Fire Dance

by Ilana C. Myer

  CHAPTER

  17

  HE’D followed Etherell all that day, but it hadn’t gone as expected. When the singing began outside, Dorn had thought surely now Etherell would leave his position outside the Hall of Harps, go take his place beside Elissan Diar at the need-fires for the gods knew what purpose. Dorn’s plan had been to do whatever he could to save his friend from the effects of enchantments, even if it meant pummeling him where he stood. But instead Etherell Lyr had set himself outside the door—why was it now closed?—to the Hall of Harps, and commenced to look casual. From his hiding place on an overhead balcony Dorn saw the transformation. While there were no fires that night, the entrance hall with its many windows was open to moonlight. Dorn saw as his friend glanced about, a studied coldness; and then suddenly, after a pause, relaxed his stance. Took on an appearance of boredom.

  Dorn knew the other man well enough to recognize when he put on artificial mannerisms. What he didn’t know, yet, was the reason.

  Some time passed. His friend paced below. It seemed to go on for quite a while, and Dorn found himself beginning to doze where he crouched. He awoke with a start to an irritated voice from below. “For heaven’s sake, Dorn, you may as well come out.”

  For a moment he hesitated. But Etherell was looking directly at the spot where he had imagined himself hidden. Dorn leaned over the rail of the balcony. “I could tell you why I’m here, but so could you,” he said, “and that is a child’s game.”

  “I know why you’re here,” said Etherell, idly wiping at a spot on his sleeve. From this height, Dorn could see the top of his head, the smooth fall of his hair. “You’re following me. Why, I am not sure. But if I had a guess—I’d say it’s because you want to save me from myself. Which is touching. Never mind that I don’t need saving.”

  “All right,” said Dorn. “So you know why I’m here. You have the advantage. As usual.” He grabbed hold of the rail, flipped himself down to the landing at the midpoint of the stairs; grabbed hold of the rail there, flipped again, and he was level with his friend at the door to the Hall of Harps. He had performed that little trick many times through the years, though not recently; this castle, with its corners and crannies and jutting surfaces, had offered the delight of discovery, those early years. Now was different, perhaps because he was older; though he had engaged in an act that made light of the place, still he felt within him its solemnity.

  Etherell looked on, expressionless. “I never meant to lead you on.”

  It was like being punched. “Shut up,” Dorn said. “It’s not like that. I’m—I wanted to make sure nothing happens to you. These people—they’re not what they say they are.”

  “I know what they are.”

  “Then why—” He was cut off. In that moment they both heard it: a long, drawn-out scream from the Hall of Harps.

  Etherell crashed through the door. He had drawn his knife.

  The scene that greeted them was one Dorn would remember vividly all his life. A horror at odds with the lambent Hall.

  Before the Silver Branch, the Seer Valanir Ocune lay crumpled on the floor, his lips drawn back from the teeth, face bloodless; it was so clearly death in the room with them that Dorn cried out. Sprawled beside the Seer in a sitting position, her back supported by the stone dais, was the girl Julien Imara. She lay lifeless, stared open-mouthed at nothing.

  The moonlight that poured in showed it clear: the mark of the Seer etched around her eye.

  Etherell was snarling imprecations. His face had gone purple. “Fucking Seer.” He knelt by Julien, passed his hand before her eyes. Seized her wrist and felt for a pulse. “She’s alive. He’s done something to her…”

  Dorn’s heart was hammering. “She is a Seer.” There was no mistaking the mark and its meaning.

  Etherell had moved on to Valanir’s body. Was shaking the Seer by the shoulders. When at last he turned, it was with a rage so intense that Dorn fell back. “He knew,” Etherell spat. “Knew he would die. I see it now. Of course he didn’t tell me. Now it is too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “To repay my debt to him.” Etherell’s teeth clenched. “I cannot stand to be in debt.” Regaining control, he motioned to Julien. “Help me with her. We’ll take her to our room. No one must see her this way—there would be questions.”

  “You work for Valanir Ocune?”

  But Etherell wasn’t looking at Dorn anymore. His eyes were trained off to the side, over Dorn’s shoulder. His lips curled in his whimsical smile, though Dorn thought he could see the effort it cost him. “Just the man I wanted to see,” he said. Dorn spun around.

  Maric stood framed in the doorway. With a single bound he was in the room and had wrapped one arm smoothly, almost tenderly around Dorn’s neck. The pressure at his windpipe was knowing, strategic; any move on Dorn’s part would seal off his air.

  “I was wondering if you’d be here,” said Maric. “But won’t the Master find this interesting.”

  Etherell stepped forward. “I expect he will. Unless,” this said with earnestness, “I can persuade you to keep it between us?”

  Maric laughed. “And why would I do that?”

  “No reason.” Etherell’s wrist darted; Maric gasped. Dorn felt the grip around his neck loosen and broke free; turned to stare as a gout of red erupted from Maric’s throat. Dorn backed away, hardly aware of what he did, how he moved. The young lordling fell to his knees. Face taut with shock. He tried to scream again; it came out, instead, as a gurgling. Maric fell to his side, clutching at his throat with skittering fingers.

  Etherell surveyed the knife in his hand. “More nuisance,” he said with a curled lip. “Perhaps it can be salvaged.” He turned his back on Maric, who still bubbled and spluttered on the floor, and knelt by the corpse of Valanir Ocune. He closed the dead Seer’s hand around the knife handle. “There. So that’s done. They killed each other.” He rose and went to Julien, drew her haltingly to her feet. She was unresponsive still. The knotted lines that made the mark around her eye were red, etched as if with a blade. The skin around the lines ruddy, too, angry. With a nod, Etherell signaled for Dorn to help carry her. “Let’s go.”

  Once upstairs, they laid her out on Etherell’s bed and covered her. Etherell lit a candle and placed it on a table beside her head. She had begun to mutter and grasp at the air. Eyes sightless, as if in a fever. “Hush, dear,” said Etherell with what sounded like a forced gentleness. “Quiet now.” After a time, her eyelids drooped shut—or mostly; an unnerving sliver of white still showed. Her limbs gradually ceased their frantic movements, at last lay still.

  “An herb mixture in that candle does the trick,” said Etherell. “I never asked him what was in it. I suppose now I’ll never know.”

  Dorn had dropped to sit on his own bed. Staring at the man who bent over the unconscious girl … the man who moments before had swiftly, carelessly killed. Blood splashed the front of his shirt, left a mark like a slash on his cheek. Dorn said, “Who are you?”

  Etherell’s smile was too wide again, as if he was out of patience. He swept a bow, exaggeratedly, almost to the floor. “Etherell, heir to the estates of Lyr, if it please you.”

  “No.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “You will force me to ask?”

  Etherell drew himself up, ran a hand through his hair. It seemed like a gesture of acquiescence. “All right.” He went to the window. All this time they could hear the strange singing that arose from the courtyard. Against the violet sky he saw an orange tint of flame. The songs were wrong, he knew.

  Everything about this night, this spring, was wrong.

  Looking down at whatever he could see in the dark Etherell began to speak. “I was ten when Valanir found me. At the time I was being kept by a lord of the north. Not Amaristoth—their neighbor, farther west. It is said.”

  Dorn waited, but the other was silent. “Being kept?” Dorn ventured. Still no response from the man at the window. Dorn felt hi
mself go cold. “Oh no.”

  “Since I was six, I believe. I don’t remember when I was taken from home, or where home was. I’m not certain, to be honest, how old I am.” His profile was soft in the moonlight. Outside, the singing had entered a lull; they heard the lick and chatter of the fires. “As a boy I was—well. People saw me, and wanted me. And so. The lord kept me as his favorite, and there were parties.” He turned to Dorn with what seemed a genial smile. “I learned a lot in those years. About people, and what they want, and what they will tell themselves to get it.”

  Tears were tracking down Dorn’s cheeks. “I am … so sorry.”

  “It hurts, then?” Etherell’s smile had gone; he looked across to Dorn with what seemed polite interest. “I suppose it would.” He strode from the window, as if from a need to move about the room; began to stride back and forth near the bed where Julien lay, though he did not seem aware of her. “Valanir Ocune was at one of those parties—the entertainment, bought for an evening. Entertainers were paid in great sums to forget what they’d seen. Yet Valanir didn’t do that. When he saw me, I remember, a change came over him. I looked in his eyes and I could tell right away, somehow, that he saw me. He knew what I hid in my heart. That I was crafting a plot of revenge, for when I was sufficiently grown … and that I would be good at it. At the plan, its concealment … and execution. Strange as I know it sounds, I think he saw all that. We entered into a partnership, he and I, in that glance across the firelit hall as my lord drooled in his fourth cup of wine.

  “Later that night, plying him with more wine, Valanir challenged my lord to a wager … and won.” A note of outrage in Etherell’s voice. “He bought me. Spirited me away before anyone was sober enough to know what had happened. Of course, I thought I knew what he wanted. But no. Valanir Ocune wanted something else of me. He knew I would be quick at learning. He would train me in the ways of a lordling—letters, history, music. Swordplay. And send me to the Academy to be his spy. And I? I would, upon the completion of my time here, have fulfilled my debt to him. No one could ever again claim to own me.”

  “Where … where did you plan to go? After?” It was with effort that Dorn made himself speak.

  Etherell grinned. “I thought to pay a visit to a certain castle in the north. With my knives. And take my time. I don’t want him to die slowly. Justice is important, don’t you agree?”

  Dorn was shivering, though the room wasn’t cold. He held himself coiled inward, tight. He would not reach to give comfort where it was not desired. He would not say my love. He said at last, “What happened to you…”

  “Forget it. Forget what happened to me.” Etherell’s face had taken on that stone cast Dorn always dreaded. “You want to help, don’t you? It’s commendable. You want—other things, too. I know that.”

  He moved quickly, as he had with Maric and the knife. He drew Dorn to his feet and was gripping him by the shoulders and walking him backward, back, until Dorn was tripping but couldn’t stop marching backward, held upright by that painful grip. It happened too fast for him to react; back, back, Etherell’s face close to his now; breath warm on lips, eyes level with his. The wall pressed at his back. Etherell pinned him there, leaned close. In that silken voice such as he’d used with Sendara Diar he murmured in Dorn’s ear; it warmed and made him shiver all the way down. “I know what people want. I could make you explode in ways you’d not forget.” Breath turned to hiss. “But I would feel nothing.”

  Etherell flung himself back and away, did not look down at what would have been Dorn’s shame where he stood pressed to the wall. The tears had not ceased, to his humiliation. Profound humiliation was what Dorn felt, joined to grief, and what seemed a hundred other things he could not have put into words. Yet he said, “That’s not … what I want,” with unexpected clarity. Kiara had returned to him his voice, at the least; that last shred of himself. He shut his eyes, head tipped back against the wall, his traitor heartbeat racing on.

  It had begun to slow, somewhat, when he opened his eyes. Etherell was moving swiftly about the room, in the midst of changing clothes. He’d untied his shirt and slid out of it like a lizard, let it fall. Then went on to the basin, bent over it, began to rinse the blood from his face.

  When the bodies of Maric and Valanir Ocune were discovered, suspicion would fall on anyone who had not been at the fires.

  With that glimmer of rationality, a return of his ability to string together actions and their consequences, Dorn found he had regained his ability to move. He crept to the door. Opened it.

  “Where are you going?” Etherell, sounding irritated. Dorn let the door swing behind him. A harsh report as it shut. Then silence. He kept on, stumbling even though these were his hallways, had been for nearly half his life. As if he’d been pitched from the room, like a cast-off stone, and could not regain his balance. The dark enough to swallow him whole. He fell into that dark. Let himself fall. It opened to him, that and a silence, complete. Not even music, anymore. One sound: his heart.

  Then another, coming from elsewhere, or from within him—he didn’t know.

  Dorn Arrin.

  His own name, breathed in the dark. As if uttered by a lover, or perhaps the opposite—if he could be said to know the difference.

  Arising ahead, the slightest change; a pillar of stone now visible, with its medley of carved faces: mocking, mourning, frozen in icy hauteur. Its scrollwork fluid as the ripple of water. Some moonlight must be filtering in, then, from the foot of the stairs.

  Dorn Arrin.

  It came from downstairs. Dorn grasped the rail, began to descend with care. It seemed important to take care, though he did not know why. If he fell it would not matter to anyone, surely; it would not matter even to him.

  One step, another. The stone bannister cold to his hand. Dorn recalled himself, an earlier self, curled on a rug in his father’s workshop with a book he’d pilfered for the night. A vivid memory, for his father had set the book aside to show to wealthy clients, having acquired it from a rare book dealer passing through their town one market day. Illuminated with capering, splendid figures, it told of the deeds of heroes. Men armed and clever, confident and brave, engaged in the only aim that mattered: to make a lasting mark on the world. Death came for all; but some shone beyond it for all the days, enshrined in a firmament of legend.

  In their blue and red cloaks adorned with gold leaf, swords gripped in their hands, the men of epics shone from the page. There were battles, but that wasn’t all; there were journeys to the Otherworld as casual as stepping across a creek, of grappling with hounds of hell and the King who led them—all with dreadful red eyes. The King wore a horned helmet of black. He could be tricked, his evil contained for a time. Never killed.

  Dorn stood on the landing of the entrance hall: from here could see the way moonlight had settled on that place of pillars and stairs, carvings and doorways, like an encasement of glass.

  Dorn Arrin.

  Beings of the Otherworld could neither be conquered nor destroyed, not decisively. It was not the place of mortals to attempt it. The most they could hope to do was turn them back for a time. Deeds could not last. But stories did, and the names they illumined; though stories might go through quicksilver changes with the years. Some core of them—that core that made you recall that helmet and its dull absorption of all light, the hills of impossible green beyond the border of what was real—that was lasting.

  It was that which he had taken with him from hours of reading in his father’s workshop. What he’d hoped to discover within himself in the Tower of the Winds, when released at night to solitude; showered with the extravagant gifts of time, a supply of candles, paper, and an emptiness into which words might come. The only things a poet could be said to need.

  But in the end there had always been himself in the way, his self like a hostile stranger that obstructed his path. The luxuries of time and solitude compelled Dorn to grapple his rage. His songs went to that rage, emerged from it, too, as in a wheel t
hat would not cease to turn. He was a spiral of smoke, a cyclone trapped on water. There could be value in what he made; at times, it was good work.

  It did not take him to a place beyond. Would not be set into legend.

  Dorn Arrin.

  He had turned the handles of the great doors and walked out. Now was light; the fires, rearing up to make the sky bleed. Arrayed on benches were all the Academy—Archmasters and students alike. Firelight splashed them with color, yet also made them look flat as manuscript illuminations. Skin shone gold and white. Copper hair of the Diar pair, father and daughter; she in a dress of red and gold trim that he could see even from here, bared at the arms. A crown of rowan flowers in her hair. Beside her, Elissan Diar also crowned, with a circlet of silver.

  Music came from them, from everyone present, mingled with the roar of flame; they were singing. Of course—he’d been hearing them. All along.

  Dorn Arrin.

  It was they who called to him, in a layered, harmonied chorus; solemn with an undertow of excitement, a frenzy yet contained. They summoned him now, to step into the sphere of light. To be exposed.

  Dorn Arrin.

  And he was so tired, and the light that beckoned was, perhaps, the thing for which he’d been searching all the years; a thing incandescent, consuming. A thunderous wall that stood for more than it in itself was. The enchantments were back, after all, and if Dorn could not escape them, perhaps the only alternative was this. To surrender.

  He saw that Archmaster Lian, white robes gold in the firelight, held something upraised like a battle standard. A slip of paper.

  No need for Dorn to read what it said. He knew.

  Dorn dragged forward another step, and then there was no longer a need: they’d seen him. Their eyes lit in a way that would have scared him at any other time. He stood and watched them come. Students came running, swarmed him like locusts; and then they had grabbed his arms and legs, he was being borne aloft by many hands, and they ran with him, faster and faster. They carried him as if he were weightless, a feather, or as if their strength had increased tenfold. His name their song, their cry, their eyes bright and blank as mirrors. The heat an annihilating blow. Smoke stung and blurred his eyes.