“Can they really do that?” Elsa asked. “Tell the future? Or see the nether?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know, but it’s a revered practice. Very few of the Serpentine can do it.” I leaned in. “You know how fortune tellers here try to predict your future by throwing those bones on a table?”
Elsa nodded. “I had it done once,” she said sheepishly. “Just for fun, of course.”
“Well most of what they do is horse shit. But the bone throwing—it has roots in alchemy.”
Elsa looked up, the sparkle in her green eyes reflecting her curiosity.
I continued. “Some of the Serpentine, they practice this unorthodox kind of magic. Bone alchemy.”
“That’s where their visions come from?” Elsa asked.
I nodded. “It takes decades to learn. Days for the alchemy to work. Taa goes every two or three years to visit them.”
“Think she’ll bring back interesting news?”
“One can hope,” I said. “They’re supposed to see abstractions of the future and the world between worlds.”
“The Speights have been spreading rumors about her again, you know,” Elsa said. “Mother overheard.”
“That family is always spreading rumors about Taa,” I replied. I shook my head grimly. “One day, they’re saying that all the tales about Taa’s adventures are lies or exaggerated. The next that her mind isn’t well enough to be giving advice to the Royal Court. She doesn’t pay it any heed. Doubt she’d even notice now. She’s been away for longer periods of time recently.”
“She’s back for your birthday at least,” Elsa said, avoiding my eyes. She shifted in her seat then leaned into me. “Oh, come on. For once, just be happy about it. Then I could start giving you gifts like normal best friends.”
“I’m not upset,” I lamented. “Just… I don’t know.” I leaned back in my seat.
“Everything is better when you’re grown.”
I didn’t reply, letting the sound of the wheels as we clattered to the bottom of the hill fill up the silence between us.
It wasn’t that I was depressed about getting older. There were too many things I was looking forward to for that. It wasn’t really the past that I longed for, just the vague impression of a limitless future. That strip of your imagination that gets left behind a little more every passing celebration.
The rain was still light by the time we spotted the Cathedral’s four spiraling towers. Inside the iron caravan, the sounds of the outside world were no more than a distant melody. A fragmented rhythm that I had slowly grown accustomed to through the years.
CHAPTER 4
“Use your hands, Dina,” Father Clairmont said.
I nodded, pretending to consider his words. I couldn’t actually use my hands, of course. I was holding firecrackers in them.
“Mother Mendhi said you are to become the most celebrated alchemist of our era,” he continued. “Show us why.” He adjusted his glasses, watching the two bowls of water in front of me as carefully as he could. I wasn’t sure if he was suspicious, or eager to be impressed. His expression could have been either. But it was good that he was watching the bowls, and not me. So was the rest of the room, a class of sixty students. I needed their eyes on the bowls of water and the frog inside one of them. I needed their eyes to be engrossed, absorbed in the spectacle, bewitched before the trick even began. I was supposed to demonstrate how to use one bowl of water to bring the other one to a boil, hot enough to make the frog jump out. Only three people had succeeded so far, and they had done it in a painfully slow fashion. There was a good chance their frogs had jumped out of boredom, rather than discomfort. Now, the moment had finally come. What they were all waiting for.
“Dina summoned fire and lightning with her bare hands,” they’d say after class, “and the frog jumped in less than a tenth of a second, fearing for its very life!”
Now, here’s the thing. I don’t know a single fucking lick of magic. Not one.
It might be hard to believe, given my Anasahara heritage, but it’s true. Not every girl or boy was born an alchemist. Some were. Most weren’t. You knew from an early age. An interest in enchanted objects. A knack for using the elements in an instinctive way. Or just some form of an inexplicable talent. Mawlik could always tell when it was going to rain. When Nikhil went hunting, he could catch the scent of animals like a wolf on the prowl. Elsa was always… lucky. She rolled sixes, flipped heads, found gold coins on the streets, and could guess any number you thought of from one to twenty in three tries or less.
There were always signs. Big signs, little signs, obvious signs, subtle signs. Signs when you were four years old. Signs when you were seven years old. Signs when you were eleven years old. They were always there.
I hadn’t told many people. The ones that I did tell found it hard to believe. But Dinaaaa, your grandmother is one of the most famous alchemists in all of history. But Dinaaaa, they say your father could fight off four vampires on his own with just a few ounces of iron. Alchemical blood went from parent to child, parent to child, stronger bloodlines breeding stronger children. Until it didn’t. Most of the time you were born with it. Especially if, like me, both your parents had a talent for it. Sometimes, you just weren’t.
But I wasn’t going to be the shame of House Anasahara. My father had proclaimed I was going to be the greatest alchemist in all of Chaya before I was age three. He had planned to build a new Cathedral in my name, where students would travel to from all five human kingdoms to learn the secrets of liquid gold and molten earth. They’d learn how to fight daemons in the coming war against Rhauk. How to bring people back from the teeth of their own graves. How to bend and twist and break the laws of nature to pull Narkissa down from her throne of bones.
He may have spoken a bit too early, but I was never deterred. My mind had been set since I was four. I was going to be House Anasahara’s greatest jewel one way or another. So I did what any good-natured queen with tens of thousands of people looking up to her would do. I faked it. From age eight, my days began adding up into one long card trick, with aces stacked upon kings, and queens stacked upon jesters, all of them neatly lined up and ready to collapse at the sound of one firecracker going off a moment too early. Not just any house of cards, either. This one was for the ages. Tall enough to rake the sun from the sky, the moon from the night, and the stars from the heavens.
I didn’t mean for my hoax to turn so elaborate. I began lying about it when I was eight, and one lie tumbled into another. And then another, and another. Until our whole kingdom expected their next queen to be the second coming of the prophet Dh’hpur. Mother and Taa always knew, but I’d told more people in the past few years. Father, Elsa, Nikhil, Mawlik, Jahlil, Cecily. On accident, my uncle had found out too, and with him, all of the Speight family. The rest of Chaya was being hoodwinked by a thirteen-year-old girl with quick hands and a penchant for stretching the truth.
Father Clairmont smiled over me. He adjusted his glasses again. It was a meaningful quirk. He was always trying to see more of the world than he could see. “It is easier to do magic with your hands,” he said, wiping his fingers on his charcoal robes. “It helps you concentrate. What we are doing now, it is more difficult than what we have done before.” He blinked his threadbare eyelashes and set his sallow face with the hint of a grin. He was approaching fifty now. The lines on his face didn’t go as deep as Mother Mendhi’s, but his cheeks and brow had a sagging quality, like they had been sitting underwater for too long.
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I remembered the hand movements of some of my classmates. It had looked like they jumped into a séance mid-speech. It was bit a strange, really. I didn’t want to look like I was wiping invisible windows in front of everyone.
“I don’t need my hands. Shall I do it slow or fast?” I asked him, sounding as bored as I could manage. Murmurs spread across the classroom. I grinned—what I thought, or rather hoped, was a sinister grin. I imagined myself a daemon, flames
lashing around the fingers of one hand, rings of ice circling the other. And my classmates imagined me a savant. A prodigy, a natural marvel from two powerful bloodlines. Their future queen. They believed magic came to me just as easily as languages came to Dh’hpur.
“Quickly, if you can,” Father Clairmont said, leaning toward the eager side now. He wanted to see the magic he was promised. I thought he’d say that, that’s why I asked. If he had said slow, the show would have been over early. I’m not sure what I would have done. I had thought of a few emergency exits for situations like these. I could fake a seizure and dispel some kind of prophecy. “A sacred animal rises in the east and it shall be tamed by a boy born in a farmhouse,” I’d say, in utter rapture. Then I’d go to the woods and paint a goat red, add sacred sigils to its horns, and maybe scent it with some of Mother’s perfume.
I would say farmhouse to make sure the boy chosen was Nikhil. He was sitting at the back of the classroom, pretending to be less interested than everyone else in my display of magic. My father always imagined that Nikhil and I would rule Chaya side by side some day in the future. Mother and Taa might have felt differently. Nikhil’s father, Walin Huq, was my own Father’s closest friend, and the current head of Chaya’s King’s Guard. His mother, Elyeat Huq, came from a noble bloodline in Jidarth.
Nikhil was about to turn fifteen. His birthday was on the first week of Lastsun. He was almost two years older than me. Wide-shouldered like his father, and with auburn hair that he inherited from his mother. His face had a wavering quality to it. His eyes were light brown, and always darted from place to place until some emotion took him, at which point they would become intense, darker, and much more focused. He had short black hair, always trimmed to a fade on the sides, and fingernails that were cut more neatly than my own. He was halfway to six feet tall, and still between his growth spurt. If he grew to his father’s height, he would be just over six feet in a few more years.
I watched Nikhil from the corner of my eyes. He had that reticent kind of confidence that comes with knowing some truth about the way the world works that no one else seems to know. He got it from his father. I didn’t have it. Mine was a bit more irrational, the kind that comes from knowing that the world works in ways it actually doesn’t. It was unbecoming of a girl, really. But I wasn’t just any girl. I could pull it off. I was Dina Anasahara, and I commanded fire and lightning with smoke and mirrors.
I leaned into the bowl. Everyone’s stares intensified. Elsa watched carefully. Not with awe or wonder, but curiosity. In the dim light of the Cathedral, I could barely see the frog. This room was used both as a storage house and for alchemy lessons. There were no torches—for the same reason that they only let novice alchemists practice here. Too many flammable materials lined the top of the wooden shelves, which reached as high as the ceiling, with wheeled ladders planted underneath, and encyclopedias at the bottom meant for keeping track of which materials went where. The only light came from stained glass windows that reflected the morning sun like a distorted rainbow.
There were sixty students in the room, but more than two hundred could fit comfortably. With a wide breadth of space near the front and back, and a ceiling higher than the king’s tower, the room always gave you the impression that you were somewhere you didn’t deserve to be. I didn’t need a reminder, of course. I was always ready for Yuweh to crash through the tinted windows and smite me with his triton for lying inside of his own house. He’d open up the holy books right in front of me and yell, “Right here, page 36, I told you motherfuckers it was a sin to lie.” And then, with all the might of the ocean behind him, he’d shatter my body into a thousand pieces.
Ten cracks sounded off in quick succession like iron clapping against a furnace. The firecrackers I made were wider than usual. The sound they created as they went off was deeper, and echoed across the Cathedral in a way that didn’t resemble firecrackers at all. At first, the frog didn’t move. It lay there, peacefully floating across the bowl despite the sound of danger. I really did feel guilty. It looked like it might have been going through an existential crisis. Sometimes, I got like that too. “Jump, you little shit,” I whispered under my breath once I was out of firecrackers. It jumped after the tenth crack. I waved my hands in circular motions around the bowl, making it seem as though the smoke was coming from the water and not my hands. My sleeves were halfway covering my palms. I had popped the firecrackers by squeezing them between my fists. I’d have blisters after, but since when has physical comfort been worth more than vanity? I had nerves that could crush ice. Even in the ocean god’s own house, I didn’t flinch.
Everyone’s eyes were on me now. This was my drug. It gave me the kind of rush that made lima tea laced with wormwood feel like lemon drops. My pupils dilated. My skin prickled. The tips of my fingers went numb.
I still remember the first time I did this. I was eight, and I needed a spot in the Cathedral so Chaya wouldn’t start petitioning for a different heir. I went to Mother Mendhi, who was removing a dead flower from a pot outside of the Cathedral. I told her I could bring it back to life, that I had done it countless times before. I touched the petals while closing my eyes, making an elaborate show of the process, and then told her to leave it there. Overnight, I switched it out for a new one. I made sure they looked almost identical. I still remember the flower, a mithya. I had spent all day looking for it. They were rare in the wild. Nearby, they only grew at the outer edges of the Dwah Forest. The petals turned a different color at night. They were white when they faced the sun, and red when they faced the moon. Two-colored, like the many faces of Dina Anasahara.
Mother Mendhi was bewildered. Her dark eyes had pooled with water after she saw the flower. She hid her face behind a handful of snow-white hair for a full minute before leaning in and hugging me. I was to study in the Cathedral the very next day. She said I might have been talented enough to become a nun myself, had I not been destined to be queen. If you had magic, but you weren’t too bright, you could be useful to a blacksmith or a physiker. If you were decent at it, you’d join the King’s Guard or the army or one of the guilds and help defend Chaya every night against the daemons and creatures that served Narkissa. If you were good, you could serve the Church. Teach the next generation magic, cure the diseased, counsel the king, fight daemons without being paid for it. “You can be the light of the world. Your parents named you after the word ‘day’ in Old Emelim. You’ll get to do the work of the gods as queen,” Mother Mendhi told me. To which I asked her, “Why don’t they do it themselves?” That got me into a bit of trouble, but she liked me enough to overlook it.
“Marvelous, marvelous,” Father Clairmont mumbled now, in the alchemy room. Other whispers spread through the class, ranging from reverent to resentful, impressed to impolite. The class was a mix of chemicals just as complex as the ones on the shelves high above them. I couldn’t blame them, of course. I’d be envious too, if I had been outdone like that. More so if it was by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. But in a twisted kind of way, it did make sense that it worked out like this. The gods love irony, you see. The universe is a theatre for the angels. Werewolves? Wraiths? Stonemen? They look like dark beings from below, but they’re dark humor for everyone above. I watched Father Clairmont as he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. Like the daemons that haunted our dreams, he was a creature of irony.
“The cracking sound though, I’ve never heard that before,” Father Clairmont said.
“Yes, it’s been happening recently,” I replied, trying to sound sorry. “I’ve done this outside a few times. I used to do it slow and it never happened. I started being able to heat up the water faster and faster, bringing it to a boil almost instantaneously, and then it started making that sound. Doesn’t it happen to you, Father Clairmont?”
I saw Elsa smiling from the corner.
Father Clairmont muttered something inaudible underneath his breath. “Volatile magic. Some kind of reaction—” were the only words I pick
ed up. He adjusted his glasses again, glinting the light off the stained windows like circular prisms. He walked toward the front of the room, changing the subject to the properties of water.
I leaned back, careful not to spill the used firecrackers tucked underneath my sleeves. I stopped listening. It was for my own good, really, and maybe even for the good of those around me. If you listened to a priest for too long, you could convince yourself that you were bound for heaven. It was always a slow descent after that, a kind of spiraling decay where righteousness nestled into the corner of your mind, ready to serve as an emergency exit in case of moral ambiguities. I took out my quill and paper to write a poem.
Blue and blue, the moonlit path
Who and who, does the Dream Weaver grab?
If you find yourself in a vermilion pass
Then try and run from the Dream Weaver’s path
Try and run from the moonlit path
But for now, dying sun, let the blue moon pass
Down the sound, the moonlit path
Crowned and drowned, the one the Dream Weaver grabs
If light and dawn can hide the moonlit path
Then crying sun, wash away the sins of past
Crying sun, wash away the moonlit path
But for now, dying sun, let the red moon pass
This was my other pastime—besides cultivating a reputation as a world-renowned expert of the arcane. From a young age, I was always good at lying and stealing, so I knew I’d make a fantastic writer. A half-hour passed by as I jotted words into different sheets of paper. I wrote on the front and the back, sometimes sideways, sometimes diagonally. Another half-hour followed. I wasn’t aware of what was happening in class until someone else’s words caught my attention. A name.
“—Saythana,” someone said. Mawlik. His small eyes roamed around the room, then settled on Father Clairmont with a watchful expression.
Jahlil and Mawlik were cousins. Native Chayans whose lineage went all the way back to the first people who settled here. Their last name was Khadun, same as the name of the new continent, and taken after Dh’hpur’s maternal grandmother. As far as surnames went, it was a common one in Chaya. Jahlil was tall and lanky, with arms that were made for climbing trees and hanging from Elsa’s windowsill. Mawlik was my height, a bit under five feet. Besides their heights and builds, they looked close enough to be brothers. They had shocks of dusty black hair like cinder, black eyes that were always searching, and freckled, burnt caramel faces. Jahlil had a calm manner, even more than Nikhil. Mawlik could be equally serious when he needed to be, but in an anxious way. They had both vied for Elsa’s attention for as long as I could remember, but it was Jahlil who had her heart. Elsa and him would grow up and marry one day, if this could remain the one thing she was never fickle about. This and me.
Vermilion Dreams (Book One of A Vampire Fantasy Epic) Page 4