Gown of Shadow and Flame

by A. E. Marling

  Celaise cradled Anza in swaths of blossoms. The gown billowed about them, folds swaying in the breeze that stirred the cherry tree's branches. The girl had to feel she floated—Celaise's magic made Anza rest on pillows of petals—but Celaise could not remove the girl's sense that she might fall at any moment through twigs and branches and out of the tree. Black Wine could never bring Anza true comfort, but it distracted her from her other fears. For now, that had to be enough.

  “So soft. So high up.” Anza breathed in short, intense puffs of air, and she squealed. “Eeeii!”

  The girl's heat surprised Celaise. Is everybody this warm? She thought back to other people she had touched, and the memories flowed as they never had before, each embrace more hurtful than the last, knowing the person had betrayed her in the end.

  Thanks to Jerani, Celaise knew she should add a scent to her flowers, that Anza would expect it. Celaise had not been able to smell the cherry tree, but she had raced across high meadows of wildflowers as a girl. A few boys in her village had even given her flower bracelets. For the first time ever, she remembered a scent from before.

  Gentle and sweet, a mellow spiciness, a bouquet of colors pressed into her face, Celaise smelled flowers. The pleasure of it captivated her, and she wondered what other simple joys she had lost. Next she remembered the musty smell of llamas, the wet-rock zing of air after a lightning storm—she used to love them all.

  The calf Gem dashed forward to sniff Celaise's side. It tickled her with the damp length of its tongue. Celaise wanted to grin down at the calf and Anza, though the magic numbing her face prevented it.

  She spotted Jerani gazing at her and his sister. His scarred brows lifted in unmasked fondness that Celaise would have found disturbing on most people but was thoroughly tolerable on him.

  Anza's lashes danced open and closed as she breathed in Celaise's flower perfume. “Will I get a dress pretty as yours?”

  Hunger pulled Celaise's mind down from a pleasant cloud and back to the pressing matters. She felt as if a string of her guts tugged her to the ground with jerks of pain. She said, “I'm not sure you want one.”

  “Why?”

  “The price is great.”

  “Don't want all of them. Just this flower one.”

  Celaise eased Anza back to her feet, and petal fingers kissed the girl's bandaged brow with a last touch. Between the cherry branches wafted a stinking mist, Celaise's gown shifting back to the scene of the steam vents.

  “The Angry Mother!” Anza pointed at Celaise with a victorious finger.

  “Jerani,” Celaise said, “bring the bull. Have him kneel before me.”

  As he fetched the animal, Celaise realized she would rather not Feast on the Greathearts. The Lord of the Feast had promised her any one tribe, and after she had butchered the Headless, she would take one of the others on the battlefield, the ones with charcoal or white cows. Of course, Jerani and his family would despise her when they understood what she really was, and she did not know why that thought bothered her so much.

  Maybe Jerani would track me down. I'd have to defend myself against him. The idea sent a wonderful thrill icing down her back. She did not believe she could leave the savanna without tasting his fear.

  Jerani pushed down on the bull's nose until it sat. Celaise shoved her center of vulnerability outside of herself, onto the lowered back of the bull. The safest place is on this gentle creature. A sense of loss cut into her as sensations ripped out of her body. She could no longer feel anything, but on the other side of the bargain, nothing could touch her, hurt her.

  She beckoned to Jerani and the bull with a glove of steam. A cow lowed to them in somber tones as they left.

  The Holy Woman stepped between them and the trail. “You can't take Hero. Wouldn't be the Greathearts without him.”

  “Won't have a tribe without warriors, either.” Celaise stared her down and laid a hand on Jerani's shoulder. “I will protect them all.”

  Jerani cupped the bull's chin under his hand, set his other hand on the forward curve of a giant horn, and jogged after Celaise down the mesa, toward the nearing army of Headless.

  Jerani was sorry to see the dress of flowers go. It had reminded him of the yellow blooms of the acacia. As he navigated the trail down the Big Stump, he wondered why she had not used that sacred tree. Then again, he supposed those who visited the black fields in the night sky would be used to different sorts of bush.

  Slowing, Jerani guided Hero's forelegs over a crack between two plates of white-speckled stone. The bull plodded forward, lifting his back hooves over the obstacle. Celaise drifted alongside them in the air, off the ledge of the trail. Her dress streamed below her in sheets of mist. Jerani knew they needed to hurry, so he focused on going as fast as Hero could. Jerani suspected Celaise wanted her quiet, to prepare her magic against the Rock-Backs, and he decided not to disturb her.

  “I need you to stop the Bright Palm.” Her words sounded as echoes, far and muffled and only recognizable in reflection. “If we see him. His touch dispels my power.”

  So that's what the Bright Palm did to her. “It looked painful.”

  Jerani had no reason to doubt Celaise, not after what she had said to Tall Tachamwa and the other warriors, but thoughts drifted in anyway of the Bright Palm's warnings. Jerani still was not sure why a handmaiden of the goddess would have to ask for protection against a man, even one strengthened by magic.

  Jerani spoke before he realized what he was saying. “He said you were a Feaster.”

  “I am Celaise.”

  She whisked in front of him in a slash of steam, and worry lumped into his throat. Her white eyes bored into him as she drifted backward, ahead of him on the path.

  “You've seen all that I am,” she said. “Great heights and blue flame.”

  Jerani did not understand. He knew she was so much more than that. Courageous, kind, stronger than any warrior in the tribe. True, he had not seen all of her, not all of who she was. Haven't even seen under her dress. He would have blushed at the thought, if not for the force of her stare. The copper bracer flashed on his arm, tingling with a sensation close to pain.

  I offended her, he thought. Or is it that she is a Feaster?

  He pondered for a choking moment, but he could not believe a Feaster could wear a pink flower dress while rocking his sister. Jerani made his decision, to trust her.

  “The Bright Palm won't get close to you.” Jerani lifted his spear in promise.

  Celaise nodded then simmered back to the side of him. She did not speak the rest of the way down, and Jerani felt tension wafting off her like the waves of her brimstone scent.

  At the base of the trail, the bull stopped to suck air into his nostrils and stamp.

  “Smell herds of Rock-Backs, do you?” Jerani rubbed Hero along his shoulder, to his neck and nose, following the flow of his fur.

  “Jerani!” Celaise hissed. She was moving ahead of the line of Greatheart warriors. Moonlight shone through her dress.

  A crescent lifted above the dusty shadows of the horizon, broad and yellow like the horns of a charging bull. Jerani felt a burden of purpose soar within him. He was flying, or perhaps falling, carrying the future of his tribe in his hands. The horned moon was a sign from the Sky Bull that Jerani had been right in his choices. Right to trust Celaise. Right to fight for the other tribes of the grassland.

  “The horns!” Warriors waved their spears at the moon.

  “This is our fight, Greathearts!”

  “Celaise!”

  “And her dress!”

  Hero blasted out a battle cry.

  Moo and cheers both were drowned out by the grinding approach of Rock-Backs. Lumps of varying heights surrounded the Sky Herders and the Light Hoof tribes, and the clank of horns against plated backs stood Jerani's hair on end. But another glance at the horned moon told him he was where he was meant to be.

  Jerani charged forward with the other Greathearts. One of the chains of Rock-Backs snaked forwar
d with speed. The ground quaked as if a herd of elephants charged, though it was but one creature, with far more teeth and claws.

  Celaise did not want to battle the giant centipede, not yet. Should Feast first. Build my strength.

  But the monstrous centipede—the monstrapede—seemed more than ready to devour her and all the Greathearts. Twenty-two Headless had linked, one predator seizing the one ahead of it with its fore-claws. Twenty-two sets of ground-shaking feet slammed down, heaving the monstrapede forward with a gait that rippled its rocky length.

  It outpaced all other Headless. The chain of predators would reach the Greathearts first and pulverize their ranks.

  I should run. She could not help thinking it. It's going too fast. The back ones will push the front ones away before I can snare any with my magic. This is hopeless, and I'm going to die.

  The men pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, spears clacking against each other. The tall warrior sweated and trembled, blinking nonstop at the onrush. One man limped with a spear for support, and he looked about him and said, “Sure wish we had more horns with us.”

  “Easy, Greathearts,” Jerani said. “We have the Angry Mother.”

  He cast Celaise a worshiping look. He thinks I'm a goddess, she thought. Me of all people, a goddess.

  She decided she would try to be one, for Jerani.

  Celaise stepped in the path of the monstrapede, lifting her arms in a sweep of steam. The monstrapede did not slow, chunks of ground torn and sprayed by its dozens of legs.

  “Come then,” she said. “Death waits for you with open arms.”

  The monstrapede never slowed, but it did stop. When Celaise wafted her burning-rock scent forward to the lead Headless it dropped its forelegs and tried to roll. Its shoulders were plunged instead into the dirt. The momentum dug the Headless halfway underground and shoved the beast next in the chain into the air.

  Clawed forearms clinging, the back Headless kept kicking forward. More of the front beasts curled upward in a totem of glistening back-plates. It all happened so fast that Celaise only began to be rocked by blasts of surprise when the pillar of Headless bowed toward her. The first beast stayed anchored while the middle ones arched their backs, pulling the last in the monstrapede off the ground.

  A warrior gasped. “What is that?”

  “It's rolling,” the tall warrior cried out from behind her.

  The lead Headless was ripped from the dirt as the monstrapede crunched forward. They were a ring now, a bounding circle that would squish cows and men like roaches under a cart wheel. Instead of a bronze rim, it had backbones armored by rock. Rather than spokes and grease, a score of maws trailed strings of drool.

  The monstrapede trundled over Celaise. She blasted steam into the Headless that impacted into her. It was ripped from her grasp, hurling back into the air in the beasts' roll.

  Celaise felt her confidence give out, and she teetered toward a pit trap of panic. Whipping her head around, she saw Jerani dive out of the way. That was a gasp of relief, but the monstrapede whirled over the Greathearts and snapped their line in two.

  After completing one revolution, the monstrapede toppled sideways with the dreadful slowness of a falling tree.

  As one, the Greathearts shrieked and bellowed. Men scrambled and hooves kicked to get away.

  “The bull!” Jets of white spat from Celaise's fingers as she reached toward the falling circle of fangs. “Save the bull!”

  Her center of vulnerability was under the monstrapede's shadow, somewhere. Her vision constricted with her terror, and her eyes darted amid the blackness to try to find the bull. She saw a man tripping over his own spear. Fleets of Skin-Backs glided down in kites of stretched membrane. Men were flailing at the sky. Running. Dropping and screaming. Lurching from the shock of the monstrapede landing.

  The wheel of beasts must not have fallen on her center of vulnerability, or she would have been dead already. But the monstrapede was on its side in the heart of the tribe. As it straightened itself, a wall of jagged rock plowed men off their feet.

  With a hundred stings of horror, Celaise saw the bull bludgeoned. Celaise felt an impact in her side. Oh no! With a snorting protest, the bull was rolled over, hooves jerking upward, and Celaise witnessed her center of vulnerability crushed.

  The Black Wine numbed her to the first wave of pain. But she felt—oh yes, she felt—the cutting edge of the bull's hoof as he scrambled away. The monstrapede rolled onto its score of feet, and one set of claws punched through her core.

  Celaise felt as if a god had hammered her with a scaled fist. The ground buckled and tipped under her, and she slid toward the crashing length of the monstrapede, toward the soft spot where she had been gored.

  She saw herself, the lady in a dress of steam. She hovered over Celaise with a dripping hem, her face frozen but her eyes bright with pain.

  One of those times again? She could feel the wrongness of it all, a cold dullness spreading through her as if she were turning to lead. How did this happen? I have to get up, have to finish my trial.

  Oh, the Lord of the Feast will not be happy with me now.

  She sank into a swamp of darkness. The reek of her failure bubbled around her, and she shook with the booming steps of her nearing lord.

  Jerani heard her scream as the sound of keening gales scouring stone.

  Dismay stampeded in his chest. He raced around Hero, along the segments of the giant snake as it flipped onto its feet. Is she hurt? He had feared for her when the rock snake had rolled over her. She flitted past his vision a moment later in a white streak.

  Now she knelt before a broken figure, and relief kindled with Jerani. She's not hurt, only grieving. The fight will go on.

  Celaise slumped forward. Her translucent hair shriveled as if burnt, and her dress melted into a grey puddle that seeped into the ground and left no trace of a body.

  She was gone.

  Jerani's shaking knees lowered him to where she had fallen, and he pawed at the dirt, not knowing what he was doing. Storms of disbelief bombarded him with icy waves of fright and pain.

  Did the Bright Palm touch her? Jerani scanned the battlefield, seeing the shining figure in the distance among the Light Hoof tribe. Too far, but how'd a Rock-Back hurt her? She had defeated a score of them without creasing her dress.

  Amid the cries and stomping, someone moaned nearby. Jerani hoped to see Celaise but instead found the outlander with a white-knuckled grip on her crutch. A wound gaped in her chest. Her lips were deathly pale except for a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  Jerani wondered how she had gotten there, and where Celaise had gone. Then his heart screeched as he remembered the Bright Palm's words.

  'They are one. The cripple and the woman with the dress share one false heart.'

  Before, something about the outlander's face had struck Jerani as familiar, and now he saw it. Though her black brows were thin and patchy and hard to focus on next to that ruined mouth, those eyebrows tufted up at the sides like Celaise's.

  The Bright Palm was right. She is a Feaster, Jerani thought. And now she's dying.

  At first, he felt nothing, just a throbbing emptiness. Then he felt too much. Anger, for being fooled by her lies. Despair, for the warriors and the cows and the future of his tribe. Sorrow, for the woman of beauty and power who had turned out to be crook-limbed and dying.

  The emotions rotted in him like spoiled milk and corpse blood, and he had to howl them all out. His cry deafened him to the clangor of the battlefield.

  Celaise had betrayed him. As he watched Tall Tachamwa running for his life from a smaller Rock-Back, Jerani knew that she had also betrayed his sister, and his brother, and all the Greathearts.

  “I trusted you!” He screamed it at the wrecked woman before him.

  Her eyelids lazed open and shut, and her lips trembled, as if she was trying to speak. Jerani spun away from the sight of her wrecked body.

  The copper bracer clung to his wrist, lightless an
d marred by dings. Just like her. He flung it away. It skipped into the air, glinted once, then rolled in front of the giant rock snake and was flattened by foot after clawed foot.

  The Lord of the Feast shadowed the gorge. Celaise flopped onto her back, squinting up at his silhouette. Two of his heads coiled through the air in long, black smears. The third head bulged between them in a lumpy patch of darkness.

  “My heart, you smell lovely this evening.” Each of his three voices rose and fell in volume in turn, like snakes twisting about each other. “Regrettably, that's because you're dying.”

  Will he eat me as I die? Too afraid to speak, Celaise pulled her legs to her chest. Or she tried to. Her left knee hardly bent, and she wore her beggar's rags, not her True Dress.

  “How distressing to see you like this,” the three of him said. “Death is the time one least wants to be poorly dressed.”

  Celaise's True Dress slid over herself like a comforting gush of cool water. Now she could bend her left leg. As if it matters. She was dying. She had failed, and she knew why.

  I never should've relied on Jerani and the others. Should've attacked alone. That way, she might have better picked off some appetizer Headless before the main course trampled her.

  “Now, my sweetly poisoned apple, did the Bright Palm at last catch you?”

  “N-no,” she said. “A—a chain of Headless ran me down.”

  “Alas! The masses always savage the most elegant among them.” Eyes smoldered on two of the looming heads. “Did you learn what the beasts most fear?”

  “Smells,” she said. “Scents of burning, of blue flame and volcano steam.”

  “Sulfur, we know it well. Little amuses more than a rousing stench.” One of his serpentine necks reached down. As he continued to speak, his breath choked her with a reek of rotten eggs cooking over a tar fire. “You have done well, my dear daughter. Mortality is such a pity, but you'll have earned your oblivion.”