Fire Dance

by Ilana C. Myer

  Her voice was weak. “Zahir, what is this?”

  He opened the door with a bow. A candle had materialized in his hand where before there was none. Its holder plain brass. Again nothing like the furnishings of the palace. He handed it to her. “I will not venture inside,” he said. “This place—it is yours. For as long as you desire it.”

  Uncomprehending, Lin began to circle the room, candle in hand. It was a tower room. Its walls were stone. Drafty, with a scent—she sniffed. The sea?

  As her eyes adjusted, she saw a large space. The walls cut with many windows. Beside each, a cubicle of carved stone, rough as if hewn from the heart of a mountain.

  She had been here before. Once.

  Lin went to a window. Dusk outside, hazed with clouds. She saw water breaking over rocks far below. Outlined against the sky, the great shoulder of a mountain. There was a smell she recognized, too, of wet leaves and pine and unnameable, moldering things. From a time that had passed quick as a sunbeam yet remained lodged in her as an ache. She remembered: warmth of a narrow bed, scents of loam and rain, a harp and golden voice singing her to sleep.

  Lin’s breath stuck in her throat. “Impossible.”

  “You have questions,” said Zahir. He was on the threshold, between worlds. “Of course. But you need not know how this is done. This is the Tower of the Winds. Not a duplicate.”

  “Shouldn’t there be … other people here, then?” She looked wildly around. “Might someone come in?”

  “The place is captured in a moment in time. Neither past, nor future. There is only the present. And what better way for you to write, Lin? Your past … it weighs so heavily. Likewise the future. This moment must be what matters. And this, the place that was denied you. The music you could have made … It need not be lost.”

  She had her hands to her mouth. She, who took pride in the aloof manner she’d cultivated until it had become second nature. Lowered her arms to her sides. “It is too much,” she said. “Too great a gift.”

  He was avoiding her eyes, as if to allow her the privacy of emotion. “Your mark,” he said, brushing the edge of his eye socket with a fingertip, “it grew bright as we entered.” He reached into his belt, extended to her a simple iron key the size of his hand. Simple, but for the mark of the Seer engraved in the handle. “When you return to your room tonight,” said Zahir, “you’ll see a door in the wall beside your bed that was not there before. None but you may open it, with this key. It leads here. None may enter this place until I remove the enchantment. Not Magicians. Not even me.”

  Lin closed her eyes. “How … did you know? What I wanted more than anything?”

  Moonlight from Academy Isle cast Zahir’s features as if in marble. “I felt it the moment I saw you,” he said. “Your need … was a thing that burned me. These two things you carry, lady: a shadow, and a flame.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  HE was alone that day in the room, as he now was most days. Dorn tried to make light of it, told himself he no longer had to share the small space with another as he tried to work. That the presence of Etherell Lyr no longer distracted him. But the quiet was consuming. Dorn had never minded—at least, not unduly—when he’d known his friend was on the mainland seducing some tavern maid. Perhaps the difference was that this time it was more than a trivial seduction. Sendara Diar, daughter of Archmaster Elissan Diar, was no tavern maid.

  It did distract him if he recalled the time he had been in the hallway on the way to their room, was just about to open the door, when he’d heard Sendara’s voice within. In their room, Dorn’s only sanctuary. He had felt anger, his hand frozen on the door handle. Wondering if he should knock. Heard her say, with a little laugh, “I … don’t like to be touched.”

  And then Etherell, in silken tones. “Are you sure?”

  A silence. Dorn stood trembling. He knew he should move from the door but yearned, horribly, to hear more of that voice, which he’d never heard from Etherell before. Even if it drove him to despair, he wanted it. But Etherell didn’t speak again right away. What Dorn began to hear were soft, shocked gasps, decidedly feminine.

  “That’s right,” Etherell said, his voice a caress. “Bite me if you need to, darling. That’s right.”

  Dorn knew then with cruel clarity that he had stayed too long. He ran.

  That was a bad day. Dorn had wandered the hallways without purpose, feeling himself an exile. And now something new to taunt him: That’s right.

  Etherell had arrived to the next lesson late, disheveled. Dorn ignored him all that day and in the evening when they prepared for sleep. It seemed to him a scent clogged the room that should not have been there, somewhere between lilac and musk. He felt cold.

  At last Etherell had said, “It won’t happen again.”

  “What?”

  “Will you look at me?”

  Reluctantly Dorn looked up from the fingernails he was trimming. Etherell sat on his own bed across from him. “I can only think of one reason you’d be angry with me,” he said. “We will go … elsewhere, in the future. The room was convenient, but … it was unfair to you.”

  “Doesn’t she have a room?”

  Etherell shook his head. “It’s too near the Archmasters—we might have been seen. Soon I will make a formal offer to her father. But he must come to know me, first. See that I am an asset.”

  He sounded, Dorn thought, more like the young lord than in all their years together. Formal offer. An asset. “So that’s why you want to join his chosen. To prove you’re an asset.”

  Etherell shrugged. “You understand now.”

  No more was said. But his friend had kept his word, and from then was rarely in their room at all. Dorn grew to know that small dusty space better within those weeks than he had in all of six years. It was his now. Though Etherell Lyr was yet a student in the Academy, in the ways that mattered he was as good as gone. He had ceased to make even a pretense of attending to his studies. All his energies were now focused on wooing Sendara Diar and proving himself worthy to her father.

  So it wasn’t a surprise when his friend stopped coming to their room at night. That had been the only time, aside from meals, when Dorn could expect to see him; but one night he simply wasn’t there. He was not there in the morning the next day. Dorn didn’t worry; it was known by now that Archmaster Diar and his chosen did their work at night. And there Etherell Lyr was at breakfast, looking tired but pleased, with heightened color and tousled hair. His attention to the modest meal of porridge and bread was ferocious, like a dog attacking scraps. But that wasn’t what gave Dorn Arrin pause as he approached the table—why he hung back.

  Between ravening bites, Etherell Lyr was deep in conversation with Maric Antrell. Elissan Diar’s favorite sat beside Etherell, in Dorn’s accustomed seat. When at last Dorn found himself another seat across the table, his friend didn’t look up. The two leaned close, gold and auburn locks nearly mingling, oblivious to all else in the dining hall. Down at the end of the table, Dorn saw the girls, the small, curly-haired one attending to her porridge half-heartedly, pushing the oats around with her spoon, while Sendara Diar kept glancing down the table in their direction. She would do so furtively, looking away if she caught sight of anyone watching. But even from here Dorn could see in her eyes what he did not want to see: hunger for anything Etherell Lyr might send her way, any amount of attention.

  Dorn saw there an unsettling mirror and was glad to look away.

  What has happened to me? he wondered once as he traversed what now seemed the endless distances from his room to lessons to meals. The hallways that seemed silent and vast even when they were crowded with students. All he’d wanted was to devote himself to being a poet; his life to that sacred road. Instead he was losing sight of that—of his purpose—day by day. The petty politics of this place and his own weakness worked against him at every turn.

  He hadn’t lost hope of recovering that road. He had only to last out the remaining months. He couldn’t
even grieve yet. Later, at a distance from this place, he would do that, too. He was paradoxically alone all the time yet never alone enough.

  Sometimes he encountered Etherell Lyr in their room at odd hours. He might awaken in the night and see him there, standing motionless at the center of the room. “Go back to sleep,” Etherell had murmured to him one time, in a tone so commanding that Dorn did, even though he wanted to ask where his friend had been. Another time Etherell startled him by coming in one afternoon, while Dorn was practicing a new song. He still intended to play at Manaia, whether Etherell joined him or not.

  That time, in the unforgiving sunlight, Dorn had seen some of the changes wrought on Etherell Lyr in the past weeks. His friend had grown haggard, with days-old stubble on his cheeks. His eyes shadowed purple beneath. “You look as bad as Maric,” Dorn had observed. “Might it be possible to carry this chosen business too far?”

  “I must prove myself,” his friend snapped. He went to the basin, blade in hand. Slapping oil on his face, he began to shave. Soon he would appear the perfect lordling again, Dorn thought with annoyance. All it took was a shave and a trim.

  Still Dorn pressed him. “What does Sendara Diar think of all this?”

  Etherell managed his signature shrug as he scraped the blade across his jaw, tautening the muscles as he went. “She knows I do it for her father. She is pleased I have joined with him. If I can demonstrate as much skill as Maric Antrell, Archmaster Diar will readily agree to my suit.”

  “Skill—in what, exactly?”

  Etherell had begun to wash his face in the basin. It was some moments before he lifted his head, darkened strands clinging to his forehead. His eyes larger and brighter than usual. “Everything you oppose, Dorn Arrin. But you knew before you asked.”

  * * *

  IT was during this time that another of the chosen departed the Isle, though not in the manner of Gared Dexane. There were no screams in the night. There was simply a vacancy at the table one morning. A whisper went about that Syme Oleir had broken in a meeting of the chosen, was sent away to recover at home. Dorn was startled. What did Elissan Diar have to gain by losing followers in this way? Or … and this thought disturbed him more … what sort of work was he engaged in that made such losses acceptable?

  He thought then of the Order of the Red Knife and his heart quickened. Not something he’d put past the cold-eyed, ambitious Elissan Diar. But Etherell would not involve himself in blood divination … surely not. Something else must be at work. Not for the first time, Dorn regretted he couldn’t speak with Valanir Ocune. Not that the Seer had been particularly available even when he was around, but since his departure the Archmasters clearly felt they had free rein to do as they pleased. The eye of the Crown, as embodied in the Seer Ocune, was no longer upon them.

  Perhaps the disappearance of Syme Oleir—a lively fellow, more popular by far than Gared Dexane—would have garnered more scrutiny if events even stranger had not immediately followed. One morning three students, second-years of fourteen, were sent to gather kindling in the forest. This was customary—it was a chore considered beneath the more advanced students. But they didn’t come back. None were known for disobedience, yet as day waned to evening still they did not return. For two days the castle was in a state of panic, as the Archmasters organized search parties and some, like Archmaster Lian, were in a rage. Apparently two of the boys were of noble blood. Any harm that came to them would need to be accounted for.

  Noon on the third day the boys staggered through the castle gates. They trembled with exhaustion, their garments in tatters as if they’d been flung through a hedge of thorns. But their story, which was meant to stay confined to the Archmasters but swiftly circulated throughout the Academy, far eclipsed their appearance in strangeness. Dorn heard a full retelling at dinner that day, by a solemn fourth-year who believed it his duty to keep all informed.

  The tale ran that on their way back to the castle the boys had taken a common shortcut, marked by an oak that was one of the largest on the Isle. As they passed the tree they had begun to grow tired. Next they knew they were waking from sleep on a mountain, bare and stony, with no sign of the season’s green, torn by a wind that had the bite of winter.

  After a long, desperate climb, they came at evening to a cave where a woman sat at a tall fire. Here the tone of the tale-teller became reverent. “And they say she was lovelier than a hawthorn in spring,” said the thin boy, rubbing his nose wistfully.

  “I’m sure,” said Dorn. Though he had to admit that if they were lying, the invention was impressive.

  The woman was clad in diaphanous gold, they said; the outlines of her body near-visible even while hidden from view. Her hair black and shining like onyx, a mass of braids bound in gold thread down one shoulder, falling past her waist. Her eyes … here he stopped. These were indescribable, it seemed.

  “I can imagine what happens next,” Dorn had said.

  The boy had shaken his head, equal parts negation and reproach. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. His tone hushed with that same reverence. First she had waved a hand and a table spread with a great feast appeared before the boys. Neatly folded on each chair was a change of clothes, soft and woven of bright, costly colors. Later, after luxurious baths in hot springs beneath the cavern, the boys would discover the clothes suited them as if they’d been tailored to fit. New boots they had as well, and fur-lined cloaks against the chill. They then attended to the food: soft loaves of bread still fragrant from baking; meat so rare it was bloody; colorful, sweet fruits they’d never seen. Their gold chalices that brimmed with wine remained full no matter how much they drank.

  The woman did not eat or drink. At first she stood watching them at their feast. When they were done, having eaten the last of the fruits and meat and bread, a harp appeared in her hands, and she sang for them. And with her voice she possessed their hearts.

  She declared she would give herself to the one who succeeded at three tasks, each of which sounded more impossible than the last. They were first to build a ship of their own hands from whatever timber they could find on the mountain, sail west seven days, until they would come to a land where lived a giant; their mission, of course, that he should be slain. Following this second task, they were to recover a necklace the giant had stolen from her, an amulet of engraved gold that belonged to her kin. So they had set off, bound by their common purpose yet in competition with one another; only one could be winner. And the desire that drove them was like none other they’d had. For her they would die or kill many times over.

  Here the boy trailed off. He looked around at the expectant listeners, of whom most were younger than he. Shifted from one foot to the other. The meal had long since ended; chairs had been pushed back, food long since devoured. In the dining hall there grew, despite the number of boys there, an unbearable silence. At last one of the students urged, “What happened?”

  The boy swallowed. “They say … they say they wandered years in pursuit of the lady’s tasks. One thinks it was eight years, another ten, another fifteen. They would not say more, only that … that at the end they failed, all three, and were sent home.”

  They had returned in the clothes they had worn on departing. Nor did they show signs of age. No trace upon them of another world.

  Years? Dorn wanted to laugh and found he could not. The memory came to him of a night of lament before the corpse of the High Master, when it seemed the doors of the world were opened. He said, almost accusingly, “That is truly all they say?”

  The boy glanced at Dorn with alarm. “That is all. And … and that they are done with music. That they will never know joy again, now that they’ve lost the lady.”

  “Such words,” one of the other students scoffed, and cuffed the tale-teller’s arm. “Now they have material for nights in the Tower for years to come.” A ripple of laughter went around at this; all students had suffered nights in the Tower of the Winds when they would sit for hours, stare at the caperings of their ca
ndle or out to sea, and struggle to find words.

  So it became a jest at the end. But later that same night one of the boys who had been lost was discovered hanging by his neck from a beam in the kitchen storage room. He had used his own belt. It was only by randomest good fortune that the cook had needed something from the storage room at just that time. The boy was cut down, and lived. The Archmasters sent him away.

  In later days the two who remained kept to themselves, vouchsafing not a shred of interest in their peers, only grudgingly heeding the Archmasters. On the few occasions when Dorn met their gaze he was shocked by the emptiness he saw there. Soon they, too, departed, and were not heard from again.

  Whether or not the tale was true, something had occurred in the woods, at the site of the great oak tree.

  * * *

  JULIEN thought she would always remember the evening it began. She had guessed what was happening even before Sendara did. When she saw Etherell Lyr advancing towards them, eyes respectfully downcast, she had known all that would happen. Perhaps fear was foresight of a kind.

  When Etherell was near Sendara Diar had noticed him, had an uncertain smile. With a flourish and in full view of the dining hall he had presented her with a wood carving: slender, elegant, utterly strange. Julien Imara had never seen its like, with its noble, equine head and serpent’s body. Sendara had turned it over in her hands. “A seahorse,” she said. Her breath unsteady despite herself. “It is fine work.”