by Lauren Roy
Amma said that was nonsense, but she’d never offered a better story to take its place.
Across the way to the south, two of the buildings split apart enough that they could sidle through. There were a few places where they’d have to cross actual streets, but Yulla thought she could keep it to a minimum. The Wind might be able to move freely wherever it wished to go, but maybe they could lose the witch-women in the twists and turns and narrow places.
“Follow me,” she said, and sprinted for the gap between the houses.
The opening was smaller than she’d thought, though after a few panicked, sideways lunges, she got to where it opened a little wider, enough that she could take a full breath unrestricted. Heat spread along the stone as Ember squeezed along behind her. He was wider than Yulla; for a heart-stopping moment she was sure he’d be trapped and the witch-women would simply have to catch up to them and capture him. It would be all her fault.
Then his glow deepened. His fire rolled in on itself, and the dark form beneath the flames shifted from brown to crimson, and crimson to a dark orange. Yulla propelled herself deeper into the passageway as the heat he gave off intensified. Where he touched the walls of the dwellings in front of him and behind, they too began to glow. He pressed his molten hands against the rock, and they sank down into it, as if he were pressing them into wet plaster.
He grew thinner, taller, and flowed through the tight spot.
Flowed, like the cauldrons of liquid iron they poured into molds at the forge.
Yulla wanted to stop and stare, to both make sense of his impossible metamorphosis and to admire it, but pausing for even a second made her face feel like she’d spent too long in the sun. She hurried along ahead of him, getting a better lead so he could slip along more quickly. His brightness blocked her from seeing the other end of the alley; if they were being followed, she couldn’t tell.
Another gap between buildings opened, perpendicular to the one they fled down. It would lead them closer to the center of town, near the market and the Worship Hall, but she wanted to get out of the witch-women’s line of sight as soon as she could. If she had to lead, it meant she couldn’t block out Ember’s light from behind like she’d done in the house.
This alley was wider than the last, enough for a small cart to travel along, though there wouldn’t be more than a handspan to either side. The houses along here had recessed doorways and tall, deep-set windows on the ground floor. The windows were as high as they were to let in as much feeble light as possible; both they and the doors had been designed to give someone walking along a place to duck into should a cart need to get past.
It served Yulla well, too. She motioned Ember into one. He was back to the way he’d looked before, she noted, his form once more cooled to that dark shape beneath the flames. “Can you... can you dim yourself any more than that?”
“I can’t.” A scowl flickered across his features. “I’m sorry. I’ve been keeping the flames low as I can since I found you. And that last alley, it was more than I ought to have tried.”
“Since you... This whole time?” A glance at the sky didn’t tell her just how much time that was. They’d met just before noon, but she couldn’t see Mother Sun’s position here to get a sense of when it was now: This passage ran north to south, and Mother Sun had already drifted out of sight. It couldn’t have been more than an hour or two.
What did it take out of him, to tamp down his heat? She imagined it might be like holding your breath, but Yulla’d never been able to do that for more than a minute at best. Ember had kept at this for much longer. “All right. We’ll think of something else. Stay here.”
He nodded and sagged against the stone archway.
Yulla darted as quickly as she dared back to the start of the alley. She stayed on the balls of her feet, padding along at a skip-hop to make as little noise as possible. The gap between buildings was shadow-filled, the stars directly above providing only a meager bit of light. If she turned around, she’d see Ember’s glow, but where she was seemed just as dark as where they’d been. Good.
She couldn’t risk a peek around the corner—weak starlight wasn’t no starlight, and the last thing she needed was the witch-women seeing her silhouette.
So she turned to the wall, buried her face in her forearm, and closed her eyes. It wasn’t quite the same as being down below, but it was as near as she could get.
With the dark settling in, she felt the cool, rough bricks against her skin, and the chill of the air clearing sweat from the back of her neck. She could smell herself, too, unwashed but not pungent, the remnants of cheese and plum on her breath. The sounds were what she needed, though, so she focused on them.
Close in was her breathing, rough from the brief exertion, and the thump of her heart as its beat returned to normal. From farther away came the calls of night birds and desert animals who’d decided to venture out into the not-quite-day in search of food. What she needed would be somewhere in between. She hardly dared to breathe, straining to hear even the softest sound.
There.
A footstep, far away. The slap of flesh on stone, as if someone had smacked the wall in frustration. Now that she’d found the witch-women, Yulla heard even more: she couldn’t make out words in the murmured conversation, but they sounded upset, angry. More footsteps, and the shrr of fabric against brick, but that last ended in a grunt. Either the woman was stuck or she’d retreated.
There were three of them, she thought, maybe four. If they could have made it past that choke point between buildings, they would have by now.
The rush of triumph faded when the Wind went tearing by.
She was already pressed against the stone, but at the new sound, she tried to meld with it. Yulla waited, one breath, two. The nearest alcove was several feet to her right, but she didn’t dare make a run for it. Fear kept her frozen where she was, flat against the brick, pulling back the tiniest bit to peek out at the alley’s entrance.
Soon enough, the Wind returned. It paused as it drew parallel with the alley. Though she couldn’t see the Wind itself, she could track its hesitation by the whirls of sand and grit it set spinning.
This is it, she thought. Even if it doesn’t see me, it will see Ember’s light. We’re spotted. Could the Wind see at all? She had no idea how it had sensed her the first time around. She held still, expecting any second to feel it rip Aunt Mouse’s quilt from her shoulders and buffet her with blows; to hear its mad wailing in her ears as it called to the witch-women.
She didn’t know how long she stood braced for discovery. It felt like hours, but she remembered how no one could agree on the time down below, either, and Aunt Mouse’s warning that time and distance could get distorted when you had no way to get your bearings. So she stood as still as she could, her breath coming in slow shallow gasps. Counting her heartbeats did her no good; she kept losing the tally. The Wind didn’t leave, and Yulla didn’t move.
Finally, after what might have been a year or what might have been an eyeblink, one of the witch-women uttered a sharp phrase. Yulla couldn’t understand the words, but the tone of command in them was unmistakable. The Wind gusted one last time, then went whistling toward its mistresses.
She counted to a hundred, or maybe closer to a hundred and fifty, since at every tiny sound she stopped, strained to identify it, and had to find her place all over again. It wasn’t until she was running through the thirties again that she thought to tap a finger against the wall at each set of ten. When at last the little finger of her left hand struck one hundred, she dared a glance down the alley where she’d left Ember.
It was dark—not the pitch-black of down below, but the dark of a starlit alley on a moonless night, with no Fire Child lurking in an alcove.
He couldn’t have fled; she’d have heard. Or could he be quieter than she knew, and have slipped away down the street, or into the house whose door she’d left him scorching?
Yulla went back that way, doing the same skip-hop again. Softly, ba
rely above a whisper, she called his name.
His answer didn’t come in words. White-hot light flared out from the doorway, so bright she had to shield her eyes. It blazed that way a moment, then—as Yulla abandoned all attempts at quiet and raced towards the source—gradually dimmed back to the golden hearthside glow she’d grown accustomed to in the last few hours.
It was hot and dry as an early summer day around Ember’s alcove, but that heat was dissipating quickly. He was bent double on the step, hands on his knees, breath coming in ragged gasps. He didn’t look up as she skidded to a stop.
“I heard the Wind,” he rasped. “I was afraid it would see me.”
“You said you couldn’t go any dimmer. You’d already overtaxed yourself.”
“Guess I had one last try in me. But when I let it go...” He balled his hands and spread them apart, imitating the flare.
“They’ll have seen that. We have to leave.” It worried her that the Wind hadn’t come rushing back yet, wasn’t whirling around them screaming their location to its mistresses.
Ember nodded, but he didn’t move. “I need a minute.”
“We don’t have one. They could be coming. They have to be.” If this had been Kell, Yulla would have grabbed her by the wrist and started dragging her. But she had no way to do that with Ember, and had to make do with impatient, fearful glances up and down the alley.
If he collapsed now, she wouldn’t be able to carry him. She looked around for anything she could use—an abandoned cart, a forgotten wheelbarrow—but even if she had one, it would get too hot too fast. If we can’t run, then we’ll have to defend.
A shovel and a pitchfork leaned against the wall deeper into the alley. What good will they do? I can’t hit the Wind, and I can’t imagine they’ll turn aside spells. The idea of actually hitting another human being with either made her queasy. “They don’t have to know that,” she muttered.
“Know what?”
“Nothing. Wait here.”
Hay clung to the pitchfork’s tines. As she leaned down to heft it, Yulla caught a strong whiff of manure, and on top of it, the unmistakable scent of horses. She realized then they were behind the stables only a few streets over from her house. She and Kell had come here countless times to pet the horses and offer them oats and carrots and bits of apple from the flats of their palms.
She found the stable’s back door, tried the latch and found it open. Maybe she wouldn’t need to stab anyone with the pitchfork after all.
Ember looked a little better when she returned to him. No longer breathing rapidly, he’d sat down, rested his head against the door and closed his eyes. He might have been a worker taking a break in the waning of the day from his position: one knee up, his arm draped casually over it, the other leg stretched out, other hand idle at his side. He could have been any teenager laying back and listening to music in the market, except for the part where he was made of living flame.
“Can you walk?” Yulla asked. “Only a little farther. I have an idea.”
He opened his diamond-chip eyes and nodded. “I think so.” The illusion of him relaxing broke as he staggered to his feet. Now he reminded her more of Old Moll, testing his balance with every movement. He was walking, though. That was the important thing.
They made it, step by shuffling step, to the stable door. Still no sign of the witch-women or the Wind, which worried Yulla more and more. It wasn’t worth bringing it up, though, not yet. Besides, from the nervous looks Ember kept shooting toward the ends of the alley, he was thinking it, too.
When he saw where she was trying to lead him, he balked. “Yulla, it’s dangerous for you in there. Everything will catch.”
“That’s the point.” She grinned. “They’ll see the light from the stable fire and come looking, but you’ll be long gone when they get here.”
“And once they realize I’m not here, they’ll go back to searching and follow the light that’s moving.”
“That’s the other half of the plan.” She picked up the pitchfork. “I need you to give me some fire again.”
“I don’t understand.” He glanced up and down the alley again. “We have to go. Not in there. Just... away.”
“Ember.” She waited until he was looking at her again, and offered him the kind of smile Aunt Mouse said meant she was Up to Something. Which, of course, she was. “You’ve been helping me all day. I can help you now. I can get us both away from them, but I need you to trust me, and I need you to do as I say.” She wished she could lay a hand on his arm, or pat him on the cheek the way Amma did to Abba when he needed convincing. But she couldn’t, not right now, at least, when he was exhausted from controlling his flames. All she had were words. “Please?”
He sighed like a guttering candle and nodded his defeat.
Inside, the smell of horse and hay intensified. They’d come in through a human-sized entrance that was inset in a much larger, horse-sized one. Across the stable, on the street side, were the massive doors that could open to admit a cart drawn by a two-horse team. A half-dozen stalls lined the space to the left and right, their living inhabitants replaced by wooden simulacra. They were saddled and bridled, ready for the Fire Children to swing up into the seat. Yulla even noticed mounting blocks beside a couple of them—in case, she supposed, the riders were too short to reach the stirrups.
Ember stayed toward the middle of the space, keeping as far from the hay bales and wooden beams of the stalls as he could while Yulla hunted around to see what else might have been left behind for the Fire Children. In the tack room she found a pile of horse blankets tucked away in a corner. Whether they’d been forgotten by the stable’s owner, or left out for the Fire Children, she didn’t know. She said a quick prayer of thanks to Mother Sun anyway, asking a blessing for the stablemaster.
When she saw the still-full water trough, she added another prayer of thanks and blessing on top of the first. “They’re not going to see you at all,” she said to Ember.
She told him her idea, like the Brigand Queen laying out a scheme for Red Fennec.
YULLA COULD TELL from the way the flames around his eyes burned—low and quick, roiling—that Ember didn’t like the plan. He didn’t like it, but neither did he question it.
They’d found a knife in the tack room, and sawed thick strips off one of the extra horse blankets. Wrapping that around the hay-covered tines of the pitchfork gave Yulla a torch so large she felt almost silly holding it, like a child in a game of Let’s Pretend, with props markedly bigger than their real-life counterparts. Except, there was nothing pretend about what they were about to do.
“I can guarantee it for a quarter of an hour,” said Ember, “maybe a half, if we’re lucky. After that, it’ll eat up what’s there fast.”
“That should be all I need.”
If he noticed the tremor in her voice, he ignored it. “If I were stronger, I could surround you with my fire, not just a farm tool. You’d be like one of us. Or like Mother Sun.”
Was it sacrilege, if the words came from one of the Fire Children? Yulla wasn’t sure. Amma would tut with disapproval, but she couldn’t help but imagine it: running through the darkened streets of the city, throwing not shadows with every step, but light. She’d run so fast bits of flame would follow behind her like the bright ribbons girls wore in their hair when they danced the versam on their sixteenth birthday.
Pretty as the scene was, she forced herself back to reality. “Maybe when you’ve rested,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
With the butt of the pitchfork’s staff, Yulla fished the woolen horse blankets out from where they’d been soaking in the trough for the last few minutes. Now that they were completely saturated, they must have been ten times as heavy. She set the pitchfork-torch aside and spread the sopping blankets out on the ground, layering them so they’d cover as much of Ember’s body as possible.
“When I open the doors, you turn right and run,” she said. Keep going until you’re out of t
own, go where I told you, and I’ll come find you as soon as I can. Okay?” He didn’t answer her at first. She paused in her work to make sure he heard, but the prompt of “Well?” she’d prepared died on her tongue.
He was looking at her the way she’d seen Abba with one of the blacksmith’s puzzles, trying to suss out how the loops and bends of metal fit together, how they could unlock with just the right twist. “Why are you doing this? You could be the one running out into the desert, and they wouldn’t come after you, not if they had me to chase after first. You could take some food and hide out until we went away, and I wouldn’t blame you. I’m not arguing!” He held up his hands before she could tell him it sounded like he was doing exactly that. “I only want to know why.”
Yulla shrugged. “Because you asked me to help you. And... I like you. You don’t leave someone behind because you’re scared.” The option had never even occurred to her. “I wouldn’t even leave Kell to the witch-women, not on her meanest day.”
Precious seconds ticked by as he regarded at her, but Yulla didn’t break away from his gaze. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“Aunt Mouse says ‘thank you’ is always good.”
Ember smiled. “Someday I want to meet your Aunt Mouse. For now, I guess I’ll have to settle for taking her advice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She forced herself back on task before she could get bogged down in staring at him again. What was she, Kell?
No. No, she was not.
The blankets were as well-arranged as they were going to be. If they’d had more time, she’d have tried sewing them together, but it had been nearly ten minutes since Ember’s flare. Every minute the witch-women didn’t come pounding on the door added to Yulla’s certainty they were springing some other kind of trap. It was all right to think that way—smart, even, not to assume they were safe—but she dared not act as though their capture was inevitable.