are you finished?”

“Hating things?” She paused, reading some inner gauge. “Yes, I think I am. For now.”

Mik peered through the opening. “We’ve got a crowd,” he said. It had been his idea to take Zuzana’s semester project to the street. He sometimes played his violin for change, donning a patch over his perfectly good left eye to seem more “romantic,” and he promised Zuzana she could make a few thousand crowns in a morning. He had his eye patch in place now, and looked somehow both roguish and darling.

“God, you’re adorable,” he said, his visible eye on Zuzana.

Usually adorable was not a word Zuzana relished. “Toddlers are adorable,” she’d snap. But where Mik was concerned, all bets were off. She blushed.

“You give me wrong thoughts,” he said, slipping into the crammed space, so Karou was trapped against the puppet’s armature. “Is it weird that I’m turned on by a marionette?”

“Yes,” said Zuzana. “Very weird. But it explains why you work at a marionette theater.”