The Fire Children (16 page)

“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 discoveries, 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?”

“We touch Mother Sun,” he said, “and we see what she sees.” His flames dimmed, lowering the light all through the cave. It made his blue eyes seem so much brighter. He covered her hand with his own, and Yulla gasped.

She was looking at herself through Ember’s eyes. Dust dulled her hair, which was limp in some places and windblown and tousled in others. Dirt and soot streaked across her face, broken only by the smudges where she’d wiped sweat away during her flight from the witch-women. Her clothes were a mess, her fingernails filthy with dirt.

And yet.

Kell always told her she was a pretty kind of plain. Looking through Ember’s eyes, she couldn’t quite refute that, but there was something else there she couldn’t quite put a finger on. It was almost as if she were lit from another source of light, small and subtle, certainly not as bright as Ember’s, but there all the same. It made her seem alive, vital. Yulla was perfectly happy with what she saw in the mirror every morning. This light, whatever it was, made her lovely.

She reached up with her free hand, as if she were touching the face in the mirror. She saw her own dirt-caked fingernails come up—

And she snatched them away, hissing in pain. The vision snapped.

Ember let go of her hand. “Yulla, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you would... Are you all right?” He held a hand out, as though he could help. In the end he let it drop into his lap. “I’m sorry.”

She stuck her singed fingertips in her mouth and sucked at them for a moment before she answered him. “It’s all right.” She showed him, and immediately wished she hadn’t: her saliva had only smeared the dirt around. “I’ve gotten worse helping Aunt Mouse in the kitchen.”

“It looks like it hurts.”

A small blister was forming about midway down on her middle finger, but she hadn’t lied when she told him she’d had worse. “Once, Aunt Mouse set a hot pan down on the table. I watched her do it, but when I wanted to put something else beside it a minute later, I wasn’t thinking. I tried moving it without a potholder.” It had been agony, even though she’d dropped the pan as soon as the pain registered, scattering dinner across the floor. For a week, she’d gone around with her whole hand wrapped in silk, the burnt parts smeared with salve. It had throbbed and throbbed. This was nothing next to that. “It’ll be all right. Watch.”

The water in Abba’s canteen was tepid, but it calmed her singed skin and washed away the worst of the dirt. She patted her fingers dry with a corner of Aunt Mouse’s quilt, and rummaged around in her pile of stolen foodstuffs until she found the pot of honey she’d swiped. Getting the lid off was awkward; she steadied the pot with her injured right hand and twisted with her left. It took a few tries, but soon enough she set it on the ground, dipped her fingers in, and gingerly rubbed a scoop of honey over her burns. What the water hadn’t cooled, the honey did.

“See?” She grinned. “Worlds better.”

Ember didn’t look convinced, but he nodded anyway.

Yulla sorted through the pile of food with her good hand until she found a persimmon that was just barely ripe. Kell made fun of her for it, but she liked the slightly bitter tang the fruit had when it was like this. Her teeth were about to break the skin when she remembered herself, and held it up so Ember could see. “Would you like any?”

“No.” He stared at her honeyed fingers. “How does putting food on that help?”

It hurt to flex them, but it would keep the burnt skin from stiffening too much. “Honestly? I don’t know. It’s a remedy Amma uses.” She bit into the persimmon, savoring the bitter and sweet mixing on her tongue. “You haven’t seen anyone do that before? When you’re watching us?”

“We don’t watch individuals, really. More like, we watch people as a whole. Towns, cities. The whole world.”

She tried imagining what that would be like, viewing the comings and goings of Kaladim from the top of the guard tower. You’d see the caravans travelling in and out of the gates, smell the bread baking as Hatal got his apprentices working before Mother Sun rose, see the merchants open their stalls at the market and the people crowd in. But there’d be no way to know that this person was buying herbs for a sick mother, or the conversation that family had around their dinner table. “So you only know us from a distance.”

“Until we come down here.”

“But even then, how well do you know us? You experience our
things,
but that’s not
us.
How much can a chair tell you? Or a picture?”

Ember scuttled forward and selected one of the pastries Yulla had set aside. It sat in the palm of his hand at first, a dollop of kumquat jam in the middle of its buttery, flaky crust. Then it ignited, the doughy part of it burning up, the jam melting and running before it, too, caught. The smell of burnt pastry and fruit made Yulla’s nose wrinkle. “I see the woman who made it rolling out the dough and painting it with melted butter. She folds it and rolls it again, then adds more butter. Over and over, until it’s just the way she wants it. I see her children helping her make the jam, and before that, the family at the market, buying the kumquats and the flour and the butter and the eggs.

“I see the grove of trees where the fruit was grown, the hand that picked it. I see the little girl who tends the chickens, how carefully she gathers the eggs from beneath the hens. I could tell you about the miller who made the flour, or the man who churned the butter.

“I can hear the songs the children sang while they waited for their pastries to bake, and I know who stole one from the cooling rack when their mother wasn’t watching.” His smile was both proud and shy. “But I’ve never been able to talk to any of them, or ask them questions.”

“What do you want to know?” She wasn’t a priestess or an elder, had done nothing in her life that all the other children in Kaladim hadn’t done as well. What could she tell Ember that wouldn’t bore him?

“Everything.”

F
IRST,
Y
ULLA INSISTED
on peeking into the back of the cave to see if the spring was still there. If she was going to answer his questions, she wanted to be composed. It was, and after a long drink from the tiny, shallow pool, she washed the dirt from her face, got the worst of it from under her fingernails, and did her best not to irritate her burns. By the time she was done, she felt closer to normal than she had all day.

She remembered being in the Worship Hall, sitting at the priestess’ feet with a cluster of other children her age. Lessons were held in the cool of the evening, after school was over and chores were done. Every priestess was different: one expected complete silence while she read aloud from her holy book; another made the children do the reading, and asked them to reword each passage in their own way. Some frowned on fidgeting, others took it as a hint of drifting minds and would change tactics to keep their class engaged.

Her favorite priestess would sit with them—among the children instead of on the steps above—and not say a word. The students asked whatever questions came to mind, and she answered them, letting them branch as far afield as they wished over the hour. No question was too silly, no leap of logic ever mocked.

She felt a little like that priestess now, as Ember asked her question after question after question.

The priestesses, of course, never had unkempt hair and two-day-old clothes, but Ember didn’t seem to mind. He hadn’t been joking when he’d said he wanted to know everything. She walked him through a day, and every sentence sparked a new slew of tangents: what did she see out her window when she woke up? What did Abba sound like? Amma? Aunt Mouse?

She felt only a teeny twinge of guilt for making her Kell-voice shrill.

What did she eat for breakfast? How was it cooked? How did it taste? They stopped to compare notes on a piece of hard cheese, Yulla nibbling at hers and closing her eyes, telling him about its saltiness, its sharpness, its crumbly texture on her tongue; Ember burning it in pebble-sized chunks, telling her about who made it.

He wanted to know what she studied at her lessons, what the light was like in the classroom in the morning, at midday, in the afternoon. When she mentioned that Amma played her setar sometimes, after everyone was asleep, he asked if Yulla played an instrument. If they went back into the city, after they were safe, could she play a song on Abba’s flute?

He asked about stories, and she had to stop after two of the Brigand Queen’s tales and as much of Inkspot as she could remember without Abba’s book. Her throat was dry by then, and a peek outside told her Mother Sun and Sister Moon had set.

Then he asked about the
versam.

“There’s a dance I’ve seen,” he said. “In the summer. Everyone’s in bright colors, and you’re all spinning around from one person to another.”

“The
versam.
When we’re sixteen, it’s considered the first of our in-between years. We’re not children anymore, but we’re not quite adults. I guess you could say we’re saying goodbye to childhood and hello to being grown-ups. Letting go and welcoming.” She thought of Kell, how she’d been this past year and a half: mercurial, moody.

“You start leaving things behind,” Yulla said, and for the first time, realized how hard that must be on Kell. She watched Yulla still doing the things Kell herself enjoyed, and yet she tried so very hard to act the way she thought the adults wanted her to, she’d given those things up.

“Will you show me how it goes?” Ember asked, pulling her out of her thoughts.

“I’m not sixteen for another year.”

It wasn’t a straight answer, and Ember didn’t let it pass. “You must know the steps, though. Either practicing yourself, or watching your sister.”

Yulla looked at herself again: wrinkled, dust-stained clothes, sandals whose straps were ready to give, not even a flower to tuck in her hair. “It loses something without the dress.”

“I can help with that.” Ember stood, dampening his flames again, and beckoned Yulla to her feet.