Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [73]
Akiva waited for her to say she was ready to get down out of the wind, but she didn’t. The sun climbed above the hills and she watched as its glow herded night into the shadows where it gathered, all the darker for its density—all of night crowded into the slanting places beyond the reach of the dawn.
After a while she said, “You know last night, you said your earliest memory was of the soldiers coming for you—”
“I told you that?” He was startled.
“What, don’t you remember?” She turned to him, eyebrows twin quirks, cocoa-dark, raised in surprise.
He shook his head, searching his mind. He’d been so ill from the devil’s marks, it was all a fugue, but he couldn’t believe he’d spoken of his childhood, and that day of all days. It made him feel as if he’d dragged that bereft little boy out of the past—as if, in a moment of weakness, he had become him again. He asked, “What else did I say?”
Karou cocked her head. It was the gesture that had saved her in Marrakesh, the quick birdlike tilt, to regard him almost sideways, and Akiva’s heart sped up. “Not much,” she said, after a moment. “You fell asleep after that.” She was clearly lying.
What had he said to her in the night?
“Anyway,” she went on, not meeting his eyes, “you got me thinking, and I was trying to remember my own earliest memory.” She levered herself back to her feet from the roof’s edge, a move that required releasing her hair, which sprang wild back into the wind.
“And?”
“Brimstone.” A hitch in her breathing, a fond and infinitely sad smile. “It’s Brimstone. I’m sitting on the floor behind his desk, playing with the tuft of his tail.”
Playing with the tuft of his tail? That didn’t fit with Akiva’s own idea of the sorcerer, which had been forged by his deepest anguish, seared into his soul like a brand.
“Brimstone,” he said, bitter. “He was good to you?”
Karou was fierce in her reply. Her hair a blue torrent, her eyes hungry, she said, “Always. Whatever you think you know of chimaera, you don’t know him.”
“Isn’t it possible, Karou,” he said slowly, “that it’s you who don’t really know him?”
“What?” she asked. “What exactly don’t I know?”
“His magic, for one thing,” said Akiva. “Your wishes. Do you know what they come from?”
“Come from?”
“It’s not free, Karou. Magic has a price. The price is pain.”
32
BOTH PLACE AND PERSON
Pain.
As Akiva explained, Karou felt sick. She thought of every nonsensical wish she’d ever made—why had Brimstone never told her? The truth would have achieved what all his grumpy looks never did. She would never have made another wish if she’d known.
“To take from the universe, you must give,” said Akiva.
“But… why pain? Couldn’t you give something else? Like… joy?”
“It’s a balance. If it were something easy to give, it would be meaningless.”
Karou said, “You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? Which have you had more of?”
He gave her a long look. “That’s a good point. But I didn’t create the system.”
“Who did?”
“My people believe it was the godstars. The chimaera have as many stories as races.”
Troubled, Karou asked, “Well… where does the pain come from? Is it his own pain?”
Akiva said, “No, Karou. It is not his own pain.” He enunciated each word carefully, and the implication hung there: If it wasn’t his own pain, whose was it?
She felt queasy. An image came to her of bodies laid out on tables. No. That could be something else completely. She knew Brimstone, didn’t she? She might not know… well, anything about him… but she knew him, trusted him, not this angel.
Swallowing a lump in her throat, she said, “I don’t believe you.”
Not ungently, he said, “Karou, what were the errands you did for him?”
She opened her mouth to answer and closed it again. A slow wave of understanding began to creep over her, and she wanted to push it away. Teeth: one of the great