Daughter of Smoke and Bone

23 INFINITE PATIENCE

Fairy-tale city. From the air, red rooftops hug a kink in a dark river, and by night the forested hills appear as spans of black nothing against the dazzle of the lit castle, the spiking Gothic towers, the domes great and small. The river captures all the lights and teases them out, long and wavering, and the side-slashing rain blurs it all to a dream.

This was Akiva’s first sight of Prague; he hadn’t been the one to mark this portal. That had been Hazael, who had remarked on it after, back in their own world. He’d said that it was beautiful, and it was. Akiva imagined that Astrae might have looked something like this in its golden age, before it was razed by the beasts. City of a Hundred Spires, the seraph capital had been called — a tower for each of the godstars — and the chimaera had torn down every one.

Many a human city had been demolished in war, too, but Prague had been lucky. It stood lovely and ghostly, its chapped stone worn smooth by centuries of storms, millions of rivulets of rain. It was wet and cold, inhospitable, but that didn’t bother Akiva. He made his own heat. Moisture hissed on his invisible wings and vaporized, marking out the shape of them against the night in a diffuse halo. Nothing a glamour could do about that, any more than it could hide his wings from his shadow, but there was no one up here to see it.

He was perched on a rooftop in Old Town. The towers of Týn Church reared up like devil’s horns behind the row of buildings across the street, in one of which was Karou’s flat. Her window was dark. It had been dark, and her flat empty, for the two days since he’d found it.

Folded in his pocket, its creases worn smooth from much handling, was a page torn from a sketchbook — number ninety-two, as was printed on its spine. On the page, which had been the first in the book, a drawing showed Karou with her hands clasped in supplication, accompanied by the words: If found, please return to Krâlodvorskâ 59, no. 12, Prague. You will be rewarded with cosmic goodwill and hard cash. Thank you.

Akiva hadn’t brought the whole book with him, just this one page with its ragged edge. He wasn’t after cosmic goodwill or hard cash.

Just Karou.

With the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return.