Daughter of Smoke and Bone

47 EVANESCENCE

Madrigal ascended the scaffold. Her hands were tied behind her, her wings pinioned so she couldn’t fly away. It was an unnecessary precaution: Overhead arched the iron bars of the Cage. The bars were there to keep seraphim out, not chimaera in, but today they would have served that purpose. Madrigal was not going anywhere but to her death.

“That is unnecessary,” Brimstone had objected when Thiago ordered the pinion. His voice had come out as a scraping almost too low to hear, like something being dragged across the ground.

Thiago, the White Wolf, the general, the Warlord’s son and right hand, had ignored him. He knew it was unnecessary. He wanted to humiliate her. Madrigal’s death wasn’t enough for him. He wanted her abject, penitent. He wanted her on her knees.

He would be disappointed. He could bind her hands and wings, he could force her to her knees, and he could watch her die, but it was not in his power to make her repent.

She was not sorry for what she had done.

On the palace balcony, the Warlord sat in state. He had the head of a stag, his antlers tipped in gold. Thiago was in his place at his father’s side. The seat at the Warlord’s left hand belonged to Brimstone, and was empty.

A thousand-thousand eyes were on Madrigal, and the cacophony of the crowd was sharpening to something dark, the voices cresting to jeers. Feet stamped, thunderous. There had not been an execution in the plaza in living memory, but those gathered knew what to do, as if hate were an atavism just waiting to resurface.

A shrieked accusation: “Angel-lover!”

Some in the crowd were stricken, uncertain. Madrigal was a beauty, a joy — could she really have done this unthinkable thing?

And then Akiva was brought out. It was Thiago’s order that he be forced to watch. The guards knocked him to his knees on a platform opposite hers, from which his view would be unobscured. Even bloodied and shackled and weak from torture, he was glorious. His wings flared radiant; his eyes were fire, and they were fierce, and fixed on her, and Madrigal was filled with a warmth of memories and tenderness, and with sharp regret that her body would never again know his, her mouth never again meet his, that their dreams would never come to their fruition.

Her eyes filled with tears. She smiled across space to him, and it was a look of such unmistakable love that no one watching could continue to doubt her guilt.

Madrigal Kirin was guilty of treason — of loving the enemy — sentenced to death and worse, a sentence that had not been handed down for hundreds of years: evanescence.

Unmaking.

She was alone on the scaffold with the hooded executioner. Head held high, she stepped toward the block and sank to her knees, and it was then that Akiva started to scream. His voice soared over the pandemonium — a scream to scour the souls of all gathered, a sound to drive ghosts from their nests.

It drilled through Madrigal’s heart, and she yearned to gather him in her arms. She knew Thiago wanted her to break and scream and beg, but she wouldn’t. There was no point. There was not the slightest hope of life. Not for her.

One last look to her love, and she laid her head down on the block. It was black rock, like everything in Loramendi, and it was hot as an anvil against her cheek. Akiva screamed, and Madrigal’s heart answered it. Her pulse raced — she was about to die—but she kept calm. She had a plan, and it was what she held on to as the executioner raised his blade — a great and shining thing, like a falling moon — because she had work ahead of her, and she couldn’t afford to lose her focus. She wasn’t finished yet.

After she died, she was going to save Akiva’s life.