“The country’s name was Phoinikaea. Do you know where that is? Or was, I suppose, since Romana-Graecia burned it down and salted the earth. Here’s another picture.”
Yes, definitely bored.
“How should I know?” I frowned at a book of children’s rhymes. Several of the pages had been burnt to tatters, though I could not imagine why the Kindly Ones would care about it. “You sundered our world, remember?”
“And your people have spent near on two centuries studying the World Before.”
“We were more interested in killing you than in the location of ancient barbarians.” I dropped the book, giving up on it. “But if you died right now, I’m sure we might find time to research Phoinikaea in a decade or four.”
He smiled at me. “Too bad I’m quite intransigently immortal.”
He still spent the nights with me, huddled against my side. Without Shade, he had to bring and arrange all the candles himself, though he could set them all alight with a wave of his hand.
“Much good it does you to be a demon, when you have to carry your own candles,” I told him the second night.
“Who said there was anything good about being a demon?”
On the third night, I lay awake a long time, staring at his face in the flickering candlelight. I still remembered looking at him and knowing something beyond all doubt: an answer that filled me with hope and despair. But try as I might, I could not remember the secret.
I thought back to the Heart of Fire. I had begged Shade for help—the flames had closed over me—
I remembered the bird in the garden, the half-seen figures in the liquid light. I remembered bright blue eyes and the voice of a desperate young man. But I didn’t remember anything more.
Ignifex made a soft noise and shifted closer. Without thinking, I slid an arm around him. I knew I should draw back, that I should harden my heart and prepare to destroy him, but lost in the endless hours of the night, I was finally able to admit it: I didn’t want to defeat him. I knew what he was and what he had done, and I still didn’t want to hurt him in any way.
The thought should have disturbed me. But instead I drifted into a heavy sleep, and all night long I dreamt of sunlight and birdsong, with no fire or pain anywhere.
On the fourth morning, I woke up before Ignifex, when the sky was dim and colorless, veined with charcoal. I tried to lie still, but my body felt like a clock wound to the point of bursting, and in only a few minutes I couldn’t bear it any longer. I had to get up.
The dawn was close enough that the darkness no longer gnawed at Ignifex; I felt no guilt sliding out of his arms and tiptoeing to the wardrobe. I wanted proper clothes, but I couldn’t stand the thought of another layered, buttoned-up dress constricting me. Instead I pulled out a dress of the ancient style: a simple white linen gown belted at the waist and held together with golden clasps at the shoulders.
I eased the door open and ran out into the hallway. My feet whispered against the cool floors; the breath raced in and out of my lungs, but I did not weaken or grow dizzy. I ran through the corridors until finally I caught a pillar to slow myself and, laughing, tried to catch my breath.
I should check on Astraia, I thought, and then I remembered that the mirror was gone, shattered so I could find the Heart of Fire. So that Shade could betray me.
Something touched my neck. I whirled, realizing only after I had moved that it was just wind from an open window, trailing a strand of hair across my neck.
Nobody followed me in the shadows. Nobody waited for me, blue-eyed and solemn, with gentle hands and a quiet voice.
Tears stung at my eyes. I blinked them back, realizing that I was still mourning Shade. I had thought that he loved me, that I might love him. I had certainly trusted him. He had nearly killed me. And now he was surely gone forever.
I tried to show them the truth, he had said. However mad or monstrous he might be, I didn’t think he had become so for little reasons. I remembered knowing that truth, and it had felt like it was tearing my soul apart. I had to remember it again.
Staring at the dawn-dim corridor, however, did not particularly help. I wiped my eyes and went to find the dining room, where platters of breakfast and little pots of steaming coffee awaited me.
The house would gladly render up breakfast, but it would not help Ignifex collect candles to keep himself from being eaten alive by darkness every night. I pondered that a few moments, then decided it was one more sign of the Kindly Ones’ capricious nature, and laid into the breakfast.
Ignifex trailed into the room, rubbing his head, when I was halfway finished. “You seem to be recovered,” he said.
“I hope you aren’t planning to order me back to bed.”
“No, you have far too much crockery at your disposal.” He sat down at the table, got up again, and wandered to my side. I raised my eyebrows, but he said nothing; instead he sat down beside me and started piling apples into a tower.
“You are losing your ability to terrify me,” I observed after his apple tower had fallen twice.
“That is the problem with a wife who survives so long.”
“Have I set some sort of record?”
“Two of them lasted longer. But not by much.” He stared at the far end of the table a moment; then he stood abruptly. “Are you done with your breakfast?”
“Yes,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“Good. I want to take you somewhere.”
“I haven’t got any keys for you to steal,” I said, rising.
“Not every one of my actions has an ulterior motive.” He took my hand. “If I pick you up, will you hit me?”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Take you to a garden.” He scooped me up into his arms and strode toward the open end of the hall that looked out on the sky. I realized what he was planning and swallowed.
“I thought I was never to leave this house,” I said, looking back over his shoulder so that I wouldn’t have to see the edge approach. Instead I saw his wings appear. First they were no more than indentations in the air itself; then they thickened into shadow or perhaps smoke, and then they were solid: great arching wings with soot-black feathers.
“Oh, this place counts as part of it.” His wings pumped once and I threw my arms around his neck, squeezing my eyes shut as I hunched against his shoulder; then he leapt into the air.
For one agonizing moment we fell; then his wings pushed us up, and up, and with a strangled gasp I managed to look down. The house was already well below us: from above, as from the hill outside, it looked like a solitary tower standing among ruins. There was no sign of the great open hall from which we had launched, and I wondered what I would have seen if I’d kept my eyes open in those first moments. Would the world have twisted, the lines and corners of the building bending as space curled in on itself?
I realized that I was imagining this transformation happening to a great pillared throne room, and the image felt familiar, like a half-forgotten memory. Was it something I had seen in the Heart of Fire?
We kept flying upward, the landscape shrinking away beneath us. I saw the houses of the village grow tiny, until they were no more than dots on the ground, while the land itself became hazy with distance. We were level with a great bank of clouds to the left, huge white structures that billowed and rolled and sent out translucent tendrils.
And then we were above the clouds. The very surface of the sky loomed close to us, its parchment patterning as huge as if it were stolen from the writing desk of the Titans. And horribly close to us yawned the ragged gaps in the sky through which the Children of Typhon could any moment swarm out and devour—
Pain lanced through my head. I gasped, again dizzy with the fleeting sense of phantom recognition.
“Don’t worry,” said Ignifex. “I’m the demon lord, remember? They cannot seize you against my will.”
“They managed it quite well a few nights ago.”
“Yes, but now you’re in my arms.”
“So already seized by a demon,” I muttered. “Hardly an improvement.” But I still relaxed in his embrace.
Then a shadow fell across my face. I looked up, and caught my breath in wonder. The latticework of the Demon’s Eye loomed overhead, but what I—along with everyone else in Arcadia—had always taken to be a figure painted on the parchment sky was in fact the framework of a vast garden hanging in the air. What from the ground looked like a thin strands of knotwork were actually broad walkways sixty feet across, covered in grass and snowdrops. Marble statues of young women, their face worn half away, stood at the points of the design as if they were caryatids supporting the sky. At the center was a round pool of water with benches beside it, and as we swooped past, I saw great gold-and-silver-splotched carp swimming in lazy circles.
A huge iron chain, its links as thick as a man was tall, hung down from the dome. It seemed to hold up the Eye: but thirty feet above the pool, it faded into thin air, and we flew under it without a whisper of resistance.
Ignifex landed on the far side of the pool and set me down. I took a wobbling step, still a little dizzy; I expected the ground to sway beneath my feet, but it was firm as a rock. If I ignored the vastness on every side and looked at the grass between my toes, I could pretend that I was safely on the ground.
Pretending, though, would have been a waste. I didn’t quite dare to stand on the edge, but I walked as close as I dared, then spun myself in delight, because there was wind on my face and grass beneath my feet, and I had never thought to feel either one again.
When I halted, I saw Ignifex sitting sideways on one of the benches, leaning back on his hands, one knee pulled up. The wind ruffled his hair; he looked faintly amused.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“It’s your reward for not dying,” he said.
I took a step forward, resisting the urge to twist my hands. “Yes. About that. Can I—if I could talk to Shade—”
He growled.
“You don’t understand.” I didn’t understand either, not entirely, but I thought that if I saw Shade again I might remember. “I know what false kindness is like, because I’ve been smiling and lying all my life. Shade isn’t like that. Long ago, he was truly kind. I think some part of him still is, but he knows something that makes him willing to murder five women. If we knew—”
“And if it was that sort of knowledge, perhaps we’d murder each other and save him the trouble.”
“Or perhaps we could find a solution.” I took another step toward him. “I thought you wanted to know your name and the truth about your origins.”
“Maybe I changed my mind.”
“Maybe you’re contradicting me for the fun of it.”
“You do make it fun.”
I nearly yelled at him, but I knew that was not the way to defeat him.
“Almost every day I’ve known you,” I said slowly and clearly, “you’ve told me how you despise the people that come to you, because they won’t admit their sins even to themselves. Are you content to be such a coward yourself?”
He tilted his head back to stare at the sky. “There’s one advantage to being a demon, you know—”
“Besides the power to cause terror and destruction?”
“Besides that and possibly more important. Yes.” He looked at me, his face turned deadly serious. “Demons know alternatives. I have spoken with the Kindly Ones face-to-face. I have handed out their dooms for nine hundred years. I don’t deny what I am, but I know what I could be if I knew too much truth. So yes, I am a coward and a demon. But I am still alive in the sunlight.”
Looking into his eyes, I remembered the Children of Typhon crawling out of the door. He had guarded that door and commanded those monsters for nine hundred years. If I had done the same, maybe I would think as he did.
But I had not, and I crossed my arms over my chest. “The philosopher said that the virtuous man, tortured to death on spikes, is more fortunate than the wicked man, living in a palace.”
“Did he put his theory to the test?” Ignifex was back to smiling.
“No, he died by poison. But he faced that death because he would not give up philosophy, so he was at least in earnest when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Ignifex snorted. “Tell that to Pandora.”
“And if Prometheus had told her what was in the jar, she’d never have been so foolish.”
“Or been more culpable, when she opened it anyway. There’s no wisdom in the world that will stop humans from trying to snatch what they want.”
My head ached. Flame crackled in my ears.
“Sometimes ignorance,” I said, “is the most culpable . . .”
The crackling turned to the rustle of leaves in the wind, and then to laughter. My lips and tongue continued moving, but what came out were little sharp noises like the language of fire. I tried to silence myself but could not, and I stared at Ignifex in helpless terror.
In an instant he was on his feet, and then he seized my face and kissed me. My lips fought him only a moment; when we finally broke the kiss, both breathless, my mouth and my voice were my own again.
“What . . . was that?” I gasped.
“I will kill him,” Ignifex muttered, hugging me to his chest.
I pulled free. “If he’s just your shadow, I can’t see how that’s possible, and you aren’t answering the question. What was that?”
He looked away. “Something I have not heard in a long time.”
“A useful answer, please.”
“The language of my masters.” He flashed a mirthless smile at me. “You seem to have a gift for surviving what kills most other people. First you survived seeing the Children of Typhon, and it made you able to see their holes in the world. Then you survived the visions in the Heart of Fire, and it seems that now the Kindly Ones can speak through you.”
My heart jagged in my chest. The Lords of Tricks and Justice. Speaking through me.
“What did they say?” I asked.
“Nothing useful. Do you know there was a man the Kindly Ones struck mute and used as their mouthpiece? When they were done, they granted his speech back to him, but he cut out his own tongue because he could not bear to profane it with human words again.”
“Distracting me with gruesome stories will only work so often.”
“I’ll distract you with something else, then.” He grasped my shoulders and turned me around. “Look at the world below. Look at the sky. Tell me what you think.”
“It’s Arcadia. Imprisoned under your sky.” I looked around only to demonstrate that there was nothing to see—but then I paused. A memory niggled at the back of my mind: the round room with its perfect model, the wrought-iron ornament hanging from its parchment dome.
I remembered the words written in the round room: As above, so below. As within, so without.
“It’s all inside,” I breathed. “All Arcadia, our whole world, it’s inside your house. Inside that room.”
He leaned his head on my shoulder. “You see the flaw in your plan.”
The realization crashed over me. If I had somehow managed to set my sigils on all four hearts, and if they worked, I would have collapsed not just his house but all Arcadia in on itself. Whatever that meant for the people living there, it could not be good.
I turned on him, shoving him off my shoulder. “And you let me find three hearts, without telling me? Do you know what could have happened?”
“You’re a very special woman, but last I checked, you still couldn’t fly.”
I opened my mouth to demand what he meant—and then finally I felt the heartbeat. “This is the Heart of Air.”
“Mm.”
“. . . You’re still a fool,” I said. “I’m sure I could somehow use this knowledge to kill you.”
“Would you?”
I opened my mouth, then had to look away from him. “Maybe.” My voice came out rough, and my heart had started racing.
Silence stood
between us. “What do you want?” I demanded finally.
He tilted his head. “What do you want?”
His face was pale and composed, his pupils narrowed to threadlike slits; there was no hint of hesitation in his body. It came over me again, the knowledge of how little he was human.
He had clung to me in the night. He had saved my life twice. He had seen me, in all my ugliness, and never hated me; and in that moment, nothing else mattered.
“I want my world free.” I stepped toward him. “I want my sister never to have been hurt by me.” I took his hands. “And I want you to say that you love me again.”
His hands tightened around mine. “I love you,” he said. “I love you more than any other creature, because you are cruel, and kind, and alive. Nyx Triskelion, will you be my wife?”
I knew it was insane to be happy, to feel this desperate exultation at his words. But I felt like I had been waiting all my life to hear them. I had been waiting, all my life, for someone undeceived to love me. And now he did, and it felt like walking into the dazzling sunlight of the Heart of Earth. Except that the sunlight was false, and his love was real.
It was real.
Very deliberately, I pulled my hands out of his. “You’re a demon,” I said, staring at the ground.
“Most likely.”
“I know what you’ve done.”
“The exciting parts, anyway.”
“And I still don’t know your name.” My hands trembled as I undid my belt, then started to unclasp the brooches. It seemed forever since that first day when I had ripped my bodice open so easily. “But I know you’re my husband.”
The dress slid down to land on the ground about my feet. Ignifex touched my cheek very gently, as if I was a bird that might be startled into flight. Finally I met his eyes.
“And,” I said. “I suppose I do love you.”
Then he pulled me into his arms.
“I still might kill you,” I told him, much later.
He traced a finger along my skin. “Who wouldn’t?”
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