by Marc Secchia
“Jaki, look.” Airi held up the brown cloth pouch holding the purported egg in her left hand. She was hopping with excitement. “Look, Jaki, it’s all jumpy.”
He stared. In an evening of weirdness, nothing seemed impossible anymore. Did he just imagine a quiver? “Well, I do say … come here with that, Airi. Be careful. Do you want me to –”
“Airi do it!”
“Aye, calm down, you cheeky scrap of silk.”
Quickly opening the drawstring bag, his little sister burrowed her fingers into the soft cotton he had used to insulate and protect the egg. But she was walking at the same time. It seemed to Jakani he knew what must come next in the natural order of things, that his feet were already moving into position and his hands tensing upon the tabletop and the seat of his own chair in readiness. As his sister rounded the table, her left foot snagged on the base of Sokadan’s chair. She stumbled. The white-gilded egg popped out of her grasping fingers and tumbled toward the hard-packed dirt floor in a languid curve.
Next he knew, he was on the floor with the egg clasped in his left hand.
Tytiana exclaimed, “Wow!”
“Thanks, brother,” Sokadan added.
“Huh?”
“You saved my chair from toppling.”
“Oh. Nice.” He picked himself up with care for a decently skinned elbow. A flap of skin dangled loose, but the pain was dull, as if the wound had forgotten how to hurt.
“Good work, son,” Hanzaki put in.
“Well, the egg’s still in one piece, as you can see, o Choice Tytiana.” He held it up to the light. “Hmm. Seems slightly less opaque than before, unless it’s just my eyes. Want to take a look?”
Stretching over the table, he deposited the egg in her upturned palm. In doing so, fingers brushed the skin of her inner wrist. There was a brilliant crimson flash as lightning seemed to lance into him from everywhere at once. KAABOOM!! His eardrums imploded. Jakani tingled from head to toe as if his skin had just been peeled off of him, slapped to within an inch of its life by a team of enthusiastic carpet beaters, and replaced seamlessly. His hair felt as if it had been blown off his head; indeed, he felt a cool breeze entering from a yawning hole in the ceiling, and white ashes drifted down around him like a rare snowfall, and … unholy caroli! Where was his shirt?
As he gazed at Tytiana in stupefaction, someone cried, “His elbow! Oh!” And then the remains of the girl’s dress began to sag away from her torso.
With a squeal of horror, she clutched at the fabric and sank under the level of the tabletop, until only her head and neck showed – and the carbonized imprint of the back of her dress, indelibly burned into the back of his father’s chair.
Tytiana yelled, “You! You impossible – what did you do to my – oh! Where’s your shirt?”
Jakani couldn’t have cared less for his shirt. His hands flew to his trousers. His belt had crumbled to dust. But the important bits were intact. Just about. His relief at this discovery must have been plain to Tytiana, because her gleaming gaze was communicating all manner of very discomforting delight at his state of undress.
His eyes bulged. “She’s on fire!”
* * * *
KAABOOM!!
Faster than her eyes could blink, a torrent of crimson fire poured up Jakani’s arm, stormed around his torso, and then roared upward to blast a gaping hole right through these nice people’s roof.
The Dirt Picker just stood there, mouth agape, smoking.
Oh, heavens weeping rainbows, he was beautiful. For an embarrassingly protracted minute, Tytiana could not tear her eyes off the perfection of his compactly muscled torso. Every detail of every tendon and vein and scar was outlined in black soot, as if a House had commissioned a statue to be entitled, ‘Ode to Masculinity.’ That was Jakani. He would never be called bulky, but his abdominals were like sculpted four-part granite columns apiece, and the sinews of his arms rippled with the slight clenching action of his fists. The anatomical detail of his slanted pectorals leading up to shoulders like clusters of hard fruit, was breathtaking, but above all that hilarity reigned supreme. His long black hair stood stock upright, like a shocked fowl’s feathers, and there was grey smoke – o heavens – drifting out of his ears!
What form of insanity was this?
She had just immolated him. He was fine!
For her part, Tytiana felt better than fine. Ridiculous and befuddled, but abuzz!
Half a chuckle later, a cool breeze creeping around her back alerted her that not all of the scarlet fire had rushed to embrace Jakani. Some of it had – oh no! Duck! And now she was sprawling half under the table wearing half a dress watching all of his family gaping at her scrabbling about as she tried to balance somehow against the chair seat while rearranging a few smouldering scraps of material about those bits of her she would very much not prefer to air in public!
Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for such humiliation. What was she to do?
“She’s on fire!”
A bucketful of water gushed over her head. It was hearth-warm, but just the shock an embarrassingly unclad girl trying to hide beneath a family’s dining table needed at that moment. She drew breath, started to yell something extremely rude and irate, and was doused a second time.
“Blub!” she just about managed.
“Sorry,” said Jakani’s mother, who had just thrown her goblet of fruit juice down her guest’s front. “Your dress – still smouldering!” Whack-whack. “There.”
“Yeow!” Tytiana clutched her right breast.
“Sorry, sweet pea, you might need those one day.” Isimi caught herself with a horrified gasp. “O Choice, I didn’t mean …”
“No, I’m fine, I think –”
How had the flame not burned her? Either of them? Even her artificial foot seemed perfectly fine; the harness was intact.
Isimi cried, “Hanzaki! Fetch her cloak. Jakani, don’t just stand there like a poleaxed goat, go check the roof, you thumping clod of – don’t you dare look! Sokadan, you stay right where you are. Mayoko. Cloths, and fast, we need to dry –”
“We need to hide her,” Jakani interrupted.
His father nodded brusquely. “Right. Neighbours will be over. Arzan, run and get the tarpaulin from Master Jalzi. Tell him we had a fuel spillage in the hearth. Got that?”
“Aye, father.”
“And Jakani, for Islands’ sakes, go put on a shirt,” hissed his mother.
“That was my only shirt,” he growled, still staring at Tytiana as if she had reached out and slapped his jaw firmly through the end of next week. There was an idea. She had been sadly neglectful. What crazy power did that boy possess to set her alight like this? Or her, him?
Those abdominals just didn’t get any less sculpted at a fourth or fifth glance, did they? She had never seen a man upon whom the actual fibres of the muscles stood in etched relief, courtesy of what had to be a ridiculous dearth of body fat. Never imagined one!
In short order, Isimi had scrambled down from her high chair and Tytiana, sans the charred scraps of her dress, was bundled away into the main bedroom under cover of her cloak. Arzan returned with a rustling tarpaulin and a gaggle of voluble neighbours to help secure the roof against the rain until it could be properly repaired, while Jakani apparently went to dunk his overheated, ralti-stupid head in a water barrel somewhere. And to fix his fetching new hair hairstyle.
Isimi pressed the door shut behind Airi. “Sit on the bed. We should check you for injuries.”
Tytiana sat numbly.
Airi gasped, “Look, Mama, she’s got a funny leg like you.”
Before Jakani’s mother could quite die of embarrassment, Tytiana said, “That’s right, except mine is wooden and look, you can move the ankle hinge a bit like this. See? It’s clever.”
“Where’d you lose your real leg?” the girl asked.
“I fell out of a moving carriage when I was very young and was run over by the wheels. It’s alright, sweet pea, I can still –”
she glanced guiltily at Isimi “– walk.”
Sorry, Isimi. Quite the failure of actual tact, there.
The other woman pretended to be busy checking for burns.
If she heard correctly outside the window, Hanzaki threw a shirt at Jakani and offered a few fatherly words that were too low for her to overhear, but they sounded urgent and angry and rattled.
Too right. She was still trying to catch her breath, to make sense of what she had seen and done. All she knew was that his touch seemed to have ignited a secret, unsuspected volcano of flame, as if the time they had spent apart had exacerbated whatever power lurked within her. The time apart had not healed anything, had it?
Jakani’s defensive reply carried clearly, “I didn’t know, father. She – she just – it’s like we spark each other off, don’t you see?”
“I see far too many sparks around these parts!”
Too right. Sparks that started wildfires.
“Aye, father.”
“You are never to touch her again, do you hear me? It’s far too dangerous – for both of your sakes. Fra’anior forefend, protect, sanction without penalty all that has and will be done in this … moment of Moons’ madness!”
Tytiana squeezed her eyes shut. This was terrible. What had she done to him? What misfortune had she selfishly lumped upon this family? A year away and the fires had only been banked up? She had found ways to cope – regular exercise, burying herself in her work, and a few times when she had hiked away into the nearby wilderness around the trout lakes and screamed until her throat was raw. But she knew better than to accuse Jakani of being more than the spark to her bonfire. She must be that different, more mature girl she sincerely hoped she had become during her year away. More enamoured with the truth, less selfishly inclined to vent upon everyone around her, like a wildfire uncaring of where it blazed.
She had vowed to stop hurting people selfishly.
Yet one touch of Jakani’s hand … oh mercy, what was she to do now?
Tears came. Tytiana buried her face in her hands, furiously wishing them away, but she had not cried since her mother died. And now Isimi, kneeling on the bed beside her in that private space, said softly, ‘It’s like that, is it, my sweet-silk?’ and the sensation of a motherly arm slipping about her shoulders broke the terrace lakes of her heart.
How she wept!
Chapter 9: Fire in the Night
BEFORE DAWN, JAKANI walked Tytiana via the secret paths through the many hectares of orchards, up to the main house. Tytiana was shivering. All the fire had rushed out of her in that one great gasp. She hurt all over, but was surprised to notice the cup of her artificial limb and the harness had hardly rubbed her raw, as she would have expected from such a long walk. Was she healing herself?
They spoke in exhausted fragments of sentences.
“Where’s your bedroom window?” he asked.
“That one.”
“Ah. Second floor?”
“Third.”
Jakani’s quick eyes followed the lay of a huge jinsumo tree that stood alongside and overshadowed the Eastern wing of the white brick, broad-fronted manor house with its three sweeping, crenelated gables. Two smaller wings jutted out at twenty-five degree angles behind the main four-story house, giving it the feel of a bird spreading its wings sideways. The great building had wide crysglass windows set in a mathematically exact progression of largest on the ground floor up to smaller windows on the upper floors; three tall, elegant panels per window. Her corner suite boasted five such triple windows of which each panel was two feet wide, three for her receiving chamber and two for the bedroom. The design gave the structure an airy feeling which was accentuated by the fluted two-storey columns around the front and secondary entrances, and the delicately frosted detail picked out around the window frames, lintels, and decorative eaves, crafted to resemble icicles and snowflakes.
An ever-wintery house.
“You can’t climb it,” she said. “Didn’t plan too well.”
He waggled an eyebrow.
“Fine, be insufferable if you must.”
“Can you climb that tree?”
There seemed to be no condescension in his question. She was so used to expecting references to her incapability with physical tasks, she had to blink several times before answering hoarsely, “Only with help.”
“Good.” Jakani pointed at a hedgerow separating the lawn surrounding the front and sides of the house from the formal garden sections. “Follow me. Stay low.”
“To do what?”
“We’re burgling your bedroom.”
“Must we touch again?”
“Scared?”
With a silent imprecation at his obstinacy, Tytiana growled, “Aye.”
And then they were ghosting through the dawn mists. He moved like a ghost, anyways, while in comparison she blundered about sounding like a furious Dragoness. Jakani paused to demonstrate how to place her feet. How to move lower and more sneakily. How to blend with the shadows between the ornamental trees as they sneaked past one guard, then two. He burst forward and simply ran up the fragrant jinsumo’s trunk before leaping upward in one seamless motion, disappearing silently into the broad leaves above. A hand appeared to beckon her forward.
Tytiana scowled. How did a man run ten feet up a vertical surface and then not disturb a single twig? That devious lamko needed a jolly good – ah, indeed. The hand was growing impatient. Move it, slow-slug!
He was dangling upside down from the lowest branch, now. Tytiana reached out. This time his touch barely tingled. Clasping her wrist, he drew her one-handed off the ground as if she weighed no more than a child. Smooth and effortless. Were men ordinarily this strong? Just look at the striations in his shoulder and forearm! Carved like weathered wood.
His left hand reached down for her wooden foot. “Up.”
Using his firm grip as a stepping stone, Tytiana gathered her skirts and scrambled up onto the thick branch he had wrapped his legs about. In a second, he twisted his body and popped up beside her with decidedly annoying facility, adding to her discomfort with a fine example of a ‘how amazing am I?’ smirk. Ugh. Now she really itched to slap him, but since he was allegedly saving her honour after she had scorched his shirt off his infeasibly chiselled torso – ahem.
Her errant thoughts needed a slapping, too!
Jakani helped her up the difficult parts. Tytiana was not a bad climber, but a jinsumo was a huge tree and so reaching some of the branches was tricky. Furthermore, the moisture-saturated air made everything slippery. He offered to boost her up. She politely singed his ears about her lack of desire to climb about above any man when she was wearing a dress. Half a dress, he reminded her. Tytiana snarled that he had best erase that image from his disgusting mud hole of a mind, forthwith! She was quite certain he smothered a chuckle. Arrogant son of a windroc! Perhaps he thought she would rather be looking at his ascending rear end, which was absolutely not the truth.
Apart from one glance. Perhaps two.
And, now a third … Tytiana bit her lip and ordered herself to cease this nonsense!
At length they found a fragrant bough heavy with sweet-smelling pink blossoms in apparent defiance of the season, about six feet from her window, and after steadying himself, he hopped over onto the narrow windowsill with a monkey’s skill and sense of balance, bracing himself with a hand either side of the frame. Not even a wobble. Fishing a kitchen knife out of his belt, he fiddled with the latch and in three seconds flat swung the window inward. So much for House security. Tytiana decided she might not tell her father about this detail.
Exactly how much sneaking about in the dead of night to meet boys was she planning to do?
Zero!
He beckoned again.
Tytiana froze. A guard had just walked by right beneath them. Jakani flattened himself into the window; despite the fellow looking directly up at the House wall, she believed, he failed to see the shadowy figure clinging to the third storey window ledge. The
mists were not all that thick.
After a breathless minute, the man moved on with his patrol. Jakani called softly, “Come on over.”
She shook her head. That gap. It looked like a canyon, and she did not have his confidence. Far from it. They were three storeys off the ground! If she fell, a broken leg would be the least of her worries. Dare she imagine her father’s reaction?
He stretched out further. “I’ll catch you.”
Tytiana reached out gingerly, but their fingertips were still several feet apart. She could not. No. The fire was back, just a gentle susurration, stirred by the rampant fear. Pause. Swallow. Shut eyes and go, go … her strong right foot slipped on the slick bark as she attempted to make her leap, more a dying-duck lurch, in truth. She yelped inadvertently, but again his incredible reactions came to the fore. His fingers caught her flailing arm near the elbow in a grip like a vice. That would bruise! She slammed awkwardly into the wall, knee and hipbone first before chipping her left foot – one benefit to having a wooden appendage – but he was equal to the task, his muscles knotting and leaping into sharp relief as he adjusted to her weight, and then she was rising once more with that absurd ease.
Like flying.
“Dancing rainbows, that was –”
Jakani’s callused palm clamped over her mouth. He almost threw her backward into the room. They landed together behind the brocaded crimson drapes. Even though she landed on top of him – perhaps his deliberate choice – there was nothing soft about him to cushion the fall. All bone and muscle. Thump.
He hissed, “Guard. Pretend to open window, big breath, yawn. Act natural.”
Easier said than done when, to her intense annoyance, an appealing picture flashed into her mind of pirate-Jakani kidnapping her away thus in his Dragonship! Unholy caroli! When had she turned into such a simpering pollen-brain? Aggrieved, Tytiana bit his hand. “Get off.”
Then, she did as she was bid.
This too was a novel sensation.
She wanted to kick someone sprawling into the mud, herself most of all.