Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,195

thought that if she was seeking him now, it must be to speak in private. If there was something she wanted to say, though, she didn’t get to it right away.

“Which one is it?” she asked him, standing by his shoulder and gazing outward with him over the vista. On a clear day, from up here, nearly two hundred islands were visible. Some ninety percent of them were uninhabited, and perhaps scarcely habitable, and Akiva had claimed one for himself. And for Karou, though he never spoke this aloud. He pointed out an island cluster to the west, the sun setting behind it.

“The small one that looks like a turtle,” he said, and she made a noise like she had picked it out, though he thought it unlikely. It wasn’t one of the sharp-featured islands, all upthrust and ancient lava extrusions, and it wasn’t one of the calderas, either, with their perfect hidden lagoons.

“Does it have fresh water?” Melliel asked.

“Whenever it rains,” he said, and she laughed. It rained ruthlessly at this time of year—every few hours, a kind of downpour such as they’d never experienced in the north: brief but torrential. The waterfalls that descended from this peak would swell and turn from blue to brown in a matter of minutes, and then shrink back to normal almost as quickly. The air was heavy, and clouds drifted low and slow, burdened by bellies full of rain. One of the eeriest things Akiva had ever seen was the shadows of those clouds hunting across the surface of the sea, looking so much like the silhouettes of submerged sea creatures that at first he hadn’t believed they weren’t, and was still teased for it.

“Look, a rorqual!” Eidolon would say, pointing at a cloud shadow bigger than half the islands, and laugh at the idea that there could ever be a leviathan so large.

A nithilam is what it put Akiva in mind of. They were never very far from his thoughts.

“And the house?” Melliel asked.

He shot her a sideward glance. “It’s a stretch to call it that.”

It was something, though. Hope kept Akiva sane, and the thought of Karou kept him working, day by day, at foundational lessons in the anima that was the proper name for his “scheme of energies,” and which was the root not only of magic but of mind, soul, and life itself. Only when it was certain he was master of himself and his terrifying ability to drain sirithar would he be free to go where he wished. As for whether Karou might come here and see what he busied himself with in his spare hours, her own duty would keep her away for a long time to come. It was some consolation to him to know that Ziri, Liraz, Zuzana, and Mik were with her, to make sure she took care of herself. And Carnassial, too, who had promised to tutor her in a finer tithe method than pain.

Though somehow the thought of Karou in daily lessons with the Stelian magus was less than pure consolation to Akiva.

“It’s coming along, though?” Melliel asked.

He shrugged. He didn’t want to tell her that the house was ready, that it had been ready, that every morning when he woke in the longhouse he shared with his Misbegotten brothers and sisters, he lay still for a moment with his eyes closed, imagining morning as it might be, rather than as it was.

“Is there anything you need for it? Sylph gave me a beautiful kettle, and I haven’t used it once. You could have it.”

It was a simple offer, but it caused Akiva to cut Melliel a suspicious glance. He didn’t have a kettle, or much of anything else, but he didn’t know how she could know this. “All right, thank you,” he said, with an effort to be gracious. Kind as the offer was, it felt intrusive. For the most part, Akiva’s life since coming here had been an open book. His routine, his training, his progress, even his moods seemed to be up for general discussion at any time. One of the magi—most often Nightingale—kept contact with his anima at all times, a monitoring process that had been compared to holding a thumb to his pulse. His grandmother assured him that no one was reading his thoughts, and he hoped this was true, and he also hoped that in his inexperience he wasn’t scattering his attempted sendings like confetti over the entire population.

Because that would be embarrassing.

Anyway, what with