Daughter of Smoke and Bone

an avalanche of old sketchbooks that Karou had been leafing through the night before, keeping company in the only way she could with her family.

One lay open to a portrait of Brimstone. She saw the angel’s jaw clench at the sight of it, and she grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. He went to the window and looked out.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Akiva.”

“And you know mine how?”

A long beat. “The old man.”

Izil. Of course. But… a thought struck her. Hadn’t Razgut said Izil leapt to his death to protect her? “How did you find me?” she asked.

It was dark outside, and Akiva’s eyes reflected orange in the window glass. “It wasn’t difficult,” was all he said.

She was going to ask him to be specific, but he closed his eyes and leaned his brow against the glass. She said, “You can sit down,” and gestured to her deep green velvet armchair. “If you’re not going to burn anything.”

His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile. “I won’t burn anything.”

He loosed the buckle on the leather straps that crossed his chest, and his swords, sheathed between his shoulder blades, fell to the floor with two thunks that Karou did not think her downstairs neighbor would appreciate. Then Akiva sat, or rather collapsed, in the chair. Karou shoved her sketchbooks aside to make a space for herself on the bed, and seated herself in lotus position facing him.

The flat was tiny — just room for the bed and the chair and a set of carved nesting tables, all atop Karou’s splurge of a Persian carpet, haggled for while it was still on the loom in Tabriz. One wall was all bookcases, facing one all of windows, and off the entry hall: a tiny kitchen, tinier closet, and a bathroom roughly the size of a shower stall. The ceilings were a fairly preposterous twelve feet, making even the main room taller than it was wide, so Karou had built a loft above the bookcases, which she had to climb to reach it, just deep enough to lounge on Turkish cushions and take in the view out the high windows: a direct line over the rooftops of Old Town to the castle.

She watched Akiva. He had let his head drop back; his eyes were closed. He looked so weary. He was rolling one shoulder gingerly, wincing as if it pained him. She considered offering him tea — she could have used some herself — but it felt too much like playing hostess, and she struggled to remember the dynamic between them: They were enemies.

Right?

She studied him, mentally correcting the drawings she’d done from memory. Her fingers itched to snatch up a pencil and draw him from life. Stupid fingers.

He opened his eyes and caught her looking. She blushed. “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said, discomposed.

He struggled upright. “I’m sorry. It’s like this, after battle.”

Battle. He watched guardedly as she processed the idea. She said, “Battle. With chimaera. Because you’re enemies.”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated, as if the notion of enemies needed no justification.

“Yes. Why are you enemies?”

“We have always been. The war had been going on for a thousand years—”

“That’s weak. Two races can’t have been born enemies, can they? It had to start somewhere.”

A slow nod. “Yes. It started somewhere.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “What do you know of chimaera?”

What did she know? “Not a lot,” she admitted. “Until the night you attacked me, I didn’t even know there were more than the four of them. I didn’t know they were an entire race.”

He shook his head. “They aren’t one race. They’re many, allied.”

“Oh.” Karou supposed that made sense, with how unalike they were. “Does that mean there are others like Issa, like Brimstone?”

Akiva nodded. The idea gave new shades of reality to the world Karou had glimpsed. She imagined scattered tribes in vast landscapes, a whole village of Issas, families of Brimstones. She wanted to see them. Why had she been kept from them?

Akiva said, “I don’t understand what your life has been. Brimstone raised you, but just in the shop? Not in the fortress itself?”

“I didn’t even know what was on the other side of the inner door until that night.”

“He took you inside, then?”

Karou pursed her lips, remembering the Wishmonger’s fury. “Sure. Let’s say that’s what happened.”

“And what did you see there?”

“Why would I tell you that? You’re enemies, in which case, you’re my enemy, too.”

“I’m not your enemy, Karou.”

“They’re my family. Their enemies are mine.”

“Family,” Akiva repeated, shaking his head. “But where did you come from? Who are you, really?”

“Why does everybody ask me that?” Karou asked, animated by a flash of anger, though it was something she had wondered herself almost every day since she was old enough to understand the extreme oddness of her circumstances. “I’m me. Who are you?”

It was a rhetorical question, but he took it seriously. He said, “I’m a soldier.”

“So what are you doing here? Your war is there. Why did you come here?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath, sank back once more into the chair. “I needed… something,” he said. “Something apart. I have lived war for half a century—”

Karou interrupted him. “You’re fifty?”

“Lives are long, in my world.”

“Well, you’re lucky,” said Karou. “Here, if you want long life, you have to yank out all your teeth with pliers.”

The mention of teeth brought a dangerous flicker to his eyes, but he said only, “Long life is a burden, when it’s spent in misery.”

Misery. Did he mean himself? She asked him.

His eyes fluttered shut as if he’d been struggling to keep them open and abruptly abandoned the fight. He was silent for so long that Karou wondered if he’d fallen asleep, and gave up on her question. It felt intrusive, anyway. And she sensed he had meant himself. She thought of the way he’d looked in Marrakesh. What made the life go out of somebody’s eyes like that?

Again the caretaker impulse came to her, to offer him something, but she resisted it. She let herself stare at him — the cut of his features, the deep black of his brows and lashes, the bars inked on his hands, which were splayed open on the chair arms. With his head tilted back, she could see the welt on his neck and, a little higher up, the steady pulse of his jugular vein.

Once more his physicality struck her, that he was a flesh-and-blood being, though unlike any she had ever seen or touched. He was a melding of elements: fire and earth. She would have thought an angel would have something of air, but he didn’t. He was all substance: powerful and rugged and real.

His eyes opened and she jumped, caught staring once again. How many times was she going to blush, anyway?

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice faint. “I think I fell asleep.”

“Um.” She couldn’t help it. “Do you need some water?”

“Please.” He sounded so grateful she felt a pang of guilt for not offering sooner.

She untangled her legs from their lotus, rose, and brought him a glass of water, which he drained in a draft. “Thank you,” he said in a weirdly heartfelt way, as if he were thanking her for something much more profound than a glass of water.

“Uh. Uh-huh,” she said, awkward. She felt like she was hovering, standing there. There was really nowhere in