Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,169

look and say, “You see? There’s a much better way to get your blood moving than battle.” And he would add, she didn’t doubt, because he had said it enough times, “And please unbraid your hair. It hurts me just to look at it. What did it ever do to deserve such punishment?”

Liraz laughed a little, imagining him, and she might have cried a little, too, missing him, but no one saw, and her tears froze before they hit the mountains, because they had climbed high into the Adelphas now, and she cast Karou a glance, just enough to catch the glint of silver at her hip where the canteen swayed.

When? she wondered.

And What then?

Akiva, for the duration of the journey, felt divided in two.

There was the memory of kissing Karou, and everything he’d said to her, and everything he’d thought but hadn’t said—which was the far greater portion—and every stir in him, when his eyes traced the lines of her in flight, his hands aching to trace them, too… She should have been all he could think of. They would spend a night at the Kirin caves to break their journey, and he knew that it would not be another night spent apart. They had come to the end of those, at last, and it felt like a bubble inside him, this great pressure in his chest: joy and hunger and a shout building, a wordless cry of gladness ready to burst from him and echo.

He wanted only to set down in the entrance cavern, call hasty greetings to those who awaited them, drop his gear on the ice-rimed floor and let it lie there. Seize Karou’s hand, and draw her, running, away with him. Into the caves, and in, and in, and take her, and hold her, and laugh against her neck in disbelief that she was finally his, and that the world was finally theirs, and this was all he wanted.

Or rather, it was all that he wanted to want.

But there was an intrusion in his mind. It had been there for some time. Most recently: hearing the accounts of victory in the Adelphas, and seeing the vague puzzlement of those who did the telling. The dream logic of it, and how they all accepted it because it had happened. The way they accepted what had happened in the caves when they first faced one another, blooded, ready to kill and die—and hadn’t.

But the intrusion had been there already. When he had reached for sirithar in the battle of the Adelphas and gotten thunder instead. And before that, when he had sensed a presence in the cave with him, or thought he had. And even before that, from his first attainment of true sirithar, a state of power his mind had no context for and that made him feel, in its aftermath, like an infinitesimal figure pulled along in the wake of some catastrophic force. A flood, or a hurricane. He couldn’t control it. Somehow, he could summon it, and that wasn’t the same thing at all.

He had spoken to Karou of a “scheme of energies,” and that was real—a place that he had navigated, blind, since his first earliest fumblings with magic. He sensed the vastness that was in him, the limitlessness, and was humbled by it, but… this wasn’t that.

This was what troubled him most: the suspicion that when he attained sirithar—that is, this thing which he had chosen to call sirithar, because it was the only word he knew for a state of exceptional clarity—he was not reaching down within himself, but out. Beyond. And that what responded—the source of the power—it was not him, and not his.

So… what was it?

76

WAITING FOR MAGIC

They were watched for.

Those left at the caves must have kept a sentry always posted to look out for their return, because by the time they drew nigh—cautious, in case anything had gone wrong in their absence—everyone had gathered in the entrance cavern to welcome them, and it felt good. Like coming home.

Karou flew straight into Issa’s arms and stayed there long enough that a nest of serpents the Naja had called to herself for company—blind cave snakes from the muggy passages below—wound round her, too, pallid and glimmering, and joined them together.

“Sweet girl,” whispered Issa, “all is well?”

“And more than well,” Karou said, and flushed with emotion, knowing that this was as close as she would ever come to telling Brimstone that it was begun: the unlikeliest dream, and the sweetest.

After