Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [68]
“Family,” Akiva repeated, shaking his head. “But where did you come from? Who are you, really?”
“Why does everybody ask me that?” Karou asked, animated by a flash of anger, though it was something she had wondered herself almost every day since she was old enough to understand the extreme oddness of her circumstances. “I’m me. Who are you?”
It was a rhetorical question, but he took it seriously. He said, “I’m a soldier.”
“So what are you doing here? Your war is there. Why did you come here?”
He took a deep, shuddering breath, sank back once more into the chair. “I needed… something,” he said. “Something apart. I have lived war for half a century—”
Karou interrupted him. “You’re fifty?”
“Lives are long, in my world.”
“Well, you’re lucky,” said Karou. “Here, if you want long life, you have to yank out all your teeth with pliers.”
The mention of teeth brought a dangerous flicker to his eyes, but he said only, “Long life is a burden, when it’s spent in misery.”
Misery. Did he mean himself? She asked him.
His eyes fluttered shut as if he’d been struggling to keep them open and abruptly abandoned the fight. He was silent for so long that Karou wondered if he’d fallen asleep, and gave up on her question. It felt intrusive, anyway. And she sensed he had meant himself. She thought of the way he’d looked in Marrakesh. What made the life go out of somebody’s eyes like that?
Again the caretaker impulse came to her, to offer him something, but she resisted it. She let herself stare at him—the cut of his features, the deep black of his brows and lashes, the bars inked on his hands, which were splayed open on the chair arms. With his head tilted back, she could see the welt on his neck and, a little higher up, the steady pulse of his jugular vein.
Once more his physicality struck her, that he was a flesh-and-blood being, though unlike any she had ever seen or touched. He was a melding of elements: fire and earth. She would have thought an angel would have something of air, but he didn’t. He was all substance: powerful and rugged and real.
His eyes opened and she jumped, caught staring once again. How many times was she going to blush, anyway?
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice faint. “I think I fell asleep.”
“Um.” She couldn’t help it. “Do you need some water?”
“Please.” He sounded so grateful she felt a pang of guilt for not offering sooner.
She untangled her legs from their lotus, rose, and brought him a glass of water, which he drained in a draft. “Thank you,” he said in a weirdly heartfelt way, as if he were thanking her for something much more profound than a glass of water.
“Uh. Uh-huh,” she said, awkward. She felt like she was hovering, standing there. There was really nowhere in the room to go except the bed, so she scooted back onto it. She kind of wanted to take off her boots, but that was something you didn’t do if there was any chance you might have to quickly flee or kick someone. Judging from Akiva’s plain exhaustion, she didn’t think she was in danger of either. The only danger was of foot smell.
She kept her boots on.
She said, “I still don’t get why you burned the portals. How does that end your war?”
Akiva’s hands tightened on the empty water glass. He said, “There was magic coming through the doorways. Dark magic.”
“From here? There’s no magic here.”
“Says the flying girl.”
“Okay, but that’s because of a wish, from your world.”
“From Brimstone.”
She acknowledged this with a nod.
“So you know that he’s a sorcerer.”
“I… Uh. Yeah.” She’d never really thought of Brimstone as a sorcerer. Did he do more than manufacture wishes? What did she know, really, and how much did she not know? Her ignorance was like standing in pure dark that could be either a closet or a vast, starless night.
A kaleidoscope of images whirled in her mind. The fizz of magic when she stepped into the shop. The array of teeth and gems, the stone tables in that underground cathedral, laid out with the dead… the dead who were not, as Karou had learned the hard way, actually dead. And she