Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [27]
“Don’t be curious” was one of Brimstone’s prime rules, and Izîl had not obeyed it. Karou pitied him, because she understood him. In her, too, curiosity was a perverse fire, stoked by any effort to extinguish it. The more Brimstone ignored her questions, the more she yearned to know. And she had a lot of questions.
The teeth, of course: What the hell were they all for?
What of the other door? Where did it lead?
What exactly were the chimaera, and where had they come from? Were there more of them?
And what about her? Who were her parents, and how had she fallen into Brimstone’s care? Was she a fairy-tale cliché, like the firstborn child in “Rumpelstiltskin,” the settlement of some debt? Or perhaps her mother had been a trader strangled by her serpent collar, leaving a baby squalling on the floor of the shop. Karou had thought of a hundred scenarios, but the truth remained a mystery.
Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was—a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once when she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.
But what?
She reached the square and wandered through the chaos, her movements synchronizing themselves to the rhythms of mystical Gnawa music as she dodged motorbikes and acrobats. Billows of grilled-meat smoke gusted thick as houses on fire, teenage boys whispered “hashish,” and costumed water-sellers clamored “Photo! Photo!” At a distance, she spotted the hunchback shape of Izîl among the henna artists and street dentists.
Seeing him at one-month intervals was like watching a time-lapse of decline. When Karou was a child, he was a doctor and a scholar—a straight and genteel man with mild brown eyes and a silky mustache he preened like plumage. He had come to the shop himself and done business at Brimstone’s desk, and, unlike the other traders, he always made it seem like a social call. He flirted with Issa, brought her little gifts—snakes carved from seedpods, jade-drop earrings, almonds. He brought dolls for Karou, and a tiny silver tea service for them, and he didn’t neglect Brimstone, either, casually leaving chocolates or jars of honey on the desk when he left.
But that was before he’d been warped by the weight of a terrible choice he’d made, bent and twisted and driven mad. He wasn’t welcome in the shop anymore, so Karou came out to meet him here.
Seeing him now, tender pity overcame her. He was bent nearly double, his gnarled olivewood walking stick all that kept him from collapsing on his face. His eyes were sunk in bruises, and his teeth, which were not his own, were overlarge in his shrunken face. The mustache that had been his pride hung lank and tangled. Any passerby would be taken with pity, but to Karou, who knew how he had looked only a few years earlier, he was a tragedy to behold.
His face lit up when he saw her. “Look who it is! The Wishmonger’s beautiful daughter, sweet ambassadress of teeth. Have you come to buy a sad old man a cup of tea?”
“Hello, Izîl. A cup of tea sounds perfect,” she said, and led him to the cafe where they usually met.
“My dear, has the month passed me by? I’m afraid I’d quite forgotten our appointment.”
“Oh, you haven’t. I’ve come early.”
“Ah, well, it’s always a pleasure to see you, but I haven’t got much for the old devil, I’m afraid.”
“But you have some?”
“Some.”
Unlike most of the other traders, Izîl neither hunted nor murdered; he didn’t kill at all. Before, as a doctor working in conflict zones, he’d had access to war dead whose teeth wouldn’t be missed.