Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [112]
Again and again, Chiro and Nwella were swept into strangers’ embraces and kissed, mask to mask. That was tradition: a spinning, stamping dance punctuated liberally with kisses, to celebrate unity among the races. Musicians were grouped at intervals so that merrymakers were passed from melody to melody as from hand to hand, with never a lull. Wild music spun them along, but no one swept Madrigal up. Several times some soldier started toward her—one even grabbed her hand—but always there was a friend there to pull him back and whisper a warning. Madrigal couldn’t hear what was said, but she could imagine it.
She is Thiago’s.
No one touched her. She drifted through the revelry alone.
Where was Thiago, she wondered, her eyes darting from mask to mask. She would get a glimpse of long white hair or wolf aspect and her heart would jump at the thought that it was him, but each time it was someone else. The long white hair belonged to an old woman, and Madrigal had to laugh at her own skittishness.
Every citizen of Loramendi was in the streets, but somehow space opened around her and she moved alone, following in her friends’ wake toward the agora. Thiago would be there, she guessed, probably standing with his father on the palace balcony, watching the crowd surge as the procession spilled wave after wave of chimaera into the square.
He would be watching for her.
Unconsciously, she slowed her steps. Nwella and Chiro went whirling on ahead in their masks, kissing. For the most part they just touched the lips of their masks to the lips—beaks, muzzles, maws—of other masks, but there were real kisses, too, with no regard to aspect. Madrigal knew what it was like from previous festivals, the grasswine breath of strangers, the nuzzle of a tiger’s whiskered jaw, or a dragon’s, or a man’s. But not tonight.
Tonight, she was in isolation—eyes were on her but not hands, and certainly not lips. The Serpentine seemed a very long stretch to go alone.
Then someone took her elbow. The touch jarred her, coming as it did to end her apartness. Thinking it must be Thiago, she stiffened.
But no. The one at her side wore a horse mask of molded leather that covered his true head completely. Thiago would never wear a horse head, or any other mask to conceal his face. He wore the same thing to the ball every year: a real wolf’s head atop his own, its lower jaw removed so that it made a sort of headdress, its eyes replaced with blue glass, dead and staring.
So who was this? Someone foolish enough to touch her? Well then. He was tall, a head above even her own height, so that Madrigal had to tilt her face up, laying her hand on his shoulder, to nudge his horse muzzle with the beak of her bird mask. A “kiss,” to prove that she still belonged to herself.
And as if some spell had been broken, she was part of the crowd again, spinning in the graceless stamping of the revel, with the stranger for a partner. He moved her along, guarding her from the shoving of larger creatures. She could feel his strength; he might easily have buoyed her without her feet even touching the ground. He ought to have turned her loose after a twirl or two, but he didn’t. His hands—gloved—kept hold of her. And since she didn’t think anyone else would dance with her if he let her go, she didn’t move away. It felt good to be dancing, and she gave herself over to it, and even forgot her anxieties about her dress. Fragile as it seemed, it was holding up fine, and when she whirled it rose in waves around her gazelle hooves, weightless and lovely.
Part of a seething, living tide, they streamed along. Madrigal lost track of her friends, but the horse-masked stranger didn’t abandon her, and when the procession neared the end of the Serpentine, it began to bottleneck. The dancing slowed to a sway and she found herself standing with him, their breathing quick. She looked up, flushed and