So he worked at it. It took months. He learned to go into his pain, like it was a place. From within it, things looked different—sharp-edged—and felt and sounded different, too, tinny and cool. Pain was like a lens that honed everything, his senses and instincts, and it was there, through relentless trial and repetition, that he did it. He achieved invisibility. It was a triumph that would have garnered him fame and the emperor’s highest honors, and it gave him a cold satisfaction to keep it to himself.
Blood will out, he thought. Father.
The other part of his plan was language. To master Chimaera, he perched on the roof of the slave barracks and listened to the stories they told by the light of their stinking dungfire. Their tales were unexpectedly rich and beautiful, and, listening, he couldn’t help imagining his chimaera girl sitting at a battle campfire somewhere telling the same stories.
His. He caught himself thinking of her as his, and it didn’t even seem strange.
By the time he was sent back to his regiment at Morwen Bay, he could have used a little more time to perfect his Chimaera accent, but he thought he was basically ready for what came next, in all its bright and shining madness.
40
ALMOST LIKE MAGIC
Back then, it had been Madrigal’s existence that had called to him across space. Now it was Karou’s. Then, Loramendi had been his destination, the caged city of the beasts. Now it was Marrakesh. Once again he left Hazael and Liraz behind, but this time he didn’t leave them in ignorance. They knew the truth about him.
What they would do about it, he couldn’t guess.
Liraz had called him a traitor, said he made her sick. Hazael had just stared, pale and repulsed.
But they had let him go without bloodshed—his or theirs—and that was the best he had hoped for. Whether they would tell their commander—or even the emperor—come back hunting for him, or cover for him, he couldn’t know. He couldn’t think about it. Flying over the Mediterranean with the wishbone in his hand, his thoughts belonged to Karou. He imagined her waiting for him at the mad Moroccan square where he’d first locked eyes with her. He could picture her so clearly, down to the way she would keep lifting her hand to her throat, reaching for the wishbone before she remembered, with a fresh pang every time, that she didn’t have it.
He had it. Everything it meant, to the past, to the future, was right here in his hand—almost like magic, as Madrigal had told him once.
Until the night that he had finally seen Madrigal again, he hadn’t even known what a wishbone was. She wore one on a cord around her neck, so incongruous a thing against her silk gown, her silken skin.
“It’s a wishbone,” she’d told him, holding it out. “You hook your finger around the spur, like this, and we each make a wish and pull. Whoever gets the bigger piece gets their wish.”
“Magic?” Akiva had asked. “What bird does this come from, that its bones make magic?”
“Oh, it’s not magic. The wishes don’t really come true.”
“Then why do it?”
She shrugged. “Hope? Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”
He was lost in her. The radiance of her eyes kindled something in him that
