Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  Lan.

  There was pain, very sharp, very sudden. All the loss that had been dulled with the years, the joy and sadness put away, came shattering now the barriers built of patience and time. And yet there was no space to feel it. This new company of watchers looked skyward, and branches snapped from the trees to rain down upon the coming warriors, knocking the weapons from their hands.

  Then, from Kate, a jolt of panic, and the boy yelled, “Stop!”

  “Look!” Kate shouted. “Look at the children!”

  Children poured over the western ridge, propelled by red cloaks and dogs. Hobbled by chains, they lurched down the slope while, like jackals roused by the scent of blood, the lost ones bounded after them.

  Stumbling, awkward, the children made easy prey. A maddened slasher snatched at the neck of a redheaded girl; a dog yanked a boy to the ground. To Laysia’s shock, fire spat from the first child, throwing the slasher off. Around the boy, the grass flared. Laysia had almost reached them when she stopped. What was happening?

  Nell charged past her. “Make a path for them!” she yelled. And stones jumped from the grass to knock the dog from the boy; dust flew up to blind a soldier hurrying their way. His shirt in flaming tatters, the boy rolled to his feet and ran, the girl at his heels, their wild fear blaring in Laysia’s ears.

  But if she could hear the children, the old man had gone deaf. He paid no heed to the small figures running amid the chaos. He raised a hand, and lightning slammed into the ground, throwing soldiers to the dirt and heaving a curly-haired girl down beside them. A shower of sparks shot from her, and as she rolled there, the old man roared, “Charge! Now! This is your moment!”

  And Lan — even Lan! — ran forward.

  The fleeing children swerved and turned back, caught between the troops pouring from the hill and the watchers who ran to meet them.

  Laysia spun around. “Stop!” she screamed at Lan. “They’re children!”

  But she could see the watchers changing. The skin of her brother’s face rippled and bent.

  Madness! Its poison was everywhere; it choked the air. Laysia and the children hurled wind and stone and threw the dust from the ground into the faces of the attackers, into the fires, but no one stopped and no one heard beneath the shattering noise of flame and wind.

  Fear sliced knife-like through her chest. Kate! The girl let go of her hand and darted after her brother, who’d bolted past the fleeing children toward the oncoming soldiers.

  Madness in the children, too! Laysia chased after them, calling — when a light sparked and shimmered, and the sunlight ignited. The noise of the coming stampede abated. Laysia froze.

  A wall of thick glass shimmered between the panicked children and the red cloaks.

  Behind her, she heard Nell laugh.

  “A window!” the girl said. “Max made a window that doesn’t open!”

  Shielded now by the glass, the fleeing children stopped. Behind Laysia, the watchers did the same. But the old man shouted, “No!” and hurled a wind to batter the wall. The bewildered children ducked beneath the blast of air and tried to run, but they were bound, and more — they each held their hands out, stiff, as if running with a gift to show.

  Laysia could make them out now: silver balls that hung around their necks, pulled out and held in their cupped hands. What was this?

  Then a small boy tugged at his neck, tearing the orb away. A flare, and his sleeve caught fire.

  “It’s on them! They’re wearing it!” Nell shouted. “Max! Stay back!”

  The boy stopped short, but Susan didn’t. She ran past Laysia toward the child trying to douse his arm in the grass.

  “Espin!” she shouted back at them. “It’s Espin!” Horror poured from the others as the boy writhed. Max and Nell snatched up a fallen cloak, torn from one of the attackers, and beat at the fire. Kate and Laysia ran to do the same.

  Still the watchers sent the wind, trying to shatter the wall and reach the enemies on the other side. The children cried out, the orbs glinting in their hands.

  “Get them off! Get them off!” Nell shouted. And Laysia and Kate, Max and Nell ran from child to child, lifting the orbs from their necks. But the wind blew too sharply, and one after the other, the orbs popped. Stung, the children dropped them to the grass, which lit, flames shooting up into the heat.

  Then Susan stopped moving. For a moment, Laysia again feared madness, but no dark terror pulsed from her now, only that needle of focus, the hungry shout to the listening world. The air shuddered. Beneath Susan’s feet, the soil buckled.

  “Get back!” Nell screamed at her sister, but as the ground churned, Susan shot into the air. A sheet of water tore the grass in two. The geyser ripped upward, throwing the rest of them to the ground amid a shower of dirt and grass and foam. It arched overhead and then splashed to earth, drenching the children and dousing the burning swath before the glass wall that shimmered and glittered now with spray. Once, twice, the water shot heavenward, until the fire had been pounded from hair and skin and clothes and grass.

  Suddenly, silence. Jean looked up and saw the wall of glass, glittering in the spray, and the Genius, his hand raised. The troops had paused on the ridge. As it had in the tiled room, the man’s face shifted before her eyes, its already rough edges going jagged, the hair thickening, the eyes receding further into the bony skull.

  “Coward!” he shouted, and his voice echoed strangely across the now quiet hollow. “How long will you hide your face from me behind pretty walls? The time has come, old man! Show yourself!”

  For a beat, nothing moved on either side of the wall. And then two figures rose from behind it to land on the glass ledge.

  “Yes! See my face!” the old man called back. “Look at the face of a man before you feel the weight of his hand!”

  Muttering anger from the troops on the ridge, but the Genius only laughed.

  “Oh, I will! I’ll look at your face and your outstretched hand. It offered me five smooth-faced children, after all. Who wouldn’t come for such a gift? But, old man, did you think that was all I’d take?” He flicked his head at Jean and said to his guard, “Bring me the girl!”

  They dragged her from the corral, Liyla tripping after her, and the Genius grabbed Jean by the shoulder and pulled her against him to face the hollow. Liyla hunched before her, clutching the gathered pendants.

  On the glass wall, the second man called out, “Who are you to speak of courage, dog? You hide behind a child!”

  Jean gave a start. It was the voice of the Master Watcher!

  “Ah, but I don’t hide my gifts,” the Genius countered. “I make use of them. Look how I adorn this one you sent me!” And then the basket was beside them, and as Jean struggled to pull away, he slipped a necklace over her head. She recoiled as the weight of the metal pressed through the thinness of her dress.

  “Do you think you can deter me now? With this?” the old man shouted at him. “When so much is at stake?”

  The Genius’s laugh shook them both, and Jean cringed. “Deter you? Never! We are the same, you and I, aren’t we? We always have been.”

  “You’re a dog who barks at men!” the Master Watcher roared. “This great man is nothing like you!”

  Again, the Genius laughed. “Really? Look at him! Better, look at yourself!”

  The Master Watcher turned and looked at Tur Kaysh. Jean looked, too. The Guide’s features were shifting. Anger seemed to swell him, curdle his high brow and the sharp line of his jaw. The Master Watcher staggered and raised a hand to his own face.

  “Tricks!” the old man roared. He pulled his lips back and bared his teeth. “Conjuring!”

  “Tricks!” the Genius repeated. “Oh, yes. But not the one you think. Is all your storied power, too, only sleight of hand? Old man, you’re as easily fooled as a child! You’ve been looking the wrong way all along!”

  He half turned, taking Jean with him. The soldiers on the ridge had drawn aside to reveal a row of cannons that had been hid
den beneath the mass of red cloaks.

  “Fire!” the Genius called to them. “Now!”

  And with a thundering boom, the guns let fly. The wall buckled and cracked, then shattered, as the old man leaped to the sky. But the Master Watcher, still staring at his own hands, tumbled earthward, falling amid a shower of broken glass.

  The world crumbled and fell to nothing. Only a single point of light remained — Lan among the shards, wet with blood and a gray cast shadowing his changing skin. Too late, she had seen him drop, too late to catch him with the wind or soften the fall.

  Salt and ashes, Laysia thought bitterly. Salt and ashes.

  Finish them!” the Genius called, and with a whoop, the soldiers charged past the smoking cannons, a red tide swallowing the land.

  Jean spotted the others in the ruins of the wall. Her heart contracted. Max had come, but he couldn’t save her. There were too many of them. It was over. The Genius must have seen it, too, because he let go of her shoulder and came around to look into her face. His teeth had gotten sharp in his mouth, his lips were black, but his voice was velvet again, as if the battle in the hollow had disappeared when he turned his back on it, as if they were alone together in the tent once more.

  “Is this illusion, too?” he asked, squatting to touch her cheek. “Pity. I would have liked it to be otherwise, but there’s no use fooling myself. I should have guessed you were too small to be useful.” He made as if to get up but stopped himself, smiling.

  “Perhaps we can salvage something from you after all, though. Such a pretty thing. Like the doll you brought, only softer. That was made of sturdy stuff. Tell me, are you the same? Can this pretty illusion survive the heat?”

  And he shoved her backward. She toppled, taking Liyla with her.

  Jean grabbed her pendant as they fell, holding it as she hit the dirt, while two, three, four of the orbs on Liyla’s neck burst, vomiting fire. Flames ripped across Liyla’s shirt and caught the grass. The heat sent Jean reeling, and the chains still holding her to the girl bit through her skin, but she held her own pendant, arm shaking.

  Small, small, small echoed, hateful, in Jean’s ears as Liyla flailed, violently jerking Jean’s arm. Jean slapped at the flames and fought to hold still and felt the hot tears pour down her face as she forced her arm out, desperate to keep the orb away.

  No one should be this small! She scrambled in the dirt. Was it her imagination, or was the thing turning hot in her hand? If only it were covered in glass, like the wall in the hollow! Or, better, ice — something to soothe the burns, something to heal the terrible pain racing up her arm!

  But wishing was nothing — that’s what Max had said. It wasn’t wishing she needed. It was seeing. Was she too small to see? Was she?

  The fire had raced across Liyla’s sleeve now, and Jean felt it sear her wrist. Liyla cried out and the Genius laughed and the silver orb burned against Jean’s palm.

  With all her might, she tried to see ice. Hadn’t she known cold aplenty here, even in this terrible summer? Hadn’t she shivered in the tiled room? Awful, awful cold it had been, cold so it hurt.

  The screams from the hollow dimmed. The Genius’s laughter, too. In her ears, there was a rushing now that blocked the rest, blotted out the clang of metal, the boom of explosions, the wrenching, terrible sound of Liyla sobbing.

  Then suddenly her hand burned, but not with fire.

  She opened her palm and stared. The silver orb glittered there, encased in ice, sparkling in the sunlight.

  “What’s happening?” Liyla’s voice was thick, but she’d stopped crying. She lay gasping in the dirt, her chest adazzle with ice that had doused the fire and glassed the pendants. “You took them away!” she whispered.

  But they were still here, simmering beneath the ice, waiting. Jean could not stomach it. The orb hung at her neck, and with her mind’s eye she flung it away.

  The chain at her wrists snapped, and the cord at her neck. From Liyla the cluster of icy silver jerked skyward, the ribbons frayed and shredding.

  Away, Jean thought, and a chill shot across her arms. The glassy fire pendants shot out, knocking the Genius onto his back, shot over the lines of soldiers rushing from the wood — so many! Too many to stop! But there had been a song — what had Laysia told her? A water drop and a wave, not different at all, really, because there was no small, there was no big, there was only the song, and seeing . . . The air bit at her skin, and this time a sharp pain shot through her. Shadows filled the sky, pebbling the light on the grass. Jean looked up. The handful of orbs had multiplied into a thousand, and the new-made fire pendants hung overhead, all glittering and slicked with ice. She didn’t wish it this time; she saw it. Away!

  The wind whipped overhead, the trees thrashed, and the pendants shot away, across the streaming line of soldiers, out and out, falling and flaring in a hailstorm of fire and ice.

  On a bed of mud and broken glass, the scholars and soldiers fought, the difference gone from their faces. Laysia braced herself among them, holding the space where her brother lay. Pain and terror and fury curdled the air, but she no longer heard it, for Kate had run ahead with the others, racing to find their sister.

  Moving shadows blotted the sun; Loam rumbled beneath her feet, the air snapping and alive. Laysia looked up at the stippled sky.

  A hailstorm had spun upward from the ridge. It hung there a moment, frozen stones in a summer sky, before it whipped across the horizon. Ice fell and turned to fire, and the wood flamed. Beside her, even the fighting men stopped to watch it, agape.

  Then two small figures appeared on the ridge and raced down into the hollow, the sky glittering behind them. Jean!

  She watched the children run to meet their sister, shouting with joy and relief. With dread, Laysia had remembered the old woman’s words, a child lost, a child gone, but perhaps even dreams could be mistaken!

  Then, to her horror, another figure topped the rise, a man in heavy brocade, teetering, aflame. Before she could call out, he dived toward Jean, swinging a fistful of the deadly pendants over his head like a slingshot.

  Ashadow fell across the hill, and Jean spun in time to see the silver orbs flash against the sky. Then a squall shot across the hollow and knocked her aside. She fell into the grass as it plowed past, sweeping the man from the hill and heaving the pendants against him. Pop! Pop! Pop! They exploded, igniting his hair and clothes. Flaming, he shot backward, through the barn doors and into the pile of orbs heaped there. For a beat, the barn seemed to glow, then it withered, buckling. With a volcanic roar, it exploded skyward in a shower of fire that lurched to heaven before falling in a mass of flaming pieces, a thousand shooting stars snuffed to ash.

  Hungry dark,

  Devouring.

  It will come

  And teach you

  To know fear,

  And you will lose

  Your very selves

  Amid a blood tide

  That pierces to your heart.

  But take hope,

  For the smallest candle

  Will light a torch,

  To make the end,

  Beginning.

  — Orchard Vision, Age of Anam, Ganbihar

  From the smallest of them, the child at play, had come the end of all things, and the beginning. Laysia had watched the old tale unfold all unexpected. She should have been joyous. But in the shattered hollow, she sank back to her knees beside her brother. Lan lay torn beneath the empty sky, and unlike the ancients, she had no healing.

  “I remembered your song,” the little one said, coming to her with trepidation. Glass crunched underfoot, and Jean kept her eyes from the fallen man. “The water drop and the wave.”

  Tur Nurayim’s song, Laysia thought as she praised the child. She heard her own voice from a distance. Not mine. Tur Nurayim’s song. He had so many. Songs of play, and teaching, and power, and healing. He had so many that she had hummed them, sometimes, in her sleep.

  She watched the life seep from her brother, hi
s face so changed, and thought, This, at least, I can give him. A remembrance of lost power as he goes, a song of comfort, of mending. So she sang of fibers rejoined, of wholeness, of health.

  Beneath her hands, the wounds closed, and Lan breathed easy.

  The age of wolves had ended.

  Or at least that’s what Laysia said, when a day had passed. Susan was happy for her, happy for all of them who acted like they had woken from a bad dream.

  In Susan’s opinion, though, the age of wolves had given way to the age of awkward silences. For a full day after they’d returned from the clearing, Max had been quiet. If she looked at him, his eyes slid away and he would find some work to do, helping guide people down to the valley, now that even some of the red cloaks came looking. The hours that had followed the battle had been full of confusion. Some of the watchers had disappeared, and the old man — the Guide — could not be found. But then red cloaks approached, this time seeking entrance, and help, and already their faces had begun to shift as they streamed down into the valley, where the sanctuary stood out in the summer sunlight, the mist all gone.

  She’d been waiting for Max for so long, she thought they’d have lots to talk about.

  But the absent old man still stood between them. Max mumbled an apology there among the red cloaks and the watchers, but it was not enough, and he couldn’t seem to find the words for what would be. Uncharacteristically, he had run out of things to say.

  And Susan, who’d longed for quiet ever since she’d heard the first hissing of the mist, now found that the sudden silence just made the gaping hole between them seem bigger. She’d wanted quiet, but not this kind.

  It was Nell who finally put a stop to it. She and Susan found Max on the hill after he’d shown a knot of newcomers to the outer wall.

  “Max . . .” Susan said.