“I am Hanali,” he said. “An ambassador from the Sunlit Lands. I have an offer to make to you.”
“Stay away,” she said.
“I won’t harm you,” he said. “Nor ever touch you without permission.”
“I have a knife,” she said.
“I am well aware.”
“What do you want?”
Then he explained in great detail—far too much detail—a war in his country (“not unlike your own”), where the best of all people, the Elenil, were harassed and harried by terrorists called the Scim. “Come with me,” he said, “for one human year, and I will teach you to fight.”
“I know how to fight.”
“I will give you magic. Your heart’s desire for a year. Then come back here and fight on whatever side you choose.”
Her father was not a fighter. He had no weapons in the house, would not have them. Her brother, Boulos, had bought a long-handled knife, and their father, furious, had broken the blade off in the wall. Her father said to stay where they were, to try to help the less fortunate, and what happened when she followed a homeless family to offer them food? She was attacked by a soldier in an alley. She wanted to fight. Wanted to learn to fight better, wanted to be stronger. Wanted to follow this strange man, who seemed more dream than reality. She knew dreams were often true. She felt the stinging pain of the cut on her face, the blood mixed already with dust. She pressed it with the heel of her hand, still holding the knife’s blade toward him with the other. “I can’t leave my family,” she said.
Hanali bowed his head. “You must leave them if you are to come to the Sunlit Lands. But only for a brief time.” She could leave them, she knew, and come back. Could return knowing how to fight, how to protect them.
She found out later that the arsonist had set the fire in her apartment complex at the same time she was talking to Hanali. The bombs had missed their place—they’d hit two blocks over. But someone brought cans of petrol into Shula’s building and lit them on fire. The conversation with Hanali had saved her life. If she had been home ten minutes earlier, she would have died too.
“My family,” she had said. “I have to check on my family.”
Hanali looked sad for some reason. “I will come back and ask you again. One more time, Shula Bishara. Be ready with your answer.”
She ran then, ran like she had never run before, and she heard the explosion when she was less than a block away. The impact shook her, the sound reverberated in her ears. The apartment had caught on fire in a way she could not believe, that made no sense. It spread too fast, too far, climbing the building like it was alive, enraged.
She did not pause but burst in through the door. The smoke choked her immediately, the flames were unbearably hot. She raced up the stairs, her arm over her face, but she couldn’t get to her door. It was too much, too hot, and she found herself outside again, enraged and helpless, her face bleeding and tears mingling with the blood.
And where was God in all this? The God her father had loved for so many years? Did he watch in disappointed silence? Did he refuse to intervene? Did he not have the power or not care enough? Or both? These are the questions that pounded through her brain. But maybe . . . could her family be at the church?
Of course, the church. So often her family was there. God had kept them safe, she knew it, and she ran, ran, ran again to the church to find it closed up, empty, dark. By the time she walked home again, it was lit up like a torch in the night. She knew then that they were inside still. Her sister and brother and mother and father, and she should have been with them. She wished she had been with them.
She saw the man who had attacked her standing in the crowd, watching the flames. She clenched the knife in her hand tighter. Someone asked her if she was okay, concerned about the blood on her face. Offered to help her find medical attention, but she could hardly hear them. She shoved the man, and he stumbled to the side. Not so tough when there was a crowd. She screamed at him, shouted, told the crowd what he had done. She could not stop the flames, could not find whoever had done this, but this man could be punished. He could be shamed, beaten, stoned.
And they did nothing. Some shouted at him, yes, or pushed him. One man spit on him. But then they turned back to the flames, watching their friends and neighbors rise to heaven as smoke. They prayed, yes, they cried, they called for help and cared for those few wounded who had escaped, found them a place to sit away from the flames. But all of this was nothing. Less than nothing. It changed nothing. The Russians would still bomb them tomorrow. ISIS would still roam the streets. Bullets and rocket launchers and bombs and all the other things people used to kill each other would still be killing tomorrow.
That’s when Hanali appeared beside her again, only this time it was different. This time everything froze. Time stopped. There was a strange silence and something else: a coldness settled on her. She could no longer feel the flames.
Hanali started to speak to her, but she was already running for the stairs, through the frozen fire, and up to her apartment. She opened the front door and found her parents and sister where they had died: together in the kitchen. Why had they been there? Mama was cooking, probably, and maybe her father was doing the dishes. Maybe her mother had called Amira in, offering her a taste of dinner. She didn’t know, but they were dead. She didn’t have to kneel beside them to see. Her mother. Her father. Her sister. How could the fire have moved that quickly? How did it overtake them so easily? All that remained were burned husks, and the fire still raged throughout the building.
She felt a flutter of hope. She didn’t see her brother’s body here. She had to check the rest of the apartment, had to find Boulos. She jumped to her feet.
Hanali stood at the doorway of the kitchen, and he shook his head sadly. “Your brother is in the bedroom,” he said. “He is gone. You will not want to see what remains.”
No. That small bit of hope crashed to the ground. She collapsed beside her parents and sister again. Hanali was right. She didn’t want to see her brother’s body. Wasn’t this enough? She closed her eyes and could still see the burned corpses of her parents and her sister, knew she would see them for the rest of her life. She had been right about that . . . all this time later and she still couldn’t remove the memory. She had tried. Had drunk addleberry wine, which was supposed to erase memory, and whatever it took from her, it wasn’t this.
“Come away from here,” Hanali had said gently. He held out his gloved hand.
She hesitated, then leaned over her sister, taking the small metal cross from around her neck. Then she took Hanali’s hand and followed him downstairs through the frozen flames. She didn’t take anything from home but Amira’s cross, none of the rest of it mattered. Hanali paused with her at the edge of the crowd.
“A year,” he said. “In exchange I will teach you to fight.”
“No,” Shula said. “I don’t know why you need me, but you do. You will pay me what I am worth.”
Hanali smiled. “I knew I was right about you. So your heart’s desire is more than fighting. You tell me the terms.”
She saw the man who had cut her standing in the crowd. “Him. I want him dead.”
Hanali scarcely glanced at him. “Done.”
“Whoever set this fire. I want them dead. Burned to death.”
“Done.”
“And I want them to know why.”
“Of course,” Hanali said. “Is that all?”
“I want to be immune to fire. And I want to be able to bring fire. To fight people with it.”
“That is a massive amount of magic to give in exchange for one year’s service.”
“I’ll give you two years. Five. I don’t care.”
“Five years’ service. So be it.” He held out a thin silver bracelet. “Just slip this upon your wrist when you are ready to make the deal.”
She slipped it on, and it constricted so tight it felt like it was burrowing into her skin. “When do we leave?”
Ha
nali raised his eyebrows. “People are not ready so quickly, usually. May I borrow your knife?”
She gave it to him. Hanali looked at it in the firelight. There was something strange about that fire. The color—it wasn’t quite right. Hanali grimaced at the blood. He walked through the frozen crowd. When he came to the man who had attacked her, he slid the knife into him and left it there. “When I restart time, that should be it for him,” Hanali said.
She wanted to say she had felt bad in that moment, but she had felt only satisfaction. Did he have a family? Probably. Who didn’t? (Other than Shula—she had no family now.) She was glad his family would lose him, and she suspected they might be glad too. “When do we leave?” she repeated.
“Now, if you like,” Hanali said, and they walked a while. Time rushed back in like water. He led her two blocks away, to the broken remnants of another apartment building. The white helmets were there now, digging out survivors. “You’ll have to crawl through that,” Hanali said, and she was going to ask why but decided it didn’t matter. Something about how hard it was to get to the Sunlit Lands, she found out later, but in that moment the only thing that mattered was that she was leaving, she was done here, this was over.
Then the journey through the rubble that ended in a beautiful place unlike anywhere she had been before, the Sunlit Lands. She had learned to fight, with fist and fire, and had crushed the Scim at the side of others like herself. She grew a reputation as someone to be feared, the burning girl, the warrior, the flaming heart of the army. And over time she accepted it. All that had happened.
Or something like acceptance. Hanali told her he had burned the arsonist to death. She didn’t know if this was true, but she liked to believe it was, and also felt guilty that she was pleased by it. And where was God in all this? She didn’t know.
“Not in the flame,” someone shouted, jolting her back to the present. She couldn’t see who, and she wouldn’t stop running. No doubt the flames had overtaken some Aluvorean or Elenil, but she didn’t care. Something about the voice sounded familiar, though. She hesitated, then ran toward it.
Her father sat in a clearing on a burned-down stump. There were flames all around him and even going through him.
“Baba?”
He smiled at her. “Not in the flame,” he repeated.
“What?”
“Do you remember that story? There was a prophet who wished to hear the voice of God. He hid in a cave. A great wind came that cracked rocks, but God was not in the wind. There was an earthquake that could knock down an apartment building, but God was not in the earthquake. A burning fire came, but God was not in the flames.”
She knew the story, of course. She couldn’t have grown up in her father’s church and not known the story. “Is it really you?”
“But then he heard a quiet whisper, and he covered his head and went out of the cave and heard the voice of God.”
“Is that you, Baba?”
He smiled again. “Not in the flame, Shula. You’re looking for God in the flame, but that’s not the right place. Not the earth-shattering destruction. Not the burning fires. Instead, listen for the quiet whisper. Do you hear the voice?”
“Is this . . . magic?”
Her father stood, brushing off his knees. He had always done that. As if dust had somehow accumulated in the time he was sitting down. He brushed off his knees and looked at her and said, “Magic will reset in a moment. When it does, you will have to make a choice.”
She looked at where she was in the forest. She thought she was near where she had left Jason and Baileya. She tried to memorize it, to make sure she could find her way back here, try to see her father again. “Baba,” she said.
But he was gone. Again. She stood alone in a circle of flame.
A howling wind came, and the fire burst into a thousand sparks, washing over her. The firethorns launched their seeded fireworks into the sky, and the pinecone-like pods throughout the forest opened up and fired magic into the air.
The earth shook, and Shula braced herself. Not well enough, it seemed, because she fell to the ground. Something moved on her arm. She jumped, startled. It was a silver bracelet. The bracelet Hanali had given her so long ago. It had disconnected from her. It was a bracelet again, no longer a tattoo.
She felt the flames now, felt them in a different way than she had a moment before. She was in danger of burning. The magic. It had reset. Of course. Which meant she had a choice. She could put this bracelet back on and submit herself again to the conditions of her bargain with Hanali. Or she could leave it off, lose her invulnerability to fire, lose her ability to summon the flame.
She thought of her father, of his insistence on peace, of how he would feel about her fighting. But what else did she have? She had discovered the Scim were not the terrorist monsters she had been led to believe, but she could still fight the Elenil. And when her time was done, she would need this power, would need the fire to return home to Aleppo, where she would bring justice to Syria. She would save the world.
That was when she heard the whisper. She could not see anyone, did not hear anyone walk up near her. Who said it? She didn’t know. Maybe she said it herself. But she heard the whisper, and it only said one word.
“Yenil.”
Yenil. The Scim girl Madeline had adopted when she was orphaned. The Scim girl Shula had come to love as her own. Now Madeline was gone, and who would care for the girl if Shula allowed herself to be wrapped up in the fight again? Who would take care of her, protect her, keep her safe? Could Shula do those things if she had a bracelet tying her to the Elenil, making her their slave? No.
A great crashing came from behind her. The main part of the fire was close. It would sweep over her in a few minutes, and she was suddenly vulnerable. The time had come. She had to leave the fire, leave her anger, and try to become someone who could build a better life and better world for her Yenil.
Shula gripped the bracelet in her hand. She looked for the place that seemed to have the fewest flames, and she ran. The fire crashed behind her, following her, chasing her, like a monstrous animal trying to devour her. Still she ran. She leapt over fallen branches, wove between flaming trunks. She was tempted to put on the bracelet more than once. She wouldn’t survive without it, couldn’t survive—she was crying, almost sobbing at the thought of laying her protection aside—but she could not be a good mother for Yenil if she was invulnerable. How could she let the child into her heart unless she was willing to be hurt? Unless she made herself vulnerable?
She burst out of the trees and saw the lake, the same water that had taken Madeline, and although her heart fell to think of her friend disappearing into that water, she felt an impossible lightness at the thought of escaping the flames. She ran as far as she could into the water before she dove, swimming away from shore. When the cool water was about to be higher than her head, she stopped, turned, and watched the forest burn. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she dunked her head and washed her face and hair, removing as much of the ash and blood and tears as she could.
Hours later—it must have been hours—when what remained of the forest lay black and smoking, she swam back to shore. The smoke rose from the ground, but already it was cooling. A gentle rain had begun, and to Shula’s astonishment, green shoots were already pushing their way through the ash.
She turned back to the water, the bracelet still in her hand. She threw it as far as she could, watched it glimmer in the light before falling into the water. She left it there with everything else she had washed off herself. She would never need it again.
Then she walked to find Yenil, through a newly born landscape that was fresh and green and growing. She found the girl playing with Delightful Glitter Lady amongst a whole tribe of Aluvoreans, Mrs. Oliver gazing at her with a tired look on her face, and David keeping careful watch nearby. Yenil ran to Shula and leapt into her arms, wrapping herself around her like a sea star on a rock. “Shula, Shula, you’re back!” she shouted, and Shula t
old her yes, yes, she was home.
34
THE ARCHON
“Farewell then, old friend,” says she,
“for I have made a foolish mistake.”
FROM “MALGWIN AND THE WHALE,” A TRADITIONAL ZHANIN STORY
Hanali led Darius through a warren of corridors. He shooed off any Scim servants who got in their way, and ordered Elenil to step aside. The servants gave Darius’s bloody sword a sidelong look, but when Hanali spoke, people listened. Maybe not always, but today they certainly did. They passed through lavishly appointed rooms, rooms that appeared to be outside but were not, and at least one room entirely filled with water, floor to ceiling . . . even though the doors were off their hinges and the water should have flowed out. They passed a group of Pastisian soldiers bashing in a marble wall with what looked like power-assisted sledgehammers. Hanali almost paused for that, but then he hurried on.
He stopped outside a nondescript door in a long hallway full of nondescript doors. He put his palm against the door, his other hand preventing Darius from entering. “The Crescent Stone is mine, once the deed is done. Agreed?”
Sick of agreements with Hanali, Darius pushed past him and threw open the door. On the other side was a small room with a fountain full of tropical fish. Darius spun around to find Hanali watching him with crossed arms and a disappointed look. “Agreed,” Darius said.
Hanali smirked, then led him two doors down, across the hallway. He pulled the door open, and there he lay: the archon.
Archon Thenody did not look well. His face was drawn and haggard. He was propped up in a bed, weak enough that his breath was labored. His eyes moved to Hanali, then to Darius. “Come in, then,” he said. “At least have the decency to sit and talk with me for a few moments before that blade strikes again.”
“Do not bother to call for your guards,” Hanali said. “I have already—”
The Heartwood Crown Page 38