Soul of Cinder

by Bree Barton

  I choose to take my rightful place as king of Glas Ddir.

  I choose to never be enthralled, enkindled, or controlled again.

  And if these choices throw me into conflict with any one of you, so be it.

  It really was an excellent letter. He’d always had a way with words.

  As Quin smiled beatifically at the Embers, he assessed their leaders in his periphery. Maev was fuming as Sylvan tried to calm her down. But he could see in their faces they would not fight the popular opinion. Quin would stay in the Kaer.

  Tobin stood a ways apart. Curious, and a little defiant. Did he want to see the letter? Fine. Quin had nothing to hide. He did plan to embellish the last bit to make it more forceful. He was not merely requesting the return of the Twisted Sisters to Glas Ddir; he commanded it. And though it would take the courier a month to cross the desert and reach the glass cities of Pembuk, it would be well worth the wait.

  A flash of movement caught his eye. Domeniq du Zol stood outside the kitchens. In the firelight, Quin detected a glint of cerulean: the blue uzoolion pendant Dom always wore around his neck. A stone meant to protect against magic. Some good it had done him, once he’d been rendered helpless under Zaga’s and Angelyne’s enthrall.

  Three scullery maids poured out of the kitchens, drawn to the commotion, and when Quin looked again, Domeniq was gone.

  Twice now Dom had avoided him. His brooding presence was a puncture wound, deflating Quin’s good mood. Had Dom sniffed out his secret? That Quin, too, had dark magic?

  He shoved the thought out of his mind. He would deploy subterfuge, play the guest in his own castle, and flatter the Embers—but only as long as it took to learn how to defeat them. He knew he could burn them alive this very instant. But that was no way to win hearts and minds.

  So he would be clever. Charming. A man of the people. He would pretend, just as he had done on the stage in his drawing room—only this time with the benefit of applause. And when it came time to show his strength, he would not hesitate to destroy those who opposed him. The Embers. The Twisted Sisters. Anyone who had ever called him weak.

  But first things first. On the morrow he would dispense a courier to the glass kingdom to deliver his letter. Mia, Pilar, and Angelyne had thought him gentle, good. He was going to prove them wrong.

  It was impossible to rewrite the past. But the future was a story waiting to be told. Blood was merely the ink.

  Quin would make it spill.

  Act II

  Once upon a time, in a house cut from glass, a girl plotted escape.

  Chapter 14

  Bloodbloom

  PICTURE THIS: MIA ROSE in her tidy sfeera at the House of Shadows, wearing a borrowed green dressing gown, hugging a porcelain chamber pot.

  Vomiting.

  Vomiting.

  Vomiting some more.

  And utterly delighted.

  “Garden-variety stomach bug,” Nell said from her chair beside the bed. She had effortlessly assumed the role of nurse. “Mumma says there’s a bug going around the House, what a shame you had to catch it on your second day!”

  She leaned over and pressed the back of her hand to Mia’s forehead.

  “Too warm, I think. You haven’t filled your pot in a while, do you still feel nauseated?”

  Nauseated: affected by nausea. Not to be confused with nauseous: causing nausea. In the old language, nau meant “boat,” and sea meant “sea.” To feel nausea was to be seasick, to sense the waves billowing in your body, the water swelling in your stomach.

  To feel nausea.

  To feel.

  “I do,” Mia said, elated. “I feel nauseated.”

  Nell laughed. “I’ve never seen someone so happy to throw up.”

  Mia was likewise amused. She’d never expected to enjoy the taste of half-digested lamb tajin spiced with stomach acid, or the painful heaving of her chest.

  But everything felt so deliciously new. She hadn’t experienced nausea since she stood in the castle crypt, watching an enthralled Quin kiss Angelyne. Even when she’d spewed bile in White Lagoon after drinking too much, she hadn’t tasted the silver death coming back up her throat.

  The first day in Manuba Vivuli had passed like a dream. Nell had led her through the glass halls, unmasking wonder after wonder: a laboratory full of scientists scuttling about, proposing theorems; a light-kissed studio where artists created beautiful things; and, best of all, a Curatorium where sick creatures—birds, beasts, even humans—were mended and tended to. From everything Mia had seen, the House encouraged a fluid interplay of magic and non-magic: the two blended seamlessly together.

  “Remember what I told you,” Nell had said, as they stared through the glass wall of the Curatorium, watching an older gentleman heal a blond puppy with a hurt paw. “An imbalance of power isn’t intrinsically harmful. Life is full of counterbalances, as the Elemental Hex attests. What matters is how you strike a balance, or even an imbalance—and to what end.”

  In truth Mia hadn’t been thinking about magic. She’d been thinking about Quin’s golden dogs. She had grown quite fond of Beo and Wulf at the Kaer. Whenever she’d spied them trotting down the corridors, their pricked ears and gently curling tails always lifted her spirits.

  What had happened to them? Were they alive?

  Come illness, suffering, e’en death,

  Until my final breath I will be yours.

  She didn’t understand why her wedding vows kept trailing through her mind. I will be yours. What did that even mean? Why would she want to abdicate her personhood and belong to someone else?

  It didn’t matter. Quin was dead. She belonged to no one but herself.

  “Mia! Hello!” Nell snapped her fingers. “Have you been listening? I’m going to the Swallow for a bite to eat, though I shouldn’t talk about food with you, you’ll lose your whole stomach!”

  “I won’t,” Mia said, desperate to keep Nell a little longer. She conjured the game Quin had taught her long ago, as they’d wandered famished through the Twisted Forest.

  “If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?”

  Nell looked at her blankly. “Whatever’s in the Swallow, why are you asking?”

  Mia felt a pang. She missed Quin’s games. And now she would never play them again.

  Nell stood.

  “Rest up, Mia. Isn’t it funny how all the science and all the magic in the world can’t cure a trifling stomach bug? Sometimes the body will do as the body will do. I told Pilar I’d meet her for supper, I’ll be back to check on you.”

  She squeezed Mia’s hand. Nell’s skin wasn’t as smooth as usual; Mia detected something dry and grainy in the creases of her palms.

  Clay. Nelladine was making pottery again.

  “Can I bring you anything from the Swallow?” Nell asked. “Fish ice? Hot chrysanthemum tea? It helps settle the stomach.”

  “I don’t need a thing,” Mia said, burying her loneliness. “Give Pil a hug for me.”

  After their quarrel over whether to stay in the House of Shadows, Mia had been sure Pilar would leave. And, in the heat of the moment, Mia had wanted her to.

  As Mia stormed out of the Swallow, she’d been angry and hurt. Angry at herself, perhaps, for giving Pil the power to hurt her, for believing they could ever waltz into some kind of idyllic sisterhood. Mia wanted to connect the way they had in their Reflections. But, more and more, that seemed the exception to the rule. A flawed experiment with unrepeatable results.

  She had lost another sister. She had failed again.

  And yet: Pilar had stayed. She just hadn’t come to visit.

  Mia sank lower into the bed. Her brain was tired from trying to make sense of everything. She laid her cheek on the pillow and peered out her sfeera window. She’d spent a good deal of time gazing through the glass, savoring her view of Prisma.

  The island seemed to have its own atmosphere, distinct from Shabeeka. Usually it was swathed in white fog, though sometimes the air was so clear and v
ivid she could make out the lemon coconuts swaying from the fish trees. The sand shimmered, pale as chipped ivory, so different from the rusty orange sands around the House of Shadows.

  “Why is the House so close to Prisma?” she’d asked Nell earlier that morning. “If people come here because they’re suffering, aren’t they terribly tempted to cross the Bridge and leave all their pain behind?”

  “You’ve got cause and effect mixed up,” Nell told her. “The House isn’t here in spite of Prisma, it’s here because of Prisma. The ancient mystics knew what a great temptation the island would always be, so they created a resting place for pilgrims headed to the Isle of Forgetting. It was always meant to remind people their lives were worth living, that when it came to the things they had suffered, there were many different ways to heal. To survive.”

  Now, as Mia drifted off to sleep, the island slipped away, like grains in an hourglass.

  She stood in the Royal Chapel, her gloved hands clasped in Quin’s as she said her wedding vows. She stared into his eyes, a scintillating green, his gaze burning a history of fire and ashes beneath her skin.

  And then, in the strange, fluid way dreams move from place to place, the Chapel vanished. Mia stood under the snow palace, clasping Quin’s bare hands in hers. She stared into his eyes, a hateful green, as his fire scorched her palms, burning her flesh down to bone.

  Flesh of my flesh.

  Bone of my bone.

  “Knock-knock.” A woman’s voice jolted her from the dream. “Are you up for a visitor?”

  Mia sat upright. She blinked as the sfeera took shape around her. Through the window, night had cloaked the Isle of Forgetting in a dark purple cloud.

  The Shadowess stood in the doorway.

  “Did I just talk out loud?” Mia said.

  “Yes. Something about flesh and bones.”

  “I don’t even remember falling asleep.” She rubbed her eyes. “You can come in.”

  “Lucid dreams are strange, aren’t they?” Muri lowered herself into Nell’s chair. “I like to write from that place. I wake up, grab my notebook, and let the words spill. It feels like I’m channeling something far deeper than anything my conscious mind could create.”

  “So you’re a writer?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call myself a writer. But writing does feed my soul. I’ve spent some long, painful years searching for the things that sustain and nourish me. Writing is one.”

  Mia had never heard someone describe a hobby in those terms. What sustained and nourished her? Reading science books? Sketching human anatomy? It seemed puerile to imagine her Wound Man anatomical plate as “feeding her soul.”

  She did miss Wound Man, though.

  “Would you like to write something?” the Shadowess asked. “We have a whole stack of beautiful hand-bound journals in the Creation Studio.”

  Mia thought of her mother’s journal, lost to her so long ago. The brown leather book had stored all of Wynna’s truths, when in life she’d told only lies.

  “I wouldn’t write in it,” Mia said. “But I might sketch.”

  “Wonderful! I’ll bring you one.” The Shadowess smoothed a crease in her tunic. “I know you’ve been suffering, Mia. I am so sorry.”

  There was an ambiguity to the way she said suffering. Did Muri mean the recent vomiting, or the preceding numbness?

  “Your daughter’s taken good care of me,” Mia said.

  “Nelladine has shared some of your story, but I’d like to hear more from you. We may have elixirs that can help you. Before we go there . . . are you game for a little experiment?”

  She’d spoken the magic word. Mia the Scientist leaned forward, overjoyed to be summoned.

  “I want you to take a deep breath and roll back your shoulders. Like so.”

  The Shadowess took off her wire spectacles, inhaled, and set her shoulders, drawing her scapulae down her back. Funny how such a simple gesture could revolutionize one’s posture: Muri had grown at least an inch taller.

  Mia found this an odd way to begin an experiment. She would have preferred a scalpel and a dead bird. But she mirrored the movement.

  “Have you ever felt yourself breathe, Mia?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “What I mean is, have you ever turned your conscious attention to the breath flowing in and out?” The Shadowess put a hand over her heart. “Much of my personal journey has been in learning to work with my body instead of against it. There is great healing to be found in our own hands.”

  She placed her other hand on her abdomen, her mahogany skin dark against her pale peach tunic. “Every time we inhale and exhale, the diaphragm contracts and expands.”

  Mia tried to swallow her annoyance. “I know.”

  “Nell tells me you know a good deal about the human body. Far more than I do, I’m sure. I’ll only offer you this: sometimes knowing how something works is different than letting it work through you.”

  In the sense that breathing was a physiological process, it quite literally worked through you: the nose took in air, nostrils sifting out dangerous particles, and then the lungs expanded, filling with breath. When the lungs contracted, they shunted the air back out.

  But none of this was conscious. That was the whole point.

  “Is this the experiment?” Mia said, growing impatient. “To analyze my own respiratory system?”

  “No need for analysis. Just observe.”

  Mia shifted. She thought again of her mother’s journal. Wasn’t this what Wynna had tried to teach her? To sit quietly, place one hand on her heart and the other on her belly, and breathe?

  What good had that done either of them?

  “In through the nostrils,” the Shadowess prompted, “out through the mouth. It’s a way of centering, of calling yourself back home. All you have to do is breathe.”

  Mia watched Muri’s abdomen rise and fall, rise and fall.

  Fine. The sooner she did what the Shadowess wanted, the sooner she could be done. She slapped her left hand on her chest and right hand on her stomach, ivory skin pale against the green dressing gown. Her abdomen hardly moved, even as the breath came in and out.

  “So often our breaths are shallow,” Muri said. “They only reach our chest. But when we breathe from our diaphragm, we flood the whole body with rich, sweet air.”

  The only thing flooding Mia’s body was her own irritation. But when she looked into Muri’s brown eyes, she saw no judgment, no impatience over Mia’s failure to absorb this lesson. The Shadowess simply sat calmly, hand on belly, asking her to breathe.

  Mia’s shoulders had sunk, her chest drawing in and down, as if her heart were protecting itself. She closed her eyes. Drew her shoulder blades down her back once more and felt her spine lengthen. This time, she sipped in more air through her nostrils. It went farther, deeper. Beneath her left hand, she felt her lungs broaden. Beneath her right hand, her diaphragm bloomed.

  When the breath rushed out of her open mouth, she heard herself make a “haaa” sound.

  Hot tears pricked her eyes.

  The tide of feeling came out of nowhere. Months of betrayal and heartbreak, grief and anger, slammed into her. The wave crashed through the wall of numbness, and, to Mia’s astonishment, her own hands were the flumes.

  She gasped. The act of breathing had quite literally taken her breath away.

  “How does it feel?” the Shadowess asked gently.

  Like everything, Mia wanted to say. Like it’s too much and I’m going to crack wide open.

  “Terrible,” she said.

  “Let it go.” Muri’s shoulders dropped. She shook them out, loosening her posture. “When it gets to be too much, you can always, always let it go.”

  Mia’s hands were glued to her body. She wanted to undo what she had done, to put whatever was coursing through her veins back into its box before it was too late.

  But she also wanted this ocean of unbearable feeling to swamp the room so that the Shadowess could feel it�
��drown in it, even—because at least then Mia wouldn’t drown alone.

  She felt her shoulders inching back up toward her ears, rhomboids tensing. She inhaled one last gulp of air, then let it go.

  “I want to give you something, Mia. It helped me a great deal when I was first learning to connect to my breath.”

  The Shadowess reached into her pocket and pulled out a wooden disc burnished to a dark, dewy sheen.

  “Are you familiar with the bloodbloom tree?”

  Mia shook her head.

  “Thousands of years ago, the Mahraini mystics came to Pembuk after the great land divide. It was the mystics who first discovered the Elemental Whorl. They cultivated the ancient windwood, a genus of tree that holds wind and wood in perfect balance, soothing both breath and bone. Thus the bloodbloom was born.”

  The Shadowess centered the wooden disc on her own palm. As she inhaled, it transformed. The wood grew upward, reshaping itself into an elegant tree with curving limbs. Mia heard the hollow creaks of branches, a sound she knew well from Ilwysion. She’d always thought of the oaks and elms of her childhood as stately elders with creaking bones.

  Then the Shadowess exhaled. The limbs of the tree sprouted tiny, delicate green leaves. They rustled and sighed, as if Muri’s breath were a cool breeze sweeping through them.

  And so it continued. With every inhalation, the creaks and groans of wood; with every exhalation, the whispering of wind through the leaves. The little tree grew larger with each round of breath. The rhythm was profoundly calming, the magic mesmerizing.

  “I used to have so much trouble breathing,” Muri said. “A strange thing to say, perhaps, considering I took thousands of breaths every day. But the more obsessively I thought about the process, the more my mind spun out of control. The bloodbloom helped ground me.”

  She offered it to Mia.

  “I hope it does the same for you. Your own healing magic will activate the magic inside it. The more comfortable you get with your own breathing, the bigger the tree will grow. We cannot heal the world until we heal ourselves.”

  Mia accepted the bloodbloom. As she held it on her palm, she spied a red bird peeking out from the branches. She started. In her mind’s eye she saw Angelyne under the snow palace, clutching their mother’s fojuen wren in one hand, her black gemstone in the other. And Quin, seizing both stones, slamming them together—and unraveling the very fabric of their world.