Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [107]
“Don’t.”
Oh, his voice! What a thing it was, deep as a catacomb. She should have been afraid, and maybe she was, a little, but the fire in her mind was primary. “What are they all for?” she asked, awed. The first question of many. Very, very many. Brimstone didn’t answer. He only finished the message he was writing out on thick cream paper and sent her off with it to the Warlord’s steward. That was all he wanted her for, to carry messages and run errands, to save Twiga and Yasri scurrying up and down the long spiral stairs. He certainly wasn’t looking for an apprentice.
But once Madrigal learned the fullness of his magic—resurrection! It was nothing less than immortality, the preservation of chimaera and all hope for their freedom and autonomy, forever—she was not content to be a page.
“I could dust the jars for you.”
“I could help. I could make some necklaces, too.”
“Are these alligator or crocodile? How can you tell?”
By way of proving her value, she presented him with sheaves of drawings of possible chimaera configurations. “Here’s a tiger with bull’s horns, see? And this one is a mandrill-cheetah. Could you make that? I bet I could make that.”
She was eager, piping. “I could help.”
Wistful, entranced. “I could learn.”
Determined, incorrigible. “I could learn.”
She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t teach her. Later, she would realize it was that he didn’t want to share the burden with anyone—that it was beautiful, what he did, but terrible, too, and the terrible bountifully outweighed the beautiful. But by the time she understood that, she didn’t care. She was in it.
“Here. Sort these,” Brimstone said to her one day, shoving a tray of teeth across his desk to her. She had been with him a few years, as page, and he had been steadfast in keeping her in that role. Until now.
Issa, Yasri, and Twiga all stopped what they were doing and swung their heads around to stare. Was it… a test? Brimstone ignored them, busy with something in his strongbox, and Madrigal, almost afraid to breathe, slid the tray in front of her and quietly got to work.
They were bear teeth. Brimstone probably expected her to sort them by size, but Madrigal had been watching him for years by then. She held each tooth and… listened to it. She listened with her fingertips, and picked out the few that didn’t feel right—decay, Brimstone told her later—discarded them, and shifted the others into piles by feeling, not size. When she slid the tray back to him, she had the tremendous satisfaction of seeing his eyes go wide and lift up to regard her in an entirely new way.
“Well done,” he told her then, for the first time. Her heart gave a strange surging pang while, in the corner, Issa dabbed at her eyes.
After that, and all the while pretending he was doing no such thing, he began to teach her.
She learned that magic was ugly—a hard bargain with the universe, a calculus of pain. A long time ago, medicine men had flagellated themselves, flaying open their own flesh to access the power of their agony, or even maiming themselves, crushing bones and setting them wrong on purpose to create lifelong reservoirs of pain. There had been a balance then, a natural check when it was one’s own harm that was harvested. Along the way, though, some sorcerers had worked ways to cheat the calculus and draw on the pain of others.
“That’s what teeth are for? A way to cheat?” It seemed a little unsporting. “Poor animals,” Madrigal murmured.
Issa gave her an unusually hard look. “Perhaps you would prefer to torture slaves.”
It was so awful, and so uncharacteristic, that Madrigal could only stare at her. It would be years before she learned what Issa meant—it would be the eve of her own death when Brimstone finally talked freely to her—and she would be ashamed that she had never figured it out for herself. His scars. That should have made it obvious—the network of scars, so ancient-seeming on his hide, fine crisscrossed