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.
58
VICTORY AND VENGEANCE
“What’s going on with you, Mad?”
A week earlier, Madrigal had been with Chiro in the barracks. It was dawn, and she had crept into her bunk a mere half hour earlier from a night with Akiva. “What do you mean?”
“Do you ever sleep anymore? Where were you last night?”
“Working,” she said.
“All night?”
“Yes, all night. Though I may have fallen asleep in the shop for a couple of hours.” She yawned. She felt safe in her lies because no one outside Brimstone’s inner circle knew what went on in the west tower, or even knew about the secret passageway through which she came and went. And it was true that she had slept for a little while—just not in the shop. She’d dozed curled against Akiva’s chest and woken to him watching her.
“What?” she’d asked, bashful.
“Good dreams? You were smiling in your sleep.”
“Of course I was. I’m happy.”
Happy.
She thought that was what Chiro really meant when she asked, “What’s going on with you?” Madrigal felt remade. She had never guessed how deep happiness could go. In spite of the tragedy in her childhood and the ever- present press of war, she had mostly considered herself happy. There was almost always something to take delight in, if you were trying. But this was different. It couldn’t be contained. She sometimes imagined it streaming out of her like light.
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.
Her foster sister was scrutinizing her in silence when a trumpet blast in the city caused her to turn to the window. Madrigal went to her side and looked out. Their barracks were behind the armory, and they could just see the facade of the palace on the far side of the agora, where the Warlord’s gonfalon hung, a vast silk banner that indicated he was in residence. It bore
