Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [116]
The meaning of this night caught up to Madrigal: her choice, her future.
“He’s magnificent,” breathed Nwella, clinging to Madrigal on one side. Madrigal had to agree, but she placed the credit for it with Brimstone, who had crafted that beautiful body, not with Thiago, who wore it with the arrogance of entitlement.
“He’s looking for you,” said Chiro, and Madrigal knew she was right. The general was unhurried, his pale eyes sweeping the crowd with the confidence of one who gets what he wants. Then his gaze came to rest on her. She felt impaled by it. Spooked, she took a step back.
“Let’s go dance,” she blurted, to the surprise of her friends.
“But—” Chiro said.
“Listen.” A new reel was starting up. “It’s the Furiant. My favorite.”
It was not her favorite, but it would do. Two lines of dancers were forming, men on one side, women on the other, and before Chiro and Nwella could say another word, Madrigal had spun to flee toward the women’s file, feeling Thiago’s gaze on the back of her neck like the touch of claws.
She wondered: What of other eyes?
The Furiant began with a light-footed promenade, Chiro and Nwella rushing to join in, and Madrigal went through the steps with grace and a smile, not missing a beat, but she was barely there. Her thoughts had flown outward, darting and dipping with the hummingbird-moths that flocked by the thousands to the lanterns hanging overhead, as she wondered, with a wild, timpani heart, where her angel had gone.
53
LOVE IS AN ELEMENT
In the patterns of the Furiant, no one bypassed Madrigal’s hand as they had in the Serpentine—it would have been too obvious a slight—but there was a formal stiffness in her partners as she passed from one to the next, some barely skimming her fingertips with their own when they were meant to be clasping hands.
Thiago had come up and stood watching. Everyone felt it, and the gaiety of the dance was tamped down. It was his effect, but it was her fault, Madrigal knew, for running from him and trying to hide here, as if it were possible to hide.
She was just buying time, and the Furiant was good for that at least, as it went on a full quarter of an hour, with constant shifts in partner. Madrigal went from a courteous elder soldier with a rhinoceros horn to a centaur to a high-human in a dragon mask who scarcely touched her, and with each revolution she was brought past Thiago, whose eyes never left her. Her next partner’s mask was tiger, and when he took her hand… he actually took her hand. He clasped it firmly in his own gloved hand. A thrill went up Madrigal’s arm from the warming touch, and she didn’t have to look at his eyes to know who it was.
He was still here—and with Thiago so near. Reckless, she thought, electrified by his nearness. After a moment, steadying her breathing and her heart, she said, “Tiger suits you better than horse, I think.”
“I don’t know what you mean, lady,” he replied. “This is my true face.”
“Of course.”
“Because it would be foolish to still be here, if I were who you thought.”
“It would. One might suppose you had a death wish.”
“No.” He was solemn. “Never that. A life wish, if anything. For a different sort of life.”
A different sort of life. If only, Madrigal thought, her own life and choices—or lack of them—hemming her in. She kept her voice light. “You wish to be one of us? I’m sorry, we don’t accept converts.”
He laughed. “Even if you did, it wouldn’t help. We are all locked in the same life, aren’t we? The same war.”
In a lifetime of hating seraphim, Madrigal had never thought of them as living the same life as she, but what the angel said was true. They were all locked in the same war. They had locked the entire world in it. “There is no other life,” she said, and then she tensed, because they had come around to the place where Thiago stood.
The pressure of the angel’s grip on her hand increased ever so slightly, gently, and it helped her bear up under the general’s gaze until she turned