Fireheart Tiger

by Aliette de Bodard

  They’re impossible words. They ring, over and over, in Thanh’s mind, an endless string of incoherent syllables. She can’t be spoken to like this. She doesn’t deserve to be spoken to like this. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Please,” Thanh says. Because Giang should be angry. Because Giang should be blaming her. Because—because anger is easier, and compassion hurts so much. And, because she knows no other way, she says, “I don’t know why you care so much about hurt. It’s not like you’d know what it means.”

  Giang stares at her for a while, with those same wide, gleaming eyes. Something catches in Thanh’s chest: a heartbeat, skipped; a warm breath like a kiss, swallowed and treasured. She doesn’t deserve that. She never deserved that. “You know why,” Giang says. A shake of her head that limns it in flames. “I told you.”

  You matter.

  “No,” Thanh says. “No.” That’s not possible. That’s the stuff of legends and fairy tales, of the founding of kingdoms. Not of now, in this beleaguered kingdom where every choice feels it’s leading to ever smaller places.

  “Of course it is.” Giang sounds as though she’s going to say something else, stops with a visible effort. “Are you going to tell me what I feel?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “That’s not true.” And she’s looking at Thanh with such bright, naked hunger that Thanh sees what’s been staring her in the face.

  “No,” she says. “You can’t—”

  But she can, can’t she? She understands fear and anger and atonement and the desire to make herself smaller to do less harm. Why would she not understand other feelings, too?

  “I care about you. I—you’re right: I don’t know what it is; I don’t know what it means.” She takes a small, shaking breath. “I’ve never felt this before.”

  “Giang—”

  “You do what you want with this. It’s not for me to tell you how to receive it. But—” Another shaking breath that limns the room in fire. “But I have to say it, big sis. She would have let you burn.”

  She doesn’t need to say Eldris’s name. Her words are as sharp as a knife stab, and guilt and anger well up in Thanh. How dare she? “We weren’t together at the time.”

  Giang says, simply, “When the palace was burning, she left without once thinking of you.”

  “They all did,” Thanh says.

  “Yes.” Giang flicks her fingers, spreading something that looks like ashes over the bed. “You say Eldris wouldn’t have done this if she’d been in love with you. What I’m asking is: If love is what it takes to make her remember a girl in the midst of a fire, then how much can you trust her? How much can you trust that love?”

  Blood on a sword. Pharanea’s pale face. Eldris’s voice when she spoke of the other countries they’d conquer. “That’s nonsense.”

  Giang says nothing, merely holds her ground and stares at Thanh. How dare she? How dare she?

  “You’re a fire elemental. You don’t know. You can’t know any of those things. You hurt people. You burnt the palace. You killed so many. What can you know about love, Giang?”

  Giang’s face is pale, her breath faster and faster, contracting the light around the room as if it were flames, flickering in the shadow of a burning building. “Big sis.”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any of it. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t possibly know. Just leave me alone!” And Thanh gets up and paces the room—and when she looks again Giang is gone, and there are only ashes like white snow on the bed, and the echo of Giang’s voice in the room, already fading.

  “As you wish.”

  * * *

  Alone in her room, Thanh paces up and down, trying to banish the memory of fire. “Giang?” she calls. “Li’l sis?”

  There’s no answer. “Li’l sis!”

  In the antechamber, the handmaidens are playing a game of mạt chược, and laughing every time one of them puts a particularly auspicious combination down. Thanh sits down on the bed, breathing hard. Nibbles a bun from the tray by the bedside, finding it tastes like ashes—the same ashes Giang spread on her bed, before she left. All the lanterns in the room have gone out: not even warm embers left in them. She’s gone—to some other fire, as she said, some other refuge. Always plenty to burn.

  I care.

  What has she done?

  She gets up again. The room is small and stifling and she cannot seem to banish Giang’s eyes from her thoughts. She kneels, instead, before her clothes chests, pulling out the one for the dry season and lifting out silk clothes from within. She might as well pack for Yosolis. It will keep her mind on the important things. On what she’s chosen for herself.

  Outside, the mạt chược game has fallen silent. Thanh unfolds dress after dress, staring at the beautiful embroidery—are these golden birds worth taking back to Yosolis, or will they make her seem like more of a foreigner? She’ll have to look at the jewelry, too.

  A murmur of voices from the antechamber. Thanh barely looks up—but then she hears Eldris’s voice, sharp and cutting.

  The door slams open. It’s Eldris, face flushed. Thanh gets up, holding a dress in front of her. “My love—”

  “Where is she?” Eldris asks.

  Pharanea? But surely Eldris would know . . . “I don’t understand—”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Eldris’s voice is sharp. “Your handmaidens talked. You have someone else in your bedroom. Where is she?”

  Giang. Thanh’s heart chills. She’s done nothing improper with Giang, nothing at all, but she can’t help the pang of guilt that surges through her. “Eldris, I swear it’s nothing—”

  Eldris pushes past Thanh, pulls clothes from the dry season chest, and throws them on the bed. “Where is she, Thanh?”

  Thanh still holds the dress, a flimsy shield between them. “She’s not here now.” And then realizes what she’s said.

  Eldris’s gaze turns to stone. “But she was here. Wasn’t she?” And, when Thanh doesn’t move: “Answer me!”

  “I don’t sleep with her,” Thanh says.

  “I don’t care!” Eldris’s face is contorted into what might be grief, or anger. “You hid her, Thanh. I embarrassed myself in front of Pharanea for you—and now I discover you’ve been running so fast because you wanted to get back to someone I’ve never met? That you’ve been holding out on me. What did you think you were doing?”

  “Eldris,” Thanh says—and Eldris covers the space between them, and tears the dress away from her, and Thanh feels as though she’s been stripped naked. “I love you. Please don’t—”

  “You said yes. You’re my bride,” Eldris says. “I didn’t come all this way to be lied to, Thanh.”

  She raises her hand again, and with icy clarity, Thanh sees it—that she’s going to strike, to send Thanh tumbling to the bed. And then . . . her mind balks, but she knows all the outcomes, knows that none of them are good for her. Mother’s soldiers will come here, of course, but by the time they arrive it’ll be too late for her.

  Mother’s words in her memory, each of them precise and clipped: She’s here to take what she wants.

  And Giang’s voice, small and thin: How much can you trust that love?

  Thanh catches Eldris’s hand in hers—feels the shock of it traveling up her wrist and arm; strains to remain standing. And then she twists, and as Eldris is thrown off-balance she runs for the door.

  The antechamber is deserted, the handmaidens gone, and their mạt chược tiles scattered on the floor. They’re carved ivory: any of them can send her face-first on the floor, a fall that’ll cost her dearly. Thanh dances around them, breath in her throat: behind her she can hear Eldris throwing open the door, can hear the sound of the sword’s scabbard, that slow steady beating against Eldris’s legs. She sidesteps, again and again, starts feeling her foot slipping—shakes it, panicked, until her smooth-soled shoes are gone and it’s just her bar
e feet, and she’s past the antechamber, and at the top of a short flight of steps leading down to a courtyard. Over her is the roof, with the longevity tiles, and lanterns swinging in the breeze.

  Eldris’s hand on her shoulder, unwavering. “Don’t leave.” Thanh struggles, but her grip is too strong, and she’s pulling her in. “Let’s talk.”

  “I don’t have anything else to say,” Thanh says, but Eldris’s grip doesn’t waver.

  “Apologies would be appropriate.” Eldris’s voice is flat now, the same tone she had in the audience chamber at the very beginning. It’s not going to stop at talking. It’ll be groveling and humiliation, if it ends there at all. Thanh’s eyes, wildly searching, find the lanterns above her, the gleam of embers there.

  “Li’l sis!” She calls—and again and again, as Eldris pulls at her. “Li’l sis, please. I’m sorry. Please.” Please please please. She can’t throw off Eldris’s grip: it’s hard enough to bruise.

  “She’s not here,” Eldris says, slowly, viciously.

  Thanh, the fire whispers in the courtyard. Big sis. The embers flare in the lanterns. Fire flickers and grows—spins into the air, lands at the foot of the stairs, and takes the shape of a woman.

  Giang.

  She pulls herself upwards, staring at Eldris—staring at Thanh, with wide, luminous eyes. “Let her go,” she says.

  Eldris has frozen. Thanh tries to free herself, but the grip on her hasn’t wavered.

  “What sorcery is this?” Eldris says.

  Giang stares levelly back at her. She doesn’t move, but she seems to grow larger and taller, her hands stretching into claws, her eyes catching fire, her skin golden and striped. Light spreads beneath her skin, as if it was just a thin, papery shell over ever-burning flames.

  “Let her go,” Giang says, again, and the light spreads—and when it reaches the columns, they catch fire.

  It’s a faint, translucent shadow—the ghost of flames, something that doesn’t seem to touch the wood—and yet Thanh smells smoke, and charring, and the promise of more: of rooms ablaze and corridors aflame. Behind her, Eldris stands frozen. It’s her chance: there will never be a better one. Thanh jabs behind her with her elbow, straight into Eldris’s ribs—and as Eldris gasps, she frees herself and stumbles blindly down the steps, towards the center of the courtyard. Comes to stand away from them both, rubbing at her shoulder where she still feels the shock of Eldris’s grip—the way it’s slowly segueing into a dull, throbbing pain.

  Eldris raised her hand. She threw clothes on the bed. She grabbed Thanh.

  She—words spin and falter and fail Thanh utterly.

  On the steps, Giang is staring at Eldris. Eldris looks from her to Thanh—and then says, very quietly, “I see. You could have had so much.”

  A gilded cage. A ring of thorns, gnawing her to the bone. Thanh forces herself to stand still, when everything in her screams of flight. She says—because darkness needs to be faced, needs to be denied—“You would have given me so much, in exchange for me giving up everything.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  But she knows she’s not. She knows that the drama maker is the one who rifled through clothes and would have pushed Thanh to the bed.

  “No,” Thanh says, simply.

  Eldris gazes back at her. And then, slowly and deliberately, turns and walks away without a backward glance, alongside the covered corridors of pillars leading outside Thanh’s quarters, and back into the gardens. Abandoning Thanh—a pawn that’s served her purpose, that no longer deserves anything. It shouldn’t hurt so much. It shouldn’t feel like someone is ripping her heart out. “Eldris—” Thanh bites back on a cry of pure anguish.

  But it’s Giang’s voice that is louder. “You don’t walk away,” she says. “You don’t get to take what you want, what you think you’re due simply because no one has ever refused you.” And she moves, then—the light of the fire extending ahead of her, towards Eldris. Eldris starts running alongside the corridor, one hand on the hilt of her sword, and Giang follows her. As she does every pillar on either side of the corridor goes up like kindling, little flames spreading to the carvings and the lanterns in the rafters, and the stones under her becoming opalescent as if with trapped light.

  No no no.

  It smells of fire and smoke, and the steps Thanh tumbled down are covered in ghostly flames, the stone luminous and orange. Thanh moves towards them, feels the heat underfoot; smells fire and smoke, and hears the crackle of burning wood. She’s alone again, powerless and forgotten. She’s running through the corridors of the palace in Yosolis and finding only burning rooms and courtyards full of ashes and choking smoke until it seems to her she’s forgotten what it means to freely breathe. Eldris and the others are already safely outside, where the real princesses are, where the people who matter got evacuated—she doesn’t matter; she’s never mattered.

  She—

  She remembers Giang’s hand in hers, remembers running through corridors. Remembers that, in the midst of bleak despair, she found the way out for both of them.

  That’s what matters.

  She’s not in Yosolis anymore, and if she doesn’t stop Giang there will be nothing left of her home.

  Worse, there will be nothing left of Giang; of the girl who looked at Thanh with wide eyes; the one Thanh befriended, the one who held her hand and whose touch made Thanh’s breath catch. The one who—

  The one whom Thanh cares for, just as Giang cares for her.

  She can’t let Giang lose herself here.

  Thanh closes her eyes; breathes in, slowly and deliberately, feeling the acrid taste of smoke in her lungs. Then she starts running.

  They haven’t gone far: only to the next courtyard, one with a pond and pavilion—the pond’s water has evaporated, the lotus flowers are ablaze, and the pavilion is falling to charred pieces. In its ruins, Eldris stands, disheveled and wild, holding her sword against Giang with a manic gleam in her eyes. Giang is now something else—a creature of claws and fire, awaiting a chance to devour it all. The flames gather around her like a court of attendants, and in the center is barely a hint of the girl in Thanh’s bedroom, the one who was finding buns odd. There’s just a dark shadow, with yellow eyes the color of amber, elongated pupils—with a stretched mouth full of fangs, and claws gleaming sharper than any human steel.

  This. This is who burnt the palace in Yosolis.

  “Giang. Li’l sis. Please.”

  Giang turns, a fraction. Faces Thanh, her head cocking curiously, a tiger unsure of its prey.

  “It’s me,” Thanh says. Giang isn’t recognizing her. She’ll swallow her whole, as casually as she’s burnt everything—as she’d have burnt Eldris. Thanh says, with a confidence she doesn’t feel—heart beating frantically in her throat—“Remember.”

  A shrug, from Giang.

  “Li’l sis. Giang. You—you said everything you touched caught fire. You said you didn’t know what you’d done. You said you hadn’t meant to burn the palace.”

  A pause. The claws stretch, lazily, towards her. “If you do this, it’ll be deliberate.” Ancestors, please watch over me. Please please please. “You’ll be responsible for it. All of it.”

  Giang says, in a voice that’s the crackle of flames, “She would have killed you. Or worse.”

  Thanh stares at Eldris—at the sword, at the face that looks like a stranger’s. “Yes,” she says, and the word tastes bitter on her tongue. Because that’s who Eldris is, and it hurts to admit it. “But she’s not worth it.” That hurts, too.

  “She’ll come back,” Giang says. “To conquer you. To reduce you to a different sort of ashes.”

  She might. She might not. “Yes,” Thanh says. “But that’s not how you solve it. Li’l sis, please. You said you cared. You said I mattered. You said you didn’t want to hurt me. This will hurt. This is my home you’re burning.”

  A pause. An eternity while the courtyard burns around her—while she digs her nails into her hands to not run
away, to not find fresh air and coolness and everything that’s not fire.

  Giang says, finally, “I want you safe.”

  Thanh swallows back bitter tears. “There’s nothing that keeps me safe. Not the way you or she want.” Not the way Eldris wants. Because that safety is a cage. It’s Thanh held in amber, forever shielded by someone else’s will.

  Giang looks at her. The darkness at the heart of the fire is dwindling, and when she speaks again it’s with the voice of the girl. “I’m not her.”

  “I know,” Thanh says. She’s meant to keep her voice low and quiet, but it slips out all the same, as if she’d been holding it in her the entire time and running finally dislodged it. “I care for you.”

  Giang’s voice is shaking. “Big sis.”

  Thanh says it again, because it’s the only thing left in her. “I care for you. I—stay with me, Giang, please. Will you stay with me?”

  Giang smiles, and it’s wide and careless once more. “Of course I’ll always stay with you.” She moves—and the flames become transparent again, the stones dark and solid. “Go,” she says, to Eldris.

  Eldris doesn’t need to be told twice. She sheathes her sword, and walks—and then runs, getting out of sight in less time than it takes the flames at the pavilion to subside.

  Thanh and Giang stare at each other. Giang’s corona of flame is still around her, and behind her the corridor is still burning, with shouts from the palace’s fire brigade to bring water. In a moment, there will be people—attendants, scholars, counsellors—an irate, desolate Mother who will need to be reassured, or placated, or both. In a moment the world will intrude again on the reality of it all.

  In a moment.

  Thanh covers the distance that separates them both. She reaches out, holding both of Giang’s hands in hers—feeling only a faint warmth, a memory of what once terrified her. Her shoulder still aches where Eldris grabbed her, and her heart feels overlarge in her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have—”