Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.

All that he didn’t deserve and could never have was in that instant. All he wanted now was to fold her against him, lose his hands in her hair — which was clean and combed straight as rivers over her shoulders — lose himself in the fragrance and softness of her.

He remembered a story Madrigal had told him once: the human tale of the golem. It was a thing shaped of clay in the form of a man, brought to life by carving the symbol aleph into its brow. Aleph was the first letter of an ancestral human alphabet, and the first letter of the Hebrew word truth; it was the beginning. Watching Karou rise to her feet, radiant in a fall of lapis hair, in a woven dress the color of tangerines, with a loop of silver beads at her throat and a look of joy and relief and… love… on her beautiful face, Akiva knew that she was his aleph, his truth and beginning. His soul.

His wing joints ached with the desire to beat, once, and propel him to her, but instead he walked, heavy and heartsick. His arms felt banded by iron, keeping them from reaching for her. The way the light went out of her at the cold manner of his approach, the hesitation and hope in her voice — it was killing him by degrees. It was better this way. If he gave in and let himself have what he wanted, she would only hate him more once she knew what he really was. So he held himself remote, aching, preparing for the moment he knew must come.

“Break it?” Karou asked now, looking at the wishbone in surprise. “Brimstone never did—”

“It wasn’t his,” said Akiva. “It was never his. He was just keeping it. For you.”

He hadn’t been able to drop it in the sea. That he had even considered it made him sick with himself — more evidence of his unworthiness of her. She deserved to know everything, in all its heartbreak and brutality, and if he was right about the wishbone, she very soon would.

She seemed to sense something of the magnitude of the moment. “Akiva,” she whispered. “What is it?”

And when she looked at him with her bird-black eyes, frightened and imploring, he had to turn away again, so powerful was the longing that twisted through him. Not touching her in that moment was one of the hardest things he had ever done.

* * *

And it might have gone on between them in that terrible, false way, but Karou had seen what she had seen, and felt it, too — Akiva’s yearning, meeting her own in a deep place — and when he turned away she experienced a sudden unspooling, like the snap of a cable and all her restraints giving way, and she couldn’t bear it anymore. She reached for him. Her half-gloved hand, hamsa covered, took his arm, gently and full against his skin, and turned him back to her. She stepped close, tipping back her head to gaze up at him, and took his other arm.

“Akiva,” she murmured, her tone no longer fearful, but low and ardent and sweet. “What is it?” Her hands climbed him, over the steel of his arms and shoulders, up ramps of trapezius to his throat, his rough-smooth jaw, and then her fingertips were on his lips, so soft by comparison. She felt them tremble. “Akiva,” she repeated. “Akiva. Akiva.” She seemed to be saying, Enough of this; stop pretending.

And so, with a shudder, he did. He dropped the pretense, and dropped his head, so his brow came to rest against the sun-warmed top of hers. His arms went around her and drew her in, and Karou and Akiva were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight. With a sigh, she softened, and it was pure homecoming to melt against him and rest. She felt the coarseness of his unshaven throat at her cheek as he tested, against his own, the perfect water-smoothness of her hair. They stood like that for a long time, and they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not — they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

The wishbone, small but sharp, was trapped between them.

42 ACHE AND SALT AND ALLNESS

“In here,” Karou said, leading Akiva to a sky-blue door set in a dusty wall. Their fingers were laced together. They couldn’t not touch, and guiding him through the medina, Karou had felt like she was floating. They might have hurried, but instead they drifted, pausing to watch a carpet-maker, to peer into a basket of puppies, to test the points of ornamental daggers with their fingertips — anything but haste.

But as slowly as they went, they still arrived at their destination. Akiva followed Karou down a dark passage, where they were spilled into the light of a courtyard, a hidden world open only to the sky. It was fringed with date palms and brilliant with zelij tiles, a fountain plashing in its center. A balcony ran around the second story, and Karou’s room was up a twist of stairs. It was bigger than her flat, with a high, timbered ceiling. The walls were vermillion tadelakt with a deep, earthen glow, and a Berber blanket on the bed spelled out some mysterious blessing in a language of symbols.

Akiva closed the door and let go of Karou’s hand, and the moment that she had been pushing ahead of them, forestalling — the breaking of the wishbone… It was here.

This was it.

This was it.

Akiva paced away from her, looked out a window, raised his hands and raked his fingers through his hair in a gesture that was becoming familiar, then turned back to her. “Are you ready, Karou?”