The Fire Children (26 page)

“What if they come for the others?” Char said it softly, pitched, Yulla thought, so the children wouldn’t hear. “If they’re... if they’re
sacrificing
us, what if they come to take someone else? Or all of us?”

The girl, who’d been so quiet all this time, spoke up. Yulla hadn’t even heard her come close. “Get to them before they can. I’ll protect the little ones.”

“You’re still collared.”

“I’ll fight anyway. However I can. Just... just be quick.” She touched Yulla timidly, light as a dragonfly landing on a leaf, and pushed something into Yulla’s palm. “Take these.”

Yulla skimmed her fingers over the two coils of material, flat ribbons wound around themselves. A design was branded into them. With horror, Yulla realized what she held. It took all she had not to cast them away like she’d done once before.

When she’d taken them off Ember and Char’s necks.

“Why would I want these?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “It’s... a feeling.”

Feeling squeamish, Yulla shoved the collars deep into her pocket and tried to ignore their weight against her hip. She wouldn’t offend the girl by refusing them, but she was damned if she’d
thank
her for them. The girl said nothing more, and sidled away.

The Fire Children switched to their own language, then, and while Yulla couldn’t understand it, she was certain they were saying goodbye.

H
ER MEMORY OF
the way to the rockfall was hazy at best, fear-tinged and overshadowed by all that happened after her initial flight. There were no other tunnels branching off that she remembered, but it felt like they’d been walking too far, too long.
We should be there by now,
she thought.
We should—

“I see it,” said Ember. “Just ahead.”

“Is the opening still at the top?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll go first and run ahead, see if I can find anyone still down here. Amma says I have the lungs of a prayer-caller, so they’ll hear me if I yell. Just... catch me if I fall, okay?”

She held up her hands. Char had wrapped them in the last of the linen before they’d left the Seaglass chamber. Her left was more mitt than hand now, her fingers bound together by tight strips of cloth. She still had most of her motion in her right; her first two fingers had taken the brunt of the damage, so Char had wrapped those together and left the others and her thumb free, like a strange version of a scorpion’s claw.

“You’re not climbing,” said Ember. She could hear the grin.

“I’m... not?”

“No. We’re going through. Stand back.”

She did as she was told, shuffling backwards and hugging the tunnel wall until they told her to stop. Then came the heat. Even at a distance, it felt like standing beside a kiln. The smell of molten rock reached her, dusty and metallic. And the sound... Amma made caramel sometimes, and the slow, bubbling boil of the thickening sugar and cream was a lot like this. Rocks slid and shifted as their foundation changed, but soon enough they subsided, and there was only the sound of flowing stone.

Suddenly as it had come, the heat dissipated. A cool breeze brushed past Yulla, toward Ember and Char. At first she thought it was the Wind come down to stop them, but no, this was the pair of them cooling down the rock. They drew the heat out of the air and into themselves—she heard their flames, two distinct sounds up ahead, roaring with what they pulled in.

“It’s done.” Char sounded better than she had earlier. Where there had been a listlessness beneath her words, now there was energy. Whatever they’d done, it must have been a bit like feeding on the offerings.

Ember came to lead her along. She kept expecting her toes to send pebbles skittering, but the ground smoothed out where the rockfall ought to have started. The echoes changed, too, and she had the sense of being in a much smaller space as her footsteps bounced back to her. Ember pressed in close as they entered the tunnel-within-a-tunnel. The walls were narrow enough that they had to squeeze.

Gingerly, Yulla touched the stone with her exposed fingertips. It was warm to the touch, and smooth like the footprint she’d tripped in outside the Worship Hall. “You both just... made this. In what, five minutes?”

“If we were stronger, we could have done it in seconds.”

Char called from somewhere ahead. “I’ve found something. One of the houses.”

She was deceptively far down the tunnel. When they caught up, Yulla felt around for the rope guide, looking for a clue whose house it might be. She recognized the name only vaguely, someone Aunt Mouse knew from the market. The cellar was as empty as it had been the last time she’d come through here, angry and upset at Kell. Only then, the family had been off visiting. Now they were up above, in danger with everyone else.

“Look for the stairs,” said Yulla. “We’ll go out that way.” The doors were warded on their outsides to keep Yulla and the Fire Children from coming down here. She hoped the witch-women hadn’t found a way to paint their sigils on the insides, that they’d be able to get
up.

This cellar was bigger than her own. With Ember and Char’s help, Yulla was able to navigate across the space and climb the stairs. The first sign her theory was right was the doorknob. When she’d tried getting downstairs that first night with Ember, she’d been unable to touch it. This one was solid in her grip. A turn and a push, and the door swung open.

“Hello?” she called, but no one answered. She stepped across the threshold, expecting any second for
something
to stop her—pain, invisible bonds, the Wind—but nothing did. She felt her way into the room, bumped into a table, and turned around. “Come across.”

They did. Ember first, laughing as he came and hugged Yulla, then Char. “Shhh,” she said. “Listen.”

The din was low and subtle at first, but Yulla recognized it. “It’s people. A crowd.” You heard it often enough as you approached the market, or the Worship Hall on a holy day: the buzz of hundreds of people talking. “Not far away, either. Find more stairs. If we can get up high enough you can see where we are.”

Ember and Char left her there while they searched the first floor. The more Yulla listened to the crowd, the more frightened they sounded. No one was screaming, yet, but a panicked note rang through it all. Reemergence was supposed to be a celebration; there was no chance these people were reveling.

It didn’t take long before Ember was at her side again. “We found a way up. And we saw out the front. It’s... It’s not good, Yulla.”

As they headed higher, she noticed the chill that had settled over Kaladim the last few days was gone. The desert heat had reasserted itself, hot and dry, even here in the shade of the house. Combined with the heat Ember and Char gave off, Yulla was sweating by the time they reached the second floor.

“There’s a window here.” They stopped before it, and Ember painted the picture of what was happening below. “We’re across from where they were keeping us. I can see into the hall. Three of them are standing guard. The tall one, and the little one, and the one who can become a flock of birds.”

“Wait,” said Char. “Let me try something. We couldn’t do it earlier, but now...” She got close and took Yulla’s face in her hands.

Everything shifted, like it had the night in the cave when Ember had let her see through his eyes. She saw herself again, even dirtier now, her face red with all the time spent near the Fire Children’s heat. Her eyes... they
looked
all right, but there was a glossiness to them. Her pupils were pinpoints, though, her gaze clearly unfocused. Her clothes were a mess, dirty and torn. Her hands were worse than she’d imagined. The linen was filthy, tattered, though the wrapping job was as good as anything Aunt Mouse had ever done.

“Stay where you are,” said Char. “Last thing we need is you falling out the window thinking you’re using my legs, too.”

It was strange, standing in place while her sight told her she was moving, but when Char looked out the window, Yulla forgot all about it.

Below, a golden glow tinged the crowd. People filled the street, some in clusters. It was like Ember had described: the
versam
hall with its gaping maw of a torn-up floor across the way, Amara, Nasreen, and Siwa in a line along its steps. Vedra was nowhere to be seen.

“What are they doing?”

“Holding back the people,” said Ember.

“Why isn’t anyone stopping them? They could just... they could swarm them. Thousands against three!” Where were Old Moll’s grandsons? Where was the blacksmith woman, with her arms like boulders? Where was Abba, and Amma? Why was no one picking up stones from the street and hurling them at the witches?

“I think they tried already. There are bodies.”

Char’s vision shifted to show her. Men and women, priests and priestesses, lay in a heap at the edge of the crowd. Perhaps a dozen of them, all unmoving.

Ember sighed and squeezed Yulla’s shoulder. “They look like they drowned on dry land. I can see water around some.”

“We should kill them,” said Char. “We could, Ember. You know we could.”

“I don’t want us to be like them,” he said. “We’re not—”

A gasp went through the crowd as he cut off.
Now
someone screamed, and others lifted their voices in prayer. “What is it?” Yulla leaned forward, trying to make sense out of the cacophony. She
tsked
when the view didn’t change with her movements.

But Char was on it, casting about to see what had happened.

From the back of the
versam
hall, on the opposite side from the cellar stairs, came a brilliant glow. It was a Fire Child, taller than Ember, his pale yellow flames tipped with blue. He dug at his neck, at the collar around it, but it did him no good. A dark shape dragged him along, across the floor and down a ramp that led to the Seaglass.

“Vedra,” breathed Ember, as Char said, “She has our brother.”

In one hand, the witch-woman held the leash. In the other, a wicked-looking dagger. The blade was long and thin, wavy like a puddle after a stone’s been dropped in its center. Its hilt was made of that same cobalt the witch-women used for their salves.
Ceremonial, like the ones the priests use at the Worship Hall.
Only, she doubted this blade’s edges were dull.

“Do something,” said Yulla. “Hurt them if you have to, but distract them. Stop their spell and the people on the ground can get to him.” Hurting them wasn’t terribly merciful, but it was better than killing them. Perhaps better than what they deserved, no matter the teachings.

Ember might have hesitated, but Char didn’t. The sweat on Yulla’s left side dried in a flash as Char roared in her fiery language. Ember echoed it, though his heat was different,
kinder.
Char was a brushfire, hot and all-consuming; Ember was the steady smolder of a campfire dying down.

Yulla waited, bracing to hear the witch-women’s dying wails, or the surge of the crowd. Anything but the stunned silence that followed. She didn’t know what form whatever Ember and Char were doing would take—no gouts of flame shot out from their hands to arc downward; the ground didn’t melt into slag beneath the witches and swallow them up.

Nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

“They’re protected.” Char let out a shrill panicky laugh. “We can’t touch them.”

From her place atop the Seaglass, Vedra looked up. Her gaze locked on Char’s, and Yulla got the wild sense the witch-woman knew
she
was watching, too. A slow smile spread its way across her wide, wide mouth, and she shook her head. Just once, the way Amma did to warn her daughters whatever they were doing was a bad idea.

Char began babbling. “She saw us. Ember, she saw us, she’s looking right up at us she’s, we have to, she’s going to—
Noooooooo!
” Char’s voice climbed into a wail, then a roar as Vedra lifted the dagger to their brother’s neck.

Ember was roaring, too. The crowd howled right along with them, and Yulla’s throat ached with the force of her own screams. Beneath it all came the chanting of the witch-women.

There was a crash as Char crumbled beside her. Their shared vision cut out. Yulla was grateful to be plunged back into darkness, but that only meant her mind had the perfect backdrop to replay what she’d just seen: the clean, practiced sweep of Vedra’s dagger along the Fire Child’s throat, the spill of golden blood that gushed from the wound, the way it pooled around him when he collapsed atop the Seaglass.

And through it all, Vedra looking up at them and laughing.

Y
ULLA HELD OUT
her arms in Ember’s direction. She didn’t know what else to do. Ember pulled her close, burying his face in her shoulder. She held him as he trembled, cursing herself for thinking
I have to get them moving.

“I’m sorry,” she said instead. “I’m so sorry.”

Vedra and her sisters didn’t give them time to grieve.

Outside, the witch-women’s voices crescendoed. Char choked back a last, harsh sob, and rose; as she stood, she brushed her fingers along Yulla’s arm and vision flooded back in. “Ember,” she said, resignation weighing down her words. “It’s starting.”

Ember let Yulla go and joined his sister at the window. Yulla saw the grim set of his jaw through Char’s eyes before she cast her gaze on Vedra. Their brother’s flames had gone out, leaving him a cold brown shape curled up on the glass. From this distance, he could have been any citizen of Kaladim rather than a godling.

Vedra had taken the collar from his neck. She bent now to soak it in his blood as the other three witch-women threw their splayed hands in the air, closed them into fists, and pulled them down. It was as if they were hauling on a rope, bringing something to them hand over hand.

Because they were.

The sun blazed high above them, at her noontime zenith. At first it
was
simply the sun,
Mother Sun,
shining down. Then there came movement, a blurring of bright-on-bright that Yulla suspected she could only see because she was looking through Char’s eyes. It shimmered and jigged and then there were
two
suns, peeling off from one another.