by Lauren Roy
His feet hadn’t scorched the road, and any ashes that fell from the horse blankets had long since scattered. At first, when Yulla came upon the twisted acacia tree she’d given him as a landmark, she saw no tracks striking out across the dunes. Had he missed it? Had he been taken before he left the city after all? Had something caused him to keep going, or turn away sooner?
Then two things became apparent: in some places, the sand had melted and clumped together, not quite footprints, but evidence of something extremely hot passing by; and, masking those, the sweep marks made by dragging the edge of the horse blanket over the tracks. She looked at those lumps of glass and realized just how much he had to be cooling himself to be near her. The thought both thrilled and frightened her.
He’d done well hiding the tracks, really, enough to nearly fool Yulla. She had to hope that the witch-women would miss them if they came looking—Yulla herself had only spotted them because she knew this was where Ember should have left the road.
Aunt Mouse’s quilt was too heavily-laden for Yulla to cover her own tracks in the same way, but she found a fallen branch from the acacia tree that could serve the same purpose. Dragging it behind her, swishing it from side to side across the indents her steps left in the sands, Yulla left the road and followed Ember’s tracks.
MOTHER SUN AND Sister Moon had dropped lower in the sky by the time Yulla reached the cave. The desert’s usual nighttime chill had deepened; she almost regretted wrapping her supplies in Aunt Mouse’s quilt, but even if she could wrap it around herself it wouldn’t do much good. It will be warm inside with Ember, she thought, surprised how much she looked forward to the idea.
Spurred on by equal parts cold and anticipation, she hurried towards the darkened mouth of the cave. Unease crept up on her as the low-slung hump of rock began looking less like a particularly tall dune and more like a hideaway worthy of the Brigand Queen and her companions.
In fact, it was exactly that sort of thing that had made Yulla explore the cave in the first place. The summer before, someone had suggested going off and scouting out that way. When Kell realized the younger children were the most eager to go, she’d sniffed in disdain and announced her own excursion, to the market to look at a new shipment of silks that had come in. By itself, that would have made Yulla’s day—an afternoon where she could let her imagination run wild, free of Kell’s judgment.
But then her own friends had opted to go with Kell, too, leaving Yulla the eldest of the desert-bound group and its leader by default. She’d spent an agonizing moment staring after the knot of girls, hurt that her friends—who knew how insufferable Kell could be—had chosen to go with her sister. She’d almost chased after them and inserted herself into their ranks because it was what she thought she should do.
But it wasn’t what she’d wanted to do, and she was fairly sure the same was true for at least two of the girls who’d broken off to go wander the market with the older group. Well, they could tell Yulla about their miserable afternoon later, and she promised herself she wouldn’t gloat if she had a better time. She’d led her ragtag group out of the city feeling much better.
The cave was perfect: not very big or deep, more a sheltered outcropping if she were honest, but tall enough for half a dozen of them to stand up in and wide enough to sit in a circle in the shade and tell stories, or plot capers just like the Brigand Queen. There was even a spring toward the back, where cold, clear water bubbled up slowly from somewhere deep below. It only made a small puddle, one that would take hours to refill if someone drank too greedily, but in their games it became the fountain of wisdom, or healing, moon-blessed waters, or the sip that would pull the parched hero away from death’s edge.
They’d played in the cave for weeks, inventing new games or adapting old ones to the space. Yulla brought her friends, the ones who’d chosen Kell that first day, and they loved it as much as she did. But interest tapered off after a while, as new exciting places were found and the children moved on to those. Still, while it might have slipped the others’ minds, it stayed fresh in Yulla’s.
Returning to it now was a homecoming akin to those first steps she’d taken in her own kitchen after emerging from the cellar just this morning.
Except.
The sense of unease grew. Ember’s tracks were there, leading up to the shadowed opening of the cave. He must have been burning hot by the time he got here, because those lumps of melted sand were even more prevalent than before. So why wasn’t his flickering glow lighting up the entrance? Even if he’d tucked himself way in the back, she ought to be able to see him by now. He’d made it this far, his footprints said so. And unless the witch-women had erased their own, no other tracks stretched out into the night.
The Wind. Did the Wind take him? She’d lost track of it back in the city, so intent was her focus on the pale-haired witch’s birds. Kell’s dire tales of the Wind scooping people up clanged in her ears as she dropped her branch and ran toward the cave.
Only a few paces away, Yulla saw what Ember had done, and dropped to her knees. Breathy, gasping giggles of relief escaped her as the tattered remnants of the horse blankets stirred on the breeze. He’d tucked the ends into the crevices above the opening, securing them by wedging rocks in the cracks. When the rags moved, Ember’s glow shone through the strips.
Yulla collected herself and spent a minute peering around, trying to make sure the breeze she felt was only a breeze, and not an extension of the witch-women’s spying Wind. Without magic of her own there was no way to be sure, but it didn’t go shrieking off after it riffled her hair, didn’t duck into the cave and throw a tempest at Ember’s presence.
It might not have been a malicious breeze, but it was certainly a cold one. She stood up and pushed her way past the horse blankets and into the cave.
Heat—oh, wonderful heat—enveloped her as soon as she stepped inside. The blankets dropped into place, banishing the chill that had slipped in on her heels. Ember sat near the back, pressed up against one of the walls. He wasn’t flaring now, though the scorch marks that crawled up the wall and across the cave floor suggested he had when he’d first arrived. Now he was that comforting fireplace yellow-orange he’d been when they’d first met.
“You made it.” He looked better than he had back in the city, but when he started to stand, Yulla waved him back down.
“Keep resting.” She set herself down across from him and began unpacking the quilt. “I took more food from a different house. I hope that’s all right. I thought maybe you’d be hungry, too, but I don’t know what you like. So I grabbed a little of everything. Um.” She was babbling. Some of it was because they were safe now, at least for a little while. Her brain was finally catching on to that, and was winding down from the fear and adrenaline by talking too much.
There was a piece of her that knew she was talking to a... god? Godling? Whatever being Mother Sun’s own child made him, they were sitting in a cave together, he and Yulla. They’d worked together to escape the witch-women, but that didn’t mean she had the right to be so familiar with him.
She hardly knew him, but she liked him. He was as scared and trapped as she was, but he’d kept his wits about him. He was kind and brave, and all kinds of intriguing. She had half a hundred questions she wanted to ask him, and yet she didn’t know how.
“It’s all right,” he said, when she finally took a breath. “I don’t need to eat.”
“You... you don’t? But today—”
“It’s not just your food that gives us strength.” He stood, the motion smooth and graceful. “Watch.” He ran toward the cave’s mouth, touched the top edge of the opening, and trotted back. When he dropped down into a sitting position again, he wasn’t even a little winded. “The stable,” he said. “Yulla, the way it burned, so fast and so close. I was the only one there to take it all in. That one whole, huge offering, for me.” He ducked his head, sheepish. “I felt so strong by the time I reached the edge of town, I almost turned around and tried to go
find my brothers and sisters. I felt like I could do anything.”
She was too shocked to try chasing away the silence that fell with words. Anything she might have said was driven right off her tongue by the image of Ember going back into the city and taking on the witch-women by himself.
He took her horror for hurt. “It was the rush of energy speaking, I promise.” He’d been leaning forward, intent. Now he sat back, softening, some of the confidence draining away as he spoke. “We’re a team now, you and me. Your plan got me away from them. Running back in after that? Alone? That’d be throwing away a gift.”
“I was getting us both out of there. It wasn’t a gift, just, I don’t know. Fear. It wasn’t anything special.”
“It was, though. It gave me strength, too, like burning the stable did.” Again he ducked his head, and looked up at her from beneath the smoke wisps that were his eyelashes. “I was getting worried, though. If you hadn’t gotten here when you did, I was going to go back and look for you. Gift or no gift.”
“You’d have come back for me, even after you’d decided against going and finding the others?”
“It’s different. You don’t leave your rescuer behind.”
“But that was the plan.”
He shook his head. “No. The plan was for us both to get away and meet up here. That’s not leaving you behind; it’s splitting up for a while. How did you get away from them?”
This was more familiar territory. Yulla launched into the tale, from where she’d seen him running down the street in his smoldering cloak, through the maze of alleys and up onto the rooftops. He laughed when she got to the pitchfork flame thwarting the pale-haired witch, and frowned when she mentioned her strange power. He promised her no starlings had come flapping by.
“And the Wind? It hasn’t been here, either?”
“No. Which is odd, don’t you think? This is its home. Her home, out here in the desert.”
Yulla thought about the words she’d heard Vedra mutter, the ones that made the Wind respond. “They’re controlling it—her—somehow. But I don’t think it would take very much coaxing. She hates us. We’re what came after Mother Sun boiled her lover away. We’re a constant reminder of that loss.”
He’d sat back the rest of the way while she told her story, making a tiny flame-Yulla reenact the events on the surface of his palm. The figure melted back into the rest of him as he pushed himself to his feet and began pacing. “How do your people tell the story? Of Mother Sun and Father Sea and the Desert Wind?”
She thought of the priestesses at the Worship Hall, how they recited the poems in voices that lilted and flowed. Yulla loved listening to them so much she’d memorized a few and recited them for her family on holy days. It was one thing to say them before Amma, Abba, Aunt Mouse, and Kell. Entirely another to tell one of the Fire Children a story about his own mother. Especially one like this, that painted her as jealous and vengeful and cruel when provoked. “I...”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know it’s not a nice one.” Amusement sparked in his eyes, quirked the corners of his lips.
It relaxed her. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was in her own sitting room, with a human audience. She told him how Mother Sun loved Father Sea with all her blazing heart, and how their children fished from his waters and basked in her light. How the Wind had loved him, too, playing over his waves, skimming his body with her own, and how Father Sea became her lover. They’d tried hiding it from Mother Sun, by meeting only on nights when Sister Moon’s face was turned away, but one night, she was merely behind the clouds. When they parted, she saw, and told Mother Sun, even though she knew it would break her heart.
“The Wind hid away while Mother Sun came down to boil Father Sea away to nothing. Mother Sun destroyed the children she’d made with Father Sea as well, because she couldn’t bear to be reminded of him. When she was gone, the Wind emerged to find nothing but the scorching sands of the desert. The only memento she has of Father Sea is the salt flats to the east.” Yulla opened her eyes and found Ember watching her closely. “It’s why she stays and mourns. She’s scouring the desert, looking for more of his remains.”
Ember was quiet for a long time after she stopped speaking. Yulla worried that the story had angered him after all, but he looked more thoughtful than upset. “She won’t find them,” he said at last. “Father Sea isn’t dead.”
“WHAT DO YOU mean?” The stories said Father Sea’s waters had risen taller than the highest towers, that his and Mother Sun’s children had lived on rafts tied together to make their cities. Now and again someone found a piece of wood in the desert that they insisted came from one of those ancient floats.
“She regretted what she’d done. When all her rage was spent, and after that, her grief, she looked at the destruction she’d wrought and knew it was a terrible thing.” Ember crept closer, but Yulla didn’t mind: this new part of the story made her cold. “She begged Sister Moon to bring their children back first, but it wasn’t possible. My aunt can heal many things, but death is beyond her domain.”
“Like she tried to bring back my people, after the first time the Fire Children—” she broke off, eyes widening at her own boldness, but Ember was nodding.
“Like that. It didn’t work either time. But Father Sea, he’s as immortal as they are. Mother Sun gathered up his remains. Her punishment had left him so scattered the clouds filled the sky from horizon to horizon, but she found every last drop of his body. Then she led them far away, to another part of the world. To a place where the trees are so tall and so dense, there are spots where her light never touches the ground.
“And that’s where she let him go. She rained him down in the greatest storm the jungle had ever seen, and he became the mightiest of rivers. He’s there to this day.”
At first, Yulla could only stare. Did the priests know? If they did, why hide the information? It didn’t change the fact that Mother Sun could be vengeful and cruel. And while it didn’t excuse what she’d done, knowing she felt remorse, that she’d tried to make it... if not right at least better, could only serve to endear the people to her. No, they probably didn’t know. Did the witch-women, then? Or...
“The Wind doesn’t know, does she?”
Ember shrugged. “I’d imagine not. Not if she’s stayed here all this time.”
She didn’t quite dare ask how long that was. “What if we told her? Do you think she’d leave us alone to go find him?”
“Maybe,” said Ember. “It’s worth a try.”
“But how do we talk to her? I mean, we don’t know if she’s working with them or if she’s under a spell.” Yulla thought of the way Vedra had muttered in that sing-song voice back in the alley, and how the Wind had responded. It certainly seemed like a spell, but she couldn’t be sure. “And we don’t know her language.”
“I can try. I know some of the old tongues. I have to.”
“To talk to other gods?”
“Because Mother Sun yells at us in them.” He made a face that was a lot like Kell’s when she got a scolding: lips pursed, eyelids hooded, brow furrowed.
Yulla couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s it like?” she asked, when her giggles were under control. “Living among the stars.”
“We are the stars. Or we will be.”
“What does that mean?”
He picked up a handful of pebbles, shook them in his palm until they began glowing with heat, and tossed them gently toward the rear of the cave where it was darkest. For a moment, they hung suspended in the shadows, forming tiny constellations that twinkled before they faded out. “We’ll grow up,” he said, simply. “Someday we’ll all move on, and have worlds of our own to watch over.”
Other worlds. Did that mean there were other people? Other Kaladims, other Kells and Old Molls, far away? Her mind spun with the possibilities. There were stories in Abba’s book about a pair of twins who rode a comet to other worlds, but those were stories. She’d envied them their dis
coveries, but to be told there was a grain of truth in them... Something else struck her.
“You won’t be able to come back here, then, will you?” The thought made her sad, though she knew even if he did come back, she might not be able to see him again. She shouldn’t have left the cellars this time; there was no way Amma would let her sneak away the next time the Darktimes came, even if it wasn’t for another fifteen years and Yulla was a woman grown.
“Well. I can choose when I’m ready. It doesn’t have to be this time, or the next. My eldest sister has come visiting a dozen times now. She likes the paintings the children leave for us.”
“But that’s...” Doing the math made Yulla’s head spin. Fifteen years since the last time they were here. Threes and fives and tens before that. Old Moll remembers nearly twenty years between their visits, once. “She’d have to be a hundred years old. More.”
“That’s not so long. And it’s different for us. Some of us only stop being a part of Mother Sun to come down here. When they go home, they’ll go back to being part of her until the next time, or the time after that, or the time after that. Some of them sleep for centuries at a stretch. It’s what our middle brother did. He’ll probably go back to sleep after this, too.” He didn’t say if we rescue him, but the thought hung unspoken on the air.
Yulla wasn’t ready to deal with that possibility. She saw the opportunity for further distraction and clutched at it. “What do the rest of you do, the ones who stay awake?”
“We catch hold of comets and have races. We ride the flares from Mother Sun out into the dark and drift our way back. There are molten pools on her surface bigger than this whole world, and we swim in them.” He smiled at her shyly. “We spend a lot of our time watching you all.”
The priests said Mother Sun was always watching, and Amma wasn’t afraid to threaten her daughters into behaving with the same, but the thought of the Fire Children looking down at them, too, mystified her. They knew Mother Sun was far, far away. The scholars said there were other worlds between Mother Sun and their own, and others far beyond. You could cover her face with your hand in the sky the same way you could hide a traveler on the road to Darat with your thumb while he was still miles out. Yulla couldn’t begin to fathom how huge Mother Sun must be close-up, but Ember was right here, people-sized. Even the travelers on the road disappeared after a while, to her eyes. “How do you see that far?”