“I was,” Bijou said. She’d left Ambrosias behind for once. “Doing better?”
“There are good days,” Salamander said. The pinch of her lips suggested this might be one of the other sort. “Will you sit?”
“I have a gift for you,” Bijou said. She perched on the edge of the stool opposite Salamander and rested the tips of her left fingers on the table top. Warmed by her heat, the artifice’s stone and metal skin felt neutral, like her own flesh touching her. It slid down her arm inside the sleeve.
Salamander watched, rapt, as the serpent slipped its head from Bijou’s cuff, tasting the air with a sparkling tongue. “Oh, my—”
She looked up at Bijou, eyes wide. “You made that?”
Bijou smiled an answer.
“It’s like jewelry,” Salamander said. “I can’t take that.”
“You can and will,” Bijou said. “I made it for no one else. You will have to name it—”
If Salamander had been about to argue, Bijou’s tone brought her up short. She raised both hands as in surrender.
“All right. I hope it doesn’t eat much.”
Bijou laughed. The serpent coiled across the table, bridging the distance between them. Its jeweled scales rasped and rattled on the tile, casting a scintilla of reflections from the light dripping through the leaves of the tree they sat beneath.
“Just a clockwork nightingale now and again.”
Salamander held her hand out tentatively. The serpent scraped a tonguetip across it, hesitated, then slithered toward her as if its mind had been abruptly made up. As it climbed Salamander’s arm to drape around her neck, she said, “It’s so heavy!”
“It’s stone and metal,” Bijou said. “As heavy as the living snake. And a bit cleverer, perhaps. What will you name it?”
“I need to think about it,” Salamander said. “It doesn’t seem like a decision to be made lightly. Bijou—”
“Ask,” Bijou said. “I’m not good at answering, but for you I will try.”
“Why?”
That was an easy one. What she wanted to say stuck in her throat, though, as if it were some huge admission of vulnerability. The vulnerability that Bijou had never allowed herself—not since she left her childhood behind.
She swallowed. “You are never alone,” Bijou said finally, hoping Salamander would understand.
Maybe she did. Because she just stared for a moment, and then she reached out with the hand not burdened by artifice, and squeezed Bijou’s fingers lightly once.
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Wishnevsky.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2013 by Maurizio Manzieri. All rights reserved.
Print version interior design Copyright © 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN 978-1-59606-624-3
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519