Soul of Cinder

by Bree Barton

  “How do you get two piccolo players to play in unison?”

  “Make them practice?”

  “No! You stab one.” She guffawed. “Get it? Then there’s only one!”

  “I wish you’d tell me what was wrong.”

  She chucked the piccolo off to the side. Slammed the cabinet shut. She couldn’t play violin if Stone was here. She hated him for taking that away from her.

  “Why do you trust me, Stone?”

  The question hung in the air a moment. When he answered, he sounded uncertain.

  “Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

  “Let’s see. Maybe because I’m a complete stranger who arrived from a foreign kingdom at the end of the world with a certain murderous Dujia for a sister?”

  He was quiet. Surely he’d known about Angelyne. Pilar figured Mia had spilled their whole twisted history to the Shadowess, and that Muri had in turn spilled it to her children.

  “But you’re not a murderer,” Stone said.

  “You have no idea the things I’ve done. The things I’ve survived.”

  “I would if you told me.” He hesitated. “You know everything about me. Or, well . . . almost everything. I’m an open book. I want to know where you come from, what your life was like. But you’re a brick wall.”

  “And you, my friend, are a piece of straw.”

  She waited for him to argue. He didn’t.

  “Did you know I had a fight teacher from the river kingdom, Stone? Just like yours. Well. Not just like yours. I liked him. Liked him a lot. He understood me better than anyone. We’d spend hours sparring. He gave me attention. So much attention! He told me I was his favorite.”

  Tears jammed her throat. Why had she invoked Orry? She’d beaten him back for so long. But there he was, in the House. In the Orkhestra. His hand pressing into the small of her back.

  “Come here,” she said to Stone. “I have a new move to teach you.”

  “Right now?”

  “When do you think?”

  He trotted eagerly toward her, weaving through the music stands. The look on his face—so trusting, so hungry for her approval—infuriated her. She’d spent a solid month teaching him how not to leave himself vulnerable to attack. He had learned nothing.

  “Come close,” she said, as he got into his fighting stance. He took a step. “Closer.”

  He stepped forward again. His face was inches from hers.

  “Lean in a little more,” she said.

  He leaned toward her. Tilted his upper body. Lost his base.

  It was too easy.

  She swiped her foot behind his left ankle. Stone fell backward—and went down hard. He crashed into a music stand. Let out a whimper.

  “Why did you trust me just now?”

  “I . . . you said . . .”

  “You let me get into your head. You didn’t just let me—you practically begged me. You’ve been begging me for weeks.”

  “I thought you said I was getting better,” he said quietly.

  “Sure, you’re better at jabs and hooks. I was good at jabs and hooks, too. But your fists are useless when someone really wants to hurt you. You have to defend your mind.”

  “Defend it from what?”

  “From anything! Anyone who tries to hurt you. Or people who pretend to love you. I’ve tried to teach you to stand on your own two feet. But you keep leaning. If you lean into someone, they’re going to pull away. People always pull away. I promise you that.”

  She was thinking of Mia now. How Rose had painted such a pretty portrait of sisterhood, promising to stand by her side. And then, when Pilar was finally ready to open her heart—Mia had jumped ship.

  The Orkhestra was so quiet she could hear her own breath. She tried to imagine it during the day. Noisy with music.

  She couldn’t imagine it.

  “What is it, Pilar?” Stone said finally. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  She took a breath.

  “Mia is gone. She left for Prisma. Decided to forget us all. I’m leaving, too. There’s a new king in the river kingdom, a boy I used to know. He hates me. He probably should. I have to stop him. I’ve already packed a bag.”

  She hadn’t, but she might as well have. When you owned nothing, there was nothing to pack.

  “Don’t go,” Stone said, and the raw pain in his voice stopped her cold. “You didn’t see me before you came here, you don’t know what it was like. How sad I was all the time. It’s the one thing I haven’t told you. Because . . . because I’m ashamed.”

  Pilar leaned forward. Stone had never mentioned being sad. He showed up every day in the Gymnasia, jolly and good-humored.

  “Sometimes there were whole days I couldn’t even leave my sfeera. No one knew what was wrong with me. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I’m so much happier since we started sparring. We all are. Things are better for us, a lot better than before you came to the House. I’ll work on not trusting people. I won’t lean on them. I promise. I’ll learn to defend my mind the way you have. But please don’t go, Pilar. We need you. I need you.”

  The picture of him as a sad little boy made her want to wrap her arms around his shoulders and pull him close.

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t. All she heard were his last three words.

  I need you.

  She picked up the flask of rai rouj. Shook the last drop onto her tongue.

  “Congratulations, Stone. That was your last lesson. You failed.”

  Chapter 29

  Brialli Mar

  QUIN AWOKE TO THE smell of hot coffee.

  The scent wafted into his nostrils slowly, easily. His face felt delectably warm, and when he blinked his eyes open, the morning sun poured in, melting onto the quilted blanket he was tucked beneath.

  He sat up sharply.

  This wasn’t his room. He was no longer in the Kaer.

  “Are you awake, darling?”

  A woman sat in the corner. It took him a moment to place her. Black corkscrew curls. A kind, open smile. Her skin the same mellow brown as her son’s.

  “Lauriel du Zol,” Quin murmured. Domeniq’s mother.

  The memory of his last moments in the Grand Gallery came rushing back. Tobin putting his hands to the floor, rupturing the stone. Walls crashing down around them. The embers screaming. And a piece he was forgetting, some vital fragment his foggy mind couldn’t quite grasp.

  Quin frowned. Groggy or not, he still remembered the punch to the face.

  “Dom is sorry, darling,” said Lauriel, correctly reading his expression. “He wasn’t sure you’d come of your own free will, or who you might hurt along the way. And he had to act quickly.”

  “Is the whole Kaer destroyed?”

  “We’ll talk about everything, I promise.”

  When Quin tried to touch his throbbing nose, his arms were wrenched roughly back into his lap. He looked down to find his hands swallowed by a monstrosity of blue stone—half manacle, half glove.

  “I asked Dom to remove them, but he insisted we keep the uzoolion on. Just for now.”

  Quin glowered. He had been stripped of his magic and taken here against his will. Had Dom tasked his mother with playing warden? Was he back at the Kaer with Tobin, plotting the Embers’ next move?

  Was Quin really so impotent that even with the power to create fire, he had failed to reclaim his own castle?

  “Where’s Domeniq?” he said gruffly. “We have unfinished business.”

  “He’ll be back soon.”

  “Then he’s with the Embers.”

  “Duj katt! I hope not.” Lauriel shook her head. “They’ll be the death of him. Of us all.”

  Intrigued, he studied her. She clearly had no love for the Embers. Quin had never been able to justify Dom’s allegiance to the group, seeing as how Dom came from a family of Dujia. Then again, Domeniq du Zol had once been a Hunter, swearing a vow to kill Dujia. He seemed to have a knack for infiltrating enemy camps.

  Quin took in his surroundi
ngs. He was in a cabin of some sort, perhaps a trapper’s, in light of the sheer density of animal skins: bear, wolf, deer, and rabbit pelts hanging from the walls and piled on the floors. Several dishes lined the small wooden table where Lauriel sat. He noted the washing strung across the far wall, the long white cord bowed from the weight of freshly laundered socks and women’s undergarments.

  Embarrassed, he looked away.

  “Where are we?”

  “A little plot of land between Ilwysion and Killian Village. Would you like some coffee?”

  She held up a copper coffeepot.

  “I make it very strong. Come, sit with me.”

  Quin knew he should say no. He was a bound prisoner in enemy terrain. For all he knew, the coffee was spiked with poisonous chokecherry pits, a trick he’d used himself.

  But he saw no malice in Lauriel’s brown eyes. Her presence was strangely comforting.

  “What am I doing here, Lauriel?”

  “I’ll explain everything, darling. Vuqa. Come, come.”

  When was the last time he’d had a proper cup of coffee? Perhaps not since he last saw the du Zols, when he and Mia had breakfasted in their cottage. It seemed impossibly long ago.

  Quin’s mouth was watering. If a strong cup of coffee would be the death of him, so be it. He kicked off the quilt—uncomfortably, without the use of his hands—and stumbled out of bed. Lauriel gestured toward the other chair, which he flumped into.

  She poured him a generous cup. Steam curled off the top. He stared at it ravenously, as if he could will the dark liquid into his mouth.

  Lauriel sighed.

  “My son does enjoy being right. But sometimes, he is wrong.”

  She reached out and unclasped Quin’s uzoolion gloves. They dropped to the floor.

  “You’ll be good, won’t you?”

  Good. A perilous word. Quin stared at the discarded gloves, bending and straightening his fingers, waiting for the blood to recirculate. Was this how it felt to be a woman in the river kingdom? Your hands always gloved, your blood flow always constricted?

  He studied his own hands. They looked unexceptional—yet he’d burned down half a library with a single spark. He would have done worse in the Grand Gallery, were it not for Tobin.

  Surely the Kaer was still standing. No matter how great the damage, they could repair it. Kaer Killian had withstood far greater attacks in its long, bloodied history.

  Ah! He almost had it. The sliver of a memory hovering just out of reach. Something he’d seen in the moments before he lost consciousness.

  Then it was gone again.

  Warily, he regarded Lauriel. She, too, had magic. With a brush of her hand she could unblood him or, worse, enthrall him. As he’d told the Twisted Sisters in his letter, he swore never to be enthralled, enkindled, or controlled again.

  “You must eat something,” Lauriel insisted. “You look famished.”

  He was famished. Even more so than usual. He felt weak with hunger.

  Very well. He would replenish his strength, then decide how to proceed with the du Zols.

  Quin slurped down half the coffee Lauriel offered him and reached greedily for the closest dish: warm slices of crusty bread and a dollop of purple jam.

  “Zanaba jam,” he murmured, remembering how Lauriel had proudly presented each dish in her kitchen. He never forgot the names of foods he loved.

  “Yes! You remember. There’s minha zopa, too. I believe you liked that quite a bit when you last ate with us, no?”

  She nudged a steaming bowl of soup across the table. He inhaled the spicy-sweet aroma of onions and tomatoes, garlic and wine.

  “Not my finest effort,” Lauriel conceded. “I have not been able to find chouriço, and the tomatoes aren’t as fresh as I’d like. But the river kingdom never did have the right ingredients for minha zopa, even before everyone fled for their lives.”

  Quin didn’t want to think about the gutted villages of his kingdom. He lifted one lid after another, carving off flaky pink pieces of salmon, dipping potato wafers into cheese gravy, and scooping up heavenly spoonfuls of buttermilk pudding. The meal was more modest than their breakfast on Refúj, but still outrageously good, a blend of Glasddiran and Fojuen cuisines.

  Yet the more he ate, the heavier the silence between them. Lauriel, so boisterous and larger-than-life, had fallen quiet.

  Quin patted his mouth with a napkin. Cleared his throat.

  “When did you leave Refúj?”

  She nodded, as if she’d been waiting for him to ask.

  “After Zaga betrayed us, we knew we were no longer safe. And when I learned what she and Angelyne had done to Domeniq . . .” She pressed a hand to her heart, as if it hurt to remember. “I took my mother and my daughters and came straight to the Kaer. I knew I had to save my son.”

  “Your son seems perfectly fine.”

  “In body, yes. In soul, I worry.” She refilled Quin’s coffee cup, then her own. “These are strange, uneasy times. And not just for us Dujia.”

  The “us” included him. To his surprise, he felt moved.

  Lauriel gestured toward the east. “If things were different, I would take my family back to Fojo. But the volqanoes have made that impossible.”

  “Has there been an eruption?”

  “Duj! You haven’t heard? Dozens of eruptions. The sleeping giants have come back to life, screaming gray plumes of smoke into the sky. One by one the islands burn to ash.”

  Till the eastern isles burn to ash.

  Promise me, O promise me.

  “The elements are out of balance,” Lauriel said. “Whether the cause is natural or unnatural, we are all suffering for it.”

  Quin’s wedding vows to Mia dissolved into Angelyne’s menacing words.

  She who can tip that fragile balance is a mighty queen.

  Minutes later Quin had slammed the two stones together, and the snow palace had collapsed.

  Was it the stones themselves that had tipped the fragile balance? Angelyne’s magic? His own? After all this time, he still didn’t know. Sometimes he wondered if this was simply what happened when two broken people collided. Two Dujia with nothing to lose—and everything to gain.

  And then Quin saw another castle crumbling down around him: his own.

  The food soured in his stomach. How had he not suspected Tobin’s magic? He’d been ruinously naive. If magic bloomed inside a body that had been ruthlessly abused, of course his former lover’s blood and bones held a powerful strain.

  Quin thought of the Grand Gallery, the walls fracturing and falling, smashing into the frightened Embers below.

  He choked on his coffee. The memory came searing back.

  Brialli Mar.

  He saw her being crushed under a giant stone.

  He saw himself, unable to save her.

  Had he even tried?

  A knot rose in Quin’s throat. His kingdom was ravaged. Countless Glasddirans dead. Why did he care so much about one little girl? She was not the only innocent. He thought of all the children from the orphanage, who had no doubt suffered equally terrible fates. Perhaps even worse.

  “There was a girl with the Embers.” He fought to keep his voice even. “Lithe and fair. Her parents both dead.”

  “Yes, darling. You knew her as Brialli Mar.”

  Knew. The past tense landed hard. His cup trembled as he sat it back in the saucer.

  “What was done with her body?” he asked, but a noise outside the cabin devoured his words.

  “Mamãe!” shouted a girl’s voice, followed by a burst of laughter. The cabin door swung open, banging into the wall so hard it shook the laundry line. A pair of ladies’ undergarments leapt to an ignoble death on the floor below.

  “Mamãe, where’s breakfast?”

  A girl charged into the cabin. She had Lauriel’s vibrant spiral curls; her skin was a dark, dewy umber. Quin knew her immediately. Junay, one of the du Zol twins.

  “Duj katt.” Lauriel massaged her temples. “Must you e
nter every room like it’s a castle under siege, Jun?”

  “Apparently she must,” said a voice at her heels.

  Sach’a, Junay’s twin, rolled into the cabin, one hand expertly maneuvering the wheels of her wicker chair, the other resting on a furry black creature in her lap. Quin gave a start. He recognized the dog. The puppy had been in the Kaer, tucked under the arm of Brialli Mar.

  “Nanu’s coming,” said Sach’a. “Callaghan is with her. They’re going very slowly, because Nanu tripped and almost fell—” Her eyes landed on Quin, then widened. “Your Grace!”

  “I told you he’d be awake.” Junay surveyed the table. Her eyes narrowed. “And now he’s eaten all our food.”

  Lauriel sighed. “Be kind, Jun. I can always make more.”

  “Because there’s so much food lying around an empty village.”

  “You could try cooking yourself,” Sach’a suggested. “Instead of waiting for Mamãe to feed you.”

  Her sister brandished a hand at the puppy. “He waits for you to feed him.”

  “His brain is the size of a walnut, Junay.”

  Quin felt a pang. He missed Wulf and Beo terribly. But it was more than that. Seeing the sisters griping and swiping at each other brought back the cozy morning he’d spent with Mia in the du Zols’ kitchen. Quin was no stranger to the coziness of kitchens; he knew they engendered a special kind of bond. But he’d never felt that warmth in his own family. Not once.

  Was it possible to miss something you never had?

  “Hello!”

  A cheerful voice came from the doorway.

  “I’ve got Nanu!”

  The twins’ grandmother stepped shakily over the threshold, helped by a girl of eleven or twelve. Cropped dirty-blond hair. Puckish blue eyes.

  Her smile faded when she saw Quin.

  Quin’s jaw dropped halfway to the floor.

  “Bri—Brialli?” he stammered. “I don’t understand.”

  He glanced at Lauriel, then at the twins, then back at Brialli Mar. No one else seemed shaken.

  “But I saw the Kaer come down around you. You were pinned under a stone.”

  “I’m fine. So is the Kaer.”

  She stared him down. Challenging. Defiant.

  “And I’m not Brialli Mar.”