by Adi Rule
Papa reaches across the table and pats my sister’s hand, which surprises us both. “I know … I know you’re not a little girl anymore. I know it is exciting to talk to young men. You will even fall in love someday.”
Jey, who falls in love every other week, forces a feeble smile. I will her to keep her response short and vague. We don’t know yet if Papa has found out about her secret meeting with Bonner.
“Hopefully!” she says, too loudly. Good enough.
Papa grasps the message again, as if he isn’t certain what he is supposed to do with it. “But, Jey, dear one, you know what the rules are. You can’t speak to anyone there. School, yes. The tea shops, yes. But there—it just isn’t safe for your sister. You must know that, my girl.”
Jey frowns. “Papa? I don’t—”
“There’s nothing to do now,” he says. “You must decline. Whatever you did, whatever you said, it got his attention, so you simply must not go.”
“Go?” Jey says. “Go where?”
I can’t take any more. “Papa, what is the message?”
He seems to notice me for the first time. He is silent a moment, then hands it to me. The paper is heavy with a gold coat of arms embossed at the top. A sturdy wax seal has been broken, and a gold tassel dangles off the back.
Miss Jey Fairweather, 162 Saltball Street
Her Imperial Majesty the Empress of Caldaras
and
The Esteemed Azizi Zan, Commandant of Caldaras City,
Protector of the Nation
humbly request the Honor of your Presence
at an afternoon’s Entertainment
to be held next Restlight
at the Copper Palace on Roet Island,
at the specific request of their Devoted Son,
the Admirable Zahi Zan.
I gasp. The Admirable Zahi Zan? The Empress’s son? I thought he and his brothers were away, getting university educations in the snowy mountains of southern Caldaras. Questions and confusion stay my voice, the most vibrant of which is, Why in wet hell was he mowing the lawn?
How was I supposed to know? And now he has invited me to a private party at the Copper Palace!
Correction: He has invited Jey.
But neither of us is going.
six
The face of the dead obsidian redwing of High Ra Square finds me in my sleep, haunting me because he doesn’t look like a redwing. Because he looks human, as I do.
I stare at the outlines of the stones in the wall next to my bed. My mind refuses to drift into unconsciousness; it swirls with memory and rapture and worry. I follow the slow progress of a beam of moonlight, and when it reaches my face, I give up on sleep and swing my legs out from under the blanket.
I leave the impression of my body in the hay mattress as I clamber out of bed, black fog pressing against the glass walls of the Dome. I spark a candle stub to life, eliciting feathery rustles from the perches above me, and reach up on tiptoe to the top of my armoire.
The old metal wrench-box I find there takes some coercing before it slides jerkily off the edge and into my hands. It came from Val Chorm, from the house that is now only the green memory of ashes. Inside is a ragged square of linen tablecloth, carefully folded, and a small collection of soft-worn pages from the penny pulps Jey brings home. Each page is from a different story, with lurid titles like “Taken by the Monster,” “Duplicate of Evil,” and “Bride of the Blood Prince.” All the stories contain redwings in their most depraved and brutal manifestations.
The pages I’ve saved are the illustrations, usually melodramatic line drawings of beautiful people unfortunate enough to be terrified and lose large swaths of their clothing at the same time. But, gorgeous, frightened, and scantily clad as these people are, my interest lies elsewhere. Each illustration also depicts a redwing.
Hairy, most of them. Wild eyed. A lot of teeth and claws. I pore over them again, trying, straining to see myself. My hair is long, but I keep it brushed. My fingernails are filed and my teeth clean. The eyes that look out from my mirror seem placid enough.
It’s ridiculous to think that someone who has never seen a redwing could write a story about or draw a picture of one. It’s ridiculous to think there could be anything of me in these sensationalist tales.
But we know the truth of monsters by their actions, not their appearance.
Why do you keep them? Jey would ask if she knew. What could I tell her? That as horrible as these fictional redwings are, they are a family that I could belong to, if only I looked like more of a fiend?
Or maybe I take my comfort from not seeing myself in these pictures. I could just be a normal girl, hidden away from society, but not a danger to it. Someone who, if things were different, could go to a tea shop, attend school, meet a boy, go to a fancy party, and the world would just keep clanking along as if nothing were amiss. I could be a regular person who didn’t have the power to vaporize a man’s head with her fingers. Maybe some part of my brain didn’t believe in redwings, despite years of seeing my scars and knowing my blood runs black. Even after my hands unleashed deadly fire upon those priests.
I didn’t believe until this morning, when I saw my ordinary face in obsidian in High Ra Square, and I knew. Whoever carved that redwing, that half-Other prince, had seen him. Us.
* * *
It is the day of Zahi Zan’s garden party, and Papa is leaving. A wheat blight has infected the east, which is just about the worst thing that can happen mere weeks from the Deep Dark, when nothing will grow for a year. The Empress has called her most respected horticulturists and botanists to help the farmers save as many plants as possible, so our father must go.
“Be well, my girls, and breathe easy.” I hear the words he doesn’t say. He means we are to be wary. Jey, quiet. Me, invisible. And for all his worry, he has no idea how much trouble I’m already in.
Seen.
It’s that damned bonescorch orchis. The air in my lungs steams. We’ve always been so careful. What do I do now?
I watch the door close behind my father and listen to his boots crunch away down the gravel path to the street. Through the window, I can see Jey waving good-bye from our tiny front yard, her dark hair uncovered, her shoulders bare.
I run my fingers through my hair. No one can see me through our lace curtains, can they? Didn’t Jey test them out, peering in from the yard, when we first hung them? Didn’t Papa put me high in the Dome so I couldn’t be seen from the street? Nothing seems certain or safe anymore.
I still haven’t talked to Jey about what happened in the alley or in the gardens. I wouldn’t know where to start, or what I would want her to say. The only thing I know is that it is more important than ever that I get to that damned bonescorch orchis.
Jey comes back inside, shutting our heavy door against the midday glare. “Well,” she says, “that’s that. Poor Papa, always getting shuffled off to solve everyone’s problems. How long will it be this time, I wonder?”
I start to tie my hair back with a piece of string. Jey comes to me automatically, tugging, fluffing, and straightening.
“I’d guess enough time for you to go to that party.” I don’t know why I say it.
“Isn’t that something?” she says, and I hear the smile in her voice. “To be honest, it did occur to me just to go. What’s the harm? I mean, I’ve never even met anyone from the royal family, and from what I hear, I’d be sure to remember if I had.”
“Why do you say that?” I keep my voice steady.
Jey gives my hair a final yank into position and swings me around to face her. Her eyes are mischievous. “Have you heard nothing about Zahi Zan? He’s supposed to be quite a thing of beauty, you know. Although he apparently lives the life that goes with it.” She leans in. “A different young lady every week—and sometimes more than one!”
“You read too many penny pulps,” I say flatly.
“What’s the matter?” Jey reaches for my arm, but I’m already at the ladder ascending to my quiet ro
om. “Hey!” she calls, but I’m already shutting the trapdoor. As if a closed trapdoor could deter my sister.
“Here’s the thing, Jey,” I begin moments later. She has seated herself solidly on my table and leans forward, staring me down like a raptor on the hunt. “It’s all to do with when we switched places.”
She straightens up and puts a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Rasus! It was you who met him, wasn’t it? When you were doing the peonies for me? I’m such an idiot.”
I rub my forehead. “Well, yes, it was me, but that’s not really the whole point.”
“So you should be going to that party, not me,” Jey says, which causes my insides to flop around. “You poor thing.”
My sister takes my hands in hers. Her face is a tapestry of concern and love and understanding. The same expression Papa wears. The one that stopped being comforting when I started wanting more of a life than I was allowed.
“Look, Jey,” I say, “you don’t understand. It was a mistake for us to pull a trick like that, and now I’m real.” It made more sense in my head.
Jey looks puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘real’? Of course you’re real. You’ve always been real.”
I look at my neat row of books. “Then what’s my name?”
Her concerned expression flickers and she lets out a frustrated sigh. “I’m not arguing about this right now.” And in a huff, she thumps off down the ladder.
I sit on the floor next to the trapdoor and listen. After a few minutes, I hear the splash of the washbasin, the creak of bureau drawers, the rustle of the pink silk suit that is probably the most expensive object in the house—billowy in the legs, tight at the top, with a neckline that caused Papa to raise one bushy eyebrow and say, “No.” I hear the crisp clack of shiny shoes on the floor and bits of song sung quietly to oneself. My sister is trying on her best party clothes.
But, for all my invisibleness, what would she do without me? I matter to Jey. And she to me, which is why I can’t let the priests take me. I can’t end up a heap of rags on the Jade Bridge. Not yet.
“I’m sorry, Jey,” I say to the empty air. “I’ve got to get to that orchis.”
I put on her spare green jumpsuit and tie a square of linen around the lower half of my face. I slide down the ladder, find her goggles on a nail in the kitchen, and hang them around my wrist.
She comes out of her room, hands on pink silk hips. “What are you doing?”
“Gardening,” I say.
“That’s my uniform.” Is it the slanted light through the window that makes her expression so inscrutable?
I inhale and put a hand on her shoulder. “Jey, I—I have to go to the party. On Roet Island.” I say it with as firm a voice as I can manage. Will she fight me?
Her face falls, and for just a moment, she wears the same expression she did when Papa told her I couldn’t go with her to her first day of First School. But we are not five anymore, and she quickly shrugs it off. She scrunches her nose. “Like that?”
I laugh. “Your face will get me in the gates. But your uniform will get me where I need to go. It’s important. More important than I can say. I’m sorry. I know you wanted—”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s you I’m concerned about. What are you up to?”
“I—” I’m going to kill the only known specimen of the rarest plant in Caldaras. I almost tell her, but something stops me. “This might be the only chance I ever have to see the Empress’s private garden.”
It’s difficult to lie to Jey. It’s worse when she believes me. She smiles. “I suppose you have a point. Well”—she pulls me into a hug—“have a good time.”
And I step out once again into the hostile world.
* * *
East of High Ra Square, dingy metal-shingled pumphouses hug the hissing shore of Lake Azure Wave. Copper and lead pipes elbow their ways down into the aquamarine depths, collecting, heating, or recycling the water that powers our volcano city. The street runs parallel to the lake here as I make my way toward the bridge, and scalding waves slosh gently against the pilings below my feet. Two workers, black clad and covered with coal dust from the boiler fires, sit on a jetty, eating their lunches as the lake bubbles beneath them. As I pass, one of them tosses a gnawed poultry wing into the water, and my eyes follow the ripples to where a tiny bit of shore sticks out below the jetty. There, the black sand is littered with the bones of old lunches, all of them gleaming white and clean, any flesh that remained having been blistered away long ago.
I cross the street, no longer enthralled by the Lake Azure Wave’s beautiful, deadly water.
The Jade Bridge, however, is just as glorious as ever. The afternoon is getting on, touching the light green edges of the bridge with glowing warmth. I soon come to the arch that marks the shores of Roet Island.
“No dusting today,” one of the guards at the gate says. They have the well-armored look of the city guardsmen, but shine like new coins.
“I’m a guest.” I hand the invitation over.
The guard looks at it and hacks a derisive laugh, but his partner points and says, “Fairweather. She’s the daughter of one of the master gardeners.”
“Yes, my father is Ring Fairweather,” I say, sticking out my chin just a little.
“All right, all right.” The first guard steps aside. “Not what I’d wear to a party, but suit yourself.”
I ignore him and stride through the arch. The lawns Zahi Zan was mowing the morning I met him are spotted with well-dressed people, including what seems to be an exorbitant number of pretty girls. They dot the grass like enormous flowers in bright, puffy fabric of every imaginable color; servants flit amongst them, insects going about their pollinating. For a moment I am transfixed. Everything they do drips with ease. I watch them eat and drink, play ball, mallet, and hoop games I am unfamiliar with, and sit lazily at the edges of elegant fountains.
I hunch behind a bed of pale yellow embergrass, hoping my posture and outfit will convey “gardening” to anyone who casually notices me even though I do not have any gardening tools. This part would be easier in stylish clothes, but this uniform is my best hope of getting access to the bonescorch orchis.
Then I catch sight of Zahi Zan emerging from a set of grand doors that can only be the main entrance to the Copper Palace. With his hair pulled back and the buttons on his jacket shining, I can’t believe I didn’t realize he was nobility. He oozes it.
A group of girls, each in different-colored silk but otherwise rather interchangeable, accosts him as he steps onto the lawn, and he gives them a graceful bow. I hear giggling. One girl—buttery yellow—detaches from the group and takes his arm.
Enough. I am here to find the orchis, nothing else. I scan the grounds from behind Jey’s dark goggles. The bonescorch may be the rarest plant in all of Caldaras, but it is a plant. It needs light and care. The Empress can’t be hiding it in a vault somewhere.
A sparkling glass dome, mottled with the muted colors of treetops within, rises behind the coppery swells of the palace. This must be the Empress’s personal garden, the place that has stolen my father so often. This is the reason my robust little garden of all colors carries with it a wistfulness, for I know buttonleaf and tomatoes and stick beans are peasants compared to its marvels. I peer across the lawn, wondering who those precious, leafy beings are who require so much more of Papa’s attention than I do.
The bonescorch has to be there.
I keep to the edge of the lawns, moving past the peonies, which drape their fragrance over me like spiderwebs. I head toward the glass dome along the wall, moving with purpose but never too quickly. Even in shade, I am captivated by the sun and the sky. If I had to be forever invisible somewhere, I think Roet Island would be my prison of choice.
The dome is guarded by tall, arched metal doors made of heavy golden vines. Not the sort of door that would yield to discreet jostling. Discouraged, I halfheartedly try a scrollwork handle, and to my astonishment, it turns with a smooth click. I slip inside
, and at last set eyes on the garden I have dreamed about since I was a child.
Trees stretch into the glass sky, leaves of green and yellow and blue casting a kaleidoscope of beautiful light over the gravel paths and mossy embankments of the garden. Songbirds I can’t see chatter and whistle from their branches—I recognize snatches of individual melodies, but I have never heard so many at once. Water cascades down the sides of the dome, its glittering rush making me dizzy, as though the whole place were shooting up into the sky. Massive flowers laze about, sprawling their tendrils, flaunting their spirals and colors and scandalously passionate scents. Black everlasting, pyxie, ring anemone—I can name only about half the species I see, and many of those are only guesses based on half-remembered drawings in my father’s books.
There cannot be another garden in all the world so wonderful.
A path littered with brass stones beckons me. The garden is deserted except for the songbirds and spotted fish in shining pools, and the scattering of voices on the lawn outside fades as I move away from the golden doors. I pull my goggles up over my hair and tug my bandanna down around my neck, and the colors and scents are even more alive. When I come to a particularly fine dodder bush, I close my eyes, drunk with the fragrance of it. I might pass out. And I wouldn’t mind at all.
A gargantuan toad-hat shrub waggles its long, hairy leaves at me, and I nearly laugh. I’ve always been proud of my own toad-hat in the Dome, since they are notoriously difficult to grow, but that one would seem positively scrawny next to this monster. Papa says the really big ones have blue roots instead of purple. I duck amongst the leaves and crouch down to take a look. Yes, there’s a hint of blue popping out of the soil underneath—
Crunch.
I freeze.
Crunch, crunch. Footsteps. Careful ones. Not the footsteps of someone who wants to be overheard. I remain still, crouched amongst the giant leaves.
“So what have you found, my dear?” A man’s wheezy voice seems to come from below me, and I realize I am situated on the edge of a mossy embankment. On the other side of the toad-hat, a gravel path runs along the bottom of the depression a few feet down.