AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
“HE CLOSED ME UP INTO IT,” SAID THE LITTLE Grass-Star, “and latched it firm. I sat upon his mantel until he died, his finest possession, his art, his beauty: perfect, pristine, eternal. Licked by lizards and fondled by a man whose hands were rough with soup-stirring. When he died, his old mother-in-law took it into her family, and passed it down and down and down, and I suppose someone must have taken it to this red and ghastly city, probably stuck it upon some Duchess’s dresser and called it a pretty little trifle—I do not know. I fell asleep. I did not care to know. In the dark I was at peace, and could pretend that I was home, that my mother would see me shining, even through that awful box. That she would know I never meant to burn anything. Let me go back to sleep. Let me go back to the dark. I have been leached dry and shrunk into a ridiculous manikin, crammed in a box and left on the sill for centuries. I have done enough.”
I blinked back my awe. “But… you could go back, now, if you wanted to,” I said.
“I am tired,” she said, and her seed-eyes glistened.
“I am a Djinn, you know. I came from, well, probably not you, but from some Star’s burning. I am not sure, really; the others haven’t cast my kindling yet. But we are distant relations, one might say.”
The Grass-Star looked at me stonily and said nothing.
“Scald,” Solace said, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “You can’t give her to them. The best thing they’ll do is put her on another mantel.”
“Grandmother,” I said slowly, though the Grass-Star scowled at the name, “will you let me carry you? Just for a little while.”
“When has anyone ever let me choose?”
“Now. I am letting you. Scald of no particular family, the Ember-Queen of the Djinn. Because, you know, the dark”—I held up a palmful of my soot-riddled hair—“is something of an obsession of ours.”
We rose like smoke. My tail trailed after me, and my silver baskets shook, buffeted by the wind. In her carnelian box, Li curled around herself and did not speak. I could see the tips of her silver feet peeking from the hem of her reed-dress. The air grew cold, and I drifted higher, to the tip of the Sirens’ tower, to the tip of Ajanabh, where her outstretched fingers reach their furthest. And there I held gentle, green-shouldered Li in one hand, and touched the dark sky, the last gasp of dark before dawn, with one flaming finger. The scent of scorched air flowed out from the puncture, and I cannot say whether it was because my fire is terrible or because I wanted it so fervently, wanted her to rest, wanted her away from Kohinoor and the army of Kings and Queens, wanted her home, that it blazed as hot as a wish might have, but the dark opened around my finger like a square of silk dropped over a candle, and I worked my hand into the flaming night, widening and stretching the dark around me. It felt like skin, and I choked, I wept, my throat froze. But I took her from her box, Li, one of a million seed-blown Stars, and folded her into the night like a child tucked into her bed.
She looked at me, disbelieving, and she did not smile. I wish she had smiled. I wish I knew that I had done well by her. But she simply breathed deeply and closed her eyes, and the dark closed over her.
In the Garden
WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, THE TORCHES STILL BLAZED AND THE SNOW pooled and watered around their polished stalks, quick little crows hopping forward to drink. The moon had set, and outside the halos of fire, it was dark as dreaming. In the still of the outer Garden, there was so little sound, no frogs, no geese, no hooting wolves. The flowers were dead and icy, the trees naked and hard. The stars were silent on the snow.
The girl opened her eyes. The blackness vanished from the boy’s throat even as she did it, and he stopped in midsentence.
“Come away,” she said. “Come away from here. I don’t want to be near them, your family, your father. It is almost over, I know it.”
“We are safe!” the boy said, pointing through the waving branches at the far-off dancers, far-off children laughing and throwing brandy-soaked green grapes at one another.
“No,” she said. “Come to the Gate, come to the edges, come to the snow and the iron.”
“If that is what you want.”
“Yes.”
He took her circlet from her and let the scarlet veil fall onto the ice. She brushed flakes from her hands and lifted her heavy skirts, turning away from the light and the sound behind the chestnut boughs. The boy took her hand.
“Wait,” came a soft voice behind them. Dinarzad stood there, in long yellow veils, her every finger ringed in emerald, her waist bounded in red. The children turned to look at her. But again, Dinarzad did not speak. She lifted her own veil and looked with mute pleading at the girl, her eyes dark and desperate. The girl let go her friend’s hand and crossed the snow to the older woman. She looked into Dinarzad’s face as in a mirror, and slowly took the amira’s long, glittering fingers in her own chapped, cold hands. She took a long breath, frightened as a hare who does not know if she has or has not seen an arrow in the mist.
“I think,” she said, softer than light, “I think that one morning, the Papess woke in her tower, and her blankets were so warm, and the sun was so golden, she could not bear it. I think she woke, and dressed, and washed her face in cold water, and rubbed her shaven head. I think she walked among her sisters, and for the first time saw that they were so beautiful, and she loved them. I think she woke up one morning of all her mornings, and found that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was clear as glass on her brow, and she believed then that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl.”
Tears slipped warm and grateful down Dinarzad’s lovely face, her lips trembled, and she folded her arms around the girl like a mother, like a sister, and kissed her frozen hair. She let her go, and drew down her yellow veil, and returned to the dais—but every so often, she glanced back over her shoulder, into the dark and the branches, into the Garden.
The girl wound her hands in the iron Gate. She looked into the deep woods beyond the Palace grounds, where she had never ventured. Her fingertips were pale as mushrooms, and she could not feel the ice. Shadows pricked in the trees outside the Gate, shadows and starlight filtering down through leafless boughs and stiff black needles.
She closed her eyes and tried to quiet her heart. She turned to the boy, her black eyelids blazing as though they burned her, and whispered:
“Come, tell me how it ends.”
THE TALE OF THE