I pursed my smoke-lips. “I am not sure what Simeon meant me to know of you,” I confessed.
“Perhaps only that there is a Star in Ajanabh, and beside her, spiders and birds and girls which do not wish to be burned.”
Solace hopped down lightly from the scorched cage and extended her hand.
“Do you want to go to the Carnival?” she asked, her tattoos gleaming up at me as fiercely as her eyes.
“Yes,” I said, and slipped my black fingers into hers.
In the Garden
THE AFTERNOON WAS LATE AND GRAY ON THE SNOW. IT HAD BEGUN TO melt, and ice flowed everywhere in silent little rivers. The lake in which the girl had bathed—so long ago now!—had frozen silver and smoky. The sun wore a veil that day, and it shone only fitfully through the thick, gauzy clouds. The Gate glittered with hard little knots of ice, and the boy, who had never seen such cold in his life, ran his fingers over them in wonder.
“You must go now,” the girl said. “Do not think you ought to linger here.”
“I don’t,” he said, and shut his eyes while he fingered the ice. It melted to water against his skin. “What,” he added thoughtfully, as casually as he could manage, “happened to the Papess, do you think?”
The girl furrowed her brow. She, too, touched the ice, and shook her head as her fingers stuck to the hard little globes that clung to the iron. “I do not know,” she said, as though he had asked her what the inside of her eyelids looked like. “If there is something more about her written on my skin, you must read it, not I. I did not create her; I cannot arrange her footsteps through the world like a basket of flowers.”
“What do you think, though?”
“I do not know, I told you. And it is time for you to run back to the courtyards, where your sister will be saying very serious vows, and eating, and dancing.”
The boy smiled broadly, like the moon emerging from the horizon. “You are absolutely right!” he cried, and seized her hand in his.
“What are you doing? Let me go!”
“No,” said the boy firmly. “You are a child of the Palace, and that gives you the right to dance at the wedding of Dinarzad, just like the others. In fact,” he added with a crooked grin, “as a child of the Pa
lace, you really haven’t much choice in the matter.”
He led her to the frozen lake, with its icy cattails waving still and shattering against each other from time to time. The ferns were white and shivering, and long naked branches bowed black and deep. From behind a rock crowned with bright mosses he drew a little bundle, just where she had said it would be, and presented it to the girl with all the pride of a cat who has managed, at long last, to catch a blackbird in flight, and brought it back to its mistress. The girl looked blankly at it, and he opened it for her, drawing the strings slowly open.
Inside was a dress. It was red, like her cloak, and overlaid with the most delicate mesh of gold, knotted into elaborate roses and birds soaring past ripe fields. The netting made a little train, and there was a belt of tiger’s-eyes and golden chains, and a necklace of garnets, and lastly, a golden circlet which held up a soft scarlet veil.
“I told you not to,” she said gently, but he saw her lip shaking.
“No one will know,” the boy whispered, his voice as full of coaxing as a mother’s who wishes her child to eat. “The veil will keep you hidden, and I shall brush your hair clean of leaves and snow. No one will know, and you can eat at the table, and stand by my side all the night long, and dance, like Solace, like a Firebird.”
The girl was weeping, her shoulders quivering as she tried valiantly not to.
And so the boy helped her arrange the netting of the dress. He fastened her belt of tiger’s eyes. He laid the necklace of garnets around her neck. He brushed her hair with his own fingers until it was soft and gleaming, and he braided it as best he could manage. He fixed the circlet on her brow, and let the veil fall over her face. He stood back and looked at her, blood-bright against the snow, the gold already catching new snowflakes like threads of silk.
“It was hers, you know,” he said, “when she was our age. She let me have it. She is…” The boy swallowed. “Not quite so awful as I thought, my sister.” He squared his shoulders and shook his snow-dappled hair back. “But I was younger then, and much more foolish.”
He took her hand, which was terribly cold in his, and thinner than bones, but he smoothed her hair, just a little, before he remembered that it was not terribly polite, and withdrew his hand quickly. The boy and the girl walked together across the snowy orchards, toward the chestnut chapel, where firelight was already leaping toward the sky.
No one knew. He showed her the table, with its roasted birds and roasted beasts, with its wine and its steaming stews and its chocolates, with its slices of rough, red hippopotamus meat and its shaved camel-hump, wet and glistening. He showed her the crocodile, its sawtooth jaws propped open with silver bolts, and stuffed with sugared pears. He showed her the rhinoceros horn dripping with honey and salt. She laughed shyly, and ate as much as she pleased, and no one took any notice of her at all in all the milling children with their colored plumage.
The girl watched Dinarzad very curiously while she was wed, and she saw the trembling of her, and heard the breathlessness of her. The boy watched, too, but he tried not to see these things, for he did not wish to shame his sister by weeping.
And in the light of a hundred torches, under a sky full of hard, cold stars like ice on an iron gate, they danced. She was uncertain at first, but he showed her easy steps, and led her into the center of the throng, where the laughter and the voices and golden, whirling bodies were thickest, and the boy danced with the demon girl in the sight of all his relations, turning her faster and faster, until Dinarzad’s dress was a red-gold blur. He could see the tears fall from her chin beneath the veil, and his hands were wet with them. The boy’s sisters and cousins and matronly old aunts spun by and laughed as they spun, their voices thick with wine.
In the midst of the dance, the Sultan gestured from his holiday throne of ivory and plum-branches dipped in bronze. The boy looked nervously to his veiled friend, but could not refuse. He walked slowly to his father’s seat with her frightened hand clutched in his. Over the Sultan’s black beard he looked at them, his eyes reflecting the firelight like a Djinn’s.
“What a beautiful little friend you have found, my son. She is quite striking, just as red as a demon.”
“Y… yes, Father.”