She dropped her hands from her neck and they trembled as she stripped off her gloves to reveal her palms. She stared at them.
They stared back.
They stared back—two flat indigo eyes—and she understood what Brimstone had done.
She finally understood everything.
Once upon a time,
there were two moons, who were sisters
.
Nitid was the goddess of tears and life,
and the sky was hers
.
No one worshipped Ellai but secret lovers
.
E VANESCENCE
Madrigal ascended the scaffold. Her hands were tied behind her, her wings pinioned so she couldn’t fly away. It was an unnecessary precaution: Overhead arched the iron bars of the Cage. The bars were there to keep seraphim out, not chimaera in, but today they would have served that purpose. Madrigal was not going anywhere but to her death.
“That is unnecessary,” Brimstone had objected when Thiago ordered the pinion. His voice had come out as a scraping almost too low to hear, like something being dragged across the ground.
Thiago, the White Wolf, the general, the Warlord’s son and right hand, had ignored him. He knew it was unnecessary. He wanted to humiliate her. Madrigal’s death wasn’t enough for him. He wanted her abject, penitent. He wanted her on her knees.
He would be disappointed. He could bind her hands and wings, he could force her to her knees, and he could watch her die, but it was not in his power to make her repent.
She was not sorry for what she had done.
On the palace balcony, the Warlord sat in state. He had the head of a stag, his antlers tipped in gold. Thiago was in his place at his father’s side. The seat at the Warlord’s left hand belonged to Brimstone, and was empty.
A thousand-thousand eyes were on Madrigal, and the cacophony of the crowd was sharpening to something dark, the voices cresting to jeers. Feet stamped, thunderous. There had not been an execution in the plaza in living memory, but those gathered knew what to do, as if hate were an atavism just waiting to resurface.
A shrieked accusation: “Angel-lover!”
Some in the crowd were stricken, uncertain. Madrigal was a beauty, a joy—could she really have done this unthinkable thing?
And then Akiva was brought out. It was Thiago’s order that he be forced to watch. The guards knocked him to his knees on a platform opposite hers, from which his view would be unobscured. Even bloodied and shackled and weak from torture, he was glorious. His wings flared radiant; his eyes were fire, and they were fierce, and fixed on her, and Madrigal was filled with a warmth of memories and tenderness, and with sharp regret that her body would never again know his, her mouth never again meet his, that their dreams would never come to their fruition.
Her eyes filled with tears. She smiled across space to him, and it was a look of such unmistakable love that no one watching could continue to doubt her guilt.
Madrigal Kirin was guilty of treason—of loving the enemy—sentenced to death and worse, a sentence that had not been handed down for hundreds of years: evanescence.
Unmaking.
She was alone on the scaffold with the hooded executioner. Head held high, she stepped toward the block and sank to her knees, and it was then that Akiva started to scream. His voice soared over the pandemonium—a scream to scour the souls of all gathered, a sound to drive ghosts from their nests.
It drilled through Madrigal’s heart, and she yearned to gather him in her arms. She knew Thiago wanted her to break and scream and beg, but she wouldn’t. There was no point. There was not the slightest hope of life. Not for her.
One last look to her love, and she laid her head down on the block. It was black rock, like everything in Loramendi, and it was hot as an anvil against her cheek. Akiva screamed, and Madrigal’s heart answered it. Her pulse raced—she was about to die—but she kept calm. She had a plan, and it was what she held on to as the executioner raised his blade—a great and shining thing, like a falling moon—because she had work ahead of her, and she couldn’t afford to lose her focus. She wasn’t finished yet.
After she died, she was going to save Akiva’s life.
P URE
Madrigal Kirin was Madrigal of the Kirin, one of the last winged tribes of the Adelphas Mountains. The Adelphas were the natural bastion between the Seraph Empire and the free holdings—the defended chimaera territory—and it had been centuries since anyone had dwelt safely in their peaks. The Kirin, flash-fast and superb archers, lasted longer than most. They were annihilated only a decade ago, when Madrigal was a child. She grew up in Loramendi, a child of towers and rooftops, not mountains.
Loramendi—the Cage, the Black Fortress, the Warlord’s Nest—was home to some million chimaera, creatures of all aspects who would never, but for the seraphim, have lived together or fought side by side, or even spoken the same language. Once, the races had been scattered, isolated, sometimes trading with one another, sometimes skirmishing—a Kirin like Madrigal having no more in common with an Anolis from Iximi, for example, than a wolf did with a tiger—but the Empire had changed all that. In naming themselves the world’s keepers, the angels had given the creatures of the land a common enemy, and now, centuries into their struggle, they shared heritage and language, history, heroes, a cause. They were a nation—of which the Warlord was leader, and Loramendi capital.
It was a port city, its broad harbor filled with warships, fishing vessels, and a stout trade fleet. Ripples in the surface of the water gave evidence of amphibious creatures who, part of the alliance, escorted the ships and fought on their side. The city itself, within the massive black walls and bars of the fortress, was shared by a multifarious population, and though they had been stirred together over the centuries, still they tended to settle in neighborhoods like with like, or near enough, and a caste system prevailed, based on aspect.
Madrigal was of high-human aspect, as was said of races with the head and torso of man or woman. Her horns were a gazelle’s, black and ridged, flowing up off her brow and back in a scimitar sweep. Her legs shifted at the knees from flesh to fur, the gazelle portion giving them an elegant, exaggerated length, so that when she stood to her full height she was nearly six feet, not including horns, and an undue portion of that was leg. She was slender as a stem. Her brown eyes, spaced wide, were as large and glistening as a deer’s but with none of a deer’s vacantness. They were keen and immediate and intelligent, leaping like sparks. Her face was oval, smooth and fair, her mouth generous and mobile, made for smiling.