The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Never, that I know,” agreed the young man. “And he’s been here a long time.” He gazed curiously at Araenè.

  “How—why did he come here?” she asked. “I mean, to the Islands.”

  Tichorei shrugged. “He hardly discusses that with any of us. I suppose the other masters know. At least Master Kopapei.”

  “Master Kopapei said something once about Yngulin politics being complicated and dangerous,” Kanii volunteered. “I thought Master Tnegun might have been exiled from Yngul—but I don’t know.”

  “I think I saw a book about Yngul in the common library,” little Cesei said eagerly. “I’ll find it for you, if you like. Can I read it first, though? I don’t know anything about Yngul. Master Tnegun is interesting, isn’t he? I expect Yngul is really interesting, too.”

  “You think everything is interesting, brat,” Sayai said, with an edge to his tone that suggested he didn’t mean it altogether kindly. Cesei flushed.

  “Master Tnegun knows a lot,” Kebei said quickly to Araenè. “Yngulin as well as Islander magecraft. He’s very skilled, they say, and powerful for his age.”

  “For his age?” Araenè asked, willing to cooperate with Kebei to smooth over the uncomfortable moment. Besides, she was genuinely puzzled.

  “Oh, well, mages lose power as they grow older,” Kebei explained. “You didn’t know? Well, it’s true. You’ll never be stronger than you are right after your magery comes in. That’s what the adjuvants are for—they aren’t mages exactly. But they have power. They, well, loan it to the mages, sort of.”

  Araenè looked across the hall toward the anonymous dark-robed adjuvants. She wondered how they liked being “not mages exactly.” “Do they …,” she began, but then didn’t know exactly what question she wanted to ask.

  “Some apprentices develop their magery but lose their power,” Tichorei explained, understanding the question she did not know how to ask. “Some of the rest lose their magery but keep their power. Those become adjuvants—if they’re willing to. Not everyone is. I mean … nobody comes into the hidden school hoping to be an adjuvant.”

  There was a small pause. It was clear to Araenè that all of the apprentices were at least a little worried that they might turn out to be adjuvants and not mages at all—except, she thought, Cesei. He looked supremely self-confident.

  Master Tnegun hadn’t explained any of this to Araenè….

  “You’ll be fine,” Kanii said briskly, tapping Araenè on the arm. “I don’t think Master Tnegun put himself to the trouble of bringing you in just to gain an adjuvant. Although,” he added hastily, “the adjuvants are important.”

  “I doubt he can tell, any more than any other master,” Sayai said, a little sharply.

  “Oh, well … Master Tnegun …,” Kepai began, but then stopped. Everybody glanced with an odd wariness at Araenè.

  “He’s a little …,” Kebei said, but trailed off just as his twin had.

  Araenè exclaimed, “It isn’t as though I ever asked him! I never wanted to be a mage at all! I wanted to be a chef! Only—” She stopped.

  A little silence fell. “It’s hard, coming in late,” Tichorei said at last. “We would all do it like Cesei, if we could: come in when we’re little and grow up in the school. You’ll do well enough, Arei. Try some of this bread, and do you think the kitchen staff might give us more if you asked?”

  The fatter chef, who turned out to be named Horei, was delighted to offer more bread, and then extra pastries, and Araenè found herself the recipient of enthusiastic, expansive approval from all the other apprentices.

  “You can borrow my compasses,” Kebei offered. “Master Tnegun’s a fierce one for getting your figures perfect.”

  Kepai cuffed his brother. “Those are my compasses, too!” But he added to Araenè, “Not that you can’t borrow them, though, if your master sets you figuring.”

  “I’ll show you the upper towers, if you like,” Tichorei suggested. He gave her a shy sideways glance. “The Horera Tower, what we call the Tower of the Winds. Sometimes you can see dragons riding the winds from the uppermost chamber.”

  “Yes, Kanii said—”

  “I could show you the black gulls,” declared little Cesei, falling over Araenè’s answer in his enthusiasm. “They’re really interesting! Or the aviary, if you’d rather see the pretty little birds.”

  Araenè thanked them all, feeling horribly awkward because somehow it seemed worse to lie to these boys than it had to just wander the streets of Canpra dressed as a boy. She was supposed to be one of them, and how could she be? They were all ready to be her friends, and she was lying to them.… She pressed a hand across her mouth, fighting off the tears that had become so easy, far too easy.

  “Arei’s tired,” Kanii said firmly. “And little surprise it is. Arei, what you need is a long, quiet night. Do you want me to show you back to your room? Here, try this: open the door over there, and if it doesn’t show your apartment, give out a shout, yes?”

  Araenè was horribly tired. She felt the day had been a hundred days long, and nothing else in the world sounded as inviting as a long, quiet night in a private apartment all her own. She nodded to all the other boys—trying hard to make it a curt, boy-like nod—and walked across to the door Kanii had pointed out. She opened it cautiously, found to her relief that it did indeed open to show her apartment waiting for her. But even as she looked, the view began to grow misty and opalescent around the edges—she leaped forward quickly, before the door could change its mind.

  Araenè jumped forward, the mist rushed inward, and for a long, lingering moment cold fog surrounded her. Then she completed her jump, coming down somewhere utterly unexpected, somewhere dense with brilliant, moving light. Heat came down on her like the blast of a furnace, and the light moved like a live thing—Araenè opened her mouth to gasp, and that terrible heat reached down her throat and tried to char her lungs—flinching, cowering from the heat, she did something. She had no idea what she’d done, but something. Coolness surrounded her suddenly, like glass set firmly between herself and the flames. The fragrance of mint became very strong; mint and lemon tingled across her skin. She straightened cautiously, looking around.

  She stood in the middle of a vast chamber of stone.… Molten stone, in places, ran across the walls and crept in flaming rivulets across the floor. She was surrounded by fire: flames leaped and danced all around her. Drops of fire fell from above, splashing harmlessly against Araenè’s arm and hand and running off the cool glass that she seemed to wear like a second set of clothing.

  All around the walls of the fiery chamber was looped and coiled a dragon of gold and fire. Its eyes were fire; its mouth was filled with fire; the feathers of its outspread wings glowed like molten gold and dripped fire as they moved.… That was the source of the falling fire, Araenè saw, gazing in awe up and up along the curve of one great wing. She fumbled behind her, running shaking hands across the wall, searching for the door.

  The dragon coiled its neck suddenly and brought its head down to look at Araenè from one fiery eye. The way it cocked its head was absurdly bird-like. Araenè froze, expecting the dragon to dart its head forward like a bird after an insect. She wondered whether the cool glass-like bubble surrounding her would shatter in the furnace of the dragon’s jaws: would she burn to death before it could even bite her?

  “Daughter of men,” said the dragon. Its voice was strangely delicate, like the chiming of crystals.

  Araenè answered, her voice shaking, “Dragon?”

  “Daughter of men,” repeated the dragon. “I have waited for you, and you have come, just at the tail of time.”

  It moved, golden coils rising and falling all along the walls of the fiery chamber. It folded and unfolded its wings, restless … indecisive? Araenè wondered. One slender foreleg reached into the midst of dense golden flames at the center of the chamber. Then, turning, the dragon offered Araenè a sphere as large as her head. It was gold as the fire, traced with a filigree of fl
ame orange and crimson. Drops of fire scattered from it. Within it, dimly, a shadowy form seemed to move and shift.

  “Quicken my child,” the dragon commanded.

  Horrified but not daring to refuse, Araenè reached, cautiously, toward the sphere … the egg. Heat beat against her hands; snatching them back, she looked helplessly at the dragon.

  “Quicken my child,” said the dragon a second time. “I no longer have the strength to free any fire sufficiently great. You hold the rising wind in one hand and in the other the living fire. Promise me you will take my child, and guard it, and cast it into the furnace of the earth. You will not fail in this. Swear this to me, daughter of men.”

  There was something in the dragon’s tone, audible even in that strange, inhuman voice … not fierceness, not exactly command. Grief, Araenè realized at last. She’d had plenty of experience with grief lately. She didn’t think she was mistaken. It occurred to her that the dragon was very thin, and that the fire that burned in its eyes seemed … dim, perhaps. Or not dim so much as … set too deep. Like a fire that was burning lower and lower and would soon go out.

  “Quicken my child,” the dragon repeated once more, but this time it was less like a command and more like a plea.

  Araenè’s terror faded in the face of the dragon’s grief. Trying not to think too clearly about what she was doing, Araenè reached out and took the egg. Somehow she folded it into a bubble of protective coolness as it fell into her hands: mint and lemon on the outside, so she could hold it safely; so fiercely clove-hot on the inside that her whole tongue seemed numbed by the heat of it. She cradled the egg with instinctive care. It was amazingly light, as though it contained nothing but fire. “But I—but I don’t know how—how do I quicken it?” she asked helplessly. “Wind and, and the living fire? The furnace of the earth? I don’t know what you mean! I would, I will, but how?”

  “Look!” commanded the dragon, and showed her a taloned hand filled with fire.

  Araenè stared into the fire, watching visions unfold in the flames like flowers blooming: she saw a silver wind that shredded high streamers of cloud and then somehow blazed into fire. She saw Islands falling out of the sky toward the sea and cried out in shock, but she did not see them fall into the water; though she tried to watch the falling Islands, her vision was wrenched aside and instead she saw three great buildings of black iron standing in a row on a shore of gray shale. She could see not only the flames that burned at the heart of each building, but also the heaving molten fire that rolled, uneasily trapped, below the earth.…

  “There it waits. Beyond my strength. Promise me,” pleaded the dragon. “Daughter of men, cast my child upon the winds and into the furnace of the earth. Call the wind to break open the earth and let out the hidden fire. You must call the wind, and the wind must become fire. Do you understand? Swear it to me!”

  “I swear, I swear I will,” Araenè promised, though she did not understand at all. She was terrified by the dragon’s grief and desperation. She would have said anything to ease that desperation, and found herself repeating, “I will. I will.”

  The dragon opened its wings once more. Araenè stumbled backward and found the door behind her, open, cool air coming through it like the winter rain after a hard summer. Only she fell over the edge of the doorway, or over her own feet as she tried to turn, and sprawled. She cried out as she fell, tucking herself up around the egg, guarding it from harm, and wound up sitting on the floor of her half-familiar apartment, with a bruised shoulder and a knot on her head. But the egg was safe in her lap.

  Tears of shock welled in her eyes, but at the same time, Araenè found herself laughing—she could hear the shocked, hysterical edge of her laughter and choked it off. The egg, cradled in her arms, glowed with warmth through the bubble Araenè had put around it—and how had she done that, and would it last? But it seemed safe enough for the moment.

  “I don’t—” she said aloud, and stopped. “I can’t—” and stopped again. For the first time, it occurred to her that she could have, should have called Master Tnegun in the first moment, the first instant she’d found herself caught within the dragon’s furnace. But now … “I can’t—” she said again. She couldn’t call him now. She couldn’t bring him the egg now. Could she? Because she would have to say that the fire dragon had given her its egg and that she’d promised to quicken it, and he’d find out—of course he would—that the dragon had called her “daughter of men,” and said it had been waiting for her. He would know that it had been waiting to give its egg to a girl.

  Araenè wondered, caught again between laughter and tears, whether any apprentice before her had ever broken all four of the mages’ rules less than a day after arriving at the school.

  7

  Trei arrived unannounced at the kajurai towers, stepping directly from Master Tnegun’s library to the novitiate sleeping hall. This was deserted, which was as well, because Trei did not want to see anyone. He walked slowly through the long sleeping hall, from one slanting rectangle of light to the next where the high windows let the afternoon sun past the thick walls, and sat down rather blankly on his bed. His things were still here, folded on the shelves above his bed. This added somehow to his general sense of unreality, as though he had not really left the kajurai precincts at all. As though Uncle Serfei and Aunt Edona still dwelled in their comfortable house with his cousin. Trei lay back on his bed and laid an arm across his eyes.

  It was all the loss. Too much loss, coming so fast—he shied from that thought and tried not to think at all. Exhaustion weighed him down like iron.

  He didn’t know what to think about Araenè. He was glad she had something she wanted. He could imagine Marrè declaring boldly that she would be a mage, only his sister would have laughed as she declared her intention, knowing that whatever the town thought of girl mages, her father would support her. Araenè … someone would surely notice … but she had wanted it so much. Not to be a mage, not even really to be a chef, Trei thought, but to somehow shed herself entirely and take up a new life. Almost any new life. And now she had. Only what would happen when somebody realized she was a girl? Trei should have insisted on … But here he ran aground, for what exactly could he have insisted on?

  “Trei!” cried a familiar voice, and Rekei bounded forward, but then slowed and stopped, looking uncharacteristically self-conscious. “Trei—I didn’t know you were back! It’s great, ah, that is, I’m glad to see you, Trei, but … are you …”

  Trei took his arm down and tried to find the energy to sit up. “I guess I’m staying. At least for now.”

  “Well, good,” Rekei said, awkward but touchingly enthusiastic. “It’s not the same here without you and Ceirfei—”

  “Without Ceirfei?” Trei did sit up at that, letting himself be pulled back to novitiate concerns.

  “Oh.” Rekei hunched his shoulders, looking suddenly smaller and somehow younger. “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?” Trei demanded, trying to be exasperated when really he was frightened. Ceirfei had gotten angry, remembered he was a prince, and stormed out. Wingmaster Taimenai had gotten angry because Ceirfei had acted like a prince, and he had thrown him out. Ceirfei’s mother or uncle had found out Ceirfei had been whipped, and they had gotten angry and taken him away.…

  “Ceirfei’s brother and two of his cousins died. And the queen herself is terribly ill,” Rekei said in a low voice, as though he could hardly bear to say the words at all. “Of the … of the same fever that laid down your uncle and aunt, they say. It’s fairly well burned out, and anyway the physicians know how to treat it now, but a lot of people died, I guess. Especially in First and Second Cities. They say it was a new Yngulin ambassador from Tguw. He was ill when he came. It was all people who’d met him who got it first, and their, um. Their families. But then it ran through the city and got … pretty bad, I guess.”

  “You don’t think …,” Trei began, and paused. But everyone knew Yngul had no sense of honor. He asked, “You
don’t think Yngul did this on purpose, do you?”

  Rekei looked horrified. “Oh, no! Why would they? The senior ambassador is very upset, they say, and they say Yngul’s going to pay an indemnity. I guess they don’t get so ill with that fever, in Yngul. The ambassador from Tguw wasn’t very ill, they say.”

  Trei thought the other boy was probably right. Yngul might have sent a man to carry illness to the Islands; that was the sort of thing the Yngulin Emperor might think was clever and amusing. He might have done that, if he wanted the Floating Islands weakened for some reason. But why would he want that?

  So probably Rekei was right: probably the illness had been an accident. But Trei couldn’t decide whether it made it better or worse, that the illness had been a pointless accident. He said nothing.

  But he almost thought he could feel the whole city reverberate with the loss it had suffered. Trei closed his eyes, ashamed that he found this thought somehow satisfying. But it only seemed right that everyone in Canpra should understand his grief, Araenè’s grief.…

  Even so, he didn’t want to think of the novitiate without Ceirfei.

  “Well, you’re back now, anyway!” Rekei said, with forced cheer. “So that’s one thing better.”

  The cheerfulness might be forced, but not the sentiment. Trei looked away, blinking. To steady himself, he said, “I should see the wingmaster, I suppose.” Trei assured Rekei he did not need company, then found, as he climbed the stairs, that in fact he would have liked the other boy’s support. He went more and more slowly, thinking of the wingmaster’s piercing kajurai eyes and humorless mouth. He wondered how many novices had ever dared to lie to Taimenai Cenfenisai, and how many had successfully slipped the lie over on the wingmaster.

  He did at least remember where the wingmaster’s office was: down the hall and up a long stair; he even remembered which of the stair’s landings he should take. Every step of the way seemed emblazoned on his nerves. He left the stair and walked down the short hall to the wingmaster’s office. The door was solid wood, plain and heavy, with a clapper of black iron. When Trei touched the clapper, he heard its distant, deep note even through the heavy door.