Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [124]
“And what do you hope for most?”
“You’re not supposed to tell. Come, wish with me.”
She held up the wishbone.
It was part whimsy and part impudence that had made her put the thing on a cord. She had been fourteen, four years in Brimstone’s service, but also now in battle training and feeling full of her own power. She’d come into the shop one afternoon while Twiga was plucking newly minted lucknows from their molds, and she had wheedled for one.
Brimstone had not yet educated her about the harsh reality of magic and the pain tithe, and she still regarded wishing as fun. When he refused her—as he always did, not counting scuppies, which cost a mere pinch of pain to create—she’d had a small, dramatic meltdown in the corner. She couldn’t even remember now what wish had been of such dire importance to her fourteen-year-old self, but she well remembered Issa extracting a bone from the remains of the evening meal—a grim-grouse in sauce—and comforting her with the human lore of the wishbone.
Issa had a wealth of human stories, and it was from her that Madrigal came by her fascination with that race and their world. In defiance of Brimstone, she took the bone and made an elaborate show of wishing on it.
“That’s it?” Brimstone asked, when he heard what petty desire had inspired her tantrum. “You would have wasted a wish on that?”
She and Issa were on the verge of breaking the bone between them, but they stopped.
“You’re not a fool, Madrigal,” Brimstone said. “If there’s something you want, pursue it. Hope has power. Don’t waste it on foolish things.”
“Fine,” she said, cupping the wishbone in her hand. “I’ll save it until my hope meets your high expectations.” She put it on a cord. For a few weeks she made a point of voicing ridiculous wishes aloud and pretending to ponder them.
“I wish I could taste with my feet like a butterfly.”
“I wish scorpion-mice could talk. I bet they know the best gossip.”
“I wish my hair was blue.”
But she never broke the bone. What started as childish defiance turned into something else. Weeks became months, and the longer she went without breaking the wishbone, the more important it seemed that when she did, the wish—the hope, rather—should be worthy of her.
In the requiem grove with Akiva, it finally was.
She formed her wish in her mind, looking him in the eyes, and pulled. The bone broke clean down the middle, and the pieces, when measured against each other, were of exactly the same length.
“Oh. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it means we both get our wishes.”
“Maybe it means that we wished for the same thing.”
Madrigal liked to think that it did. Her wish that first time was simple, focused, and passionate: that she would see him again. Believing she would was the only way she could bring herself to leave.
They rose from their crushed clothes. Madrigal had to wriggle back into the midnight gown like a serpent back into a shed skin. They went into the temple and drank water from the sacred spring that rose in a fount from the earth. She splashed her face with it, too, paid silent homage to Ellai to protect their secret, and vowed to bring candles when she came again.
Because of course she would come again.
Parting was almost like a stage drama, an exaggerated physical impossibility—to fly away and leave Akiva there—the difficulty of which she would not, before this moment, have believed. She kept turning and returning for one last kiss. Her lips, unaccustomed to such wear, felt mussed and obvious, carnal, and she imagined herself red with the evidence of how she had spent her night.
Finally she flew, trailing her mask by one of its long ribbon ties like a companion bird winging at her side, and the dawn-touched land rolled beneath her all the way back to Loramendi. The city lay quiet in the aftermath of celebration, pungent and hazy with the residue of fireworks. She went in by a secret passage to the underground cathedral.