Daughter of Smoke and Bone

the room to go except the bed, so she scooted back onto it. She kind of wanted to take off her boots, but that was something you didn’t do if there was any chance you might have to quickly flee or kick someone. Judging from Akiva’s plain exhaustion, she didn’t think she was in danger of either. The only danger was of foot smell.

She kept her boots on.

She said, “I still don’t get why you burned the portals. How does that end your war?”

Akiva’s hands tightened on the empty water glass. He said, “There was magic coming through the doorways. Dark magic.”

“From here? There’s no magic here.”

“Says the flying girl.”

“Okay, but that’s because of a wish, from your world.”

“From Brimstone.”

She acknowledged this with a nod.

“So you know that he’s a sorcerer.”

“I… Uh. Yeah.” She’d never really thought of Brimstone as a sorcerer. Did he do more than manufacture wishes? What did she know, really, and how much did she not know? Her ignorance was like standing in pure dark that could be either a closet or a vast, starless night.

A kaleidoscope of images whirled in her mind. The fizz of magic when she stepped into the shop. The array of teeth and gems, the stone tables in that underground cathedral, laid out with the dead… the dead who were not, as Karou had learned the hard way, actually dead. And she remembered Issa admonishing her not to make Brimstone’s life any harder — his “joyless” life, as she had said. His “relentless” work. What work?

She picked up a sketchbook at random, fanning past drawings of her chimaera so that they made a jerky kind of animation. “What was the magic?” she asked Akiva. “The dark magic.”

He didn’t answer, and she expected when she looked up to see that he had fallen asleep again, but he was watching the images flash past in her sketchbook. She snapped it closed, and his eyes fixed on her instead. Again, that vivid searching.

“What?” she asked, discomfited.

“Karou,” he said. “Hope.”

She raised her eyebrows, as if to say So?

“Why did he give you that name?”

She shrugged. It was getting tiring, not knowing anything. “Why did your parents name you Akiva?”

At the mention of his parents, Akiva’s face hardened, and the vivid watchfulness of his gaze glazed back to fatigue. “They didn’t,” he said. “A steward named me from a list. Another Akiva had been killed. The name opened up.”

“Oh.” Karou didn’t know what to make of that. It made her own strange upbringing seem cozy and familial by comparison.

“I was bred to be a soldier,” Akiva said in a hollow voice, and he closed his eyes again, tightly this time, as if gripped by a wave of pain. He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke again, he said far more than she expected.

“I was taken from my mother at five years old. I don’t remember her face, only that she did nothing when they came for me. It’s my earliest memory. I was so small that they were just legs, these looming soldiers surrounding me. They were the palace guard, so their shin plates were silver, and I could see myself mirrored in them, in all of them, my own terrified face over and over. They took me to the training camp, where I was one of a legion of terrified children.” He swallowed. “Where they punished our terror and taught us to conceal it. And that became my life, the concealment of terror, until I didn’t feel it anymore, or anything else.”

Karou couldn’t help imagining him as a child, afraid and forsaken. Tenderness welled up in her like tears.

In a fading voice, he said, “I exist only because of war — a war that began a thousand years ago with a massacre of my people. Babies, elders, no one spared. In Astrae, the capital of the Empire, the chimaera rose up to massacre the seraphim. We are enemies because the chimaera are monsters. My life is blood because my world is beasts.

“And then I came here, and humans…” A dreamlike wonder shaded into his tone. “Humans were walking freely, weaponless, gathering in the open, sitting in plazas, laughing, growing old. And I saw a girl… a girl with black eyes and gemstone hair, and… sadness. She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought… I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling. She was connected to the enemy, and though the only thing I wanted to do was look at her, I did what I was trained to do and I… I hurt her. And when I went home, I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and I was so grateful that you had defended yourself. That you didn’t let me kill you.”

You. Karou did not miss the pronoun shift. She sat unblinking, barely breathing.

“I came back to find you,” Akiva said. “I don’t know why. Karou. Karou. I don’t know why.” His voice was so faint she could barely hear him. “Just to find you and be in the world that you’re in…”

Karou waited, but he didn’t say any more, and then… something happened in the air around him.

A shimmer, like an aura at first, brightening to light and becoming wings—open and upthrust from his shoulder blades to sprawl over the armchair and sweep the carpet in great arabesques of fire. His glamour had given way, and Karou almost gasped to see his wings revealed, but the flame didn’t catch. It was smokeless, somehow self-contained. The subtle shifts of the fire-feathers were hypnotic, and Karou breathed again, deeply, and sat watching them for minutes as Akiva’s features relaxed into something like peacefulness. This time he was truly asleep.

She got up and took the water glass from his hands. She turned off the light. His wings were sufficient illumination, even for drawing. She got out her sketchbook and a pencil, and she drew Akiva asleep at the locus of his vast wings, and then from memory, with his eyes open. She tried to capture the precise shape of them; she used charcoal for the heavy black kohl that rimmed them and made him look so exotic, and she couldn’t take leaving his fiery irises colorless. She grabbed a watercolor box and painted. She drew and painted for a long time, and he didn’t move except for the soft rise and fall of his chest and the glimmer of his wings, which cast the room in a firelight glow.

Karou didn’t plan to sleep, but some time after midnight she subsided, still half on the landslide of her sketchbooks, to “rest her eyes” for a moment. She fell into dreams, and when she woke just before dawn — something woke her, a quick, bright sound — the room around her was, for a blink, entirely unfamiliar. Only the wings on the wall over her were not, and gave her a surge of pleasure, and then it all slid away as dreams do. She was in her flat, of course, on her bed, and the sound that had awakened her was Akiva.

He was standing over her, and his eyes were molten. They were wide, his orange irises ringed around in white, and he was holding, one in each hand, her crescent-moon knives.

31 RIGHT

Karou sat up with a suddenness that sent sketchbooks skidding off the bed. Her pencil was still in her hand, and the thought struck her: always with the ridiculous weapon, where this angel was concerned. But even as she adjusted her grip on it, ready to stab, Akiva was backing away, lowering the knives.

He set them where he had found them, where she had left them, in their case, atop the nesting tables. They would have been practically under his nose when he woke.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Just then, lit only by the flicker of his wings, the sight of him was so… right, somehow. He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou, and whatever it was, it was as sweet as a patch of sun on a glossy floor and, like a cat, she just wanted to curl up in it.

She tried to pretend she hadn’t been about to stab him with a pencil. “Well,” she said, stretching and letting