Fire Dance

by Ilana C. Myer

  “We left him out because he was a damned nuisance,” said Valanir. “Surely you remember. He told when Nick and I were out that night. Myre gave us each ten lashes with the nettle-branch.” He winced at the memory. The High Master at that time, Archmaster Sarne, had been a temperate man, inclined to forgive the boys their scrapes. Not so Seravan Myre, the grim Archmaster who oversaw discipline.

  “Stell tattled because it gave him power over his superiors—namely, the two of you,” said Hendin. “But I suppose … you’re right. You’re surely not to blame for how he turned out. Or I suppose I should say, what he’s turned into. The ideas you’ve put in my head, Valanir … they horrify me.”

  “I may be wrong,” said Valanir, though he knew it was unconvincing.

  “You and Nick,” said Hendin. He’d turned from contemplating the fire to look at Valanir. His eyes bright. “I can understand what motivated Stell, in a way. The two of you. I was envious, too. You were always kind to me … Nick was not, but you were. Nonetheless, I knew our friendship did not compare. That you were being kind.”

  Valanir’s headshake was swift, vehement. “No,” he said. “I’ll admit … I undervalued you, Cai. I was a boy … I valued the wrong things. But you know, things with Nick were—like a forge that burns too hot. Often I was scorched … or found myself becoming someone I did not like. You were the nearest I had to—a refuge. To home. I believe, otherwise, I may have lost myself. As Nickon surely did.”

  The fire popped. The room had grown warmer, though drafts came in from the cracks and casements like they always did.

  A long moment before Archmaster Hendin spoke again. “This favor you ask. It can be done—by breaking the rules.” He shook his head, then, and almost smiled. “In that way, I guess it is like old times.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE screams began in the night. Dorn was caught in the pincers of a nightmare. Fires, closing in; he could smell the smoke. At first thought the screams were his own. But no, it was in the Academy: a shrill, anguished shriek without end.

  He blinked awake. The room was dark. Etherell was already dressed and at the door. That shriek was carrying on from the floors below.

  “Where…?”

  His friend turned. “I’m going to see what’s happened. If someone needs help.”

  “Wait.” Dorn flung his legs over the side of the bed. “I’m coming.”

  He half-expected a lull in the screaming, but it went on. The agonized sound raked his nerves. They ran. It seemed to be coming from the floor below. Doors were opening throughout the castle, students spilling into the halls. By the time Dorn and Etherell reached the source of the screams they were joined by other students, most in their sleeping clothes and appearing frightened, especially the younger ones. By this time the sounds had changed, become a kind of ragged choking that was, in its way, worse. They came from one of the students’ rooms. Boys clustered around the doorway. They were waved away by Archmaster Lian, a grim sentinel blocking the threshold. Dorn realized it was the room Maric Antrell shared with his friend—some large fellow with a brutal grin who had helped pinion Dorn’s arms the day Maric Antrell had broken his finger. What was his name?

  “Gared Dexane,” said Etherell. “I’d guess. It doesn’t sound like Maric.” The next moment they caught sight of Maric Antrell lounging beside Archmaster Lian, looking—of all things—sulky. His luxuriant curls, tousled, accentuated the impression of a pampered lordling. Dorn knew, of course, that he was beautiful; a patina that gave lustre to cruelty.

  The other boys were falling back from the forbidding countenance of the Archmaster, eyes round with wonder and fear. Etherell strode forward. “What’s happened here? Is he ill?”

  Archmaster Lian’s pale eyes were cold and fishlike as ever. Nonetheless he was forced to shout to be heard above Gared’s cries. The indignity must have galled. “It is none of your concern, Etherell Lyr. Nor yours, Dorn Arrin. Be off to your rooms—and get the others to do the same. Go on, you’re an example for them.”

  Seizing Maric’s arm and pulling him inside the room, the Archmaster slammed shut the door. But not before Dorn had seen the bed where Gared Dexane writhed on the mattress, blankets thrown aside. His face was purple, except around his mouth, where it was dimpled white. Veins stood out in his neck and forehead with unnerving prominence, as if they would break. But worst were his eyes, Dorn thought, rolled up in his head until only the whites showed. Perhaps he was dying. The bugger.

  But that was not even the strangest thing. Standing beside the bed, hands uplifted in a cupping gesture above it, was the new Archmaster: Elissan Diar.

  * * *

  “IT’S the enchantments, isn’t it?” said Dorn the moment they were back in their room, the door shut behind them. The screaming seemed to have stopped. Whatever that meant for Gared Dexane. “Everyone knows what Diar gets up to with his ‘chosen.’”

  Etherell smiled. “You’re jealous?”

  Dorn shook his head, unable even to voice his disbelief at this suggestion. He pulled off his shoes and collapsed into bed fully dressed. With any luck there was still time for sleep. If he could sleep. He felt shaken—now almost as much by Etherell’s indifference to enchantments and the dangers they posed. After tonight, none could deny it anymore. When Elissan Diar had formed his group of chosen students—the ones he would guide personally in the mysteries of the enchantments—Dorn was glad not to be among them. But also filled with dread, at the idea of what might be happening in those meetings that were always held at night. Rumors drifted the hallways like blown leaves: of lights in the wood at night, of strange sounds from a locked chamber or the Tower of the Winds. Such tales had begun since long before the arrival of Elissan Diar—that Maric Antrell and his companions met in secret to explore enchantments—but now that the activity was overseen by an Archmaster all was changed. As if the Academy were diverging into two worlds—the one Dorn and Etherell studied in, and some other, secret one.

  Nothing good could come of these enchantments, Dorn was convinced. And there was something about the new Archmaster he had distrusted on sight, that very first day when Elissan Diar stood shining beneath the rose window in the dining hall. A predatory edge to those white teeth.

  Turning to face the wall, Dorn had a new thought. He turned around again. Across their small space Etherell lay on his back, also dressed, contemplating the ceiling with a lazy faraway look that meant he was thinking something through. Dorn had come to recognize that when Etherell Lyr was deepest in thought was when he appeared his most serene and thoughtless. Though could not have said how he knew.

  The night around them was quiet again. Sounds of wind and water all they heard. Dorn drew himself up on an elbow. “You want to join them. Don’t you.”

  Etherell didn’t cease his contemplation of the ceiling, which was bare, the whitewash cracked with age. “Have you considered the adventure?”

  “Adventure?” Dorn stared. “It’s dangerous magic. You saw what it did to Dexane.” His friend didn’t move or change expression. Dorn was nearly afraid to continue, that too much might come out in his voice. That his friend would think him a coward, which perhaps he was, since now he was afraid to speak. With difficulty he went on, “You’ve … never struck me as someone who wanted power. Not like these others.” Like Maric Antrell. But even as he said the words, he wondered. For Etherell the art of poets had all along been a game, something to pass the time until he grew to manhood and his inheritance. Music didn’t draw him as it did Dorn; he didn’t, would never understand why Dorn so despised the enchantments that had—to his mind—distorted everything.

  As if confirming Dorn’s fears, Etherell still didn’t look his way. His tone was cool. “In truth,” he said, each word shaped with precision, “there is little I want. Wanting … is not something I do, Dorn Arrin.”

  With this baffling pronouncement he turned to face the wall, was in moments asleep. It was Dorn who was left whitely awake in the small hours, wonderin
g when everything that mattered to him had been so upended.

  In autumn he would have his ring. Would leave the Academy to its bizarre new regimen of night gatherings, whispers, boys going mad. Only the road and himself, until all he had cared for was folded into the mist of this Isle, into memory.

  * * *

  THE Academy was becoming strange around them, she knew; a thing she’d begun to see even before Gared Dexane awakened the castle with his screams. He had vanished the next day; the talk was Archmaster Diar had him ferried to the mainland, sent home. This in itself was shocking enough, though not without precedent by now: she had regretfully bidden farewell to Miri, and Cyrilla was leaving, too. And yet Julien Imara found it impossible to give much thought to these developments, which ought to have unsettled her. Even the departure of the two girls was only distantly felt. She was too happy.

  “You’d be wise to do as we’re doing,” Cyrilla said bluntly, the day of her departure. They were in her room; Julien sat on the bed and watched as the other girl packed the last of her things in her trunk. Miri’s bed was already stripped bare. “Really, Julien. This is no place for someone of your birth. There’s little chance you’ll become a poet if no one will teach you. Learning useful skills instead would secure you—a place.”

  A place. Julien could imagine, and it didn’t bear thinking about. Sometime—was it recently?—that idea had crossed a line, from hazy to unbearable. But she couldn’t say that to Cyrilla. She forced a laugh. “I’m not good for anything useful, you know that,” she said. “Truly I wish you the best.”

  The other girl shrugged. She appeared older in her ermine-lined travel cloak, hair drawn tight beneath the hood. And elegant, as if already assimilating back into the world to which she returned. There would be the tasks of her family household, but also balls, and extended visits to other estates, to Tamryllin. All with the goal of introducing her to potential suitors, and the next phase of a woman’s life—marriage, children. She looked nearly a woman already, in that moment. Her eyes were sharp, suddenly, and made Julien uncomfortable. “That Sendara Diar is what’s no good,” said Cyrilla. “I don’t know why I think so. But I do.”

  Julien looked away. The other girls had immediately taken a dislike to the fast friendship between Julien and Sendara. The connection the two had had from the start, that night in the Hall of Harps. Even now Julien felt as if she performed a duty, seeing Cyrilla off; she didn’t feel a true desire to be there. Nonetheless, with that same sense of duty—perhaps inculcated in every Imara—Julien stood on the lakeshore until Cyrilla Pyllene’s boat had shrunk to a speck on the horizon. She felt a guilty relief as she turned to head back to the castle. The sun had just begun to rise, stroking in tender wisps through the trees.

  She was in time for the morning meal, though by a hair. As usual she was overwhelmed when she entered the dining hall, faced with a roomful of boisterous boys. As usual they ignored her—in its way a blessing. She retreated towards the end of the table, where Sendara Diar was waving to her. A light kindled in Julien. She drifted the rest of the way to her seat as if in a cloud. Baskets of bread and pots of sloe berry preserves were the daily fare. Today there were apples as well, perhaps due to the recent flurry of activity between the Isle and mainland. But Julien was late, the breadbaskets empty.

  “I saved one for you,” said Sendara as she passed a roll wrapped in a napkin. Her hair was twined around her head in a braid coronet, exposing the length of her slender neck. “These boys destroy everything they see.”

  Julien bit into the hard roll and thought it was better than Academy bread often was. Lately everything, even the sloe berry jam, tasted better. “I saw Cyrilla off.”

  Sendara shrugged. “Those who stay are the true ones,” she said. “That’s what my father says.”

  The true ones. “You mean, like his chosen?”

  Sendara smiled. “I mean, like you and me.”

  Julien dropped her eyes, suddenly shy. The joy rising from belly to throat seemed too large to contain.

  Since the night in the Hall of Harps they were rarely apart. In lessons Julien now had a partner—one who tended to know most of the answers, and spoke up, compelling unprecedented attention to the girls at the back of the room. No longer did Julien struggle to keep up with the students a year ahead of her. Sendara helped fix her hands and fingers on the strings for greater ease of playing, and fewer cramps in her hands after. And outside of that, Julien Imara at last had found someone who shared her love of the songs; who would talk to her and had ideas about what she’d read. Julien was aware her own views were half-formed. She listened more than she spoke. She was not always willing to relinquish her views, such as her passion for the songs of Lacarne, but knew she needed above all to learn more. Sendara Diar offered not only companionship but a window to the world.

  A window, if not a door. There was a space that was sacrosanct: when one of Elissan Diar’s chosen would approach Sendara with a summons from the Archmaster. No matter what Sendara was doing or what they were talking about, she would hurry away to the tower chamber of Archmaster Diar. She helped with his work, she explained once to Julien; none else could be trusted with it.

  Sendara showed confidence during lessons. That it was her right—in fact her birthright—to speak and be heard. Julien was accustomed to her place at the back, to listening quietly. Sendara changed all that.

  During a history lesson with Archmaster Lian, soon after Sendara arrived, he was teaching about the kingdom of Ramadus. Julien knew scarcely anything of that empire far away. But now that the Court Poet was in Kahishi on official business, the Archmaster had decided they must know more of the east. Standing before their assembled desks, his nose lifted in the haughty way he had, Lian seemed to address the air.

  “At one time,” he said, “Kahishi was a land without magic. It was populated with men who worshiped the Three, as we do, and ruled by a council of lords in the great city of Almyria. But then worshipers of the god Alfin arrived, and conquered. The land divided into provinces that were constantly at war.”

  He was poised to continue speaking, but Sendara in that moment spoke up. Julien sensed rather than saw the shock of all present, that a student would speak without obtaining permission. Much less a girl. She said, “House Evrayad schemed for the throne of Ramadus. They failed, and the king had the family killed. All but the youngest, Yusuf, who escaped. He came to Kahishi and united the provinces.”

  Lian cleared his throat, visibly attempting to regain control of his lesson. “So you know something of Ramadus,” he said at last. To another student he might have administered a whipping—Lian was known for resorting to the birch rod for the slightest infraction.

  But this was the daughter of an Archmaster.

  “I have been there,” said Sendara, lips curling upward. “Of all the courts I’ve seen, that of Ramadus is the most splendid. Magic permeates everything. In the gardens there are trees entirely of gold and silver, where jeweled birds sing.”

  The boys all sat perfectly still at their desks, not turning to look.

  Another such moment occurred in a lesson about the poets of the Age of Praises—that period when in order to curry favor, the poets of Eivar had written abasingly and at length in praise of the monarchy. It was a time when the art could be said to have flourished—funded generously from the kings’ coffers—but drew criticism for its cloying flattery. It was when the enchantments had long since departed, the power of the Academy drastically on the wane.

  Archmaster Hendin taught this lesson. All that year he’d reviewed each of the Ages of poets. He had a self-effacing manner about him. His manner of walking more effortful, even stooped, since the death of Archmaster Myre. He paced as he talked. “There are questions, now, about the songs in the Age of Praises,” he said. “If they rose to the heights of true art, while bent to the flattery of kings.”

  Sendara spoke, again without warning. “My father says not,” she said. “He believes any poet who bends the knee
is not a man. And only a true man may create at his full capacity.”

  It was like a challenge to all in that room.

  Julien’s feelings were complex on those occasions. She felt pride, that this girl who knew so much was her friend. Seething beneath this, she was aware, were other feelings. Later on, Sendara told Julien that upon her visit to Ramadus a prince, fascinated, had ordered her portrait painted. A painting of Sendara Diar now hung in a gilded gallery of the Ramadian court. Or perhaps even in the prince’s own chambers.

  On these occasions, Julien reminded herself that it was more important to listen than to give in to the feelings that had driven away Miri and Cyrilla. To listen and to learn. Interspersed with Sendara’s stories of herself were insights she’d gained in her travels and studies, and these she shared with Julien freely. Julien knew she was lucky to have access to knowledge like this. To have been seen by this girl, and chosen.

  The fulcrum of Sendara’s world was her father. It seemed a prerequisite to friendship with Sendara Diar that one must acknowledge the superiority of Elissan Diar in all things. He was the most handsome, his voice the most tuneful and rich, and above all—he knew all. This was not a difficult proposition for Julien—she had no reason to doubt any of these things. She didn’t see Archmaster Diar often in any case—he only taught the older students. Privately she thought Etherell Lyr was far handsomer than the Archmaster, than anyone, but would have died rather than admit it.

  Certainly she could accept that Elissan Diar, who had traveled the world and seemed to know much of the enchantments, was as Sendara insisted—superior to the other Seers. Sendara more than implied, further, that it was the Academy that needed him, rather than the other way around. This was believable, too. Julien thought of the conversation she’d overheard between Archmaster Kerwin and Piet Abarda, that night that seemed a lifetime ago. If Sendara was right, Elissan Diar’s influence, going forward, would be crucial. Though admittedly Julien didn’t understand what that meant. The world of Archmasters and their politics was distant, incomprehensible.