“Akiva,” breathed Karou with the fullness of her self.
Mere seconds had passed since they had broken the wishbone, but in that space of time, years had come home to her. Seventeen years ago, Madrigal had ended. All that had happened since was another life, but it was hers, too. She was Karou, and she was Madrigal. She was human and chimaera.
She was revenant.
Within her, something was at work: a swift concrescence of memories, two consciousnesses that were really one, coming together like interlacing fingers.
She saw her hamsas and knew what Brimstone had done. In defiance of Thiago’s sentence of evanescence, he had somehow gleaned her soul. And because she could not have a life in her own world, he had given her one here, in secret. How had he extracted her memory from her soul? The life she had lived as Madrigal—he had taken it all and put it in the wishbone, and saved it for her.
It came to her what Izîl had said the last time she saw him, when he offered her baby teeth and she rejected them. “Once,” he’d said, and she hadn’t believed him. “Once he wanted some.”
She believed it now.
Revenants were made for battle; their bodies were always conjured fully grown, from mature teeth. But Brimstone had made her a baby, a human, named her hope and given her a whole life, far away from war and death. Sweet, deep, fond love filled her. He had given her a childhood, a world. Wishes. Art. And Issa and Yasri and Twiga, they had known and helped; hidden her. Loved her. She would see them soon, and she wouldn’t stand back from Brimstone as she always did, cowed by his gruffness and his monstrous physical presence. She would throw her arms around him and say, finally, thank you.
She looked up from her palms—from one wonder to another—and Akiva was before her. He still stood at the foot of the bed on which, just a moment earlier, they had fallen back together, all of him against all of her, and Karou understood that the aching allness rose from what she had shared with him in another body, another life. She had fallen in love with him twice. She loved him now with both loves, so overpowering it was almost unbearable. She beheld him through a prism of tears.
“You escaped,” she said. “You lived.”
She uncoiled from the bed, flashed toward him, threw herself against the remembered solidity of him, the heat.
A hesitation, then his arms came around her, tight. He didn’t speak, but held her against him and rocked back and forth. She felt him shake, weeping, his lips pressed to the crown of her head.
“You escaped,” she repeated, sobbing, but laughing now, too. “You’re alive.”
“I’m alive,” he whispered, choked. “You’re alive. I never knew. All these years, I never thought—”
“We’re alive,” Karou said, dazed. The wonder of it swelled within her, and she felt like their myth had come to life. They had a world; they were in it. This place that Brimstone had given her, it was half her home, and the other half lay waiting through a portal in the sky. They could have both, couldn’t they?
“I saw you die,” Akiva said, helpless. “Karou… Madrigal… My love.” His eyes, his expression. He looked as he had seventeen years ago, on his knees, forced to watch. He said again, “I saw you die.”
“I know.” She kissed him tenderly, remembering the scouring horror of his scream. “I remember it all.”
As did he.
The hooded executioner: a monster. The Wolf and the Warlord, looking on from their balcony, and the crowd, their stamping riot, their roars and bloodlust: monsters all, making a mockery of the dream of peace Akiva had nurtured since Bullfinch. Because one among them had touched his soul, he had believed them all worthy of that dream.
And there she stood in shackles—the one; his one—her wings in their pinion crimped cruelly out of shape, and the sham dream was gone. This was what they did to their own. His beautiful Madrigal, graceful even now.
He watched in helpless horror as she sank to her knees. Laid her head on the block. Impossible, screamed Akiva’s heart. This couldn’t happen. The will, the mystery that had been on their side… where was it now? Madrigal’s neck, stretched vulnerable, her smooth cheek to the hot black rock, and the blade, raised high and poised to fall.
His scream was a thing. It clawed its way out of him, gutting him from the inside. It ripped and tore; there was pain, pain to summon, and he tried to work it into magic, but he was too weak. The Wolf had seen to that: Even now Akiva was flanked by revenant guards, their hamsas aimed at him and flooding him with their debilitating sickness. Still he tried, and ripples went through the crowd as the very ground beneath their feet shifted. The scaffold rocked, the executioner had to take a step to steady himself, but it wasn’t enough.
The effort burst the blood vessels in his eyes. Still he screamed. Tried.
The blade glinted its descent, and Akiva fell forward on his hands. He was shredded, empty. Love, peace, wonder: gone. Hope, humanity: gone.
All that remained was vengeance.
The blade was a great and shining thing, like a falling moon.
It bit, and Madrigal was unsheathed.
She was aware of the falling away of flesh.
She still was. She was, but she was not corporeal. She didn’t want to see her head’s disgraceful tumble, but couldn’t help it. Her horns hit the platform first with a clatter, and then there was the ungodly thud of meat before it came to rest, the horns preventing it from rolling.
From this strange new vantage point above her body, she saw it all. She couldn’t not. The eyes had been the body’s apparatus, with their selective focus and lids for closing. She had no such ability now. She saw everything, with no fleshly boundary to divide herself from the air all around her. It was a muted kind of seeing, all directions at once as if her entire being were an eye, but a hazy one. The agora, the hateful crowd. And on the platform facing her own, his scream still warping the air around her: Akiva on his knees, pitched forward and wracked with sobs.
Below her she saw her own body, headless. It swayed to one side and collapsed. It was finished. Madrigal felt tethered to it. She had expected that; she knew souls stayed with their bodies for several days before beginning to ebb. Revenants who had been snatched back from the verge of evanescence had said it felt like a tide carrying them out.
Thiago had ordered her body left on the platform to rot, under guard, so that no one might attempt to glean her soul. She was sorry for the treatment of her body. For all that Brimstone might call bodies “envelopes,” she loved the skin that had carried her through her life, and she wished it could have a more respectful end, but it couldn’t be helped, and anyway, she didn’t intend to be here to see it break down. She had other plans.
She wasn’t certain that it could be done, this idea she clung to. She had nothing but a hint to go on, but she wrapped all her will around it, and all her longing and passion. Everything that she and Akiva had dreamed about, now thwarted, she directed into this one last act: She was going to set him free.
To which end, she would need a body. She had one picked out. It was a good one; she’d made it herself.
She had even used diamonds.
V ICTORY AND V ENGEANCE