The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

  I groped the air above the bricked up mouth. Its breath should have been balmy as summer, but there was no change to the night’s chill.

  Could I have slept for two full days?

  I heaved bricks aside and squeezed in as soon as I’d cleared enough space to fit. On the stacking floor, I set the lantern down and groaned.

  I’d set the pieces too close. They’d fused into slag. I crept over to survey the magnitude of my failure. Would it even be possible to remove the botched mess without shattering it first?

  My outstretched hand contacted warmth—not cooling terracotta, but living warmth, a body of flesh. I sprang back as the man in the kiln stirred. A crash, like a hammer upon rock, and I wondered what had fallen before darkness tossed me down.

  Waves lapped beneath me, the peaceful tide.They rocked me, lifting and falling, and as a counterpoint, a drowsy rhythm drummed in my ears: tong-tong, tong-tong.

  Realization jolted me alert. Not tide and drum, but breath and heartbeat. I shot up. Pain lanced through my skull, and I winced, hand to temple.

  “Softly. You hit your head and knocked yourself insensible. I carried you to your studio.”

  I knew that voice, would have known it waking or asleep, even though I’d heard it only twice before. My hand fell away, the pain forgotten.

  “Fusu?” I whispered.

  Somber eyes met mine, not quite the color I remembered. Touched with heat, like red-baked earth. Or terracotta. But still his eyes, still Fusu.

  “They said you swallowed poison.”

  “Ah. Yes, I did. Imagine my surprise when I woke from that and then discovered myself lacking an essential accouterment—by which I mean my body.”

  I followed the tilt of his head until I grasped what I’d been too dazed to notice before. The prince was naked save for a thin blanket.

  I flushed and looked away. The blanket rustled, a liquid spill, as the prince closed the space between us. Strong fingers caught my chin, compelling me back.

  “You restored me, gave me this mortal sheath of perception and sensation, breath and light.”

  His words brushed my lips, like kisses I thought, until his mouth chased his words, and I saw I’d been mistaken. Fusu tasted of wood smoke, fire, and, faintly, the salt-bitter tang of fresh water drawn from our well. He unfastened the sash of my shenyi and, bemused, I marveled at the adeptness of fingers I had sculpted. He parted my shenyi, and I marveled at the firm smoothness of skin born in the scorching blaze of a kiln. He parted my body, and all thoughts became lost in a swell of movement and heat and joy.

  I swam from a languid doze to find Fusu gazing out the window in one of Baba’s housecoats—the same one I’d lent him on a rainy afternoon so long ago. That he was clothed made me shy, and I tugged on my rumpled shenyi before padding over to join him.

  Outside, night still ruled, but its authority had waned. The sky held its breath, waiting to herald in the new ruler advancing in a golden chariot upon the horizon.

  “I must go soon,” Fusu said.

  “Yes. To avenge your death.”

  He cocked his head. “Do you truly think me the kind of man to hold death as reason enough to discard the virtues I cherished in life?”

  I frowned.

  “And can you conceive of nothing other than vengeance, no other purpose powerful enough to entice my spirit from the void?”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “Shu-mei, do you recall what Kong Fuzi said about vengeance?”

  I shivered. “‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”’

  He cupped my face in his hands. “Indeed. So why would any true disciple of Kong Fuzi desire that path?”

  My heart leaped, frantic wings against the cage of my chest. “But ... you’re leaving.”

  Fusu’s eyes darkened. “Sifu, not even your wondrous craft can make the heavens forget that dead is dead.”

  I broke away. “You didn’t come back for me. Please, say you didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” I balled my hands into fists, trembling. “Did I do something to invite your hatred?” I stammered.

  “Not hatred, you fool, lo—”

  “Don’t!” I hugged myself, fighting for composure. “I-I told myself I was a fool. I was nothing to you, and I would forget you eventually. But when you died, those comforting lies were ripped away, leaving me flayed and reeling. The only way I could endure it, the only way I could survive, was to let my heart be stone. But I can’t be stone if you love me.”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  “How could it not be terrible? Thrusting someone starving and parched to a banquet and allowing one taste, one sip before snatching it all away? It’s the same, offering me words of love before forsaking me to grief.” I rubbed my eyes, and my fingers came back wet. My tears had spilled unnoticed, postponed but not averted. “It’s too late, it seems. Stone does not weep. Better that you hated me, that you were an evil spirit. This night will haunt me my whole life, the sweetness I’ll never taste again and the knowledge of what we might have been. Even if you say you hate me now, I will know you lied, and that you lied from kindness. From love.”

  Fusu held me with his eyes, sorrowful and stricken. “What do you want me to do? Already dawn comes to chase my wayward shade back.”

  “Take me with you. Anything would be better than foundering in all the tomorrows before me, bereft and alone.”

  He inhaled, a ragged shudder. “If you are fixed on this course, give me one last gift. Give me your heart.”

  Like the other time, when he’d offered me his hand to some unknown adventure, I didn’t hesitate. I took the pottery knife from my worktable and, effortlessly, as though I’d practiced it a hundred times, slit open my chest. The knife unseamed me with the same couth regard that it parted clay, producing neither pain nor blood. I lifted out my heart, although the state of it embarrassed me—misshapen, drab, and riven by faults—an altogether unsuitable gift. Yet it was also appropriate that Fusu have it, inevitable. It had always belonged to him anyway.

  He accepted my heart as though it were a delicate flower or rare jewel. Reverently, he smoothed away the flaws and cracks with a few deft strokes, easily finding the harmony and balance that had eluded me. That, too, was only inevitable.

  “Why is this so familiar?” I asked.

  “We are bound.” He breathed on my heart, suffusing it with color—warm ginger, bright vermillion, tawny red—until it was no longer mortal clay, but hard terracotta. “These acts of remaking—my body, your heart—bind us and will bind us again, choices made and yet to be made rippling out like fated echoes. Our paths are destined to converge.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck. “Then let’s continue to our next assignation together, with clasped hands.”

  “And joined hearts.” Fusu drew me close and set the newly fired terracotta back into my chest.

  Baishi knocked softly at the studio door, concern vying with uncertainty. Usually he knew when the young mistress visited the little dragon, just as he knew when a tree in the garden needed pruning or the flowers watering. But this morning he’d found the kiln partially opened—enough for a slender girl to slip in—without any inkling of when she’d been there.

  She’d unpacked it too, all by herself. Always so impatient, that one. It must have taken her several trips to lug the terracotta pieces back to the house, when he and his cart could’ve done it in one. Well, she was considerate, sometimes to a fault.

  He knocked again. The girl had a habit of overworking herself. What if she’d fainted or had a fever, too weak to summon help?

  The door swung ajar.

  “Shu-mei?” he called. “Are you asleep?”

  When she didn’t answer, he nudged the door wide enough to poke his head around.

  Baishi furrowed his brow. “Huh. Not here?” About to withdraw, he paused, his attention caught by the pair of terracotta figures at the window. He crept into the studio, curiosity win
ning out.

  The couple stood entwined, highlighted in a nimbus of sunlight. They were so close they might have been sculpted as a single piece, although he knew that wasn’t possible. Leaning for a better look, Baishi marveled at the exquisite detailing, admiring the girl’s evident skill and masterful technique.

  The maiden’s face, upturned to her lover, was ethereal and lovely, radiant with joy. The man embraced her in an attitude of tender adoration, though there was a sadness about him, so lifelike, so poignant that tears pricked Baishi’s eyes.

  He clucked his tongue at an old man’s foolish sentimentality and turned to go. On his way out, he spied the pottery knife lying on the floor. Absently, he picked it up and set it on the worktable.

  The young mistress could be so heedless sometimes. She might as well be clay.

  Dancers with Red Shoes

  Melissa Yuan-Innes

  AS an apprentice in the Wizard’s Hospital, Leah Chang was used to a certain amount of noise at night. “The night is a fertile time,” the wizard, Noah, had explained early on. “Many spells, from voodoo to demon summoning to the simple wart cure, are most powerful at certain hours of darkness.”

  Leah yawned. No need for demons tonight. Her friend Andrew, a corps member of the Royal Academy of Magical Ballet, had danced beautifully but then kept Leah up past midnight, doing shots and agonizing over his parents disowning him. They couldn’t handle him being a ballet dancer, let alone a magical ballet dancer. Leah had poured iced coffee and sympathy down his throat for hours on a muggy July Montreal night. Now she needed sleep and silence. She placed orange foam earplugs in her ears, which worked as well as her imperfect silence spell, and closed her eyes.

  Thump! Th-th-thump, thump, THUMP!

  Leah tried some yogic breathing. In. Out.

  Thumththumththumpthump ...

  That was the worst part. It had some sort of rhythm to it. So instead of blocking out random noise, her treacherous mind started analyzing it. She muttered a spell for a breath of wind. Wind was the most responsive element, though also the most fickle. This time, it answered with a small breeze. It smoothed the edge off the heat while creating a bit of white noise. Leah dozed off.

  Ththum THUMP!

  She jumped out of bed, ran up the curved stairs to Noah’s sanctuary, and banged on the door.

  The door opened a crack. She couldn’t see his face, but his voice floated out. “Yes, Leah?”

  “Noah, I’m sure you’re working on something important, but for the past few weeks, I’ve hardly slept! Could you please put a silence spell on it?”

  He paused. “Or a sleep spell on you?”

  “Ha ha. I don’t need to wake up in a glass coffin with seven dwarves.”

  The door opened a bit more. A shaft of light fell on his wrinkled parchment paper face and still-brilliant blue eyes. “Come in quickly, then.”

  Leah slipped inside, inhaling the usual tang of smoke and something darker, like licorice and rosemary and blood. It took a second for her eyes to adjust to the light. Then her mouth fell open.

  At the far end of the room, in front of the extinguished fireplace, between a faded pair of purple velvet armchairs, a pair of amputated feet danced.

  The feet did a step-twirl, step-twirl, step-LEAP, pas-de-bourré toward her in red ballet slippers. Leah recoiled. The ankle bones were smooth and white in cross section, surrounded by dun-colored muscle and papery skin. In contrast, the en pointe shoes were a brilliant, spotless scarlet. Their ribbons wound around the dead ankles and the empty air above them as if there were still legs to cling to.

  The feet smacked down flat on the ground and paused for a second. It was like a drummer’s cymbal, marking the grotesqueness. Then the feet spun away again.

  “My God,” Leah said softly.

  Noah nodded. “She’s getting more and more impatient, too. I’m not sure what to do with her.”

  Leah watched the feet spin, one on the ground, one in the air. “What are they doing here?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “You remember Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the girl with red shoes?”

  Leah’s forehead pleated. “You mean that girl who kept dancing and dancing in magical red shoes until a woodcutter chopped her feet off?” Her eyes bulged. “These are the shoes? The feet?”

  The shoes jumped en pointe, then flexed their toes, as if curtsying.

  “That’s disgusting,” she whispered.

  “Yes, I myself dislike how Hans turned a young girl’s misfortune into a parable about vanity. You should reread it, Leah. The girl tricks her foster mother into buying red shoes, which are eventually spelled by a ‘soldier’ into endless dancing, until the unfortunate ending you describe. Of course, Hans then focuses on the girl’s returning to the breast of the church thereafter. He never bothers to follow the feet.”

  Leah shook her head. “Why do we have to have the feet?” They danced more slowly now, the left foot still while the right arched up in the air.

  “My friend Cartaphilus bequeathed them to me for safekeeping.”

  Leah breathed shallowly through her nose. There were some things up with which she could not put. “So what have you been doing with them?”

  “Well, I thought she would enjoy staying in a wizard’s chambers, but she seems to be growing impatient. Though I applaud as often as I can, she seems to imagine a more appreciative audience lies beyond my door.” He shook his head. “She can see the mundanity of traffic lights and pizza parlors from the window, but she jumped up to tap-dance on the glass pane.”

  Leah’s brow pleated. “Can they see?”

  He shrugged. “She dances around obstacles, so she must have some sort of sensory system.”

  Great. Seeing-eye feet. After centuries of dancing, they deserved a rest. Vaguely, Leah noticed that Noah called them “she,” as if the girl were still alive, but Leah couldn’t stop thinking of them as an abomination disguised as feet. She’d seen a lot in med school before she quit, and even more as a wizard’s apprentice, but this one gave her the ooglies. “Can you do a disanimation spell?”

  The red shoes leaped on Leah’s feet. Hard. She yelped. They sprang away before she could snatch them.

  Noah said, “I must say, I agree, Leah. Those shoes clearly want to keep on dancing. And Cartaphilus certainly wouldn’t thank me for burying her.”

  “The girl’s feet have rights, too!”

  “Leah, my dear. After all this time, her feet and the shoes have come to an agreement. It’s called dancing.”

  Leah’s toes throbbed. She leaned against Noah’s workbench to rub them, glaring at the red shoes. “Well, why don’t you send them to a dance company?”

  He smiled at her. “The human mind is so logical.”

  In other words, he agreed.

  The red shoes capered around in delight. Leah caught herself smiling before she smothered it. The sooner the shoes were outta here, the better off they’d all be.

  In the morning, Leah read up on various dance forms while the shoes beat on the wooden floor, practically flamenco-style. But the only magical dance corps were ballet, jazz, and modern.

  Leah went for the obvious. She woke Andrew up from his hangover. He connected her with the spokeswoman for the Royal Academy of Magical Ballet. The cool British voice expressed interest in acquiring “such a unique prop.” Leah felt a twinge at that as she coaxed the red shoes into a cat carrier.

  Leah thought her role would be to stop, drop, and run, but the business manager asked Leah to stay as the shoes’ “guardian.” More likely he wanted an apprentice wizard on hand in case the slippers started beating a tattoo into his face. Since Leah’s toes still ached from the shoes’ stomping the night before, she felt some sympathy for that point of view, although she thought the prima ballerina was even more of a pain than the foot-gear. “Who will look at me if there’s a pair of disembodied feet prancing around?” the diva demanded before storming out.

  As if in response, the red shoes began what looked l
ike the pas-de-deux from Swan Lake. Andrew MacMillan rose to join them.

  “For God’s sake, Andrew!” The choreographer tore him away. “We’re watching her form. She doesn’t need a partner now, and when she does, it will be Peter!”

  Leah avoided his eyes. On-the-job humiliation was par. Humble pie shoved up your nose in front of an ex-girlfriend wizardling was unbearable.

  Only the shoes seemed impervious to the tension. They twirled, they arced in the air, they sustained leaps and splits beyond human anatomy. They were amazing, and yet Leah, the cultural troglodyte, found her mind wandering after fifteen minutes. For her, part of the tension in dance was the effort of the dancers themselves: the cords bulging in their necks, their breath panting, the grimace forced into a perma-smile. These shoes, no longer limited by muscle and bone, seemed more acrobatic and less magic.

  Still, the company gave the red shoes and mummified feet a standing ovation. It looked as though they had a new prima donna.

  Good riddance. Leah scooped up the cat carrier and waved to the business manager. “Well, break a leg,” she murmured to Andrew before she realized how weird that sounded when the new star had not only broken but severed legs.

  “Wait,” he said, turning his hazel eyes on her in a way that she yearned to refuse but knew she wouldn’t. “Could you come see my grandmother after? She’s been asking for you.”

  Leah sucked her teeth. She had to master her air spell, trouble-shoot a love potion, and walk her three-headed dog. But she’d always loved Penny MacMillan, sometimes more than her grandson, so she was sunk.

  At the end of the rehearsal, the business manager finally decided to lock up the space while the red shoes kept dancing. And dancing. And dancing.

  Andrew’s shirt stuck to him in the sticky summer air. At least the hospital entrance was shaded by maple trees, but he held his breath past all the smokers and ran up all eight flights of stairs. The air conditioning had failed again. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his yellow gown before he donned a pair of latex. At last, he rushed in the room.