“I came to thank you,” said the stranger, close to her ear, “for saving my life.”
Madrigal had saved lives. She had crept in darkness over fields of the fallen, slipped through seraphim patrols to glean souls that would otherwise be lost to evanescence. She had led a strike on an angel position that had her comrades trapped in a gully, and bought them time to retreat. She had shot an angel’s arrow out of the sky as it made its deadly glide toward a comrade. She had saved lives. But all those memories passed through her consciousness in the space of a finger snap, leaving only one.
Bullfinch. Mist. Enemy.
“I took your recommendation,” he said. “I lived.”
Instantly, it was as if her veins were conducting fire. She whipped around. His face was only inches from her own, his head tilted down so that now she could see into his mask.
His eyes blazed like flames.
She whispered, “You.”
M ADNESS
The living tide sucked them into the agora, a backwash of elbows and wings, horns and hide, fur and flesh, and she was carried along, stricken dumb with disbelief, her hooves scarcely skimming the cobbles.
A seraph, inside Loramendi.
Not a seraph. This seraph. Whom she had touched. Saved. Here, in the Cage, his hands on her arms, hot even through the leather of his gloves, this angel who was alive because of her.
He was here.
It was such madness, it made a churning of her thoughts, more chaotic than the churning all around her. She couldn’t think. What could she say? What should she do?
Later it would strike her that not for an instant had she considered doing what anyone else in the entire city would have done without a thought: unmasking him and screaming, “Seraph!”
She drew a long, uneven breath and said, “You’re mad to be here. Why did you come?”
“I told you, I came to thank you.”
She had a terrible thought. “Assassination? You’ll never get close to the Warlord.”
Earnestly, he said, “No. I wouldn’t tarnish the gift you gave me with the blood of your folk.”
The agora was a massive oval; it was big enough for an army to mass, many phalanxes abreast, but tonight there were no troops at its center, only dancers moving in the intricate patterns of a lowland reel. Those spilling from the Serpentine eddied out around the edges of the square where the density of bodies was greatest. Casks of grasswine stood amid tables laden with food, and folk gathered in clusters, children on their shoulders, everyone laughing and singing.
Madrigal and the angel were still caught in the churning delta of the Serpentine. He was anchoring her, as steady as a breakwall. In the blank, gasping aftermath of shock, Madrigal didn’t try to move away.
“Gift?” she said, incredulous. “You hold that gift lightly, coming here, into certain death.”
“I’m not going to die,” he said. “Not tonight. A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here. Everything lined up. It has been easy, as if it were meant—”
“Meant!” she said, amazed. She spun to face him, which, in the crush, brought her against his chest as if they were still dancing. She fought backward for space. “As if what were meant?”
“You,” he said. “And me.”
His words sucked the breath from her lungs. Him and her? Seraph and chimaera? It was preposterous. All she could think to say was, again, “You’re mad.”
“It’s your madness, too. You saved my life. Why did you do it?”
Madrigal had no answer. For two years she had been haunted by it, by the feeling, when she had found him dying, that somehow he was hers to protect. Hers. And now here he was, alive and, impossibly, here. She was still grappling with disbelief, that it was him, his face—of which she remembered every plane and angle—hidden behind that mask.
“And tonight,” he said, “a million souls in the city, I might not have found you at all. I might have searched all night and never so much as glimpsed you, but instead, there you were, like you were set down in front of me, and you were alone, moving through the crowd and apart in it, like you were waiting for me….”
He went on speaking, but Madrigal stopped hearing. At his mention of her apartness, the reason for it came thundering back to her, having been momentarily forgotten in her shock. Thiago. She looked to the palace, up at the Warlord’s balcony. At this distance, the figures on it were only silhouettes, but they were silhouettes she knew: the Warlord, the hulking shape of Brimstone, and a gaggle of the ruler’s antlered wives. Thiago was not there.
Which could only mean he was down here. A thrill of fear shot through her from hooves to horns. “You don’t understand,” she said, pirouetting to scan the crowd. “There was a reason no one was dancing with me. I thought you were brave. I didn’t know you were mad—”
“What reason?” the angel asked, still near. Still too near.
“Trust me,” she said, urgent. “It isn’t safe for you. If you want to live, leave me.”
“I’ve come a long way to find you—”
“I’m spoken for,” she blurted, hating the words even before they were out.
This brought him up short. “Spoken for? Betrothed?”
Claimed, she thought, but she said, “As good as. Now go. If Thiago sees you—”
“Thiago?” The angel recoiled at the name. “You’re betrothed to the Wolf?”
And at the moment he pronounced those words—the Wolf—arms came around Madrigal’s waist from behind and she gasped.
In an instant, she saw what would happen. Thiago would discover the angel, and he wouldn’t just kill him, he would make a spectacle of it. A seraph spy at the Warlord’s ball—such a thing had never happened! He would be tortured. He would be made to wish that he had never lived. It all flashed through her, and horror rose like bile in her throat. When she heard, close to her ear, a giggle, the relief almost left her limp.
It wasn’t Thiago, but Chiro. “There you are,” said her sister. “We lost you in the crush!”
Madrigal’s blood made a roaring in her ears, and Chiro glanced from her to the stranger, whose heat suddenly felt to Madrigal like a beacon. “Hello,” Chiro said, peering with curiosity at the horse mask, through which Madrigal could still make out the orange burn of his tiger’s eyes.
It hit her anew that he had come in such thin disguise into the den of the enemy for her, and she felt a queer constriction in her chest. For two years she had reflected on Bullfinch as a momentary madness, though it hadn’t felt like madness then, and it didn’t now, to wish this seraph to live—and she did wish it. She pulled herself together and turned to Chiro. Nwella was right behind her.
“Some friends you are,” she chided them. “To dress me like this and then abandon me to the Serpentine. I might have been mauled.”
“We thought you were behind us,” said Nwella, breathless from dancing.
“I was,” said Madrigal. “Far behind you.” She had turned her back on the angel without a second glance. She began to casually herd her friends away from him, using the motion of the crowd to put space between them.