The Fire Children (21 page)

Urgency clawed at her, skittering around in her stomach like a frightened rat. It drove her from her hiding place and across the square. She scurried from cover to cover, ducked down to make herself as small as possible. No shadows unfolded themselves and chased after her, but she didn’t quite dare count it as good fortune—if the guard wasn’t
here,
what terrible thing had she gone off to join?

She approached the Worship Hall from the side, skulking along its western wall until she reached the front. Picking up a handful of pebbles, she ducked around and sent them rattling across the cool stone floor. No one came to investigate.

She slipped inside and waited, willing her eyes to adjust even further to the gloom. After a few minutes, the solid lump of darkness at the rear resolved itself into the altar. The benches across the front for the acolytes swam into focus. Between them, the Sunglass gleamed dimly, reflecting the tiniest amount of starlight in its surface. Yulla wished it were closer to morning, so she could wait there and warn the priests. She imagined the look of surprise on their faces as they saw her peering down at her. Even better, she imagined the surge of people—of
help
—that would come pouring up out of the cellars at her warning.

I can still warn them. I don’t have to be here to do it.
A laugh escaped before she could stifle it—how simple it would be! If the guard came back, she’d be long gone, and maybe,
maybe
luck would be with her and they wouldn’t notice what she’d done.

A tall child could stretch out across the Sunglass, fingertips touching one edge, toes touching the opposite. Plenty of space for Yulla to write a message to those waiting down below.

She just had to find something to write with. The door to the ritual chambers sat to the left of the altar. Maybe there’d be something in there—paint or ink—she could use to write. If worse came to worst, she’d spell it out with the food left in her quilt bundle. Feeling lighter at having a plan, Yulla snuck to the ritual chamber door and tried the knob. Unlocked.

She threw it open and discovered she wasn’t alone, after all.

G
ET OUT GET
out getout getoutgetout.

Her legs obeyed, propelling her back across the stone expanse. Her eyes were locked on the figure in the middle of the ritual room, expecting it to rise up and chase her any second, or fling out a hand and stop her flight. Which meant she didn’t turn to see the set of three shallow steps leading from the altar to the main floor.

Her ankles tangled together as she tried keeping her balance, but the fall had already begun. Pain stabbed through her as she hit the cold stone floor: her bottom and the back of her head, the ankle she
almost
got underneath her, her burnt right hand as it took the rest of the impact. Her yelp echoed off the walls.

Yulla scrambled to her feet, ignoring the twinges and protests from all over her body as she looked wildly around. The woman ought to be looming over her, or gliding down the stairs, triumphant, or standing in the doorway to the ritual room.

Or at least moving.

Did I imagine it?
Was it nothing more than a pile of linens left forgotten? Yulla got her terrified breathing under control, standing still as a stone while she listened for any noise coming from the room. She almost wanted to close her eyes to mimic the darkness of the cellars and block out any distractions, but years of Kell’s gruesome tales said that’s when the figure would make its move.

The longer she stood there, the heavier the fear of being too late to help Ember grew. Whatever was in that room seemed less and less likely to come after her, if it hadn’t by now.
I need that paint.
She crept up the steps and hesitated at the door, wishing for a stick to prod the heap in the center with.

This close, she could see it
was
a person—a woman, crumpled up like a piece of discarded paper, her dark hair splayed out across the floor. Some of what Yulla had mistaken for folds and shadows on her white robes were, instead, stains.
Blood. That’s blood.
Rivulets of it trailed down her outstretched hands as well. Even in this meager light, Yulla could see the woman was deathly pale.

Deathly pale, or dead?

Part of her wanted to find the paint and go. With that much blood, there wasn’t anything practical Yulla could do to help even if the person were still alive, and if one of the witch-women had gotten hurt and stumbled in here to die, well, that was one down, three to go, wasn’t it?

No. That was
their
way, Vedra and her sisters.

All her life, the priests and priestesses had spoken of the Great Culling, and how terribly Mother Sun had regretted what she’d done. The murder of her first children, her sons and daughters with Father Sea, was to her eternal shame. Her first commandment to Yulla’s people, the children of earth and sky, was to learn from her mistakes, and never repeat them.

Mercy,
said the teachers.
Always, mercy.

Yulla stepped closer to kneel beside the woman and place a hand on her shoulder. She felt the gentle rise and fall of breath, faint as it was. That close, she spotted the faded pattern beneath the blood covering the woman’s hands—a henna tattoo, probably a few weeks old.

The memory of that first day in the dark came back to her, of the gossip that had flitted between the adults while she and Kell were confined to the cushions. A priestess and her husband unaccounted for, supposedly off enjoying their new marriage. Only, they’d never been down there at all, had they?

Anur, her name was.
She’d been married a month past; Kell had been chosen as a lightbearer in her wedding procession, one of half a hundred girls lining the street, but to hear her tell it, you’d have thought she was the only one.

“A... Anur? Priestess Anur?” Yulla gave her a gentle shake. “Can you hear me?”

The woman groaned and shifted, groaned again. She turned her head so she could see, and it was the movement of someone in agony. “Who’s there? Is that...” she struggled to push herself up onto her elbows. “Kell?”

“No, but I’m her sister. I’m Yulla.” Yulla helped Anur sit up, and was shocked at the sheer amount of blood soaking her front. The frock of a priestess’ robes was pale gold by tradition, but Anur’s had turned nearly black. Dark red had even suffused the golden-threaded sunbursts that made up her
qabbeh
, the embroidered chest panel of her vestments. Yulla tried not to let her horror show. “Tell me what I can do to help.”

“Go back down below. Holy Mother, I don’t even know why you’d come up here in the first place. Go back down below and get help. Tell them the witch-women—” She trailed off as Yulla shook her head.

“I can’t. They’ve warded the doors against me. And if there are any they forgot, the Wind comes and pushes me away.” Yulla hadn’t known priestesses could curse, but the words that came out of Anur’s mouth would make a drover blush. “I could help you to the door, though. There must be one here in the Worship Hall, isn’t there? I’ll bring you to it, and stand back, and you can call to the priests from the top of the stairs. They have to be looking for you by now...” Her grand plan fell apart even as Anur shook
her
head.

“I can’t pass the threshold.”

Yulla would have sworn, too, went so far as letting a word shape on her lips, but the thought of what Amma would say if she cursed in the presence of a priestess stopped her. “How are they holding you?” she asked instead. “If there’s a sigil I can try to erase it.” She hadn’t been able to touch the ones carved into the doors, but if the witch-women hadn’t expected her to come here and find Anur, what held the priestess might not be warded against Yulla.

“Nothing like that. It’s blood holding me.”

Vedra’s words in the desert came back to her:
Blood is power. We’ve bound our own mother with it.
She tamped down the panic that threatened. Beyond it, she found the practical: “Blood washes away.” Amma used to say it all the time, when she or Kell came home with clothes bloodied by skinned knees and scraped palms. Surely it was still true now. She took Anur’s hand in her own, gently, and turned it over. The first thing—before she tried scrubbing anything away—was to tend to any wounds that were still seeping.

There were cuts on the inside of Anur’s arms; a ladder of neat, perfectly parallel, horizontal slices climbed from wrist to elbow and again from above her elbow to just below her armpit. Each line was smeared with salve; by its smell, it was the same one Amma had rubbed into her daughters’ cuts so many times.

Two things came to her at once: Anur hadn’t said they were holding her with her
own
blood. And there was no way these cuts accounted for the sheer amount of it on the priestess’ front, not if the witch-women were collecting it for their own use. “Anur?”

“Mmm?” Her voice sounded thin, dreamy.

“They said your husband was missing, too, down below. Ishem? It’s why they didn’t search that first day; they thought you’d snuck off together to... to... be newlyweds.” She plowed past her embarrassment. “Is he up here somewhere?”
Can he help us? Can
I
help him?
She wanted to ask, but she feared she knew the answer to both.

If Anur had been drifting toward sleep or shock, she roused at the mention of her husband. “Yulla, no. You can’t, he, they...” She struggled to sit up straighter and grip Yulla’s shoulders. “Promise me you won’t go in the other ritual room. Promise me you won’t even open that door.”

“But if it would help free you—”

“
Promise me.
” In her voice was all the command of a priestess during the highest of holy days. For a moment, her eyes flashed bright (
blue, like Ember’s
) but it had to be a trick of the mind, Yulla’s brain trying to assign color to the grey gloom that surrounded them. Anur held her pinned as surely as the Wind had. “Promise me.”

“I... I do. I promise.” Yulla caught Anur as she sagged, her burst of strength over. “My point still stands. If it’s not in the other room, tell me where they’ve drawn their symbols and I’ll find a rag and some water.”

“It’s not that kind of magic. This is... deeper. Stronger.
Older.
Those spells are more thought and will than language. They bound me with Ishem’s blood, and used mine to bind the Fire Children.”

Horror dawned on Yulla, climbing up her spine like a scorpion. Blood, and blood, and blood, so much of it on the witch-women’s hands. “And Vedra said the Children’s will bind Mother Sun. She said the Wind is the witch-women’s mother, that their father was Father Sea.”

“Proud of that, aren’t they?” It was nearly a full minute before Anur spoke again. Yulla thought she’d fallen asleep, and was contemplating waking her when the priestess said, “They must have more of our blood in their veins than anything else, but they’ll deny it as much as they can. You’d think their children were sired by breath and tears rather than simply by men.” Anur paused and laughed hollowly. “I’m sorry. Those are words unfit for a priestess.”

Yulla wanted to ask a hundred other questions about that—she’d never considered that there were no witch-
men
—but she tamped down her curiosity for another time, and instead asked the one that mattered most: “Where are they keeping the Fire Children? Do you know?”

The silence that followed was palpable, the same kind of heavy disapproval Amma could summon with nothing more than a sharp inhale. But Anur didn’t break it with a scolding. “Hide, Yulla.” The words came slowly. For all that the woman beside her was too weak to sit up on her own, her voice commanded just as clearly as if she’d been standing at the altar in a ray of noonday sun. “Run away and hide in some forgotten corner of the city. Or take some of the food left as offerings and set out for Darat. Mother Sun will forgive you. Get out of here. You have time. They won’t start their ritual until the eclipse ends. I’ve heard them say it.”

When a priestess proclaimed to you, you bowed your head, gave thanks to Mother Sun, and did as you were told. Yulla’d had that ingrained in her before she could walk. She ducked her head now, but not in obeisance. “And how does that help me help Ember?” she asked softly. The stone walls of the chamber picked up his name and whispered it back to her.

“Ember?”

In the hours she’d spent with him, she’d nearly forgotten it was sacrilege to look upon Ember or his siblings.
Let alone kiss him.
Being around him felt so easy, so natural. “He’s one of the Fire Children. We... we saved each other from the witch-women a few times before they caught him.”

“You’ve... met one of the...? Oh, Holy Mother shine your light upon us.” Anur blessed them both reflexively.

I’m definitely leaving out the kissing part.

Anur’s hand paused at the top of the arc that mimicked Mother Sun’s journey across the sky. “Not just met,” she said, the rest of what Yulla had said seeming to sink in. “You talked. You stayed together. Yulla, he could have killed you. They don’t understand how easy it is to burn us. It’s why—”

“He could control the burn. And when he couldn’t, when he got tired, I stayed away.”