Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [97]
Was he bitter that she hadn’t promised? Karou wanted to tell him that she hadn’t known then what she knew now—that “as long as she could” was a long time indeed, and that she felt as if she’d been waiting for him all her life. But she was silenced by his closed expression.
He thrust out his hand and said, “Here,” and there was her wishbone, dangling by its cord.
She took it, managing a whispered thank you as she slipped it over her head. It settled back into its place at the base of her throat.
“I brought these, too,” Akiva said, and placed on the table the case that held her crescent-moon knives. “You’ll need them.”
It sounded hard, almost like a threat. Karou just stood there, blinking back tears.
“Do you still want to know who you are?” Akiva asked. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking past her, at nothing.
“Of course I do,” she said, though it wasn’t what she had been thinking. What she wanted right now was to go back in time, to Prague. She had believed then, with a certainty that was both thrill and refuge, that Akiva was coming back from some dark night of the soul for her. Now it was like he was dead again, and though she had her wishbone back, and though she was going to learn, finally, the answer to the question at the core of her being, she felt dead, too.
“What happened?” she asked. “With the others?”
He ignored the question. “Is there somewhere we can go?”
“Go?”
Akiva gestured to the crowds in the square, the vendors building their pyramids of oranges, the tourists toting cameras and parcels of shopping. “You’ll want to be alone for this,” he said.
“What… what do you have to tell me that I’ll want to be alone to hear it?”
“I’m not going to tell you anything.” Akiva had been gazing past her, unfocused, this whole time, so that she’d begun to feel like some kind of blur, but he fixed his eyes on her now. Their brilliance was like the sun in topaz, and she saw, before he looked away again, the bare glint of a yearning so deep it hurt to behold. Her heart leapt.
“We’re going to break the wishbone,” he said.
And then she would know everything, and she would hate him. Akiva was trying to prepare himself for the way she would look at him once she understood. He had watched her from the square for a handful of seconds before she looked up, and he witnessed the way her face was transformed by the sight of him—from anxious, lost expectancy, to… light. It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.
All that he didn’t deserve and could never have was in that instant. All he wanted now was to fold her against him, lose his hands in her hair—which was clean and combed straight as rivers over her shoulders—lose himself in the fragrance and softness of her.
He remembered a story Madrigal had told him once: the human tale of the golem. It was a thing shaped of clay in the form of a man, brought to life by carving the symbol aleph into its brow. Aleph was the first letter of an ancestral human alphabet, and the first letter of the Hebrew word truth; it was the beginning. Watching Karou rise to her feet, radiant in a fall of lapis hair, in a woven dress the color of tangerines, with a loop of silver beads at her throat and a look of joy and relief and… love… on her beautiful face, Akiva knew that she was his aleph, his truth and beginning. His soul.
His wing joints ached with the desire to beat, once, and propel him to her, but instead he walked, heavy and heartsick. His arms felt banded by iron, keeping them from reaching for her. The way the light went out of her at the cold manner of his approach, the hesitation and hope in her voice—it was killing him by degrees. It was better this way. If he gave in and let himself have what he wanted, she would only hate him more once she knew what he really was. So he held himself remote, aching, preparing for the moment he knew must come.
“Break it?” Karou asked now, looking at the wishbone in surprise. “Brimstone never did—”
“It wasn’t his,” said Akiva. “It was