Moth and Spark

by Anne Leonard

  Tam got hungry, and they ate meat served on skewers and licked the grease from their fingers. He bought her more wine, and she drank it quickly. He kissed her quite passionately, and she returned it the same way. When finally they broke it off several bystanders applauded.

  A woman whose face was painted half green, half gold, called from a candlelit stall, “Love potions! Love charms! For men, for women! Come see, come buy!” Catching sight of them, she said, “Even lovers need my draughts! Come see, come buy!” The liquids inside the displayed flasks were brightly colored and almost shining like the candles. “Just a drop in his water and he’ll please you all night. Or try this, it will make him crave you when you’re absent. This one is for you, you’ll have pleasure like you’ve never had, you’ll fly. This makes you ten times as beautiful or him as handsome as can be. That one’s for if he starts to stray, you may not need it now, but all men wander, you’ll want it later.”

  Tam glanced at Corin at that, and he said gravely, “If you want to waste your money, feel free. A chain would be more secure.”

  “A golden one, no doubt,” she said, and pulled him onward. Then she stood, transfixed. In an open space before them was a column of butterflies, red and gold like sparks, tiny and perfect. They fluttered in circles that moved up and down, rippling like a wave, color shifting like silk. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Both hands extended, she stepped forward, reaching, and the column broke and poured over her.

  Butterflies no bigger than her thumbnail covered her entire body, their wings moving softly. She was afraid to move lest it disturb them. However this had happened, it was not to be questioned. Someone was playing a flute somewhere, a primitive wild melody that made her want to dance and leap, and she forced her feet to stay planted firmly and her breath to remain steady. She felt people watching but didn’t turn her head. His movements slow and controlled, Corin stepped around to look at her, meet her eyes. They could have been the only people in the world at that moment. The red and gold flickering over her was her blood pulsing. Her body tingled with desire.

  She took a step forward and the butterflies scattered, reformed themselves into a globe over her head. He mouthed her name and she flowed toward him, and when their fingers touched she was jolted with the intensity. Somehow there was space in the crowd, and he ran, and she ran with him. He matched his pace to hers and they sped through the marvels and sights of the fair, dragons only three inches long and the colors of gems, a hissing spotted wildcat, a man on stilts whose body was covered with inked pictures that moved and changed as his muscles flexed. They drank more wine and danced around a huge bonfire and skipped wildly into a maze. They turned randomly, without trying even to guess where they would go, and wound up alone in a small square room painted with bright and disorienting shapes and hung with irregularly shaped and spaced mirrors that threw their reflections back at them in fragments.

  “Corin,” she said, wanting him, and he pressed her against the wall, knocking down a mirror, and kissed her. One of his hands found its way under her shirt and up to her breasts, and she pushed herself into it, arching her back. She locked her hands behind his head. Her body knew what to do, and if they had not heard laughter and voices almost immediately things would have gone much further.

  They worked their way out of the maze somehow and had more to eat and drink and raced toward the carousel, its cheerful music summoning them. The wooden animals seemed almost to be dancing and alive. They sat on two silver horses, side by side, and when the carousel began to turn Tam felt as though she were at the center of a stillness and the world was moving around her. The mirrored panels in the center of the carousel flashed and shifted with color and light. It made her giddy, delighted. They spun, round and round and round, the music clear and drowning out all other noise. The colors in the mirrors began to resolve into images: a crow, a waterfall, a castle, a bridge, a tree. A fire-red snake. Tam looked at Corin and saw with a shock that he had raised his mask and was staring at the mirrors with his body as tight and straight as a lance. The image now was a dragon, with teeth of silver and eyes of gold, its scales shimmering and iridescent, brightness surrounding it. Steam was coming out its nostrils. It roared, and fire leaped out toward them, full of heat and sulfur, and the horses twitched and whinnied. It was muscle and skin and hair under Tam, not wood. She clutched the horse’s mane and lay close against its back. Beyond the carousel was only darkness and silence, and the horses ran smoothly, effortlessly, over the pool of blackness beneath them. Corin’s cloak was fluttering and moving with all the light and wildness of fire, and his head was illuminated with a golden light. Tam’s own cloak had turned to blue flames, and when she lifted one hand she saw blue-green sparks flying from her fingertips. She gripped the mane again; it exploded into flame from her touch.

  As quickly as it had come it ended, and she heard the music and saw the painted wood. Corin looked white and stricken. The carousel was slowing; she slipped down from her horse as soon as she could and took his hand. He dismounted slowly, and she brought his mask back from the top of his head to cover his face. She had no idea what she had seen, but even through the wine and remaining frenzy she knew he needed her strength far more than she needed his.

  When the carousel was still she led him off and away, into the chaos and privacy of the crowd, and then behind a stall. For a long time he was quiet. She thought of the black moths, the twin to the butterflies, and rubbed her bare arms to warm them. He had accepted what she told him, she had to do the same.

  At last he said, his voice as husky as a boy’s, “What did you see?”

  “The dragon came out of the mirror,” she said.

  He slumped, apparently with relief. “I thought I was going mad. It looked at me, Tam, it looked at me, it wanted something.”

  “It was an illusion, that’s all.” She had to settle him as she had after the fortune-telling. “I saw it too, you weren’t imagining it.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. He raised his mask again and reached out to lift hers. She thought maybe he intended to distract her with a kiss. “There are some more things I need to tell you about the war,” he said. “But here is not the place. Let’s go on. Unless you have had enough?”

  “You have,” she replied firmly. “Time to go back.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Neither of them spoke on the coach ride. Tam pressed the token back into his hand and leaned against him. Corin put his arm around her, liking the warm feel of her body against his, but did not kiss her. He had gone cold inside the moment he saw the first picture in the mirror, and when the dragon reared at him and the horses galloped into darkness he had thought he would freeze entirely and break. Memory was coming back, memory of what had happened in the north, what had been done to him; the roaring dragon in the glass had unlocked his mind.

  Riding, riding, he had been riding, and then the dragon came and put upon him a burden. The Firekeepers have chosen you to free them from their slavery. You will forget this until the change is complete. When you remember it, then it will be time for you to begin your labor. The Firekeepers will watch, do not shirk it.

  The coach rattled along and he did not know what to do with the memory. Absently he touched Tam’s hair. How could he tell her this? How could he not? There was no passion in him now, only an aching tenderness.

  When they reached the palace and climbed the steps to the entrance, he discovered he did not want to go in. It was so strong that he stopped before reaching the door. Tam took a step forward, realized he was not following her, looked back.

  “Corin?”

  “I can’t. I can’t go in now.” Terror was waiting inside, dark and tight and heavy. He had cursed Hadon and it had recoiled on him.

  “You have to. You need to come in and warm up and rest.”

  Women, always trying to make things better, softer, suffocating. “No,” he grated.

  She held out
her hand. He didn’t take it. “Corin, you can’t just stand there on the step all night. Come in.”

  “I can damn well do what I want,” he said, and was pleased to hear her slight gasp of shock.

  She turned around and went to speak to the guards. He knew what she was doing. It didn’t matter. They could not make him move.

  One of the guards came down and said, “Come, sir, the lady’s right, it’s past midnight.”

  Corin struck him. It was not a gentle blow. The guard swore, fell heavily, hit his head, went still.

  After that came a confusion of lights and voices. He sat down and let them go. The man he had hit was breathing evenly, and when two other men came to pick the guard up he heard relief in their voices. No one touched him or spoke to him for a long time. When they did come he ignored them and they went away. There was a bright white-yellow star above. He watched it move slowly westward, out of sight.

  He was shivering, but that didn’t matter. He was filled with cold, tremendous and powerful cold, cold that would freeze the world around him and shatter it into tiny sparkling pieces, like diamonds, like stars. That was the unreal world, the illusion, the sorcery. What was real was here, in this purity of cold.

  Something brushed against his cheek. He smelled death. He felt the presence of a thing older than the dragons, vicious, desperate. It was trapped. Its wings were beating hard as it tried to come through.

  A man was talking to him. He did not look up. The darkness was on his back, ready to wrap itself around him, to stab his eyes and tighten his throat. What are you? he thought. He pushed against it. It shuddered and gave way.

  Then a cloth was thrust against his face. He smelled the narcotic on it before he went limp.

  When he woke it was early morning, the light still fresh, the air loud with birds singing their last songs before quieting for the day. His head hurt. But that was not as bad as the horrible rush of shame that accompanied his memory. What had he done? Tam, he thought, and heard it in the stillness of the room. He remembered swearing at her. At least he had not hit her. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and leaned over them, face in his hands.

  After a while he looked up. He was not in his own room; that would have been a distance to carry him. He recognized the place: a small side chamber off the entrance hall where messengers sometimes slept or rested while waiting to be sent off. It had no actual door, but a thick blue curtain hung across the doorway. A window looked over some bushes and a patch of grass. The bed was barely more than a cot. The only other furniture was a pair of unpainted and unvarnished wooden benches against two walls.

  He still wore the clothes he had had on the evening before; his boots lay on the floor at the end of the bed, not even standing. They had put him down to sleep it off like any common drunk. He deserved it. But he had not been drunk.

  His chin was scratchy, and he felt dirty and foul. Parts of his hair were sticking out. He stood up, steadied himself against sudden dizziness, then pulled the curtain aside.

  The guard outside said apologetically but firmly, “You’re to wait here, my lord. Orders.”

  That meant the king. Well, he could hardly expect that behavior to remain unreported. The guard probably had full authority to restrain him if it was called for. He was particularly tall and heavy. “Yes. Of course,” he said. “I’d like a cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, sir.” Noncommittal.

  It came quickly, though, by which he gathered he was not entirely in disgrace. He would not ask for anything else. It was hot and bitter, what he needed. He wondered how long he would be made to wait. Not too long, surely. He had responsibilities and had not done anything terrible enough to be divested of them. Or had he? He had struck a guard, and if the man had died from hitting his head that was murder.

  He had drunk about half the coffee when the curtain slid open and Tam came through. He put the cup down at once and stood. He felt hopeful at the fact that he was permitted to see her. She could even have been sent for. Then he thought of other reasons she might have come.

  She had obviously had little sleep herself; her hair was pulled back but not brushed, and her face was pale and drawn. At least she had changed her clothes. They stared at each other a moment, both afraid to speak.

  “Tam,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why did you do it, Corin? You weren’t drunk.”

  How much easier it would be if he had been. “Either I’m going mad or the world is,” he said, then stopped. He should not blame it on madness, he should admit he had made the choice to refuse to enter. Her eyes were dark, tearless, demanding. If he did this wrong he would lose her.

  Looking at the floor, he gathered his courage, or perhaps it was humility. He faced her and said bluntly, “I was afraid. There was something utterly dreadful waiting inside. It smelled like death. I was the rabbit in the hawk’s shadow. That’s what I thought. If I came inside I was going to die, or worse.” Her eyes told him nothing of what she thought or felt. He forced himself on. “I know it makes no sense. And I shouldn’t have let the fear take me anyway. But it did. There was nothing else left. You don’t have to tell me I failed.” It stung more than anything ever had. When he was dying he would remember this.

  “Does this—does this have something to do with what we saw last night?”

  “What did you see?”

  “The carousel horses, when we were on them, mine—” She paused, touched her hair. “Mine seemed to turn to flesh. We were riding over darkness and our cloaks had turned to fire.”

  He shivered. He had not thought she had been brought in so deeply as he had. The dragon in the glass, the leaping fire. So that had happened. And she, somehow, had seen it too. That was not a dream.

  “Yes,” he said. He should leave it there, make no excuses. He went on, not knowing if he was explaining or defying. “It brought me a memory. One I don’t know what to do with.”

  For a few seconds longer she looked at him, her arms stiff by her sides. It was as though she were protecting something, or trying to be brave. She took an awkward step toward him. Tentatively, he extended his arms, and then she came quickly into his embrace, her sweet-smelling hair against his neck, her forehead against his shoulder.

  They held each other hard. Relief was flooding him. This was the most important thing, this, her.

  “You don’t know how frightened I was last night,” she said at last, in a small voice, speaking into his shoulder. “You became a different man right before my eyes. I knew you were in there, somewhere, but I didn’t know how to get you out. I didn’t want to make you do anything which you would not forgive yourself for later. It was like Cade again, all over, only worse.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to become of me,” he said as calmly as he could. “But I will always come back to you, always.”

  “Did I do the right thing?” she whispered. “With the guards, I mean?”

  How worried she sounded. She needed him to be steady. He took a deep breath and stepped into his familiar role. “Yes. Were they respectful to you?”

  That brought a little laugh, and she pulled back to look at him. Her face had softened. “I wasn’t even sure they’d let me in, dressed like that and it so late, but apparently word’s got around. It was all ‘my lady this’ and ‘my lady that’ from the first.”

  “Good,” he said fiercely. He couldn’t marry her, and he certainly could not ask his father to give her rank just because he loved her, but he wanted it clear that did not matter. What she couldn’t have by law she could have by fact.

  She looked askance at him. “What would you expect? It’s not for me, it’s for you.”

  “Not last night it wasn’t,” he said. “You were making the decisions about me, if you’d told them to put me in a cell they would have.”

  “I was a convenient authorit
y. Anyway, I wasn’t the one who told the doctor to drug you.”

  “I wager you thought of it, though. Who did tell him?”

  She hesitated, clearly regretting she had said anything about it. She was not a person who hid her feelings well. It was part of what drew him to her; he was sick of artifice in all its forms. He saw her decide to go ahead.

  “Your father. After he tried speaking to you and you did nothing.”

  Hell, hell, hell. He should have known. “He was there himself? Someone went and got him out of bed?”

  “Yes. That one wasn’t my idea. Well, what were they to do, Corin? No one knew what was wrong and you’d already been violent. There weren’t any good options.”

  “You’re right,” he said. Take the prince by force or leave him on the steps like a madman, who would want responsibility for that decision? He might as well find out the worst. “I really made a bloody mess of things, didn’t I. What about the man I hit? How badly did I hurt him?”

  To his relief she answered promptly. “Mild concussion and some bruises. It could have been much worse.”

  “Thank God for that.” He was still due for punishment, but at least he did not have murder on his conscience. “Did he talk to you? My father?”

  “A little,” she said, and turned red.

  It was not at all the way he would have wanted them to meet. He hoped it had not been too hard for her. Aram would have been kind and courteous, he could be sure of that, but he was the king. “Oh, Tam, can you still possibly care for me after this?”

  There was relief in her body too. She kissed him. “You taste like coffee,” she murmured, and kissed him again. Her tongue moved slowly, maddeningly, across the roof of his mouth. There had never been anyone like her.

  “You learn fast,” he said, and she gave him one of her sly grins. “But you should go get some rest. Have you been up all night?”