The Fire Children (11 page)

It was when she reached for the doorknob things got strange. She could see its brass bulb. It reflected Ember’s flames, and in the light he gave off, Yulla could see her own face distorted in its surface. But when she reached out to grasp it her hand passed through it like smoke. The door itself felt solid, though when she tried prying her fingers into the crack between door and frame, it all went hazy again.

Break the sigil, break the spell.
Wasn’t that how it happened in stories? Wasn’t that how the Brigand Queen had escaped the Lady of the Greys? Her hand hovered over the markings as she looked for a thin spot in the paint lines. If she couldn’t chip away at it with a fingernail, she’d find something in the kitchen she could use. The family might have left cutlery behind. Or, if not that, she’d break the plate the cheese sat atop and use a sharp edge to scrape at the paint. She’d carve new grooves through the ones they’d dug into the wood to write her name.

Except.

Except beneath her fingertips, where she should have felt the bumps and ridges of the door panels, the surface was smooth as glass. It even
sounded
like glass when she tapped at it.

“Can you melt it?”

The blue of Ember’s eyes flashed white. Yulla supposed it was how he blinked. “What?”

“It feels like glass. Glass melts. And even if there really isn’t any glass there,
paint
melts.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I tried earlier, before I found you. We can’t affect the doors at all.”

Her shoulders slumped. She leaned back against the door, feeling the absence of the knob where it ought to be digging into her hip. Was
it
going intangible when she touched it, or was Yulla the one going ghost-like, her very self fading out at the spell’s command?

“What will they do?” she whispered. “If they catch us, what will they do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, but he looked away as he spoke. Kell did that, too, whenever she lied.

“Don’t. We have to trust each other, and that means telling the truth, even if it’s awful.” She waited until his eyes flicked back to hers. “You must have a guess.”

“I really don’t know what they’ll do to you. They might just lock you away somewhere. But my brothers and sisters and I... I think they’ll try to extinguish us.”

“Ex...” She squinted into the light he gave off. There was a form beneath the flames, but she had no way of knowing how they were connected. Were flames to the Fire Children what skin was to humans?

“It would be agony,” he said. “It might even kill us. When we got here, the Wind tried to blow us out. You should have heard how she screamed.” He smiled bitterly. “It only made us stronger.”

Of course.
You might be able to blow out a match, but when you wanted to get a fire started, you blew on the kindling to help it catch. And when a blaze was really going, the wind helped it spread. “So if they know that won’t work?”

“Then I imagine they’ll try a few things until they find one that does.” He said it like it didn’t matter, like he wasn’t worried, but Yulla had heard that tone before. She’d heard it in Abba’s voice, when the poison winds came and swirling walls of sand and dust and grit threatened to blanket Kaladim, ruin the crops, make the water undrinkable. She’d heard it in Amma’s voice a few years gone, when sickness had gripped the city and death had visited every third house.

This was how you spoke when you didn’t want the people near you to be frightened, even though Lady Fear had her talons stuck deep in your heart.

The anger came upon Yulla like a desert storm, boiling through her the way thunderheads rose into a clear sky. It scaled up and over the fear that had been gnawing at her gut since the Wind had chased her away from her own cellar door. The witch-women had trapped her up here, cut her off from her family, from safety. The terror that had been hovering since Ember pointed out her name carved into the wood... that terror
twisted
, took a hard, sharp turn, became fury.

Added to that was the memory of the Fire Child—Ember’s sister—being dragged along behind them, the way she’d seen cruel owners dragging skittish dogs.
Mother Sun gives us light and warmth and life, and this is how they repay her. She showed no mercy to Father Sea when he betrayed her; why would she let any of us live when she finds out humans harmed her children?

She spun and pounded at the door, kicking it, clawing at that strange glassy surface even though her nails found no purchase. She slapped at it until her palms felt bruised, then did it again with the sides of her fists. The skin on her knuckles split with the force of her knocks, and it was the warm blood trickling down her fingers and along the backs of her hands that finally made her stop.

The effort left her winded. Some of the scrapes she’d acquired in her exploration down below were singing their displeasure. When she stuck a bloodied knuckle into her mouth, she realized Ember had retreated into an even farther corner. He watched her warily—not afraid, but the way you might look at an unfamiliar animal whose movements you couldn’t predict. Or like Kell first thing in the morning, before you knew which side of the bed she’d woken up on.

“I suppose that wasn’t very ladylike,” she said, when her breathing calmed.

“It was impressive.”

“It didn’t
do
anything, though.” Leaning against the door, Yulla sank to the ground. If nothing else, the smooth ensorcelled surface kept splinters from digging into her back on the way down. “The marks are still there, and I don’t think their spell lets sound through to the other side, either. If it had someone would have come upstairs by now. There has to be something we can do. I just have to
think
.”

Her stomach yowled again, and with its complaint came a wave of hunger-born nausea.

“Are you all right?” asked Ember. It dawned on Yulla that maybe he’d never heard the sound of an empty stomach before.

“Fine. Just hungry.” She took a few deep breaths to counteract the queasiness. When she was sure she could speak without retching, she grinned ruefully. “When I came up above, I thought I’d be home in time for breakfast. That was hours ago.”

Ember swept a hand toward the table between them, and its spread of bread and cheese and fruit. “So eat.”

If she could have backed away any farther, she would have. “I... No, I can’t. That’s—”
Sacred,
she almost said, but the word felt silly after all the ways she’d been—and was still—violating the precepts of these holiest days. “It’s for you,” she said instead. “For you and your siblings.”

“Ah.” A spray of long thin breadsticks had been arranged in a glass like a bouquet of flowers. Ember plucked one, held it up so Yulla could see it, and let his flames consume it. When the last of the ashes drifted away, he nodded at the table again. “There. I’m full, and my brothers and sisters aren’t here. It would be a shame if that all went to waste.”

The idea of it! Of eating the food meant for the Fire Children! Yulla shook her head. “I can’t.”

“So you’ll starve instead?” He snorted. “If they come for us, you need to be able to run. You need to eat. Listen.” Ember came closer to her, hunkering down so his eyes were level with hers. Yulla felt the heat of him, resisted holding out her hands to warm them like you did at a campfire. “This food was left for us to do with as we wish. I wish to share it with you. Please, will you eat?”

Any protest she had left was drowned out by the racket coming from her middle.

Her head swam as she stood, another reminder of how badly she needed food. Ember rose with her, keeping his distance even when she swayed. With each step she took, he edged an equal one backwards until she pulled out a chair and sat.

The spread Sera’s family had left for the Fire Children would have been a feast any regular day of the year: half a dozen fat blocks of cheese; a basket overflowing with bread; plums, figs, apricots, dates, both fresh and dried; enough pastries to sate a hundred sweet tooths. Yulla wanted to unhinge her jaw like a snake, tilt the whole table’s contents into her mouth, and swallow everything on it at once, manners be damned.

Instead, she selected a plum, struggling against her hunger to keep at least a sliver of her dignity intact. With an effort that could have rivaled that of Inkspot in the stories, resisting the urge to open the Cache of Secrets, Yulla took a careful, casual bite.

Had she been standing, her knees would have gone weak. Sweetness flooded her tongue, and she had to take her next bite quickly to keep the overripe fruit’s juices from escaping down her chin. For a moment, she almost forgot she had a companion, so focused was she on the plum, then a chewy roll, then a piece of cheese gone slightly melty from being near Ember. Eventually, her frantic pace slowed, and she grinned at him. “It’s good.”

“I’m glad.”

It was odd, being at someone else’s kitchen table when they weren’t home to host. Even though all of this was meant to be destroyed by the Fire Children—the food, the furniture, the cheese platter with its cool green glaze—Yulla couldn’t help but feel like there were eyes on her, disapproving. Everyone she knew was down below, yet she still expected Amma or Abba or Sera’s mother to walk into the room and holler
Thief!
Which, in fact, Yulla was—eating food meant for the Fire Children, contemplating whether to carry some of it away with them when they left this house, or whether they should break into another home when she grew hungry again.

I’m like the Brigand Queen,
she thought, and on the heels of that,
Does that make Ember Red Fennec?
She shook her head at her own silliness. Once, Yulla had thought the stories about how the Brigand Queen had wooed and won Red Fennec were boring; she’d preferred to hear about the heists and schemes of the whole troupe. In the last few years, though, she’d changed her mind about that, realized there were adventures wrapped around the romance, feeding into it, making it more real.

But those were stories;
this
was real. She wasn’t the Brigand Queen, she was a fifteen-year-old girl. She was up above during the Scorching Days, and one of the Fire Children was in the same room with her. It was at the same time better than any tale in Abba’s book, and more terrifying, and...

And Ember was pulling up a chair.

The paint peeled, blackened, flaked away beneath his fingers, revealing the wood. Scorch marks ran along that as well, then came wisps of smoke, curling up toward the ceiling. The chair’s top rail caught all at once; the sudden flare of heat and light made Yulla shield her eyes instinctively.

Below the crackling flame, she heard the scrape of wood on stone. When she lowered her hands, Ember was sitting in the burning chair a few feet away from the table. She couldn’t tell where the flames of his body stopped and the ones on the chair began, but she could see the outline of the legs and arm rests, dark against the oranges and golds of the fire.

“It’s not collapsing,” she said.

“I can control it, at least for a little while. Come look, if you’d like. I can keep from singeing you.”

She took a pastry with her to nibble on as she circled around Ember in his chair. The fire shifted in places, letting her see the form it surrounded. In some places, the wood and paint seemed untouched. In others, they smoldered. Here and there chunks of ash dropped to the floor, but for the most part the chair remained a chair. Yulla bent closer, the heat enough to make her eyeballs feel dry. She came back around to the front, and found herself looking into Ember’s eyes.

He
did
have a body beneath the flames; she could make it out better close up. His blue eyes had no irises, no pupils, but instead twinkled like the stars. He smiled as their gazes met, and she was glad for the heat as she smiled back—he wouldn’t be able to tell she was blushing when she was already red-faced from the temperature.

“Hold out your hand,” he said.

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

She held hers out, palm up. Ember did the same, the tips of his fingers only inches from her own. Still, she didn’t burn.

One of the flames licking up from his palm separated from the others, separated from
him,
and danced its way toward Yulla. When it reached the end of Ember’s fingers, it paused like a cat gauging the distance between two countertops. Then it leapt and landed square in the middle of her palm.

It was warm but not painful, as though she held a coin that had been left out in the sun awhile. It weighed nothing, though as it began to trace the outline of her hand, its path was like a feather against her skin.

“How are you doing this?” She bent her fingers upward, not closing the flame in, but giving it something to climb. It moved dutifully. When she spread her fingers apart, it spiraled around the one it had been traversing until it reached the tip, then hopped to the next and spiraled back down.

“All fires are ours to command while we’re here. I gave this one to you.”

She looked away from the tongue of flame to find him smiling at her. Shyly, she returned it.

A breeze fluttered past, offering a moment’s coolness on the back of her neck. It ruffled the flames of Ember’s hair.

Wait.

A breeze.

None of the windows were open, and she’d made sure to close the front door behind her as they came in.

“We have to go,” said Yulla, as fear sent a bolt of cold down her spine. “They’ve found us.”

The flame in her hand puffed out.