Girls of Paper and Fire

by Natasha Ngan

  I untangle our fingers. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  And then I’m running back to the house before Wren can stop me. Or rather, before I stop myself. Because the longing to kiss her, to lace my arms around her and bring our bodies together in the dark, is so strong it thrashes around inside me like something caged. And as I stagger back to my room, rain-soaked and defeated, a single word repeats in my head, shining darkly, slinking, serpentine.

  Dzarja.

  Never has it felt more true. Because it appears I have found a new person to betray, and it might be the worst one yet.

  Myself.

  TWENTY-TWO

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, the memory of my almost-kiss with Wren hovers over everything I do. I barely follow a word our teachers say. In the evenings it takes all my effort to keep from staring at her in whatever beautiful outfit she’s wearing, at how exquisite her face looks made up with paints and powders. How, even better, I have seen beneath that Paper Girl mask, the night when the rain washed away everything between us and left only the deep thrum of desire.

  When dreaming of her isn’t enough, I creep to her room. Hover outside her door, fingertips resting on the wood. But I can never bring myself to go inside. Always, there is fear at being caught. And—just as frightening—the fear that once I’ve kissed her, I won’t be able to stop.

  One morning a week later, Lill dresses me in a heavy, fur-trimmed overcoat. It’s the coldest outside that it’s been so far. It won’t be long until winter arrives. I say good-bye to her and find Wren in the hallway, waiting for me.

  “Hello.” I greet her with our new awkward formality. She’s still been accompanying me to lessons as per Madam Himura’s request, but there’s been a terse politeness in our interactions since that night. Then I notice the coat she’s wearing.

  White. Our kingdom’s mourning color.

  “Here.” She hands me folded silver-white robes and a heavy brocade overcoat. “You should change.”

  “What…?” I start, but she talks quickly over me.

  “It’s a mourning day for both of us, remember?” She’s speaking more loudly than usual. As Zhen and Zhin pass, giving me identical smiles, I realize it’s for the other girls to hear. “Or have you forgotten about your own ancestors?”

  I look blank.

  “So kind of Madam Himura to give us permission to miss today’s lessons to pray,” she carries on, and finally I get it. Wren must have told Madam Himura that today is a day of mourning for the two of us, perhaps spinning some story about the funeral of an ancestor or a designated prayer day that both our families happen to observe at the same time. Spiritual commitments are one of the only things we’re allowed to miss our lessons for. But what would she want to show me in Ghost Court?

  Chenna comes out from her room a few doors away. She catches my eyes. “Everything all right, Lei?”

  “Just great. I’ll see you in a minute.”

  Her eyes glide to Wren, but she doesn’t say anything, giving me a curt nod before turning away.

  Once the corridor is empty, Wren steps in close. “You wanted to know where I’ve been going the nights I leave Paper House,” she says under her breath. Her brown eyes glint. “I’m going to show you.”

  A short while later I’m back at Wren’s side, this time dressed in the clothes she gave me. Wearing white feels strange. More than strange—wrong. The color is heavy with the implications of what it should mean to wear it, and I can’t help but think of Mama. How even though she was lost to us, we never held a funeral, not even after the weeks turned into months, and the months into years.

  It would have felt like an admission.

  Wren and I take a carriage to Ghost Court, accompanied by Wren’s maid, Chiho. Despite its eerie name, Ghost Court turns out to be a lush landscape filled with manicured rock gardens, ponds, and clusters of trees. Winding steps and arched bridges lead between temples of varying design. Some are small, hewn from rock, with wide, squat bases. Others are tall and multitiered, with delicate curving roofs and colored tiles. Bamboo parcels offering food and packets of ghost money burn in braziers outside the entrances, and from some of the temples drift the unearthly songs of shrine maidens.

  We come to a stop in a secluded grove. The temple before us is small and unassuming, with a shingled roof and faded crimson paint peeling in long strips from its walls. Its stone base is shaggy with moss. Overhead, a great banyan tree towers, casting everything in murky green light.

  “I’ll wait for you here, Mistresses,” Chiho says as we leave the carriage.

  I shoot Wren a curious glance. She must have known chaperones wouldn’t come into the temple with us.

  The two of us make our way inside in silence. Immediately, the lingering smoke of incense tickles my throat. Something about temples always makes me feel as though I can’t make any noise, but even if I wanted to, I sense Wren’s energy, tense and coiled, and it keeps me quiet, too. We pass through a prayer room with gold idols set atop a shrine, both earth and sky gods staring down at us with in an array of smiles and grimaces. I rub my hands over my arms. I could swear their eyes were tracking us.

  Unlike the other temples, this one is deserted. Our footsteps fall loudly in the quiet as we come to a courtyard at its center. The roof must have caved in long ago, dust motes dancing in the light slanting in between the hanging roots of the banyan. A shiver trickles down my back. I’m half expecting ghosts to peer out from lonely corners any second.

  Wren leads me through more prayer rooms to an archway at the back of the temple. Just as we duck through, she slips her hand in mine. Pleasure bubbles through me—whipped aside the next instant by what we find beyond the arch, which is so unexpected and beautiful that it takes my breath away.

  We’re in a small, walled garden. The stone of the wall is crumbling, green with moss and winding vines, the paving beneath our feet cracked by weeds. This place seems even more forgotten than the rest of the temple, forlorn and lusterless.

  Except for the tree.

  In the middle of the courtyard is a tree unlike any I’ve seen before. Though its trunk is like that of a normal maple, with old, grooved bark of deep brown wrapped around knotted branches, the leaves that adorn it are paper. Enchanted paper. Despite the still air, the leaves flutter and rustle as if caught in a wind, humming with the golden light of magic, each one with something written across it.

  I move closer and reach up for one. The leaf thrums gently under my fingers. A whir of air blows from the branches, ruffling my hair and clothes as I read the characters painted on it in delicate brushstrokes. “Minato.” I glance at a few of the others. “Rose. Thira. Shun-li.” I look over my shoulder at Wren. “They’re girls’ names.”

  She nods. Wordlessly, she leads me round the back of the tree. She stands on her tiptoes and draws down one of the branches, showing me a leaf near its tip, so small it looks like a teardrop.

  “Leore,” I read. My eyes flick up. “Who is she?”

  “She was,” Wren replies, “my sister.”

  There’s a pulse of silence. The walls of the courtyard seem to take a step inward, and something inside me goes very still.

  “I thought you were an only child.”

  “I am,” Wren replies, “and… I am not. The Hannos aren’t my real family.”

  My stomach gives a jolt. “Then who are?”

  “The Xia,” she answers simply.

  Simply, as though she hadn’t just spoken the name of the most infamous warrior clan in all of Ikhara.

  A clan that was wiped out years ago.

  “I was adopted by the Hannos when I was just a year old,” Wren starts. “Before that, I lived with what was left of the Xia in the eastern mountains of Rain.”

  We’re sitting under the boughs of the paper-leaf tree. The air is golden and warm from the glow of its magic, and it feels safe here with Wren, as if the tree’s branches could protect us from the rest of the world. Our fingers are twined together. While she tells me her stor
y, Wren’s thumb skates across my palm, drawing hidden words upon my skin.

  “I’m guessing you already know,” she starts, “that the Xia were once the most prominent warrior clan in Ikhara. It’s the unique form of martial arts they practiced, mixing physical movements with qi manipulation, that made them so famous. The Xia were warriors and shamans, both of the mortal world and the spiritual. Their skills were so legendary that many of the clan leaders sought to build relationships with them, enlist them to their causes. But the Xia lived by the strictest moral code. They only offered aid to those who they truly believed were deserving.”

  I nod. Tien told me stories of the Xia, how powerfully they shaped Ikharan history. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe her,” I say. “I thought the Xia might just be some legend she made up to frighten me.”

  “To a lot of people, that’s all they are,” Wren agrees. “A legend. Something talked about in whispers and rumor. Before, they could move freely without fear of persecution.” Her voice cools. “But the Night War changed everything. Before the war, the Bull King of Han—the original Demon King—reached out to the Xia to aid him in his quest to conquer the kingdom. He’d always been a great admirer of their skill, though much of it was darkened by jealousy. He didn’t just want them to help him. He wanted their abilities for himself. He’d already hired shamans to train him in using magic as a weapon, trying to mimic their fighting style. But the Xia trained their children starting from a young age. They made them understand how to call magic forth and use it in a way that respects the power of nature. They never asked for more than they could give. Unlike them, the Bull King was impatient. He tore at the earth’s qi rather than nurture it. Tried to bully it to his will.

  “Unable to master magic himself, the Bull King requested a meeting with the Xia to persuade them to join his army. They’d already heard of his violent way of rule, but out of respect, two of their warriors met with him. They listened to the King’s plans but eventually declined to help. They knew better than to put their power into the hands of a ruler like him. But the King wouldn’t accept it. Furious at their refusal, he captured the two warriors and took them prisoner, torturing them for information about their clan.”

  “Couldn’t the Xia have fought him off?” I say. “They were the strongest warriors in all Ikhara.”

  Wren’s lips are tight. “The King planned for that. He knew that a few guards were no match for the Xia, so before the meeting he readied a small army of both shamans and sword-masters. He used their combined strength to overpower the two warriors.”

  She falls silent, and I sense her anger. Her fingers grip mine a little tighter, her pulse racing against my own.

  “Nobody had attempted to capture the Xia before,” she goes on. “Just as with duels between clan lords, there was an unwritten code. An understanding that whatever the outcome, if it was fought fairly—either with words or swords—it should be honored. The Xia’s decisions were to be respected. So to attack them outside of battle, to capture and torture them for information they would not freely give…” She rakes in a sharp inhale. “It was dishonorable. Something the gods would surely punish.” A muscle tics in her neck. “But it seems the heavenly rulers had decided to stay out of mortal affairs. Week after week, month after month, the Bull King’s armies tore through Ikhara, killing clan leaders and breaking apart alliances.”

  “What happened to the two captured Xia warriors?” I ask.

  “No one knows. Maybe they never gave anything away under torture, so the King had them executed. That’s what I believe, anyway. But some people think they managed to escape. Others that they turned and ended up fighting alongside the King in the Night War, and that’s what enabled him to win.”

  A shudder runs down my spine at the thought. Might and magic. It would have been a bloodbath.

  “Once he captured the eight provinces and established his court,” Wren continues, anger still skating the edges of her words, “the King turned his attention to destroying the Xia. He knew it was unlikely he could defeat them in battle. They’d fought against some of his armies during the Night War—those included some of the battles he lost. So he planned surprise attacks. Ambushes. He even had them attacked on prayer days, when he knew their warriors wouldn’t fight back. The Xia were not a large clan. After years of these constant attacks, they were all but destroyed. The few Xia who were left went into hiding in the mountains of eastern Rain.”

  “And one of those survivors was you,” I breathe.

  Wren nods. “When I was born, I became the twenty-third member of the decimated Xia clan.” She swallows. “And its last. I was just a baby, too young to remember much of that final attack. Ketai Hanno found me afterward, when the fires that had ripped through our home had burned themselves out. He managed to piece together a rough idea of what happened. Somehow, our location was betrayed to the Demon King, who sent an army in the middle of the night. My people put up a valiant fight. The snow was said to have been red with the blood of his soldiers. But there were just twenty-three of us, half of us children. We were hopelessly outnumbered. By the time the sun rose the following morning, the Xia had been destroyed.” She turns away, lips pressed into a bloodless line, before drawing a faltering inhale. “My mother, my father, my five-year-old sister… all dead. I was the only one left.”

  The paper leaves of the tree rustle around us. Lacing my arms round her back, I pull Wren close, drawing her so tight I shift with every rise and drop of her shallow, shaky breaths. The day my mother was taken is so clear to me in this moment, so close, like a imprint burnt on my heart. I know what it’s like to lose your family.

  To lose your hope.

  Wren draws back. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  She pulls me to my feet. Reaching up into the boughs of the tree for the branch with her sister’s name, she brushes aside a few of the other leaves to reveal another glowing paper leaf beside her sister’s.

  My throat closes when I see the name written across it.

  Soraya.

  My mother.

  I turn to her, barely able to speak. “You did this?”

  “This is the Temple of the Hidden,” Wren explains. “It’s for the dead we are unable to grieve for. For me, that’s my Xia family. The family I’m not allowed to grieve for publicly, because I can’t reveal they ever existed. I have a shrine for my parents in one of the other rooms, but this tree is for hidden women only, so I come here to pray for my sister’s spirit.” She hesitates. “After what you told me about your mother, I thought you might like a place to come to pray for her, too.”

  I’m silent for so long that her face drops. “I shouldn’t have,” she mumbles. “I overstepped—”

  “No.” I take her hands, our palms pressing together. “I needed this, Wren. You knew, even before I did.”

  Tears course down my face, but I ignore them, my breathing jagged. Because it’s all so clear. Of course it is. I’ve been trying to convince myself, clinging onto the hope that my instincts are wrong. That the absence of my mother’s name from the Night Houses lists was a mistake, or maybe she found a way to escape on her own, because she was my Mama and brilliant and of course she could find a way to escape from an inescapable fortress.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I choke out. “My mother is… dead.”

  The word is as ugly-tasting as it sounds, a solid slab of weight on my tongue.

  It’s the first time I have ever said it out loud. Ever admitted it to myself. I’ve thought it, felt the admission taking shape at the edges of my mind, but every time I wrestled it down. Now the truth hits me the way thunder strikes the earth—hard and fast, and with a flash that tears the sky apart.

  It wrenches a rasping sound from my throat. Wren grabs me as I double over, holding me in silence as the gentle air of the temple courtyard fills with my cries.

  You would think seven years would have dulled my wounds. But still they burn inside me, a fire too bright to extinguish.

/>   TWENTY-THREE

  A LONG WHILE LATER WE SETTLE back against the tree for Wren to finish her story. This time we sit closer, curled together like two puzzle pieces, her arms circling me from behind. Her breath is warm by my ear. The names of her sister and my mother flutter in the branches above our heads like protective charms, our own precious gods watching over us.

  “I don’t know how I survived the attack,” Wren says, “let alone how I stayed alive for days afterward with no food or water, no shelter. Perhaps it was my Xia blood, or some last protective dao one of my family wove for me with the last of their breath. The mountainside was covered in bodies. I was hidden among them, the only living thing for miles. That’s what my father says drew him to me—my adoptive father, that is, Ketai Hanno. He came to Rain after hearing about the massacre, hoping to find survivors. He’s always believed the stories of the Xia. He wanted to learn from them, try to rebuild their presence in Ikhara.”

  My brow furrows. “But I thought the Hannos are one of the Demon King’s biggest supporters.”

  “Yes,” Wren says. “They are.”

  I wait for her to explain further. “Oh,” I say eventually. “Another thing you can’t tell me about.”

  She lowers her lips to my head, so I feel her warm breath mussing my hair. “I’m sorry, Lei. I want to tell you everything. The whole truth. But it would be too dangerous.”

  I’m stiff in her arms. “You still don’t trust me,” I murmur.

  “Of course I do. I mean that it would be dangerous for you.”

  We sit in silence, the courtyard hushed with the rustle of the paper leaves, their faint chiming hum.

  “So,” I say, hugging her arms closer to me. “Ketai Hanno found you and took you back to Ang-Khen?”

  “Exactly. Bhali—Ketai’s wife, my adoptive mother—was sick. She hadn’t been seen in public for two years, which fit perfectly with my arrival. They announced my birth late, saying that they were waiting for her recovery before sharing the news. No one questioned it. Maybe if I’d been a boy, it would have been different. But I was just a new daughter for the Demon King to eventually claim. My existence wouldn’t have much consequence. And so I began my new life in the Hannos’ palace, and grew up to love a new family.”