by Sarah Zettel
The last word stung. They had never used that word between them. But then, they had never lied to each other either.
Ananda stood. She turned away and faced her writing desk. She stared down at the creamy paper and the drying ink.
“ ‘To My Beloved Father,’ ” she read. “I’ve been trying to decide what to write next. Perhaps ‘To My Beloved Father, the son of Samudra, who came to glory wresting the last of our lands from the Huni, whose brother let the sorcerer Yamuna talk him into trying to steal the empire of Isavalta and so condemned me to life as a peace offering.’ ”
Sakra had stood beside her as her father had spoken to her on the deck of the ship sailing for Isavalta. Remember, Daughter, he’d said, when you are empress, in the end it is the realm in your care that matters. All other considerations must be set aside. All other considerations.
All other considerations. Bridget, forlorn, might become a danger. The Vixen might be playing a game. The Firebird might be coming to burn the world down. Sakra might leave her forever. Which was worst?
“Or perhaps, ‘To My Beloved Father, today I sealed the fate of Isavalta.’ ” She crumpled the paper up fiercely.
“I cannot let you go, Sakra,” she said without looking up. “Not yet. We are both thinking of my father’s words, I know we are. I must be empress. You know this. I must look to Isavalta first and Isavalta needs you and Bridget.” A spark of hope shimmered inside her, enabling her to turn. “Perhaps this day will bring other answers.”
Sakra gave her the salute of trust, and kept his silence. She touched his head, as mistress to servant, giving him leave to stand, and to depart.
Once in the corridor, Sakra got himself as quickly out of sight of the pages and guards as he could. He hid himself in a small coffee room that was empty of any other people. He could not let anyone see him bow his head into his hand. He could not let anyone see him clench his fist as he tried to bring himself back under control. He could not let any see the single tear of sorrow and anger trickle from the corner of his eye.
Ananda must be empress, and I must serve. Oh, Mothers All, Bridget, I’m sorry.
It was dark when the Firebird returned to Isavalta.
It shot overhead, faint and silent, little more than a piece of stardust in the spring night. In its wake, all other lights flickered, and died, their fuel going so instantly cold that not even the smoke remained.
In the palace of Vyshtavos, the coals in the great ovens immediately fell dark, the coals under their nightly blankets of ash in the hearths and firepits became silent and still. The bed warmers, the braziers, the lamps burning late and early in the apartments of the sorcerers and scholars, all winked out. The candles and braziers tended all night by a special pair of footmen in the imperial apartments were snuffed out as quickly as if they had been doused in water.
Mikkel Medeoanasyn Edemskoivin, the emperor of Isavalta, started awake with a wordless shout. Over the thunder of his heartbeat, he heard the sound of the servants scrambling, but the room remained dark. The mattress and blankets shifted. Hands touched him, and for a moment he stiffened, until he recognized the hand as Ananda’s.
“What’s happened?” he whispered before he remembered who and where he was. “What’s happened!” he shouted so the servants could hear.
“Forgiveness, Majesty,” called Barta, Mikkel’s chief waiting gentleman. “There will be light in a moment.”
Out of the dark came shuffling, mumbles, clanks, and the crack of some heavy thing against the stone floor, but the promised light did not come. There only came more noises of men moving back and forth, blind and trying not to stumble.
Ananda’s fine hand slipped under his and Mikkel closed his fingers around hers gratefully. What was kept a secret in this chamber was that the emperor of Isavalta, Vyshko’s heir, was afraid of the dark.
The binding his mother had laid on his mind had dimmed his sight. For a time he could not then measure, but now knew was three solid years, he had wandered in a world that faded from twilight to darkness, his mind thick and murky. There was no time, no light, no joy, only an endless dreariness, a haunting need that he could no longer understand, and a name. Ananda. His wife who shivered beside him now.
Rallying himself, Mikkel groped for the edge of the coverlet with his free hand and pulled it up around their shoulders. The clamor of the servants failed to fill up the silence and Mikkel’s ears began to ring.
Did Ananda feel his skin begin to prickle?
“What can be taking so long?” she muttered with simple, everyday annoyance. Nothing portentous, nothing special. An unremarkable grumble. He wished he could see her. Her scent was sharp, her touch warm, familiar, and welcome, but the darkness was thick, and he imagined he felt it trying to seep into his skin like water and reach through to his soul.
He shivered and tried to slow his breathing.
Ananda urged him to be patient with himself. Bound for three years as he was, it was not something he could shake off in a matter of days. Sometimes, though, he thought he saw disappointment in her eyes as she said it. There was no time for such patience. He was emperor now. His mother was dead a world away and there was no one but him to take the praise or the blame for what happened to the realm of Vyshko and Vyshemir.
“Open a window,” Barta ordered.
“What?” Unable to sit still any longer, Mikkel scrambled from the bed, pushing his way through unseen velvet curtains that fell heavy and smooth past his shoulders. The sound of Ananda followed behind him.
He moved as quickly as he dared in order to remind himself that he could move quickly, that this darkness was an external thing. His outstretched hands found the edge of the carved bed screens and he was able to pass them without knocking them over. Beyond the screens, Huras had drawn back the tapestry curtains on the two arched windows that overlooked the courtyard. The faint silver light of the quarter moon provided just enough illumination for Mikkel to see the shapes of his serving men. One crouched beside the firepit with a long poker, stirring frantically at the ashes and coughing as they swirled up around him. Another bent over a table, struggling with a tinderbox. The tiny “ching-ching” of flint and steel sounded between his breathy curses. Another stood before the window, fingering a candle’s wick, trying to tell if it was long enough, or if it had drowned in its wax.
“What is the matter here?” he demanded, and all the men froze in place, comic in their odd poses. “Why is there no light?”
Mikkel had to squint to see that it was Barta who pulled himself upright from his work with the tinderbox and reverenced. “I regret … I do not know, Majesty. We are trying, but the tinder will not catch.”
Ananda was behind him. “Fetch a light from the kitchen fires,” she said. “I’ll wake my ladies.” She picked her way to the connecting door that led to her private apartments.
Huras reverenced to the empress’s retreating back and put action to orders. Mikkel heard the rumble of his voice as he reported to the guards on duty outside. What was he saying to them? What was going on?
Standing there without any fire and without a proper robe he felt the cold begin to rest heavily against his skin. He rubbed his arms, staring hard around himself, as if trying to let as much light into his eyes as possible. It was only cold. It was only the darkness of a night during the rasputitsa. Barta saw him rubbing his arms and abandoned the seemingly futile work with the tinderbox to catch up a night robe from its stand and hold it up for Mikkel who gratefully allowed himself to be wrapped in its fur-lined warmth.
His eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, but even so he would have had no trouble picking out Ananda’s silhouette among the men as she came hurrying back. “The fire has died in my rooms as well, and nothing can be made to kindle.”
Magic. This was magic. Mikkel knew the touch of it better than any. But what was being done and how? And who was it meant for?
Is Mother not done with me yet? The thought rooted him to the ground with fear. It was too dark
and too cold to think safely of Mother. It was too hard to remember that day must come soon, with sunlight and warmth, and that what he felt was only the curl of a draft around his neck, not a thread of magic reaching out to capture his mind and drag it forever into the darkness.
Ananda gripped his arm, breaking Mikkel out of his blackening spiral of thought. Did she see his paralysis despite the dark, or did she just know? “Someone send for the lord sorcerer,” she snapped in a peremptory tone that was unusual for her.
The words had barely been spoken when a knock sounded on the door. Mikkel shook himself and covered Ananda’s hand, trying to let her know by touch he would be all right.
“Come,” he croaked.
The door opened and two men, little more than blurs of motion in the darkness, entered. The moon was sinking toward the rooftop and what little light it provided would soon be gone.
“Imperial Majesties,” said the straighter of the pair. It was not the lord sorcerer. It was Master Sidor, the first of the sorcerers to return at his command, the first to take the loyal oath. “I am sorry we were not here before, but there is no light in the halls …”
Of course, the interior of the palace would be pitch-black. No wonder Huras had not yet returned. “Is there any light left in the palace?”
The second man, whose crooked shape and reedy voice identified him as Master Luden, said, “Nothing will light. None of the candles, the fires in the hearths. The flint and steel will not even strike a spark.” He nodded toward the table where Barta had been trying so unsuccessfully to light the lamp. “As your men have discovered.”
Darkness everywhere, no way to see out of it, no end. No. “Where is the lord sorcerer?”
The man’s breath wheezed in and out several times before he was able to answer. “He is ill, sir, from his efforts in trying to find the Firebird. Sir, he thinks it is come.”
“What?” Ananda spoke the question before Mikkel could.
It was Luden who answered. Was he leaning on Sidor’s arm, or was it the other way around? The moonlight was fading, and it was too hard to see. “The Firebird is flame incarnate. It can spread fire, or it can … remove it.”
No fire? It was as if the man had said there could be no air. Fire was warmth, light, and food. It was the forge, the crucible, the cauldron. In winter it was life itself.
“How far will it have gone?” From the sound of Ananda’s voice, Mikkel knew she had gone pale. It was dark enough now that even she was only a shadow among the shadows.
Cloth rustled. Luden made an attempt to straighten himself up. “It could cross the empire in a night.”
No fire, anywhere in the empire. Spring had barely begun in the far north. They could still freeze to death. Which would be faster than starvation, which would also come into their homes or on the road as they fled … and where would they go? To Vyshtavos. To their emperor. They would come to him to beg for deliverance from this magic that afflicted them.
An image rose suddenly in front of him, of his mother’s false smile as she held up the silver girdle saying it would help him please his new bride …
Then blindness. Blindness of the eyes and blindness of the mind. Cold, like this, settling ever deeper, and not enough thought left to comprehend what was wrong.
A pain ran up his arm, clearing the memories from his mind. Aware of himself again, Mikkel uncurled the fist that he had smashed against a tabletop. Ananda, startled, had let go of him. He stretched out his hand to her again, or rather where he thought she was. The moonlight was down to a single silver shaft lighting up nothing but a strip of stone floor and the dead ashes of the firepit. His fingers did not find her and he could not bring himself to wave his hand about like a blind man looking for his stick.
“Why are we afflicted with this curse of magic?” he said, rubbing his forehead with the hand that had sought Ananda. “Why did Vyshko and Vyshemir decide of all things this would remain with us?”
But Ananda only shook her head. “I don’t know, my husband.”
“Perhaps the lord sorcerer could find the answer in the Red Library.” He glanced toward the men who had come because the first among them had been struck down so hard he could not come to his emperor. All others would come here, and they would need to be properly met. There was no one else to do this thing. The thought was a lonely one, but at the same time, Mikkel found to his surprise there was a stark comfort in it. This responsibility was his, and no one could, or would, take it from him.
Mikkel dragged his wits together. “I’m sorry, Master Luden, Master Sidor. You and the others must find an answer. You must defeat this thing or destroy it, somehow.”
“Yes, Imperial Majesty,” said Sidor with proper feeling, although Mikkel had surely not said anything the sorcerer didn’t know. “We will begin searching as soon as it is light.”
“We must get ready as soon as it’s light as well,” Mikkel went on, speaking mostly to Ananda now. For it will be light. It will be. “People will be coming here. We’ll need …” Vyshko’s pike, need what? “Shelter, blankets, bread.”
“Yes,” agreed Ananda. Her voice was close. He reached out. This time his hand found hers and their fingers locked together. “We need to know how far it’s gone,” she was saying. “Send out some of the house guard to try to get ahead of it. If there are fugitives, they can be set on the road to where the Firebird hasn’t reached yet.”
She would think of that. She’d told him of the floods in her country, of the plagues and droughts that sometimes came when the rains did not, and of how the great masses of people would take to the roads.
When the rains did not come, when the gods failed and the sorcerers failed and they were all that was left.
“If a limit to this … loss of fire is found, Your Majesties may wish to consider moving the household …” began Luden.
“No,” snapped Mikkel. He would not flee. Whatever came, he would face it here, even if no one else did. “I will not go nor will any in this household.”
He would never be consigned to the shadows again. No one else would be permitted to flee in a crisis. Especially not the sorcerers. It was good to bring them back, to show how he meant to undo all of his mother’s madness, but this time they would not be permitted to leave without a backward glance, without a thought.
Mikkel swallowed. He must curb this anger. It blackened his mind as even his mother’s spells had failed to do.
“Go, Luden, Sidor,” he said, his voice hoarse from his effort to control it. “Find an answer and quickly.”
“Yes, Imperial Majesty.” Sidor reverenced, but Luden held his ground.
“There is one other point, Majesties.” Luden’s voice was thin, but strong.
“Yes?” The moonlight must have shown Ananda how Mikkel’s jaw shook, so she quickly answered for him.
“Bridget Lederle has requested permission to seek her daughter beyond the boundaries of the world.”
The auburn-haired woman had come to stand before them that morning with Sakra at her side, telling a portion of her encounter with the Vixen she had held back. She had apologized for it. She said she had not understood, at least not fully, what it meant. She asked to be allowed to return to the home of her birth, to find out by magic or any other means at her disposal whether her child might still be alive.
She had spoken calmly, almost as if she had rehearsed the words, but Mikkel had seen the sheen of desperation in her eyes. This was a mother who loved her child. This was a mother who would sacrifice for that child, not use it to further her own ends.
He had meant to make closer inquiry into the matter, what would she need for her travels, how long might she be gone when every hand might be needed to help Isavalta, but to his surprise, Ananda had interrupted.
“The ambassador from Hung-Tse waits on you, Husband Imperial,” she said. “Shall I tell him to continue to wait, or may we pray Mistress Bridget have patience and we will let her know our mind as soon as may be?”
He had un
derstood the look in her eyes. She also wanted to make an additional inquiry, but out of Bridget’s range of hearing. The woman was, after all, a sorcerer and with magic came … he did not want to think duplicity. Not all sorcerers were as his mother was. Surely not. This Bridget Lederle had saved his life. Surely she was a different type of sorcerer, and parent.
But he had nodded, and let Ananda make their excuses to Bridget who had gone away dissatisfied, but she had gone. Ananda had not spoken of her again during the whole long day that primarily involved careful dancing with Hung-Tse’s ambassador to determine what, if anything, he had heard from the Heart of the World of late regarding their emperor’s plans for future relations with Vysthavos and Isavalta. There had been no answers there either.
Did this remark of Luden’s bear any relation as to why Ananda had wanted to delay giving Bridget Lederle permission for her quest?
Given what they had just been told, it was fortunate she had orchestrated that delay.
“Surely her eyes are needed here,” said Mikkel, aware of the irony of speaking of sight in the deepening darkness. “She will understand she must have a safe home to bring the child to, should it still be living.”
Luden’s shadow dipped. A reverence? It was impossible to tell. Mikkel fought down the fear that thickened with his blindness.
“It is our belief she should be permitted to go at once,” said Luden. The darkness seemed to make his voice higher and more querulous.
Ananda moved a little closer to Mikkel. Her hand brushed his, and it was cold. She also feared this darkness, this air that smelled of lingering winter, and lacked the ever-present scents of charcoal, smoke, and wood. “Why?” she asked.
“The child may be … useful in this time of danger,” said Sidor, his voice rougher than it should have been. “Her parentage would make her a source of great power.”
Mikkel’s frown pulled his mouth and brow tight, although by now not even Ananda would have been able to see the expression. “You think the child may be of use?” he asked, and he heard the danger underneath the words.