I didn’t see much of Cara at the Cloister. Girls were taught apart from boys, and there were fewer of them, just as there were fewer female priests. We shared the same dining room, though, and passed each other in the halls between classes.
Once in those halls I saw Cara lean close to a girl who walked beside her and whisper a few words. I thought nothing of it.
Then another time, I saw her nudge a girl’s foot beneath the dining room table, just as that girl was about to speak.
A third time I heard a soft knock on the door across the hall from mine, late at night. When I opened my own door, I saw Cara speaking to the boy who peered out of his room, though girls and boys were forbidden in one another’s quarters.
I don’t know what Cara told them. I don’t know who else she spoke to. I only know that for all of my first year at the Cloister, there were no burnings. The priests remarked on how unusual that was. They thanked Vkandis for blessing us so.
Yet I knew we weren’t only blessed by the Sunlord. We were also blessed by Cara, who had figured out indeed what she needed to do.
As the first year gave way to a second, though, I grew uneasy. Be careful, I thought, whenever I passed Cara in the halls.
But she hadn’t sworn an oath to be careful. Only I had done that.
Fire starts small. A spark, the scrape of flint on steel, a candle’s flame. Any of these can burn the world.
Any can be extinguished by a gust of wind or a human breath.
Halfway through our second year, the youngest children began whispering about a bright spirit who looked after them. When I heard that, I broke the rules myself to sneak up to Cara’s room.
She opened the door before I knocked and drew me inside. “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “I never tell them how I know what I know. I’ve broken no oaths.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. She’d already answered all I meant to say.
Cara brushed a strand of dark hair from her face. Her unbound hair fell past the shoulders of her gray nightgown, making her look like a spirit indeed. She was beautiful, I realized, and wondered why I’d never noticed before. I reached for her, then drew away. Visiting one another’s rooms wasn’t the only thing forbidden to male and female students.
Cara drew me close instead and brushed her lips gently against my hair. “I’ve always had so little time, Tamar. So I do what I can, while I can, in Vkandis’ name.”
Her words sent ice down to my bones. I drew back a little. “The priests don’t know it’s in Vkandis’ name. If they knew, they’d say demons guided you, not the Sunlord.”
“The priests are fools,” Cara said. “Or maybe they’re just afraid. Do you know I pray every night, just like we’re supposed to? I pray to the God my courage won’t fail me in the end.”
I didn’t want her to say that. I wanted her to say that of course Vkandis wouldn’t let us burn, that he would spare us both in the end. “If Vkandis gave us these powers, if we can use them to do his will—why would he let us burn for them?”
“I don’t know. But I think I’ll get to ask Him very soon.” The quiet acceptance in her voice made me shiver.
I wasn’t ready to accept anything. “You could run away,” I said. I knew better, though. Guards watched the Cloister by day, demons by night. “If you can see things, don’t just use that to protect everyone else. Protect yourself! I’ll help you, any way I can, I swear it by—”
Cara shook her head. “No more oaths. Not now.” I started to protest, but she sighed softly and took my hands. “You don’t understand. When I see things—I never see myself.”
“Then you don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said stubbornly.
Cara shut her eyes, as if my words pained her. “It’s not myself I see at the end, Tamar. It’s you. Only you.” She opened her eyes again. “The matron will be by soon. You should go to bed.”
I rested my face against her shoulder, just for a moment. The heat that rose in me had nothing to do with my power.
Yet I was good, by then, at dousing heat. I drew away once more, even as I thought about how, if not for the priests, things would have been different between us.
Then again, if not for the priests, perhaps Cara and I never would have spoken at all.
“I’ll be as careful as I can, for as long as I can,” Cara said. “I can promise you that.” But though I begged her, she would not make it an oath.
Protect her, I prayed to Vkandis as I returned to my room. Yet I was a student still. My God did not answer me.
Fire burns, but there’s no need to say that.
Everybody knows that.
Two weeks later, Cara was betrayed by one of the students she tried to help—a girl in love with one of the novices, whom Cara had warned not to speak her feelings aloud. The girl was so angry Cara knew those feelings at all that she ran right to the priests, though Cara warned against that, too.
When the black-robed priests came for her in the dining hall, I wanted to fight them. Only the oath I’d made in Vkandis’ name long ago stopped me.
I wanted Cara to fight them, but of course she didn’t; she just let the priests lead her away.
For three days she was locked away so that she could pray and prepare her soul for the fires. During those days, the priests said, she’d be allowed neither food nor water, in order to focus her prayers.
For three days I prayed, too—prayed to Vkandis for Cara’s life. The God was silent as always, but I told myself that didn’t mean He couldn’t hear. I prayed that He would hear. Vkandis was a God who answered prayers, after all. I’d learned that in every one of my classes, and from Conor back in my village, too.
Yet after three days I was led with the other students into a barren gray courtyard. A single stone pillar rose out of the ground at its center, and dry wood was piled high around it. Looking at that wood, I felt suddenly ill.
A red-robed priest led us in prayer. My lips moved to the ritual words, but I scarcely heard them. I heard only my own silent pleas. God of Light, please, spare her. She’s done so much in your name.
Too soon, a hush fell over the courtyard, and a black-robed priest led Cara out. Dressed in undyed white, she looked like a spirit indeed, though I knew white was meant to be the color of Hell’s worst demons. Her feet were bare, her hair bound above her head, her hands tied behind her back. Her lips moved in silent prayer.
Vkandis was a God of miracles. I’d learned that in my classes, too. Sunlord, please.
Cara uttered no sound as the priests tied her to the pillar, not even when another black robe crossed the courtyard, holding a burning torch. He brought the torch to the wood.
Vkandis, no!
The wood didn’t catch. I caught my breath. Yes, Sunlord. Thank you, Sunlord.
The priest’s hands moved, a subtle gesture. Wood roared into flame. The flames licked at Cara’s feet, and she screamed.
She kept screaming as she spasmed against her bonds. Her robe caught fire; gray smoke billowed around her. Her eyes rolled back in her head.
Heat rose in me, the heat I’d spent years learning to hide. Anger rode close behind. I could send that heat into the black robe’s torch, commanding the flames to consume him. What use was being careful now?
But killing the priest wouldn’t save Cara. Nothing would save her, not even Vkandis’ own power.
So I sent my power into the pyre instead, turning orange flames to a brilliant white fire.
That fire consumed Cara in an instant, putting an end to pain and leaving behind nothing but ashes and silence.
I am no God. It was all I could do for her.
I stopped praying to Vkandis. I spoke the required phrases at public services, but those were words, nothing more. My heart was cold as a dead hearth at midwinter, before it is relit from the sacred fires. I had nothing in me left with which to pray.
Cara’s cries haunted my dreams, the same dreams where flames had once danced. No God worth worshiping would allow this. Whatever the
Sunlord cared for, it wasn’t us.
When a black-robed priest came for me a week later, I was only surprised it took him so long. Surely the priests had ways of knowing that it was me who made Cara’s pyre burn so bright. Couldn’t they see into our very souls?
Yet the priest didn’t lead me to a locked cell to prepare for the fires. He led me to his own rooms and made me take a seat there. His name was Andaran, I remembered—he was the priest who’d lit Cara’s pyre.
“Your performance at the burning was—impressive,” Andaran said. “There were no hand motions to give you away.”
I suddenly remembered that Andaran’s hand had moved, right before the wood had burst into flame. He’d made that wood catch, I realized with a sick feeling.
His next words made me feel sicker still. “You are ready for the next stage of your training as a priest. At the next burning you will stand beside me as my assistant. After that, I will teach you all the subtleties of calling Vkandis’ fire.”
It wasn’t Vkandis’s fire. It was ours. Only ours. Or maybe it was a witchpower after all, if it was granted to priests who used it to kill.
Maybe Cara and I had both been wrong all along.
We think we can control fire. We see it chained in our hearths, and we think we’ve bound it to our will.
But when a brushfire roars through the fields, we flee. Or else we dig firebreaks, but fire can jump any obstacle. A burst of wind, a flash of lightning, a season without rain—any one of these can wrest a fire out from our control.
No one ever knows for certain what fire will do.
The next burning was only a week later, and the accused was the same girl who’d reported Cara to the priests. She’d been tainted by Cara’s unholy words, they told us.
This girl didn’t go quietly. She kicked, she screamed, she cursed us all as they tied her to the stone. Yet she hadn’t been drugged. She wouldn’t be cleansed unless she felt the flames, the priests said.
I stood by Andaran’s side, wishing I could run. Yet even if I got past the priests and the guards, where would I go? To the north, where demons rode beneath the open sky and creatures worse than human priests called horrors out of the night? There was nowhere to run and no one to pray to. I waited for Andaran to light the fire.
Instead he turned and handed me the torch. I was so startled I took it.
Andaran’s lips curled into a thin smile, and I knew this was a test. “Light the pyre,” he said.
Sweat trickled down my face as I stared into the torch’s flames. Careful, a voice—Cara’s voice—whispered. Be careful, Tamar.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I told myself it was only the memory of her voice, but my hands trembled as they held the wood. There might be time, yet, to keep my oath—not to Vkandis, who had never listened to me, but to Cara, for whom the oath was made.
Be careful. But careful of what—my own life? Or of what I did with it? If Vkandis would not act, that left only me and my own human choices.
For a heartbeat I hesitated, because I was human and I was scared, because I remembered Cara’s screams. But then I stepped back from the pyre, drew the torch to my chest, and called upon its fire.
White-hot flames exploded around me—only me. No one could force me to make others burn. My clothes and skin and hair all caught, yet hot as the fire was, there was time enough for pain.
Through that pain, I saw a vision: a man made of white fire and crowned in white flame. He reached for me, and I knew that when I took his hand, the pain would end.
I didn’t take it. Instead I cried out to Vkandis, Lord of Sun, of Light, of Fire: “What took you so long?”
And my God spoke to me at last. “Have you not read your writ, Tamar? I cannot interfere with the free will of my people, not until the fate of the very world is at stake.”
Why should it take a whole world to move Him? Cara had died. Wasn’t that enough? “Aren’t our lives enough?” I knew that if Vkandis withdrew his hand, I would burn forever, but still I cried out, “What kind of God are you?”
“Indeed,” Vkandis said, and his smile was terribly sad. “So what are you going to do about it? What choice will you make now?”
It is hard to see clearly by a fire’s light. Shapes distort and blur; shadows reach out of the night. The sun lights the world much more clearly.
But it is not always day. And fire is the only means we have to see in the dark.
One day, Cara says, the entire world really will be at stake, and then the Sunlord will act. But that won’t be for hundreds of years.
I did not take Vkandis’s hand. Yet still he took the pain away, though not the fire. He respected my choice, if nothing else.
Not all priests are killers. Priests also heal the sick, and comfort the poor, and overlook signs of power in their village children to try to protect them. Sometimes these priests have visions that speak through a cloud of flame. When they do, sometimes I am the flame. I am the light by which true priests see.
Sometimes, too, I am the fire that is slow to catch, the moment’s hesitation that gives a priest the time to find his courage, to say, No, I will not do this, though it means my life.
But maybe you are not a priest. Maybe you only hear a whispered voice offering advice, or else urging you to do what you already know is right.
That would be Cara then, warning you to be careful with the choices you make.
I still do not understand why Vkandis waits. I still have not forgiven Him, although He is my God. Perhaps he does not need my forgiveness.
But I am no God. I am a farmer’s son. I will do what I can, when I can, until the very world is at stake.
Dreams of Mountain Clover
by Mickey Zucker Reichert
Mickey Zucker Reichert is a pediatrician, parent to multitudes (at least it seems like that many), bird wrangler, goat roper, dog trainer, cat herder, horse rider, and fish feeder who has learned (the hard way) not to let macaws remove contact lenses. Also the author of twenty-two novels (including the Renshai, Nightfall, Barakhai, and Bifrost series), one illustrated novella, and fifty-plus short stories. Mickey’s age is a mathematically guarded secret: the square root of 8649 minus the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with a side length of 33.941126.
The stench of sickness hung over Herald Charlin’s otherwise immaculate room, despite Mola’s best attempts at cleaning. It emerged from each of the Herald’s struggling breaths, from her every clammy pore; and nothing the healers did seemed to make any difference. Mola hovered over her mistress, watching for any signs of awakening, keeping the room bright with light, fragrant with flowers, and replacing damp blankets and sheets.
No matter what Mola tried, the old Herald’s condition remained unchanged, an interminable sleep on the grim border between life and death. Aside from the rattling, uneven breathing, Charlin did not seem uncomfortable. She lay in a relatively peaceful slumber, eyes gently closed, limbs still, expression serene amid the deeply etched wrinkles. Mola kept her elder’s thin, gray hair neatly combed, and blankets covered the withering limbs.
Sietra, the youngest of the Healers, slipped into the room carrying a bowl of something steaming in one hand, a cup in the other. About fourteen, she moved with a practiced grace Mola wished she could emulate. Slender, but large-boned, Mola felt like a bumbling fool in the company of the Gifted. Her thin, stick-straight hair was a common mouse-brown. Her hazel eyes lacked the striking strength of the sharp blues, grays, and greens or the gentle soulfulness of Charlin’s brown ones. Freckles marred Mola’s round face, her nose pudgy and small, her eyes narrow and closely set. She seemed grossly out of place in a world of handsome courtiers and beautiful ladies, of talented Heralds and Healers.
The sight of the food raised new hope in Mola. “Did my lady ask for these?” Mola could not imagine such a thing. She rarely left the ancient Herald’s side, and nearly a week had passed since Charlin had spoken a word. “Is she able to eat and drink?”
Sietra smiled and
placed cup and bowl on the end table. “No, Mola. These are for you. When’s the last time you’ve taken in anything?”
Mola felt her cheeks grow warm, and she smiled at the healer’s thoughtfulness. “It’s been a while,” she admitted. “I haven’t really worried—”
“—about yourself?” Sietra finished. “You should. It doesn’t do Herald Charlin any good to have her handmaiden starve to death.”
Handmaiden. It was as good a descriptor as any other, Mola supposed. Describing her relationship to the Herald did not come easy. Mola’s grandmother had served as Charlin’s nanny before Elborik, her Companion, had Chosen her. They had had an extremely close relationship, more like mother and child; and Charlin had kept Mola’s grandmother with her through her training and beyond. Mola’s mother had stepped into the position next, until her untimely death only a few weeks before Mola turned eleven. For Mola, Herald Charlin had seemed as much a mother as a mistress. They had become so close, so accustomed to one another, that Mola often imagined she could hear a whisper of the Mindspeech that flew between the Herald and Elborik. When Mola tended the Companions, in field or stable, she sometimes thought she could just make out a dull rumble of conversation.
Now, Charlin lay dying. She had survived so many missions, so many valiant tours, that Mola had come to think of her Herald as ageless and immortal. Always before, Charlin had bounced back from illnesses, shrugged off injuries; and Mola could not picture her life without the woman who had shaped and raised and loved her for the last eighteen years. Charlin could not truly be slipping away. Something, or someone, had to save her. It always did.
“Thank you,” Mola said. “It’s so very kind of you to think of me when you have important work to do.” The aroma of the stew filled the room, covering the stench of illness the way the flowers had not; and Mola suddenly realized she was famished. But, before she could eat, Mola needed to discuss with someone the dream that had plagued her last few nights. Sietra seemed a likely and benign place to start. “Could you spare me another moment, Sietra?”
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