Fires of the Faithful

by Naomi Kritzer

  “I’m afraid of what the price of your friendship might be,” I said.

  “Perhaps it’s a price you’d enjoy paying.” He moved to stand behind me, resting his arms on the back of my chair.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Teleso dropped his hand to rest it against my waist. “You might enjoy my friendship more than you think.”

  “Take your hand off me,” I said.

  “Don’t you find me handsome? Most women do.”

  “Take your hand off me,” I said again.

  Teleso stood behind me; I couldn’t push my chair back and I couldn’t stand up. As he began to slide his hand up my side, I jerked away, then ducked down and under the table, rolling beneath it and coming up to stand and face him. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Don’t be hasty,” he said, moving toward me.

  I grabbed my eating knife, sending the eggshell wineglass spinning off the table. It smashed between us; the wine splashed onto the edge of the tablecloth, making a stain like blood. “Don’t,” I said, holding the knife out as threateningly as I could.

  Teleso froze and anger flared in his face. He narrowed his eyes to stare at me. “That was a mistake,” he said. Ignoring the knife, he reached out and grabbed my hand, twisting my wrist and jerking me toward him. “I am not interested in unwilling women,” he hissed. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You are throwing away quite an opportunity,” Teleso said. “Think it over.” He took the knife out of my hand, then released my arm and shoved me backward. He jerked on the bell cord with so much force he almost tore it off the lever. “Now get out.”

  One of his soldiers escorted me back up to my room. I rang the bell for Arianna, but she didn’t come. No one else did, either.

  The sun shone through the window high on the wall; when I pulled the chair over to peer out, I could see people assembling in the piazza for the funeral. I climbed up on the chair and tuned my violin, then started to play, still watching the people below. They could hear me; I saw an excited figure pointing up, then gathering other people to come stand under the window.

  This is the dance that turned the storm. I played Lucia’s dance now, from the window, and below me people clasped hands to step back and forth. Side-together-side skip. Front-together-front skip. Side-together-side skip. Back-together-back skip. I tried to spot Lucia in the courtyard below, but she wasn’t there. This is what Beneto was waiting for. I could feel the nervous energy rising like steam from the dancers below.

  Two soldiers came to the courtyard as I watched. They sent the dancers away. One spoke quietly to each dancer, gesturing quickly and pointing toward the keep; the other grabbed one of the dancers roughly by the arm, shoving her out of the circle. Niccolo? No, Niccolo had fairer hair. I didn’t know this soldier. At the sound of my playing, he looked up toward the window, shading his eyes with his hand. I imagined a venomous glare, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to tell. With the dancers scattered, though, I stepped down from my chair by the window, putting down my violin.

  Who will lead us now? Lucia’s question still haunted me. Those dancers under my window deserved a leader who believed in them. All the prisoners at Ravenna deserved a leader who believed in them. They deserved better than Giovanni—in fact, they deserved better than Beneto, for all his bright-eyed charisma. I paced the room, my violin in my hand.

  I stopped in front of the mirror and tucked the violin under my chin. Closing my eyes, I played the funeral song as I’d played it for Mira, when she was ill the first time. I danced as I played—I didn’t know the steps that Lucia knew, so I let the music carry me. As I whirled with the final cascade of notes, I opened my eyes and found myself facing the mirror. That night I played for Mira in her illness, I saw an image of a soldier with my face. Looking into the mirror now, I saw that soldier again, but it no longer frightened me.

  Laying my violin down on the bed, I reached behind me to the buttons of the dress. There were scores of buttons, tiny and out of my reach. I unfastened the first few. Then, closing my eyes and gripping the collar of the dress, I tore it off my body. Buttons scattered across the floor like spilled stones, and I stepped out of the heap of velvet at my feet.

  My clothes were still under the bed; they were slightly damp, but I could live with that. I put on the tunic and trousers, and belted the tunic with the red sash. The beads and ribbons took some time to remove from my hair, but I managed. The copper clip I’d used to secure my hair had vanished with Arianna, so I used a single ribbon to tie it back. Then I looked into the mirror again.

  I was ready.

  • • •

  A soldier I hadn’t seen before delivered my supper—gruel. I ate it quickly, not really tasting it. I was too nervous to be hungry, but as always before a concert, I forced the food down. The door swung open as I scraped the last of the gruel from the bowl, and Teleso froze, looking at me, my clothes, the dress crumpled on the floor. “Why did you take off the dress?” he asked. His voice trembled like a rejected child’s.

  “The price was too high,” I said, and his face grew as cold as his eyes.

  “Come,” he said, and turned away without offering me his arm. I trailed him down the stairs. Just before we reached the doorway of the keep, he reached back to grab my hand, tucking it into the crook of his arm and pinning it against his side. Soldiers joined us, and escorted us out of the keep.

  The light was fading from the edge of the hills; I stared into the shadowy sea of faces, trying to make them out. The area around the piazza had been cleared of tents again. The crowd was quiet, frighteningly so. Teleso led me to the scaffold, then up the steps and on to the platform. No ropes hung tonight, but the cross-beam was directly over my head; I wished fervently that there was some other platform for me to stand on. Teleso let go of my arm and held up his hands for silence.

  “Enemies of Ravenna will be dealt with,” he said. “Thieves and marauders will be punished. However, I am not without mercy. You may give them whatever funeral you wish. Their bodies have been returned to you.” He gestured, and I looked down to see two shrouded bodies at the foot of the scaffold. He turned to me, smiling into my horrified face. “They’re all yours,” he said to me, and stepped lightly down the stairs, retreating to the keep. I was alone.

  The crowd held its breath as I took a moment to retune my violin. My hands shook slightly as I tucked it under my chin, then started playing, sluggish in the damp air. Da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. Da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. The people were stamping their feet on the down beats, clapping their hands. “Come on!” I heard Lucia shout. “Step—wait—left behind left turn, left.”

  Slowly, like a vast mill slowly grinding to life, the crowd began to move. Dancing. Da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. My hands were warming; without meaning to, I sped up the music slightly. People responded. All around me, everywhere, they danced, moving in a slow circle around the platform.

  The crowd was vast and packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Still, I could feel their energy, like a flame the moment before the log splits into fire. They were angry; their fury billowed around us like smoke. Da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. I started trying to hold the tempo back, but it wasn’t working—they were speeding up, with or without me. The energy swelled. It vibrated behind my eyes like the wood of my violin, or the swarm of bees I’d felt when I played this with Mira and Bella and the others back at the conservatory. It was difficult to breathe.

  The crowd’s anger rose with the energy like an unstoppable tide, like an earthquake. They wanted to see Teleso’s blood. My heart was beating loud enough to hear it in my ears. They were dancing faster. This was nothing like playing with Mira and Bella; I was the violin, played by the anger of the crowd.

  A few paces from the scaffold, I could see Lucia and Giovanni dancing. Lucia’s eyes were closed; Giovanni’s were wide open, and riveted on me. Our strength is in numbers, I remembered Beneto’s voice saying. I
f you get people angry enough. We just have to get people angry enough. This was what he had been waiting for, and now Giovanni was going to make it work. Lucia’s lips were moving; she was singing the words to the song, which I could barely make out over the stamping feet. The dance was almost over. The anger was rising like a flooding river, waters that would smash everything in their path and carry the debris until the water was spent, soaked into the earth. I could unleash that against the camp—drown the keep in the anger like floodwaters would drown a hut—and my head spun with the power flashing through me.

  The last fading rays of the day fell across the edge of the crowd. Just beyond the dancers, I saw a glint like the evening star—it was the sun catching on the tip of a crossbow bolt. Staring into the shadows, I realized that there was a ring of soldiers, beyond the dancers, crossbows drawn. Of course; Teleso knew this was coming as well as Giovanni did. From where I stood, though, I could see who the crossbows were pointed at. Enemies of Ravenna will be dealt with. This was why Lucia’s name was circled on Teleso’s list. As soon as the riot broke out, they were going to kill Lucia. For a moment my own anger roared in my ears, drowning out the anger of the crowd, and I realized what I could do. Bastards won’t shoot unless there’s trouble.

  The dance was ending; I couldn’t just stop playing, because people would take that as the signal for the riot to start. Gritting my teeth, I decreased the tempo of the music. I wasn’t sure if this would make the dancers slow down, but it did. I slowed it more. The buzzing in my head became disjointed, confused, but this wasn’t working well enough. I felt like a fragile dam trying to hold back a blinding white river of anger. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Opening myself to the tide, I poured the energy into the earth under my feet, like rainwater into a field. Down.

  My E-string snapped. The dance ended. Instead of exploding into a riot, though, people stopped, heads bowed, and slowly shuffled off, back toward the tents. Lucia looked around, drained and confused. She didn’t know what had happened, what had gone wrong. But Giovanni did. I could feel his glare burning against me like magefire; if he could have killed me right then, he would have. “Damn you,” he hissed, and I met his eyes for a long moment across the dark sea. “Traitor.”

  Something jerked me backward, and I realized that Teleso had come up the steps to the scaffold and grabbed my arm. “Let’s go,” he said, and yanked me back down the steps. “You made the wrong choice.”

  “My violin case,” I protested as Teleso dragged me into the keep.

  “Shut up!” he shouted, and backhanded me across the face. I didn’t see it coming; the impact knocked me back against the wall. Teleso jerked me toward him again, then shoved me toward one of the soldiers. “Lock her up.” The soldier stared at Teleso. “You heard me! Lock her up.”

  The soldier took my arm, leading me down a narrow staircase. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “One of us will get the case for you.”

  “There was supposed to be a riot this evening,” I said.

  “Yes,” the soldier said. “I don’t know what it was you did, but thank you.” He stopped where he was and released me to look into my eyes, wincing at the bruise forming across my cheek. “My orders were to shoot Signora Lucia. I didn’t want to.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked. “You speak with a Verdiano accent. Does your family live near here?”

  “No, thank the Lady. I am Verdiano, but my family lives well north of the wasteland. My name is Tomas.”

  My cheek was beginning to ache and I pressed my hand against it, hoping that the cold from my hand would ease the swelling. “So you were supposed to reduce the number of mouths to feed, and take out Lucia.”

  “Yes.” Tomas looked angry. “But we’re soldiers, not murderers. We won’t kill unarmed people in cold blood.” He met my eyes hesitantly. “That’s what Mario says.”

  Mario. Why was I not surprised?

  “Isn’t it just as bad to deliberately provoke a riot, just to have an excuse to kill people?”

  Tomas’s gaze faltered. “Probably,” he said. He was young, much younger than Mario, and he suddenly looked tragically sad.

  “Never mind, Tomas,” I said. “It isn’t your fault. You’d better take me wherever it is you’re supposed to be taking me. Are you pulling a double shift already?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a tired smile. “This way.”

  We made our way down a hallway, then down another staircase that led to a row of cells. Tomas hesitated, looking embarrassed to be locking me up. “I heard you play, the other night,” he said. “You’re really good.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I considered offering to play for him right there, but I was too tired. It was chilly, deep under the keep, and I shivered. “Can I have a blanket? It’s cold down here.”

  “Oh!” he said, and looked around. “Here, you can have my cloak.” He shrugged off his black-and-red cloak and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  “Is this allowed?” I asked.

  Tomas shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll get into too much trouble.” He shuffled his feet. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  I loosened the strings of my violin and laid it carefully on the stone slabs of the floor, wondering how I was going to get a new E-string. “One thing,” I said. “Am I a dangerous enough prisoner to rate a guard? I’d rather Teleso not visit me unescorted.”

  Tomas blushed. “I understand, Signora Eliana. I’ll talk to Mario—he’ll arrange something.” He closed the door to the cell.

  Even with the cloak, I was chilled. Without Tomas’s candle, the dungeon was darker than anywhere I’d ever been. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. I wrapped the cloak around me and curled up on the floor of the cell. I could hear my heart beating, and an echo of something else—I imagined I could hear a heart beating in the ground under my ear, or the echoes of the stamping feet earlier. The sound lulled me and comforted me, and I drifted off to sleep.

  • • •

  I closed my eyes, knowing that in an instant I would feel my flesh burn, and there was nothing I could do about it. As I heard the screams of my friends, though, I felt no pain. Unbelieving, I opened my eyes, and realized that as the magefire burned the air around me, it didn’t touch me.

  I turned toward the hill. Five mages—that was all it took. I couldn’t see their faces, but suddenly I knew with utter certainty who one of them was, and that she was protecting me. Even as she killed everyone else.

  • • •

  I woke with a start in utter darkness. I was jumpy and imagining things that I couldn’t see, and without really thinking about it, I cupped my hand to summon witchlight.

  To my shock, a dim glow leapt to life and stayed there. In the feeble but steady white light, I could see Mario sleeping in the guard’s chair, on the other side of my bars. I stared at the light and, after a moment or two, let it go out and lay back down.

  Our magefire drained the Verdiani borderlands of every drop of energy and life they had.

  Witchlight doesn’t work here. No magery does.

  I thought about the surge of energy I’d poured into the earth. Could this be done, for all of the wastelands? Or would you need the kind of anger that could start a riot? Or was I dreaming? I drifted back to sleep.

  I woke later to find Mario shaking me gently. “Teleso wants you outside,” he said. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  “Tomas’s cloak,” I said.

  “I’ll get it back to him,” he said, so I took it off and laid it across Mario’s arm.

  “My violin,” I said.

  “We have the case,” he said. “Will you trust me to take care of your violin? I’ll return it to you later.”

  I didn’t want to let him take it, but I wasn’t sure I had a choice, so I nodded and gave him the violin and bow. He took the violin gingerly, like he was afraid the thin wood would break, and I laughed and showed him how to hold it. “Don’t go swinging it around like a club,” I said, “and don’t drop
it, but it’s not going to break in your hands or anything.”

  He tucked it under his arm. “Ready?” he asked.

  “For what?” I said, but he avoided my eyes.

  I followed Mario up the stairs; we were joined by a larger group of soldiers and Mario passed my violin off to Tomas. They marched me out the side entrance. “There she is!” someone shouted, and I saw Lucia and Giovanni and a few others. I could tell Giovanni was still furious, even from here, but Lucia just looked worried. The soldiers led me up onto the scaffold to stand next to Teleso. For a split second I was terrified that he was about to have me hanged, but there weren’t any nooses.

  Instead of making a speech to the onlookers, Teleso turned to me. He was as angry as he had been the previous evening, maybe even angrier. “I treated you with courtesy and hospitality,” he said. “I offered you comfort and safety. And you spit on the hand I extended. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I raised my voice slightly. “I averted a riot. Is that why you’re angry? Why does the commander of Ravenna want a riot?”

  “Shut up!” he shouted, then lowered his voice again. “You could still apologize, Eliana. If you apologize sincerely enough, you might be able to persuade me to reopen the offer I made yesterday.”

  I felt my face flush and I drew myself up to my full height, pitching my voice to be heard by everyone watching. “My body is not for sale, Teleso.”

  His face slammed shut and he nodded once. Then he turned to the soldiers. “Tie her.”

  Mario and the others took hold of my arms, Mario still avoiding my eyes. They bound my hands to the cross beam of the scaffold. Someone untied my sash, then pulled my tunic over my head, and I realized they were going to whip me.

  I could feel Teleso’s eyes burning into my naked back and my face became scarlet. “For insolence,” Teleso shouted to the crowd. “For attempting to instigate a riot. For insubordination. Thirty lashes.”

  I couldn’t see the conversation behind me, but I could hear it. “Mario can do it,” I heard Teleso say. Then Mario’s voice: “This is goatshit, Teleso, and you know it!”