The Fire Children (19 page)

It took a lot of effort for her not to stand there slack-jawed at how casually Ember spoke of dead (
not-dead
) Father Sea. Somehow she pulled the stopper from the canteen and managed to shake a few drops out onto the bark. It soaked up the moisture quickly, darkening the wood around the sigils etched into it. Then Ember moved past her to tuck the scrap of bark in beneath one of the ribbons.

Carefully, his flames banked so low he smoldered more than burned, Ember touched the wish he’d made. It caught, the flames devouring it in a flash that lasted only a few heartbeats.

Then the breeze came, and held the ashes suspended in the air before sweeping them away over the sands.

Ember backed away from the trees, stopping beside Yulla. “Now we wait. It won’t be long.”

The breeze skirled back past them. By the time it reached the acacias, it had picked up strength enough to rattle the high branches, making them click together like knucklebones thrown across the Worship Hall’s floor. Then it whipped them, bent them, making the trunks creak and groan with its force.

Then it came for Ember and Yulla.

The Wind howled around them, driving them so close together Ember had to dampen his flames altogether so he didn’t burn Yulla. They cringed into each other, each hiding their face in the other’s shoulder as the Wind kicked up the sands around them, driving it into every bit of exposed skin like needles. Ember was shouting something into Yulla’s neck, speaking a language she couldn’t understand.

He lifted his face, screaming it now, and the Wind tore his words away.

It wormed between them, prying them apart in bursts, preventing them from coming all the way back together. Yulla felt a sudden, bodiless shove, and went sprawling. Through slitted eyes, she saw Ember a few feet away, still on his feet. She lunged toward him, crawling to keep herself as hard to blow about as she could. When she was close enough, she sprang, reaching for his hand.

He saw her coming, locked his wrist with hers, and hauled her in. They clung together as the Wind keened, Ember’s voice hoarse and ragged as he continued to shout.

Then the Wind dropped off. It didn’t disappear, but the battering stopped, as did the howling, replaced by something that felt almost like a caress.

“I think she finally understood me,” said Ember.

Yulla looked at herself, surprised to find she wasn’t bleeding in a thousand places. Her skin felt raw, but aside from a few cuts and scrapes, she was all right. Ember seemed fine as well. He turned to face the trees, where the Wind whistled through the branches.

“I can tell you where he is,” he called. “You can go to him.”

The Wind trilled, coming down to ruffle their hair before returning to the treetops.

“Will you promise to leave us alone if we tell you?” Yulla knew better than to give the Wind that information on faith alone. Not that she and Ember had any way to make the Wind
keep
her word, but she had to try.

It descended again, this time staying near them. The day had only heated up a little as Mother Sun and Sister Moon climbed higher. Ember stood to Yulla’s left, and that side of her was warm. The night’s chill clung to her right. The Wind swirled between them, carrying Ember’s heat on a current towards her, settling against her side like a blanket.

“I guess that counts as agreeing,” she said, and got another ruffle to her hair as a reply.

Ember nodded, and spoke again in that language Yulla didn’t know. Now that he wasn’t screaming it, she heard how pretty it was: low and lyrical, not quite a song but more than a poem simply spoken. He went on for a few moments, and the longer he talked, the more Yulla could swear she felt the gentle pressure of fingers entwining with her own. Not Ember’s—he stood on the wrong side of her. It was as though the Wind were clutching at her in hope and joy. Kell did it sometimes, when she was getting news so good she could hardly believe what she was hearing.

Sometimes the Wind whistled back at him querulously, and Ember would pause and answer her. Yulla watched the skies for starlings and the walls for shadows as the two spoke, but they were alone, just herself, Ember, and the Wind.

Both of them went quiet, Ember’s voice trailing away, the Wind’s presence only detectable by the pressure against Yulla’s fingers and the warmth at her side. Ember caught Yulla’s eye and gave her a little shrug. “That’s all there is,” he said. “I’ve told her what I know.”

“Why isn’t she going?”

The air grew heavy then, thick with a feeling of
impending.
The world hushed the way it did before those infrequent storms that made the desert bloom in their wake. The booming thunder used to frighten Yulla, the forks of lightning doubly so. She’d grown out of the fear in recent years, but the way the fine hairs of her arms stood up now, she expected lightning to stab down out of the clear sky right next to her.

The ghostly fingers slipped out of hers, and Yulla’s right side went cold as the Wind moved away. It returned to the trees, whipping up their branches again. Sand stirred in its wake, funnels of grit twisting off in all directions until they collapsed only a short distance beyond where Yulla and Ember stood.

The gusts deepened, carving new contours into the dunes beside the road, but the ones behind them remained untouched.

A new sound rose, neither the keening nor the shrieking they’d heard earlier. The acacia trees bent low with it, like mourners bowing their heads. The low, choking moans made Yulla reach for Ember without thinking, but when he took her hand, his fires were banked. She finally put a name to what she was hearing: it was the sound of heartbreak.

The Wind wept.

“You can go,” Yulla said, not understanding why such good news would be the cause of pain. “It’s all right. You can go to him.”

“No, she can’t.” The smell of burnt cinnamon preceded Vedra. She’d come up from behind them, trailed by the pale-haired witch. Yulla spun, trying to push herself between them and Ember, but neither of the pair were even looking their way. Their eyes skimmed the treetops instead. They strolled unhurriedly, as if they were making their way through the market on an idle afternoon. “She can’t leave. I’ve forbidden it.”

The Wind stopped her moaning at the sound of Vedra’s voice. For a moment, the only sound came from the trees returning upright. The heavy air grew heavier; Yulla found herself holding her breath.

The Wind exploded towards the witches, gouts of sand rushing towards them in a wave twice as tall as they were. Yulla and Ember scrambled sideways, stumbling clear of the approaching wall. The Wind was all around them now, shrieking her rage as she flew at Vedra and her smirking sister. Though the gusts made Yulla sway and sent sparks flying off of Ember, the sands didn’t scour them. She seemed to have enough of a handle on her fury to leave them unscathed.

Run,
Yulla thought.
We have to run, while they’re distracted.
But her feet refused to obey, and Ember wasn’t making any effort to flee, either. They stood transfixed as the wave reached the witch-women and crested, towering in place above them for a long moment before it fell.

Neither woman flinched.

The pale-haired witch flung out her arms, as though she could embrace the avalanche, or catch it and ease it to the ground. Vedra stood still as a statue. From her expression, she might have been dealing with an unruly toddler, waiting for the tantrum to subside. Yulla wondered if that’s how she’d looked down in the dark two nights before, while Yulla spilled her story of the Seaglass and the face she’d spied peering down at her.

They’ll be crushed. Or smothered. The Wind will kill them and this will all be almost over.
She knew there were other witches—Ember had said as much—but maybe the loss of Vedra would throw them into a panic. Maybe they’d be able to go rescue the other Fire Children and put an end to this.

Cruel as the witch-women were, Yulla didn’t want to watch them die. She tried to turn away, to hide her face against Ember or if his flames weren’t banked, to stare into his light until it was over.

But her legs still refused to turn. As did her torso. As did even her head. She couldn’t close her eyes. Behind her, Ember made a strangled noise.

She couldn’t turn to see. All she could do, while her brain screamed at her to do one thing and her body did nothing at all, was watch the column of sand bear down on Vedra and the pale-haired witch.

It should have smothered them. It should have buried them deep, or swept them away, or filled their mouths and made them choke.

Any of those things, all of them, were what Yulla expected to see, but instead the sand wave broke apart above the womens’ heads, parting around them and sluicing off into new dunes to either side of them. Vedra laughed into the Wind while her pale-haired sister swayed and crowed in triumph.

Beneath the Wind’s frenzied howls, Yulla heard Ember struggling. Somewhere near him, a woman chuckled.

Vedra turned toward Yulla, ignoring both the Wind and the pale-haired witch, who had begun chanting steadily in time with her undulations. Vedra’s eyes glittered as she approached, the light of Mother Sun and Sister Moon reflected in her dark irises. The drifts came up to her ankles, but Vedra moved through them swiftly, bearing down on Yulla like a bird of prey.

The witch-woman bent close, her face filling Yulla’s vision. “The Wind won’t be going anywhere. It’s wrong for a mother to abandon her children, don’t you think?”

It took a moment to sink in. “She’s your...?”

“While Father Sea boiled, she hid away. She brought my ancestors forth in secret, and Mother Sun never knew.” Vedra looked up at the sky, then back down at Yulla. “I’m not sure she even cared. But look what happens when a mother leaves her children unwatched for too long.”

The spot where Vedra had kissed her forehead throbbed dully, the sensation spreading along her limbs and, strangely, freeing her frozen muscles. Yulla spun, her eyes locking on where Ember knelt a dozen yards away. The sand around him had turned to glass, but all his heat couldn’t burn the collar around his neck. Holding the other end of his lead was the skeletal witch.

So she’d been real after all, not just a phantom made by the pale-haired one.

Yulla strained forward, but whatever movement Vedra had allowed her, it only extended so far. Ember looked up at her with terror in his eyes.

“Blood is power,” Vedra said, her breath tickling Yulla’s ear. “We’ve bound our own mother with it, and you see how well it’s worked.” The Wind’s wails had lessened, now, her gusts dying down as the pale-haired witch’s chanting intensified. Vedra rested her chin on Yulla’s shoulder, one hand snaking around Yulla’s waist. With the other she traced a line through the air between Ember and where Mother Sun and Sister Moon hung in the sky. “Imagine the tether we can tie to her.

“And what will happen when we pull her down.”

A
T
V
EDRA’S WORDS,
Ember surged up from where he knelt. Colors flared over his skin, red to orange to gold, past white and into blue. The glass beneath him melted into slag, but the skeletal witch didn’t seem to feel the heat at all. She took a dainty, unhurried step away, letting the leash play out a little but not relinquishing her hold.

Ember’s shout was the roar of the blaze at the stables—he didn’t need to be speaking her language for Yulla to understand his fury. He clawed at the sand, burning it beneath him as he fought toward Vedra.

But he didn’t get far. “Amara,” said Vedra calmly, “control him.”

The skeletal woman drew herself up, Ember’s light throwing harsh shadows across the angles of her face, making look even more like a skull left out in the desert sun. She twitched the leash, the slightest flick of her wrist, the kind of gentle warning you’d give to a rambunctious pony. A flash went up the line. A crimson knot worked its way from the witch’s fingertips to the collar around Ember’s neck.

He crumpled, screaming, scrabbling at the collar. He could hook his fingers underneath it, but it did him no good. Sand melted as he writhed. Droplets of molten slag splashed out and away when his hand slapped down atop the puddle; they hardened into misshapen marbles when they hit the night-cool ground.

For one terrible moment, he looked up and met Yulla’s eyes. The agony and terror in them made her heart twist.

Yulla threw herself against the invisible bonds holding her—if she could get to the other witch, she’d tear the leash from her bony fingers, or knock her to the ground, or find a rock and smash the woman’s wrist, shoulder,
face
—the how of it hardly mattered: if she could get to the woman, she could set Ember free. She was sure of it.

She thrashed and tossed her head, strained her arms and kicked, all the while letting out a demon wail that echoed across the sands, but Vedra merely held her at arm’s length until Yulla had nothing left in her to fight with. At last she slumped, panting and defeated. The sand around her had barely been disturbed.

Ember’s screams died away with Yulla’s wails; the desert was silent except for their ragged breaths. The skeletal witch must have let up on whatever she’d sent through the tether. Ember lay face down, his flames back to their usual gold. The glow reflected off the liquid crystal pool around him, sending sunset colored tendrils throughout its depths. His fingers curled into the cooling but still viscous glass, imprinting their shapes in it like a potter grabbing a lump of clay.