An artist's portfolio was slung over her shoulder, and her hair-loose, long, and peacock blue-was gathering a lace of snowflakes.Ī snarl, rushing footfall, and she was seized from behind, pulled hard against a man's broad chest as hands yanked her scarf askew and she felt teeth- teeth-against her neck.Īnnoyed, she tried to shake him off without spilling her coffee, but some sloshed out of her cup anyway, into the dirty snow. She held her coffee mug in one hand and clutched her coat closed with the other. The occasional cheek-chew of bitterness when a pang of heartache intruded, as pangs of heartache will, but she pushed them aside, resolute, ready to be done with all that.

Snow and stone and ghostlight, Karou's own footsteps and the feather of steam from her coffee mug, and she was alone and adrift in mundane thoughts: school, errands. On the riverfront thoroughfare, trams and buses roared past, grounding the day in the twenty-first century, but on the quieter lanes, the wintry peace might have hailed from another time. The falling snow and the early hour conspired to paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype photograph, all silver and haze. It was cold, and it was dark-in the dead of winter the sun didn't rise until eight-but it was also lovely. It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness. Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day.

Laini taylor daughter of smoke and bone