“That will hardly make us feel better,” the Gate huffed.
I turned the flaming rings on my fingers. Something within me longed to see the corkscrewed streets of Ajanabh, longed to hear Agrafena’s bows slide through her hair. I had been Queen only a day and seen nothing at all but my own house. I did not want to put a torch to that place, any more than I had wanted to hear that Kashkash was wicked or that I was only Queen because of my hair.
Suddenly, I reached out and clutched at the Gate’s massive stone finger, which was like a long temple pillar in my hands. “Let me in!” I begged. “Let me see the city. Perhaps I can convince them to leave. Perhaps if I can find that ridiculous carnelian box, they will take it and go, and be glad to lose no one to a battle.”
The Gate squinted, his brass eyes crusted with verdigris, suspicious. “How do I know you are not intent on some sabotage? You are a Djinn. I would sooner trust a starving crocodile who wishes to mind my mule than a Djinn.”
Color and flame flared in my cheeks. “How should I trust a giant not to crush me in his fingers because a fly was buzzing at his ear?” I banked my fires. “But come, you must see that I am young. I was only made Queen yesterday; I know nothing of this place, or this war. Let me in, and I will try to find what they want, and bring it out to them with no bloodshed. If I am lying, I will wish it all back for you, and damn the Khaighal.”
The Gate frowned, his mouth lines deep and clogged with clay. “I will let you in. For one night. You must be again at my fingertips by dawn or I will not let you out, and you will discover that actors and singers are often forced into rather more unsavory lines of work, and they are not out of practice. No one who lived in Ajanabh-of-old lets their muscles soften for even a moment.” I nodded furiously. “Swear by your wish-wrangling King, swear by Kashkash the bold and his brazen beard, and I will believe you,” he grumbled.
I could make that promise, but it would mean nothing to me, not anymore, not now. Slowly, I gripped the sides of my silver hip-baskets and said, “I will swear by him, but also by the Cinnamon-Star, and the Snake-Star, and the Seven Sisters.”
Grudgingly, he nodded, and lifted his forefinger from his middle finger, exposing just enough space for me to gather my smoke and seep through. “Go to the fountain, and find Agrafena. She is always there this time of night, fiddling up the moon. She will take you to a room with rafters so high you will think it is open to the night, and an ivory cage, and a flame like your own.”
I thanked him and, holding my baskets close, drifted through his fingers and into the red city.
In the Garden
THE BOY STOPPED.
“You’re doing fine,” said the girl warmly. She put out her hands to take his, and opened her eyes. They sparkled in the firelight, and the snow in her hair had melted to dew. “Shall I bring you dinner tonight”—she laughed—“and run to escape my sister?”
“It feels strange, to speak to you, when I am so used to listening. This is how it is in the stories I knew before you—a beautiful girl sits at the feet of a boy and treasures his every word. But it does not seem right.”
“This is still my story,” said the girl, drawing away. “My last story. It is not yours simply because it sits in your mouth awhile.”
“I know! Oh, please do not be angry. I know. And I am afraid. I shall read as slowly as I can. It is your story, and it will take you away from me at the most beautiful part. Just when I want nothing more than to read it forever, it will be over. I know it.”
She smoothed his hair, but could say nothing. “At least I can rest. I had become so tired, like a little place had opened in me and all of me had fallen out of it.”
“How can you be so tired by only reading? Are you sick?”
“No, but that is the way of it. I told you it was my story. Even now you draw it out of me like a fisherman draws a carp from a lake. It thrashes and bucks as it is dragged from the water, but the sun on its scales is so golden!”
The boy’s eyes widened, and he looked at her again, how flushed her cheeks in the cold, how thin her arms, how the black of her eyes seemed to burn like pitch. He was a little frightened of her, and she was so strange—he had almost forgotten how strange she had seemed to him in the beginning, how strange she was still, and how unlike any of the girls whose black hair he had chased around the trunks of trees.
“Are you tired now? Would you like me to leave you?” he whispered.
And she came back to him, her face warm and wide and winsome as an eager cat. “No, please. I want to hear more. I want to hear how Scald found the city of artists. How odd it feels to not know what happens next!”
He laughed ruefully and passed his braceleted hand over her eyes, closing them gently. The letters danced. He read, slowly as ever, his uncertain voice sounding in the snow like a hare’s footprints.
“I followed the Ajan streets as I was told, and they were steeper and sharper and narrower even than I had imagined. But they whirled inexorably toward a center, and the moon was not even above the brow-ridge of the Gate before I found the fountain, and the dancing, fingerless maid…”
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
SHE WAS YOUNGER THAN I HAD THOUGHT—SHE must have been little more than a girl when Simeon had first found her. She was full-grown and then some now, just over the crest of life, laughing lines at her eyes and a deep, weathered color to her brown skin. She played with both hands upon her stiff, wiry hair and her red slip snapped crisply around her as she plied her practiced steps. The song was not the dirge for a city that the Gate had heard, but something sly and serpentine, staccato and sure, something that wound and writhed, something knowing, something hidden to all but her. I waited; I would not interrupt.
She finally stopped, bent at the waist, her foot pointed and poised in the air. Without moving any other muscle so much as a twitch, she turned her head to the side and winked at me. The Gate was wrong—her eyes were far greener than palms, glittering with a weakly burning light I thought I recognized—but no, it was not possible. She looked me up and down, and a secretive smile unfolded on her lovely face.