Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,197

hadn’t seen him. Nightingale had squeezed her hand and smiled, and there was some comfort in that, though nothing would be true comfort until she saw him and felt the connection between them unbroken.

She believed it was. Unbroken. Every morning she woke with the certainty of it, almost as though she had been with him in her sleep.

“How is it you’ve come?” Scarab asked, when they had all disrobed and settled into the frothy water, earthen goblets of some strange liquor in all their hands, its cooling properties offsetting the almost unbearable heat of the bath. “Have you already finished your work?”

Karou was grateful to Issa for answering. She didn’t feel up to faking her way through any normal social interaction.

Where is he?

“The gleaning is done,” said Issa. “The souls are gathered and safe. But the winter is expected to be difficult, and more refugees arrive every day. It was deemed best to wait until a fairer season to begin the resurrections.”

It was a nice way of saying that they’d chosen not to bring the dead of Loramendi back to life just so they could huddle and hunger through a gray season of ice rain and ash mud. There wasn’t enough food to go around as it was, or shelter, either. It wasn’t what Brimstone and the Warlord had envisioned when they crushed the long spiral stair that led down into the earth, trapping their people belowground. And it wasn’t what those who stayed above had sacrificed themselves for, either—that others might one day know life in a better time.

The day had not yet come. The time was insufficiently better.

It was the right decision, Karou knew, but because it freed her to do what she most wanted, she had held herself out of all debate and left the decision to others. She couldn’t help but view her own desires as selfish, and all of her hoarded hope as a bounty she had no business carrying away with her around the curve of the world, to spend on just one soul, while so many others lay in stasis.

As though sensing the conflict in her, Scarab said, “It was a brave choice, and I imagine not an easy one. But all will come well. Cities can be rebuilt. It’s a matter of muscle, will, and time.”

“And on the subject of time,” said Nightingale, “how long will you stay?”

Liraz replied, “Most of us only a couple of weeks, but it has been decided”—she gave Karou a stern look—“that Karou should stay with you until spring.”

This was Karou’s deepest conflict. As much as she wanted it—the whole winter here with Akiva—she couldn’t help thinking of the bleak conditions the others would endure. When the going gets tough, she thought, the tough do not go on vacation.

“The health of your anima is of paramount importance to your people,” said Scarab. “Never forget that. You need to heal and rest.”

Nightingale added, “As pain makes for a crude tithe, so does misery yield crude power.”

“In happiness,” said Eliza, looking as though she knew what she was talking about, “the anima blooms.”

Issa nodded along with everything the women said, I told you so fixed firmly on her face. Of course she’d said the same thing herself, if not in quite the same terms. “It is your duty, sweet girl,” she chimed in now, “to be well in body and soul.”

Happiness has to go somewhere, Karou remembered, and she settled deeper into the water with a sigh. Some fates were difficult to accept, but this wasn’t one of them. “Well, okay,” she said, with mock reluctance. “If I have to.”

They washed, and Karou emerged from the pool feeling purified in body and spirit. It was good to be cared for by women, and what a group they were. The deadliest of all the chimaera alongside the deadliest of seraphim, with a Naja, a ferocious neek-neek in deceptively adorable human form, a pair of fire-eyed Stelians of unfathomable power, and Eliza, who had been the answer. The key that fit the lock. And also, just a really cool chick.

They brushed Karou’s hair and twisted it, still damp, into vine-tied coils down her bare back. They brought out light, silken raiments in the Stelian style and held lengths of cloth against her skin. “White won’t do for you,” said Scarab, tossing a dress aside. “You’ll look like a phantom.” She produced, instead, a whisper of midnight-dark silk, aglimmer with clusters of tiny crystals like constellations, and Karou laughed. She let it