Soulstar

by C. L. Polk

  “What are you doing?” Grace asked. “It’s getting closer.”

  I felt a little higher. “This is a kit house,” I said. “They built them by the dozens in Birdland. Miles used to live in one.”

  “What does that have to do with you feeling the walls?”

  “There should be servants’ stairs right here,” I said. “So this panel is actually a door—ah!”

  My fingers found a smooth metal bump and pressed. I nearly sobbed in relief. The panel, still cool to the touch, pushed backward with a rusty click. I shoved the hidden door to the side, revealing steep wooden stairs leading down.

  Behind us, the fire roared.

  “We’re feeding it air!” Grace shouted, and the bubble around us grew heavier, denser.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s our best chance.”

  Grace made sure to shut the sliding door before venturing down into total darkness. I had hoped for a window, but fortune wasn’t with me today.

  It was hot in here. Were we escaping, or just putting ourselves in a corner? It smelled like a fireplace, and heat drifted up my skirt. Was there fire below us? Were we about to fall through the stairs?

  “Hurry,” I said, and leapt for the landing, realizing that the jump could knock me through the boards. If we wound up in the basement, we were dead.

  My stomach lurched as I hit the floor, but the boards held. The air smelled more strongly of smoke, but the door lever was only warm. Warm, but not yet hot. Was the kitchen burning?

  “I have all the air,” Grace said. “Hurry.”

  I took a steadying breath and swung the door open. The kitchen billowed with smoke. Flames licked at the doorway to the dining room. Grace shut the service door behind her and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “It’s so hot. What do we do?”

  “Shut the door,” I said, and we darted closer to the incredible heat to kick the kitchen door shut.

  “How much time did that buy us?” Grace yelled.

  “Not even a minute,” I shouted back. “There’s a window over the sink, and that window in the door. If we’re escaping, it has to be from here—”

  “Is there someone out there?” Grace pointed.

  A shadow stood outside the door, holding a—a club, maybe, or a bat. Grace backpedaled away, and smoke rushed around me—darker now. Browner and kind of oily looking. It stung my eyes and I stopped breathing, my lungs fighting to take a breath. I sealed my hands and nose, covering the now-dry handkerchief over the lower half of my face. I couldn’t breathe. Not yet. Not—

  Grace touched my shoulder. Air enveloped me again, pushing against the kitchen door, and the shadow outside resolved into a figure with close-cropped hair and a steel-headed sledge.

  Zelind had come. Khe was just on the other side of the door, right where I could see kher. Khe gestured at me to get back, raising the hammer.

  “No!” I waved my arms, crossing them over my head, the police gesture for stopping traffic. Zelind raised the hammer again, and I shook my head.

  “No!”

  But the five-pound head arced straight for the window. Khe was going to break it and let all that air inside. All that deadly, fire-fueling air, and it was going to kill us all.

  “The door!” I shouted, and dodged to the side as Zelind’s hammer swung for the window. The sound of shattering glass was lost in the roar behind me. I cringed as shards flew through the air, spinning as they sailed into the wall of smoke just two feet away from the door. The air chilled. It smelled sweet, with the promise of snowfall.

  I braced myself for the explosion, but it didn’t come.

  Grace stood in front of the kitchen door, her hands raised to protect her face. Glass sparkled in the singed fur of her coat. Her jaw bled from a splinter of glass caught in her cheek. But she held the barrier of air away from the boiling brown smoke that enveloped us.

  Zelind swung kher hammer and knocked out another pane, bashing at the wooden framework that held the glass. Grace’s seal held, but the smoke turned black.

  “I see flames,” Grace said, and so did I. They crept up the pantry door, crawling up the panels. We were so close. So close to freedom.

  Zelind swung kher hammer, and wood splintered away. Glass shattered. Grace flinched as they struck her coat. The cupboards caught. Fire boiled over the ceiling, so hot I thought my skin would crack, the fat underneath it sizzling as it dripped.

  Zelind’s hammer crashed into the glass one last time, and then a heavy blanket landed on the edge.

  “You have to go first,” Grace said.

  “Boost me.”

  Grace made a cradle of her interlaced hands and I stepped on it, rising high enough to push myself through the hole. Zelind caught me with kher magic and pulled me loose. Grace hoisted herself through the window, and we both caught and dragged her free.

  Grace pointed at the street. “Run.”

  We scrambled off the back porch. Fire blazed all around us—the bushes had caught, and they burned with the sweet smoke scent of fruitwood. Behind us, heat blossomed. It pushed at my back as the fire, starved for air while Grace deprived it, came back with a roar once she let it go. I was knocked off my feet, flying on a burning hot thermal.

  I landed in deep, freezing snow, and the sensation of it on my face stung for an instant. So cold. I got to my feet, watching what should have been our grave go up in flames. The fire, now fed by the outside air, consumed the walls. I stared at it and wondered why I didn’t feel afraid, why I didn’t feel the cold, why I was nothing but my plan to escape and survive, my humanity paused while I stared at the conflagration.

  And then I was caught up in Zelind’s arms.

  I clung to kher. My cheek stung where it scraped against kher shoulder. I smelled like burning hair, but my wool clothes were only singed. I held onto kher and concentrated on the pain in my cheek. I could feel that. I could feel kher beating heart, fast and strong. Kher breath on my temple, the chill in the air—

  Sensation flooded back. Feeling flooded back. I shook in Zelind’s arms and shut my eyes against the pain. I could have died. Grace could have died. And if we had died, no one would be there to stop Severin and his determination to crush his own people.

  “Mahalia found me.” Zelind said into my singed hair. “We all came.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “I was at the clan house.”

  The crowd was made up of neighbors, spilled out into the street, and asylum-born witches, distinctive with their short-cropped hair. Zelind pulled back to look at me. “Who did this to you? Who put you in that house?”

  “Basil Brown, under orders from the King,” I said.

  The crowd around me gasped, and a pair of youths in gray shoved forward. “He never.”

  “He arranged Jacob Clarke’s assassination. He killed Gaby Meadows to preserve his cover. He kidnapped us, and he set that house ablaze—after nailing it up.”

  They went sulky and quiet. Jamille parted the crowd and stood next to her followers. “He told us to meet him here. We were supposed to ransom the Chancellor. That’s what he said he planned to do.”

  “So it was him. He set the fire at the Battle house. And the asylum fire, too,” I said. “You wanted revenge for Jack, and Basil had an idea how to get it. He set you up.”

  “Basil and Jack were friends,” Jamille said. “He was almost family. He’d never betray me—”

  “He planned to pin Grace’s murder on you. He was going to walk away while you all got rounded up for treason. How many of yours are arrested?”

  “Cops are everywhere,” Jamille said. “They raided the Rook. Grabbed a week’s take as evidence.”

  “And was I right? Was kidnapping Grace Basil’s idea?”

  Jamille sniffed, squinting at us both. “He said the King would listen to us if we had her. That we’d give her back when we had what we wanted.”

  “And what did you want?” Grace asked.

  Jamille looked at Grace as if she were a fool. “The Free Gove
rnment to hold real power.”

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  “Money.” Jamille shrugged. “Isn’t it enough? But the King put the guard in the streets. He’s arresting everyone he can. We weren’t getting satisfaction out of him. We thought we could end this madness if we let her go.”

  “To make it stop,” I said. “But Basil had other plans.”

  “I swear to you, Auntie, Basil Brown is a dead man,” Jamille said. “And if Dame Grace died, we were all going to swing for it.”

  “It’s worse than you think.” Grace said. “He set up my abduction so he could call the War Measures Act. He told lies to make sure the people were all outraged when the firefighters found my body in the house. And this.”

  She held up her hand, showing off the sapphire ring. “This is the Heart of Aeland. He was going to lie about me being his bride, so everyone would hunger for vengeance against those responsible.”

  I spoke up then. “He was going to blame Grace’s death on us. He was going to crush us under his guard’s boot. Try us for treason. Make you all afraid to make Aeland change.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my yellow ribbon. I raised my fist in the air, and the wind caught the ends, making them flutter.

  “He will not stop me,” I shouted. “He will not stop Solidarity. He owes the people an apology. He owes the dead justice. And I’m going to the palace to get it.”

  The crowd roared. Fists rose in the air, ribbons unfurled and dancing in the breeze. A rush of wings struck the air all around us, and birds took to the sky, darting past us and toward the palace, ready to tell Ysonde that Grace had been found.

  I shouted, and my voice rang off the low-bellied clouds. “Deathsingers, call the spirits of Aeland! Bring them with us! They deserve his regret. They deserve his amends. To the palace! Let the redbacks stand aside. Aeland, come with me! Louder than thunder! Stronger than steel!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Atone or Surrender

  The dead outnumbered us ten to one by the end of the first block. Mahalia and Joy stuck close to me, following behind Zelind and Grace, who walked by my side. A guard patrol saw us coming and shouted at us to disperse, but there were only two of them and ninety of us. We walked on.

  And as we walked, marchers took up singing a labor song about the fight for better conditions. The next song asked where the witches went, and sprouted a new verse about their return, gaunt and shaven and haunted. But when the crowd broke into “Aeland Eternal, Aeland Forever,” people opened their front doors. They stared at us, marching with our fists in the air, holding up the ribbons we’d been forced to hide.

  With every verse, more came out and joined us.

  By the time the riot police reached us, thumping riot batons against shields and chanting at us to go home, we had collected thousands of people and ten thousand ghosts. They converged on the police, screaming, passing their spectral bodies through flesh. Constables broke the line, fleeing the wrath of the dead. When our force met theirs, they were already shaken. We passed by them, singing.

  Young men in workman’s tweed and flat caps joined us. Women threw coats over their housedresses and aprons to join us. We filled the block, spilling over to the next, and kept walking up King Philip Hill to Main Street. A shopkeeper ran out of her corner store with an armful of ribbons to share out, and we walked, holding our Uzadalian banners to the sky.

  The dead kept coming, called from their aimless wandering by the Deathsingers from Clan Cage, those witches who had been born to captivity, who had suffered unimaginable violation. The dead marched with us, even the ones who were little more than a handful of memories. Attracted to us like moths to moonlight, they came.

  We stopped traffic dead in downtown Kingston, making bicyclists in sack suits wait while we marched in the street, dead and living alike, the long river of thousands turning off Main Street to the King’s Way. Police stood in front of shop windows, protecting merchandise. But our purpose wasn’t looting. We marched past them, plate glass untouched, and the rumors swirled through the crowd.

  The marchers told each newcomer that Severin had lied. They recounted the story of my and Grace’s escape from the burning house in East Riverside, saying we made it out shortly before it exploded. They said that we were going to the palace to make Severin apologize and recognize the Free Government. The witches were going to curse Severin if he didn’t pay them their reparations. The dead were going to get an apology. Revenge. Justice. When the stories threatened to take on a life of their own, we corrected them, holding hard to the truth.

  Others joined us, walking bicycles once they had caught up. Someone told me the march was five blocks long. Another said that asylum-born Deathsingers were uniting ghosts with the people who grieved for them. Newspaper reporters joined the flock, talking to marchers, drawing out their stories.

  We walked the two miles to Mountrose Palace and met the protesters who held vigil there, waiting for the sun to rise on a better Aeland. We filled the square to overflowing. We pushed against the gates that kept us from the palace—but on the other side, royal guards waited for us with rifles drawn and trained on us, their message clear—rush the gates, and they would fire.

  “Stop,” I called. I put my hand up and shouted again. “Hold!” My voice was as loud as it would be through a bellower. I startled, and Grace gave me a wink. “Aeland, stay still! There are armed guards at the gates.”

  The advice to stay still muttered through the crowd, the word rumbling in the frigid air. I turned to Grace. “Can you do that again?”

  “Say what you wish,” Grace said, and I turned back to the guards.

  “Royal guards! Lay down your arms! You have a hundred bullets. We are thousands! We don’t want to fight you. You don’t want to shoot us.”

  “Disperse,” the guard in captain’s braid bellowed. “By order of the King, vacate the square.”

  “Surrender,” I shouted. “There will be no bloodshed. Stand aside.”

  Their captain barked an order, and the guards sighted down their rifles. We were only targets. They would fire on us. We would fall, and then surge back once they ran out of bullets, and this day would bleed red in history.

  I had to stop it—how? How could I convince them?

  This wasn’t about me. I spread my senses and called to the dead for help.

  A chill passed through me. Ghosts drifted through us, passing the barred gates and filling the steps. They swarmed the guards. They surrounded them, touching and groping at their bodies.

  One of them jerked. She raised the rifle, pointing it at the sky. Then another guard lurched away from the line, his steps uncertain. Another dropped the rifle as if it had suddenly become hot, and frost rimed the long barrel.

  Grace pointed, and frost-covered rifles hit the ground. Zelind pointed, and rifles yanked themselves into the air. Now unarmed, the guards backed up the stairs. Two cut and ran, ignoring the captain’s orders. The other guards watched them, looked at each other for guidance—and raised their empty hands, backing away from the gates.

  That was enough. The crowd cheered and rushed the gates, which bowed under the force, sagging back as the people backed up and hurled themselves at the barriers again. Once more, and the posts holding the gates bent. Another heave, and the gates leaned precariously, ready to fall.

  “Again!” someone shouted. “One, two, three—”

  The hollow support posts snapped on one side. Citizens swarmed over the breach. They dashed up the stairs, rifles snatched up as they ran down the guards and hauled the front doors open.

  “Watch the guards,” I told a clump of ghosts. “Don’t let them get hurt.”

  Citizens cheered as they filled the great hall. They spread into the hallways. A small unit of armed citizens overpowered red-coated guardsmen, passing their surrendered weapons to increase their numbers, and this was going to be a riot if we didn’t find a purpose.

  I grabbed Jean-Marie. “Find the kitchens. Tell them to feed th
e people. That will slow them, calm them down.”

  I sent her on her task and spied another face I knew from Solidarity. “Get a group together and spread the word that we need the Free Elected Members to get together and start working on a statement for the press.”

  He nodded and summoned up a group of his own. I grabbed a formidable-looking auntie and had her search the crowd for anyone with medical experience, to set up a clinic in the palace hospital.

  With the crowd directed, it was time to move. “Grace.”

  She was at my side in a moment. “Yes.”

  “We have to find the King. Where would you suggest looking for him?”

  “After the overthrow of the palace?” Grace asked. “Inside the temple.”

  “Take us there,” I said. “Zelind. You’re with me.”

  Zelind huffed a soft laugh. “As if I would let you go on without me.”

  I took kher hand and nodded to Grace. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Grace led us through the gilded reception hall, looking neither left nor right at the people lifting priceless works of art from the walls. It pricked my conscience until I turned my face up to behold our reflections in the mirrored tiles in the ceiling fixed together by gold moldings. Solid gold, I remembered from the time we trooped into the palace as schoolchildren to stare at all the finery I now understood to be hoarded wealth. The taxes of five hundred clan houses held those mirrors together. The wealth in that ceiling could feed the entire country for a year. This ostentation and greed had to end.

  I followed Grace down the parquet to a tall, round chamber where the noise of our footsteps carried, caught, and swirled in the overhead dome painted in the most expensive, vivid pigments—this time a mural of the Hundred Knights kneeling before Queen Agnes, who raised her hand in benevolent approval.

  Grace flung open the tall doors to the temple, and the scent of sweetwood smoke and burning beeswax filled the air. Every writing desk bore its own censer and pillar candle, waiting for a devoted scrivener to light the candle of divine vision, to burn the offering, invite the makers to guide their pens, and then fall into a light trance of writing whatever entered their mind while meditating on a problem or a gratitude.