Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [103]
Madrigal was hiding, though she would deny it if accused. She was on the roof of the north barracks, stretched out on her back like she’d fallen from the sky. Or, not the sky. If she had fallen from the sky, she would have landed on iron bars. She was within the Cage, on a rooftop, her wings splayed wide on either side of her.
All around, she felt the manic rhythms of the city, and heard and smelled them, too—excitement, preparations. Meat roasting, instruments being tuned. A firework test fizzled past like a misbegotten angel. She should have been preparing, too. Instead she lay on her back, hiding. She wasn’t dressed for festivity, but in her usual soldier’s leathers—breeches that fit like a skin to the knee, and a vest that laced in the back, accommodating wings. Her blades, shaped in homage to the sister moons, were at her sides. She looked relaxed, even limp, but her stomach was churning, her hands clasped in fists.
The moon wasn’t helping. Though the sun was out—it was full, effulgent afternoon—Nitid had already appeared in the sky, as if Madrigal actually needed a sign. Nitid was the bright moon, the elder sister, and there had been a belief among the Kirin that when Nitid rose early it meant she was eager, and that something was going to happen. Well, this evening something was certainly going to happen, but Madrigal did not yet know what.
It was up to her. Taut within her, her unmade decision felt like a bow strung too tight.
A shadow, a wing-stirred wind, and her sister Chiro was sweeping down to land beside her. “Here you are,” she said. “Hiding.”
“I’m not—” Madrigal started to protest, but Chiro wasn’t hearing it.
“Get up.” She kicked Madrigal’s hooves. “Up up up. I’ve come to take you to the baths.”
“Baths? Are you trying to tell me something?” Madrigal sniffed herself. “I’m almost sure I don’t smell.”
“Maybe not, but between shining cleanliness and not smelling, there is a vast gray area.”
Like Madrigal, Chiro had bat wings; unlike her, she was of creature aspect, with the head of a jackal. They were not blood sisters. When Madrigal was orphaned by the slave raid that claimed her tribe, the survivors had come to Loramendi—a handful of elders with the few babes they’d managed to hide in the caves, and Madrigal. She was seven, and had not been taken only because she wasn’t there. She’d been up the peak gathering the shed skins of air elementals from their abandoned nests, and had returned to ruin, corpses, loss. Her parents were among the taken, not the dead, and for a long time she had dreamed she would find them and set them free, but the Empire was vast, and swallowed its slaves whole, and it got harder to hold on to that dream as she grew up.
In Loramendi, Chiro’s family, of the desert Sab race, had been chosen to foster her chiefly because, being winged, they could keep up with her. She and Chiro had grown up side by side, as good as sisters in all but blood.
Chiro’s haunches were cat, caracal to be precise, and when she melted to a crouch beside Madrigal, her pose was sphinxlike. “For the ball,” she said, “I would hope that you would aspire to shining cleanliness.”
Madrigal sighed. “The ball.”
“You did not forget,” said Chiro. “Don’t pretend you did.”
She was right, of course. Madrigal had not forgotten. How could she?
“Up.” Chiro kicked her feet again. “Up up up.”
“Stop it,” muttered Madrigal, staying where she was and halfheartedly kicking back.
Chiro said, “Tell me you’ve at least got a dress and a mask.”
“When would I have gotten a dress and a mask? I’ve only been back from Ezeret for—”
“For a week, which is plenty of time. Honestly, Mad, it’s not like this is just another ball.”
Exactly, Madrigal thought. If it were, she wouldn’t be hiding on the roof, trying to block out the thing that loomed over her, that sent her heartbeat skittering like scorpion-mice whenever she thought of it. She would be getting ready, excited for the biggest festival of the year: the Warlord’s birthday.
“Thiago will be looking at you,” Chiro said, as if it could possibly have slipped