With a sigh, she gave in to her friends’ ministrations. She sat on a stool and let them define her eyes with kohl, rouge her lips with rose-petal paste, and string lengths of ultrafine gold chain between her horns in tiers, suspended with tiny crystal drops that winked in the light. Chiro and Nwella giggled as if they were preparing a bride for her wedding night, and it struck Madrigal that it well could be, if not in ceremony, at least in one way.
If she accepted Thiago, it was unlikely she would be returning to the barracks tonight.
She shivered, imagining his clawed hands on her flesh. What would it be like? She had never made love—in that way, too, she was “pure,” as she imagined Thiago must know. She thought about it, of course she thought about it. She was of age; her body coursed with urges, just like anyone’s, and chimaera weren’t puritanical about sex. Madrigal had just never come to a moment when it had felt right.
“There. You’re finished,” said Chiro. She and Nwella pulled Madrigal to her feet and stood back from her to survey their work. “Oh,” breathed Nwella. There was a pause, and when Chiro spoke again, her voice was flat. She said, “You’re beautiful.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment.
After Kalamet, when Chiro had awakened in the cathedral, Madrigal was there beside her. “You’re all right,” she assured her, as Chiro’s eyes fluttered open. It was Chiro’s first resurrection, and revenants said it could be disorienting. Madrigal hoped that in matching the new body so closely to her sister’s original flesh, she could ease her transition. “You’re all right,” she said again, clasping Chiro’s hand with its hamsa, symbol of her new status. She told her, “Brimstone let me make your body. I used diamonds.” Conspiratorial. “Don’t tell anyone.”
She helped Chiro sit up. The fur of her cat haunches was soft, and the flesh of her human arms was, too. Jerkily, Chiro touched her new skin—hips, ribs, human breasts. Her hand climbed eagerly up her neck to her head, felt the fur there, and the jackal muzzle, and froze.
The sound she made was like choking, and at first Madrigal thought it was only the problem of a newly made throat and a mouth that had never yet formed speech. But it wasn’t.
Chiro threw off Madrigal’s hand. “You did this?”
Madrigal backed up a step. “It’s… it’s perfect,” she said, faltering. “It’s almost exactly like your real—”
“And that’s all I merit? Beast aspect? Thank you, my sister. Thank you.”
“Chiro—”
“You couldn’t have made me high-human? What are a few teeth to you? To Brimstone?”
The idea had never even entered Madrigal’s mind. “But… Chiro. This is you.”
“Me.” Her voice was changed; it had a deeper tone than her original voice, and Madrigal couldn’t tell how much of this was its newness, but whatever else it was, it was acid, and ugly. “Would you want to be me?”
Hurt and confused, Madrigal said, “I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Chiro. “You’re beautiful.”
Later, she had apologized. It was the shock, she said. The new body had felt tight, unyielding; she could barely breathe. Once she grew accustomed to it, she praised its strength, its lithe movement. She could fly faster than before; her movements were whip-quick, her teeth and eyesight sharper. She said she was like a violin that had been tuned—the same, but better.
“Thank you, my sister,” she said, and seemed to mean it.
But Madrigal remembered the spiteful way she had said, “You’re beautiful.” She sounded like that now.
Nwella was more exuberant. “So beautiful!” she sang. A frown creased her scaled brow, and she plucked at the charm that hung around Madrigal’s neck. “This, of course, will have to go,” she said, but Madrigal pulled away.
“No,” she said, closing her hand around it.
“Just for tonight, Mad,” coaxed Nwella. “It just isn’t fit for the occasion.”
“Leave it,” said Madrigal, and that was that. The tone of her voice dissuaded Nwella from pressing the issue.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh, and Madrigal spilled her wishbone from her cupped palm so that it settled back in its place, where her clavicles met. It wasn’t beautiful or fine, just a bone, and she saw plainly that it did not do justice to her decolletage, but she didn’t care. It was what she wore.
Nwella regarded it, pained, and then turned to rummage in her drawer of cosmetic tubes and ointments. “Here, then. At the very least.” She came up with a silver bowl and a big soft brush, and before Madrigal knew what was happening Nwella had dusted her chest, neck, and shoulders with something that glittered.
“What—?”
“Sugar,” she said, giggling.
“Nwella!” Madrigal tried to brush it off, but it was dust-fine and it clung: sugar powder, which girls wore when they planned to be tasted. If her rose-petal lips and naked back were not enough invitation to Thiago, Madrigal thought, this certainly was. Its telltale shimmer might as well have been a sign that said LICK ME.
“You don’t look like a soldier now,” said Nwella.
It was true. She looked like a girl who had made her choice. Had she? Everyone thought she had, which almost felt like the same thing. But it wasn’t too late. She could decide not to go to the ball at all—that would send quite the opposite message of showing up sugared. She had only to decide what she wanted.
She held herself framed in the mirror for a long beat. She felt dizzy, as if the future were rushing at her.
It was, though at that moment, she could have no notion that it was coming for her with invisible wings and eyes that no mask could disguise, and that her choices, such as they were, would soon be swept away like dust on a wingbeat, leaving in their place the unthinkable.
Love.
“Let’s go,” she said, and she linked arms with Chiro and Nwella, and went out to meet it.
T HE S ERPENTINE
Loramendi’s main thoroughfare, the Serpentine, became a processional route on the Warlord’s birthday. The custom was to dance its length, moving from partner to masked partner all the way to the agora, the city’s gathering place. The ball was there, under thousands of lanterns strung like stars from the bars of the Cage, making it, for a night, a miniature world with its own firmament.
Madrigal plunged into the crowd with her friends, as she had in years past, but this year, she realized at once, things were different.
She might have been masked, but she was not disguised—her appearance was far too distinctive—and she might have been sugared, but no one took the sparkle of her shoulders as an invitation. They knew she was not for them. In the wild merriment of the street, she was as apart as if she were drifting along in a crystal sphere.
Again and again, Chiro and Nwella were swept into strangers’ embraces and kissed, mask to mask. That was tradition: a spinning, stamping dance punctuated liberally with kisses, to celebrate unity among the races. Musicians were grouped at intervals so that merrymakers were passed from melody to melody as from hand to hand, with never a lull. Wild music spun them along, but no one swept Madrigal up. Several times some soldier started toward her—one even grabbed her hand—but always there was a friend there to pull him back and whisper a warning. Madrigal couldn’t hear what was said, but she could imagine it.