Fire Dance

by Ilana C. Myer

  “But what do you mean—a web?”

  She leaned across the table. “Think about it. I am the slave girl he married. Instead of making the political alliance that might have saved him. Saved us all. It is used against him at every turn.”

  He nodded. He could not argue with that.

  Her gaze was fixed somewhere beyond him, now, into the night and the garden. A cricket sang. Her face relaxed into wistfulness. “More and more,” she said, “I have begun to think of home. Of my father, whose prize I was. He prized me for my mind. Now I am trapped in this palace—an ornament, and worse, a weapon against the man I love. It all went wrong. I’ve looked for a way to fix it and … now I believe there isn’t one. It can’t be fixed.” There were tears on her face, Ned saw, and he looked away. Knowing himself well enough. If he was not careful, her pain could succeed at luring him where more obvious lures had failed.

  “I have a plan for Nitzan,” she said, and Ned looked up. There was a new purpose to the way she spoke, a sharp enunciation of the words. Like a field commander. “Ned, I can do it nearly alone, but need help with one small thing. Will you do that for me?”

  And just like that he was on the cliff again, looking down and being asked to take a leap. Just when he’d thought he had control of the situation. Had thought, in fact, that he was steering it in the direction he chose, as he once had a merchant ship. Fool that he was.

  He asked, “How small?” And in doing so set in motion events beyond that sweet-scented night, the crickets’ song, the stars.

  * * *

  LATER Lin couldn’t sleep. In truth, she didn’t try. Using the key Zahir Alcavar had given her, she returned to the Tower of the Winds. By then it was so late that it was not night at all, but already morning. The sky outside the window was featureless, in that space when the stars were gone, before the emergence of the sun. It seemed fitted to her mood.

  She sat at the cubicle she had chosen, where her papers were piled on the desk. Lin could not even look at the words she’d written the last time, to recall what had led to them. With a violent motion she seized that paper and buried it at the bottom of the pile. Taking out a fresh sheet, she dipped the quill pen and set its nib to the paper before she could think.

  Thought didn’t seem to have much to do with how it worked, not in this place. The pen seemed to move of its own accord, though she knew she guided it with the violence of what she felt. Not just violence—a desperation. There was in her tonight a longing to escape herself.

  When she found herself in the hall of doors, she felt no surprise. Again. As ever, the Path between the doors, the endless hall, was silent. This was a space between worlds. Nothing happened here.

  So she thought. But this time something strange was happening in the corridor. There was, fluttering in the air ahead of her, what looked like a spark. It was a yellow-green and kept sputtering in and out, bobbed and weaved in circles, as if it played a game with itself. Or with her. Lin stepped towards it. The odd light darted forward, as if galvanized by her movement, and kept moving as she did. When she halted, so did the light. Unsettled now—though she didn’t know why she’d expect anything but strangeness here—Lin resumed walking. Again, the spark flew ahead.

  For the first time since she had entered the Tower she heard a muttering from Edrien Letrell. A foreboding. Something here was familiar to him, and made him wary.

  The light halted suddenly. So did Lin. As she watched, it moved to a door handle, began to circle around it. One spark broke into several: numerous tiny lights made a procession around the door handle. The invitation was clear. Again it had the feel of a game. I suppose that means I go in. She ignored Edrien.

  The room she entered was lavish, and instantly recognizable. With its silk hangings, the carpet depicting scenes of the hunt, it resembled her bedchamber in the Zahra. So she was in the palace.

  The playful sparks had gone. She stood on the threshold of this room and no longer knew why. But she had already opened the door. Lin crossed the threshold.

  On the bed lay a man. No. It was a woman, arrayed in splendid dress and a gold headdress set with gems. And again: a man, his face rigid as if with pain. His clothing rich, and yet: his wrists were manacled and chained together. The chains were gold, but Lin had a sense—she was not sure how—that they were strong as iron.

  And a stranger thing: rising from the chains, when she looked closely, were curls of smoke.

  The muttering of Edrien had become a hiss.

  A smell assailed Lin’s nostrils, harsh after the accustomed scents of perfume that pervaded the Zahra: this was the smell of burning and rotted eggs. Sulphur. Nausea rose in her throat.

  The man’s eyes opened. His face changed again; when he smiled—even though his body remained as it was—it was the woman’s smile. “Free me,” he said. It was a voice of many voices, as if a legion of people, men and women, spoke at once through that mouth. “Free me, and be rewarded.”

  The hiss from Edrien had become vicious, like a wildcat on the verge of pouncing. She turned her attention inwardly: he was reciting. Creature of hell, begone. Creature of hell, I rule thee. I banish thee.

  The face of the man in the bed became frantic. Again he changed into the woman with the jeweled headdress. The chorus of voices at a fever pitch. “Free me.”

  Edrien spoke to her now. You think you are in hell. You’re wrong. That thing would put you there.

  Frozen, she stared. For an instant she saw, instead of a woman on the bed, a flare like green fire in human shape. Heard a tortured howl. But only in the barest instant: and now it was a man again, panting on the bed with smoking manacles on his wrists.

  Lin backed from the room and shut the door. It was with a quick step that she made her way down the hall. Soon she found herself back in the Tower. But even as she told herself she was safe, Lin recalled the familiar trappings of that room. The window overlooked a courtyard she knew, with yellow-blooming jacaranda trees. Its fountain clearly visible, warm-lit in the first light of morning.

  Everywhere else she’d been, in her forays from the Tower of the Winds, had been elsewhere in the world. But this was right here—in her time and place. Somewhere nearby was that figure of fire with its howl of the damned. Held prisoner.

  Who in the palace would have such a prisoner?

  You may find something I’ve missed, Zahir had said when he’d given the key to her.

  Lin slept little for what remained of the morning, and fitfully.

  CHAPTER

  15

  THE need-fires of Manaia began as branches piled to the sky. For days students hauled firewood to the courtyard, assembling two mountainous piles with a space like a corridor between. Sendara Diar and Julien Imara made a slow circuit of the piles, inspecting them. The night of the festival, they would blaze as pillars of flame. It was hard to picture on a drab afternoon after rain, mist stealing through the courtyard like a ghost’s fingers. But Julien had heard from Sendara a little of what would happen on that night. The festival was to be held in two days; as it neared, Julien felt as if tension was squeezing her around the middle, that it would break her in half. The secret she carried—Julien Imara, a girl of no consequence who until now had had nothing but the pitiful fact of her own loneliness to hide.

  They’d kill Valanir Ocune if they found him. He hadn’t said as much, but something in his manner told her that. And that had shocked Julien—more than finding him had, more than being selected for his plan to help the Court Poet. That such things could happen in the Academy.

  After their meeting in the Hall of Harps that first night, he had taken her to an abandoned tower, where she huddled in her cloak against drafts. They’d sat at a small fire and he’d explained what he needed of her. “There is no danger in the work,” he said. “Not for you. But if you are found with me…”

  “I’ll take that risk,” she said, when she saw he found it difficult to go on. It pained him to risk her safety, that was clear to her. It was the reason sh
e trusted him—that, and the fact of who he was.

  “My associate will be there to guard us,” said Valanir. “After all this is over, you must never let on to anyone that you know him, or people will wonder. His name must not be linked with mine. For his protection.” He paused. Firelight outlined his face, the mark on his eye. “It will be a dark night. No candles are permitted in the castle while the need-fires burn. The dark may serve us well.”

  Now strolling in the courtyard alongside Sendara, she thought that they each, in truth, walked alone—if Sendara could be said to be alone, with the devotion of her father and Etherell Lyr at her beck. But certainly they were cut off from one another.

  Julien would have thought to feel a degree of pridefulness from harboring a secret. To take comfort from the new importance it gave her. When she and Sendara walked together in the courtyard to inspect the piles, the other girl walked with her head bowed and her cheeks a rose tint as if her thoughts were far away. It was not hard to guess where they were. She’d once said, in response to something innocuous, “There’s so much you don’t know, Julien.”

  Julien had not had a response to that. It was true enough.

  In that moment she had reached for the knowledge she carried, of her meetings with Valanir Ocune and the vital work she was to do. It had the substance of cobwebs. Nothing remarkable about Julien had made Valanir Ocune choose her; nothing but that she was overlooked, certain to escape notice. What made her slip so easily through the corridors of the Academy was of essence to the Seer. She wanted to help him, to be of aid to the Court Poet; beyond that the secret did nothing for her but weigh in the pit of her stomach.

  She would have liked to confide in Sendara, as it happened. It was strange in a way that they walked together, when the other girl seemed to hold her in contempt. Once on a recent walk in the woods Sendara had said, with an edge of derision, “Have you even ever been kissed?” And Julien had wondered when the girl with whom she’d stolen away in the night to drink wine on a bed of moss … a girl with whom she’d shared the confidences of her heart … had become cruel.

  “No one wants me and you know it,” said Julien that time, with force, jarring the silence of the wood. She had sat down on a rock. “Why don’t you go ahead,” she’d said, though dusk was falling.

  “Don’t be such a child.” Sendara’s lip was curled in that way she had—an air of weary impatience, disdain. For a moment prolonged by disbelief Julien stared at that face. Searching for any sign of warmth, any opening. Any evidence of what they’d shared. The memory of their night under the stars surfaced, seemed a trick. Sendara’s eyes were ice.

  Deliberately, Julien folded her arms and shifted to stare straight ahead, at a random spot in the trees. Hoping she wouldn’t cry. Drawing from whatever strength she could find in herself to remain impassive.

  “It’s clear you’re jealous,” said Sendara. Out of the corner of Julien’s eye she saw her shrug. “I’m going back. You’d be a fool to stay out here.”

  She had turned and walked away. Julien had waited for what seemed a long time, seated on that rock, until she was sure the other girl had gone. But she couldn’t let herself cry then, either—someone might come by, or they’d notice her red eyes at dinner, as they’d noticed the flower crown. She swallowed hard. Sadness lodged like a pebble in her throat. After a time she rose and trudged back to the castle, to arrive just before dark. Archmaster Kerwin reprimanded her in the entrance hall, in his unctuous way, for being late to dinner. Sendara Diar did not seem to notice when Julien arrived; she was watching Etherell Lyr across the table, equal parts excitement and an odd anxiety. He glanced her way only occasionally, being—Julien imagined—reserved in public. Somehow Sendara’s adoration made him appear to shine even more than before; this despite the new thinness, the weariness, that marked him as among the chosen. Their pallor was a thing Etherell Lyr wore better than the rest; Maric Antrell, though equally handsome, was a flame-haired skull beside him. Under Sendara’s worshipful gaze Etherell seemed to laugh more often, tell more jokes that Julien at her end of the table could just barely catch. His friend, the tall and often silent Dorn Arrin, seemed more silent than usual. Withdrawn into himself, somewhere deep. Sometimes when she caught his eye, she wondered what his thoughts were. She thought there was something in the way of torment about him even though he did not speak.

  She kept thinking it was over between her and Elissan Diar’s daughter, after each incident like this. But most days they fell back in step beside each other. Julien couldn’t guess the reason. Perhaps it was because, in their lessons, there was no one else for Sendara to talk to barring the younger boys; outside lessons, Etherell Lyr was often busy with the other chosen, with whatever it was they did. Now that Valanir Ocune had hinted they engaged in something profane and wrong, it pained Julien to think of Etherell involved, along with other students whom she had thought decent enough, before Elissan Diar had come to the Isle.

  That was when she thought of something else Valanir Ocune had said to her. Amid the clamor of the students at dinner, the laughter from the chosen as Etherell purveyed another witticism, Julien cast her mind back to that night in the drafty tower room.

  “Manaia will be different this year.” The Seer said this with his eyes fixed on her, near the end of their talk, as if he wanted to make sure she heard. “Now that the enchantments are back. I don’t want you there. Not anywhere near those fires.”

  “I am to sing with Sendara,” Julien said listlessly. That was another thing still binding the girls to one another; the song they had ostensibly written in collaboration. In the end, Sendara had marked it up beyond recognition, made it hers. Julien could hardly gainsay her, since she still had much to learn. She knew what she wrote was, most likely, embarrassing. Once in a while they met to practice, Sendara’s voice a liquid counterpoint to Julien’s softer one. Sendara’s voice was, she asserted, another legacy of the mother who was a Haveren of Deere; one which had bewitched lords and kings along with her beauty. “I am in the competition,” Julien said now to Valanir, though it sounded in her ears like a lie.

  “I advise against it.” The Seer leaned forward. “Listen, Julien Imara. Once, the festival was just some songs at the fire, the lottery no more than a joke. We knew it all hung upon ancient rites of spring, some stories, so the proceedings took a certain gravity from this—nothing more. This time will be different.”

  “In what way, different?”

  He settled back into wings of shadow cast by the high-backed chair. His eyes in shadow, too. “Look around you—you see for yourself what’s been happening,” he said. “The tales made real.”

  * * *

  DORN Arrin paced in his room. That morning he had confronted his friend—if Etherell was still his friend.

  “Syme Oleir?” Dorn had said to Etherell’s back. His friend was seated at their desk, writing something. Whether it was verse for Sendara Diar or a letter home, Dorn neither knew nor cared. “It was one thing when it was Gared Dexane,” he went on. “Syme was … well, not at all like that. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  Etherell kept writing. “Why should it? He’ll recover.”

  Dorn swore. “If you are stupid enough to think that, you’re not the man I know. And I don’t believe that.”

  Now, at last, Etherell turned his head. “What do you believe, Dorn Arrin?” His tone half-mocking.

  “I think he’s dead,” said Dorn. Letting the words fall like so many logs to the ground. The room seemed to become very quiet. Dorn found himself speaking nearly in undertone. “I think Gared’s dead, too. I spoke to the cook. She was wondering when the boys were transported back to the mainland—she never saw boats, either time. She is awake and about before anyone and would have done. I think they’re gone. Their bodies burned or buried somewhere.”

  Etherell whistled, and turned back to his desk. “Dramatic. You’ll make a fine poet, at any rate.”

  “Stop.” Dorn tried not to sound pleading. “What’s happene
d to you? You can’t think men like Elissan Diar … like Maric … are worth following?”

  A moment. He thought he saw one of Etherell’s hands clench on the desk. “I follow no one, Dorn Arrin.” So coldly Dorn felt it in his spine. “Mind yourself. Stay out of the woods at night.” Folding the paper he’d been working at, Etherell stood. His expression a match to his voice. “I can’t protect you anymore.”

  Thinking back, Dorn could no longer recall what he had said to that; it had filled him with anger, along with a chilled sense of abandonment.

  Now sitting on his bed, looking out at the lake, he felt curiously empty. As if he’d been prepared for this moment already, in various ways. Perhaps he had been preparing for it since the day Etherell had carved the seahorse. Standing illumined in sunlight. Dorn watched the trees along the bank stir to the wind’s invisible hand like the strings of a harp. Their tune reached him even here.

  Have you considered the adventure? his friend had said lazily about the prospect of joining the chosen. But then, soon afterward: Wanting … is not something I do.

  Dorn thought of the hollows in his friend’s cheeks that even a week previously had not been there. Of the feverish light in his eyes, so similar now to those of Maric Antrell. This from enchantments that Dorn felt sure were killing off the chosen, one by one.

  I can’t protect you anymore. Such a thing to say to a man. Even to a mere bookmaker’s son. One could not help but be stung by it, made to feel small.

  Was this what being welcomed in the highest circles had done to Etherell Lyr—made him scornful of Dorn’s friendship? Or was it something else?

  What if he knows? Dorn thought. What if he wants to protect me?

  In which case, Etherell walked knowingly into danger for reasons of his own.

  You want that to be true, Dorn told himself. He reminded himself of other unassailable facts, too, about his friend, about himself. He could not let the reality he wished to see obscure the truth. That was for people who lived within the confines of a story. Dorn made stories or sang them; he did not inhabit one himself. His thoughts must remain as crystalline as he could make them, unclouded by self-deception. That, he believed, was the essence of what it meant to be a poet. Not to work magic. Rather it was to see, and weave verse from, life’s manifold truths. Even if they hurt.