“Wait!” I cried suddenly, and dashed up the rafters, making the whole tower creak and shake. I pulled out my cloak of feathers from the space in the wall where I had closed it away, unable to look at it, unable to remember without terrible pains in my tail. I flew down, the golden cloak trailing behind me like kite cloth. With this we swaddled our girl, with this we tucked her into her dreams, and that black-haired dear slept in my down, all those golden feathers gleaming around her face like sunbeams.
I missed the Carnival that morning. Aerie lay in my wings as she had once done, and we listened to the sounds of a sleeping daughter. I struggled with tears that I absolutely would not let fall on her slender shoulders.
“But you will not go for a while, will you?” I whispered thickly. “I could not bear it. This is such a lonely place. Given time I could learn to hold this child so dear, dear as flames. Dear as any duck has held her chicks. But not without you. You must stay awhile yet, for me. We shall be a family, for a while. Just a little while.”
Aerie turned to me and smiled dazzlingly, like a dozen noontime suns. “Of course I will stay with you, my only love, my own.”
She did stay. For a little while.
It was summer when she asked me. I had carried her up to the topmost rafters of the tower and she sat there happily, kicking her feet in the air, looking out over near-empty Ajanabh, pointing like a little girl at the landmarks she knew: the Vareni with its colors blazing, the Opera Ghetto faintly singing in the distance, the square of the Cinnamon-Star, and little Agrafena dancing, tiny and dark against the light.
“Would you give me a feather?” Aerie said suddenly, squinting up at me, shading her faded eyes.
“Why? What could you ask me that I would not do in a moment?” “I want to be able to call you whenever I wish, when I need to.”
“Just cry out; I shall be here. Do I not jump whenever the child cries?”
Aerie laughed. I did not like how dry and brittle her voice was, like crackling wood. “Even so.”
I thought about it. The sun was so bright and so red, that merciless southern sun I had come to know well. “For no one else would I ever lose a single feather, but to you, I would give them all, and more: my burning heart, given over flaming into your hands.”
I craned my long neck, and the sun was caught in its loop for a moment, its glare and mine blazing together. I pulled a single long feather from my tail, tipped in sparkling blood, and let it fall into her wrinkled hands.
And do you know? It didn’t hurt at all.
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
“IN THE MORNING, SHE HAD DISAPPEARED AS though she had never been, and I stood alone in my bell tower, with a hungry daughter to feed.” The Firebird ruffled the girl’s hair with his massive wing. “I called her Solace, for so she is, my solace for an empty nest, my solace for a lost goose.”
Solace was crying, her little shoulders heaving horribly, her head bent low.
“I thought… I thought… I thought I was yours,” she whispered.
“You are, little pumpkin-seed!”
“No, I thought… I was really yours. You came from a tree, but you’re a bird. The Manticore comes out of fruit, and looks nothing like fruit. A dragon looks like a girl when it is young. I thought… I thought I was a Firebird. I thought I would sprout wings one day and fly with you, so close to the sun! I thought: Nothing in this world looks like its parents. I am no different.”
She put her arms around the great neck of her papa, and wept bitterly.
“I am sorry, poor dear. I ought to have told you. But I loved you so well, and you were so happy. I could not bear to tell you otherwise. Do you know,” he said to me over the shaking head of his daughter, “that when she could walk and jump she ran straight to my old cage and made it her bedroom? She loved the old thing, how it swayed and swung! I piled up more cushions for her, and the minute she was bouncing and laughing inside, it did not seem so dreadful after all.”
“I am just an orphan,” the child whispered to no one in particular.
“No, Solace, never that.”
I watched the two of them, burrowed into each other, and casually patted back some of my smoke-hair that threatened to overflow its basket. They slowly recalled that they were not alone. Solace hopped out of the Firebird’s tail and sat on the rim of the ivory cage, looking at me intently.
“You are a very good listener,” she said shrewdly, kicking her legs back and forth. Her right leg was blazing with the same flame tattoos, all the way down to her toes. She wore a short little skirt of the same ragged red cloth as her shirt—a dancer’s fluttering scarves. “I can’t go nearly so long without asking questions when Papa gets on about the dragon-girl and old Sleeve. She comes to see me sometimes, you know. Says I’m just like her: feral, not properly socialized. I asked her what proper girls do once, and she said she didn’t know, but she thought that dancing like I do was probably not on the list.”
“Probably not,” I allowed. “Among my people I’m considered a matron, though I’d wager I’m no older than you in years properly counted. I don’t know what a proper Queen does, either, but I’m reasonably sure they don’t go behind enemy lines and listen to stories, so I think we’re about even in our wickedness.” I smiled. Solace flinched a little at the wisps of flame between my teeth.