Lady Smoke

by Laura Sebastian

  I reach out and take hold of her hand, squeezing it tightly in mine. Her eyes fill with tears but she blinks them away before they can fall. “Ojo Hoa,” she says, so quietly that I nearly don’t hear her. But she isn’t speaking to me anyway; the words are only meant for her own ears, a name that was taken from her the same way mine was.

  “We’re looking for the Elders,” I tell the children in Astrean.

  They blink in confusion, exchanging a look. They must only understand a word or two.

  “Can you ask them in Gorakian where the Elders are?” I ask Hoa in Kalovaxian.

  She nods and translates. Understanding dawns on a few of their faces as they put it together, using some Astrean and some Gorakian words.

  One of the older girls, maybe nine years old, takes hold of my hand and leads me through the streets. A younger boy of about four takes my other hand, and when I look back at Hoa and Artemisia, I see the children scrambling to hold their hands as well—even Artemisia softens a fraction when a boy grabs her hand and beams up at her with a smile that is missing one front tooth.

  They lead us through the grimy streets and I hesitate only long enough to make sure that Blaise, Heron, and Erik got in without issue. They’re inside the gate, unloading their packs of food while a group of adult refugees look on with hungry eyes. I’m not sure how we can possibly fairly divide the food we brought—even if we could, it still wouldn’t be enough. A bandage on a gaping wound, nothing more.

  I look down at the two children grasping my hands like they’re terrified I’ll slip away. There must be more I can do, but I can’t think of what it is. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless in my life, not even when the Theyn was standing over me with the whip in his hand.

  * * *

  —

  The children lead us to the same shack as before. Just as we’re stepping up to the front door, it opens to reveal Tallah standing with one hand on her hip, her expression inscrutable.

  “You again,” she says to me in heavily accented Astrean. Her eyes dart to Artemisia, then to Hoa. “And a new friend this time. This is not a park for you to come play in, you know.”

  I feel my cheeks grow hot. “We brought food, as much as we could manage. It still won’t be enough, but it’s…it’s all we could carry.”

  Her nostrils flare as she stares at me so intently I feel like I’m going to turn to stone on the spot.

  “This is Hoa,” I say when Tallah remains quiet, gesturing to where she stands at my right.

  Realizing she’s being introduced, Hoa stands a little straighter, lifting her chin an inch. “Ojo Hoa,” she says. “Ta Goraki.”

  Something flashes in Tallah’s eyes. “There was a time when I never imagined I’d ever meet a princess. Now you seem to be multiplying.”

  “I’m a queen, actually,” I say, even though I can hear Dragonsbane’s voice echoing in my mind. Queen of what, exactly? I push the voice away, but the ghost of it lingers.

  Tallah laughs and pushes her door open farther. “Very well, Queen. Come in, the three of you,” she says before looking down at the children and saying something I don’t understand, waving her hands. They giggle and scurry away and we step inside.

  The Elders are all here. They must all share the house, small as it is. Sandrin is sitting on a threadbare mattress with a book in his hands that appears to have lost more than half of its pages. When he hears us come in, he looks up, the space between his eyebrows wrinkling.

  “Your Majesty,” he says, getting to his feet. “I thought we’d seen the last of you.”

  Guilt swarms through me even though I’m not sure how I could have managed to return any sooner. Maybe I should have never left. No matter how fine the Sta’Criveran palace is, I think I’m more comfortable here, where doing good for my people means giving out food and jewels and thatching a roof instead of selling myself to a strange ruler of a foreign country. But smuggling food and thatching roofs are temporary solutions. The only way I can really help these people is to give them a country to call home.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “It’s difficult to get away, but we brought food with us. Blaise and Heron are unpacking it with…another friend. Erik.”

  He looks confused. “No Prinz this time? Did we scare him away?” He doesn’t sound very sorry about it. In fact, I think I see a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “He’s otherwise occupied today,” I say. “But this is Ojo Hoa of Goraki. Her son, the Emperor, is helping unpack the food near the gate.”

  Sandrin turns his attention to Hoa, but before he can say anything, another voice breaks through.

  “Ojo,” a man says, his voice all breath. He’s Gorakian, with black hair so short it’s patchy in places. His face is gaunt and his eyes a rich deep brown. “Ojo Hoa.”

  Hoa stares at him, bewildered, as he falls to the ground at her feet. It’s only when he lifts his head to say her name again that I realize he’s crying. For a moment, Hoa is at a loss, but after looking around the room she drops to the ground beside him and places a hand on his cheek before speaking softly in Gorakian, the words slipping together as seamlessly as drops of water in a stream. The man nods fervently, his eyes boring into hers. After a moment, Hoa rises, taking the man’s hand and bringing him up with her. Her eyes have turned to steel.

  “It is not enough,” she tells me in Kalovaxian. I don’t understand what she means until she clears her throat and tries again. “It is not enough to bring food here. We must also bring them hope.”

  * * *

  —

  Hoa insists on seeing the camp in its entirety, and all I can do is trail after her. I don’t know how she does it—how she can look at so much ugliness and pain without flinching from it. How she can ask to still see more. I don’t want to see more—I want to turn and leave and bring more food in a few days if I can, but I don’t want to understand this place the way she does. I can’t take it.

  I follow her anyway as we go from house to house, walk down every street, and I try to mimic her grace, how she holds herself together in the face of so much misery.

  “We must also bring them hope,” she said, as if it were a physical thing we could deliver in a basket tied with ribbon. As if it were easy to share with others when it’s hard enough to keep my own hope from dying.

  When I say as much to Artemisia, she shakes her head. “Hope is contagious,” she says. “When you have enough, it spreads naturally.”

  BACK AT THE HOUSE OF the Elders, I find Sandrin with his book again. Though he glances up at me when I approach, he goes back to reading immediately after. I almost think him rude, but I try not to take it personally. If the book’s well-worn condition is any indication, it must be an engrossing story. I gingerly sit down next to him on the mattress and wait for him to finish. When he does, he marks his place with a scrap of paper and sets the book aside.

  “Can you read?” he asks me.

  I blink. “Of course,” I say before biting my lip. “I mean, I can read Kalovaxian perfectly well. I can read some Astrean—my teacher told me I was advanced for a six-year-old, but now…well, I wouldn’t say I’m even average for sixteen. Astrean was forbidden in the palace. I was forbidden to speak, to write, to read.”

  His mouth purses. “We will have to teach you, when there is time.”

  I can’t imagine when there will ever be time for that, but I don’t say as much. It’s a kind offer, and I accept it with a smile.

  “Your friend is quite popular,” he tells me. “Where is she now?”

  “Hoa is helping with the food distribution,” I say. “The Elders were concerned it would cause a mob, but she’s keeping the crowd calm and organized.”

  He nods. “She has a gift with people,” he says. “In Astrea, we would have said that she was a storaka.”

  “A child of the sun?” I ask, picking apar
t the roots of the word.

  “Who doesn’t love the sun, after all? Some people have that same energy about them—they draw others in, make friends out of strangers with a single smile,” he says. “You are not a storaka,” he adds.

  I should feel slighted, but I can’t deny he’s right. I don’t have the gift that Hoa has. I am not an easy person to love.

  He looks at me with appraising eyes. “There was a story in Astrea that you might remember hearing as a child, about the rabbit and the fox?”

  Bits and pieces of it come back to me—there was a rabbit who wanted to please everyone, so she rolled in mud for a pig, stuck feathers to herself to please a chicken, painted spots onto her fur to impress a cow. Then she came to a fox.

  “The fox said it would like the rabbit best in a pot of boiling water,” I say. “The rabbit hopped right in and the fox cooked her alive and ate her for supper.”

  Sandrin smiles grimly. “There is no pleasing everyone without losing yourself,” he says. “And you are surrounded by foxes. What will make you happy?”

  “It isn’t that simple,” I say, frustration leaking into my voice. “It isn’t just about me, it’s about them”—I gesture to the door, to all the hungry refugees in the camp—“and it’s about the people in Astrea wearing chains. My happiness is irrelevant if it comes at the cost of theirs.”

  He considers this.

  “And what does saving them cost you?” he asks.

  “The cost is…,” I start before trailing off. “The cost is marrying a stranger with strong enough armies to take on the Kaiser.”

  I wait for his admonishment, for him to tell me again that queens don’t marry, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pats my hand. “That is a difficult decision,” he says.

  “It is,” I say, my throat tightening. I blink back tears, focusing on my reason for coming to speak with him. “Sandrin, do you know anyone who knows about Guardians?”

  His hand falls away from mine and he sits up a little straighter. “What about Guardians?” he asks.

  I hesitate, a confession about Blaise’s earlier outburst rising to my lips. I push it down and choose my words carefully. “There was a Kalovaxian girl I became friends with—or, I thought we were friends, I suppose. I’m not sure what we were, really. Before I left, I poisoned her and her father with Encatrio and it killed him, but she survived.”

  Sandrin stiffens. “She survived,” he echoes. “But she is not the same.”

  I shake my head. “She’s scarred by it and she has…she has Houzzah’s gift.”

  He takes this in, his expression unreadable.

  “It’s impossible,” I say when he remains quiet. “Houzzah would never bless a Kalovaxian. He would let the poison have her and be done with it.”

  His smile is tight and grim. “To try to understand the reasoning of the gods is to court madness.”

  “No,” I repeat. “I don’t believe it’s possible. I don’t believe…” I trail off because I have no choice but to believe it. I saw it with my own eyes—I felt the heat her touch left behind on the cell bars that separated us, hot enough to burn.

  “What is to be done, then?” I ask. “A Kalovaxian with those kinds of powers…and she’s the Kaiserin now as well.”

  “I have no answer to that,” he admits. “None you don’t already know.”

  I swallow. “You mean I’ll have to kill her.”

  It isn’t the first time I’ve been told this, but the last time, Cress was innocent. She was just a girl who liked pretty dresses and wanted to marry a prinz. It still feels like a fist closing around my heart, but it’s different this time. Sandrin is right—I knew somewhere deep down that killing Cress was the only way to stop her. All those nightmares that have been haunting me, they all ended with her ending my life, and dreams or not, I know there is truth in them.

  I push the thought aside before Sandrin can see how much it affects me. “And…,” I trail off again, unsure of how to phrase my next question. Blaise was right; if anyone suspects he’s unstable, they’ll kill him. I’m not naive enough to believe that Sandrin is an exception to that.

  “Have you ever heard of someone going mine-mad and surviving it?” I ask him.

  Sandrin frowns. “That, in and of itself, is a contradiction. Mine madness by its very definition results in death. If it doesn’t, it isn’t mine madness.” He pauses. “But then again, I suppose death comes for us all in the end, so perhaps that isn’t fair. How long has it been?”

  “It’s not…” I tell him. “It’s hypothetical.”

  He doesn’t believe me, I can tell. For a second, I expect him to press me for details, but eventually, he shakes his head.

  “Mine madness is not a disease, no matter how we might treat it like one. It’s the magic in the mines—some people can handle it, some people can’t,” he says.

  “It depends on the gods’ blessings,” I say, nodding. This much I know.

  He cocks his head to one side thoughtfully. “That is the most common explanation, yes. It has always been the one I have chosen to believe, but there are others. Less poetic ones. There are some who believe it comes down to other factors—a person’s blood, or their constitution. Perhaps it is all true, in a way.”

  “If this is philosophy, I don’t think I care for it,” I tell him. “How can they both be true?”

  “I’ve always thought that belief in something lends a kind of truth to it. In this case, we may never have a sure answer, so belief is the only truth we have.”

  Frustration bubbles up in me. “That’s not an answer, it’s only more questions,” I say. “Have you ever heard of someone who’s gone mine-mad and survived?”

  He eyes me warily for a moment before shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I’ve never heard of a case of mine madness lasting more than three months before the sufferer perished,” he says.

  Perished. It’s a pretty word, prettier than died.

  “How does it happen?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

  He shakes his head. “I saw it once, with my own eyes. Not in battle—this was years before the siege. A poor, frightened man ran away from the temple when he realized that he was mine-mad. They used to kill them, even before the siege, though I imagine there was more mercy in it. Still, he panicked and ran to a nearby village for shelter. No one else was hurt when he finally lost all control, but it was a terrible sight all the same. There wasn’t much left of him afterward, and the village had been razed to the ground. It’s better if you don’t know anything more than that, and I hope you never have to see it yourself.”

  I want to press him for details, but I hold my tongue. I don’t want those images in my mind; I don’t want to see it happening to Blaise every time I close my eyes. Awful as my nightmares about Cress are, I know I would prefer them to that.

  “What if it does last longer than three months?” I ask him instead. “What if someone survives the mine, if they have a gift, the way a Guardian would…but if they sometimes can’t control that gift?”

  Again, he’s quiet for a moment, his eyes growing faraway as he turns his mind over for an answer. “Is it dangerous?” he asks.

  I pause, though I know the answer well enough. It was only hours ago that Blaise nearly destroyed the entire Sta’Criveran capital. How many people would have died in a disaster like that? I would be surprised if anyone managed to walk away alive.

  “They haven’t hurt anyone,” I say.

  It isn’t a full answer, and Sandrin seems to realize this. He heaves himself to his feet with a groan and holds a hand out to me. “Come,” he says. “I want to introduce you to someone.”

  * * *

  —

  Sandrin leads me through the maze of crooked streets. They’re empty, since everyone is waiting for food at the gates, but there’s something disconcerting abou
t the quiet. It looks, more than ever, like a dead place. At the thought, I have to suppress a shudder and I quicken my step to catch up with Sandrin.

  He finally leads me to another house with a sagging roof and a door that barely covers the entrance. Instead of walking up to the door, however, he leads me around back to a small patch of dry dirt where a few scraggly plants are growing. There are bright yellow peppers, violet eggplants, and pale green globes of honeydew. It is a welcome shock of color.

  Near the garden, a stoop-shouldered woman with short black hair tends to a weak fire. Hanging over it, suspended by a rusted metal frame, is a large cast-iron pot.

  “Mina,” Sandrin says as we approach, and the woman turns to look at us over her shoulder. Her expression is severe, but it softens when she sees Sandrin.

  “Come to make yourself useful?” she asks him, nodding toward a burlap sack next to her filled with oblong, orange sweet potatoes. “They need to be peeled.”

  “We came to talk about something, actually,” Sandrin says before clearing his throat. “The mines.”

  Something flickers across Mina’s expression. “You can talk and peel,” she says. “Give me a second.”

  Turning back to the fire, she holds her hands toward it, twisting them in the air around it. At her coaxing, the small fire grows larger, until its flames lick at the bottom of the pot. There are no tools, no matches, nothing but her.

  “You’re a Guardian,” I blurt out. Another Guardian! And one from before the siege, one who understands her power and the gods more than Heron or Art or Blaise. And a Fire Guardian at that! I think of my own hands growing warm and tingly; I think of waking up with scorch marks on my bedsheets. Perhaps she’ll have answers for that as well.