Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “What were you doing in the dark?” Jenny asked fuzzily, trying to untangle the real from the story.

  “My father told us we were poor children, sent out to cut peat for a fire on a cruel winter’s dusk. Dark came too fast; we got lost, and followed the Jack O’Lantern sprite, thinking it was someone who knew the path back.”

  “And what happened?”

  Alexa shrugged slightly. “That’s the thing about paintings. They only show you one moment of the tale; you have to guess at the rest of it. Do you want to see it? My father asked me to find a lantern for you in his studio; he won’t mind if you come with me.”

  Jenny saw Miss Lake drifting about with a plate at the far end of the garden, glancing here and there, most likely for her charge. She stopped to speak to Sarah. Jenny swallowed the last of her meat pie.

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “I’d like that.” It sounded wild and romantic, visiting an artist’s studio, a place where paint turned into flame, and flame into the magic of fairyland. It was, her mother would have said, no place for a well-brought-up young girl, who might chance upon the disreputable, unsavory things that went on between artists and their models. Jenny couldn’t imagine the distinguished Mr. Ryme doing unsavory things in his studio. But perhaps she could catch a glimpse there of what nebulous goings-on her mother was talking about when she said the word.

  “You come, too, Will,” Alexa added to him. “You don’t often get a chance to see it.”

  “Is there a back door?” Jenny asked, her eye on Miss Lake, and Alexa flung her a mischievous glance.

  “There is, indeed. Come this way.”

  They went around the apple trees, away from the noisy tables, where lanterns and torches, lit against insects and the dark, illumined faces against the shadowy nightfall, making even the villagers look mysterious, unpredictable. Alexa, carrying a candle, led them up a back staircase in the house. Jenny kept slowing to examine paintings hung along the stairs. In the flickering light, they were too vague to be seen: faces that looked not quite human, risings of stone that might have been high craggy peaks, or the ruined towers of an ancient castle.

  Will stopped beside one of the small, ambiguous landscapes. “That’s Perdu Castle,” he said. He sounded surprised. “On the other side of the marshes. There’s stories about it, too: that it shifts around and you never find it if you’re looking for it, only if you’re not.”

  “Is that true?” Jenny demanded.

  “True as elf fire,” he answered gravely, looking at her out of his still eyes in a way that was neither familiar nor rude. As though, Jenny thought, he were simply interested in what she might be thinking. He was nicer than Sylvester, she realized suddenly, for all his dirty fingernails and patched trousers.

  “When you saw it, were you looking for it?”

  “Bit of both,” he admitted. “I was pretending not to while I searched for it. But I was surprised when I found it. I wonder if Mr. Ryme knew it was there before he painted it.”

  “Of course he did,” Alexa said with a laugh. “Great heaps of stone don’t shift themselves around; it’s people who get lost. My father paints romantic visions, but there’s nothing romantic about carrying a paint box for miles, or having to swat flies all afternoon while you search. He’d want to know exactly where he was going.”

  She opened a door at the top of the stairs, lighting more candles and a couple of lamps as Jenny and Will entered. Paintings leaped into light everywhere in the room, sitting on easels, hanging in frames, leaning in unframed stacks against the walls. The studio took up the entire top floor of the house; windows overlooked meadow, marsh, the smudges of distant trees, the village disappearing into night. Richly colored carpets lay underfoot; odd costumes and wraps hung on hooks and coatracks. A peculiar collection of things littered shelves along the walls: seashells, hats, boxes, a scepter, crowns of tinsel and gold leaf, chunks of crystals, shoe buckles, necklaces, swords, pieces of armor, ribbons, a gilded bit and bridle. From among this jumble, Alexa produced a lamp and studied it doubtfully. One end was pointed, the other scrolled into a handle. Gleaming brass with colorful lozenges of enamel decorated the sides. It looked, Jenny thought, like the lamp Aladdin might have rubbed to summon the genie within. Alexa put it back, rummaged farther along the shelves.

  Will caught Jenny’s eye then, gazing silently at a painting propped against the wall. She joined him, and saw his face in the painting, peering anxiously into a wild darkness dimly lit by the lantern in his hand. Alexa, a lock of red hair blowing out of the threadbare shawl over her head, stood very close to him, pointing toward the faint light across murky ground and windblown grasses. Her face, pinched and worried, seemed to belong more to a ghostly twin of the lovely, confident, easily smiling girl searching for a lamp behind them.

  Something flashed above the painting. Jenny raised her eyes to the open window, saw the pale light in the dense twilight beyond the house and gardens. Someone out there, she thought curiously. The light went out, and her breath caught. She stepped around the painting, stuck her head out the window.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?” Alexa asked absently.

  “That light. Just like the one in the painting…”

  She felt Will close beside her, staring out, heard his breath slowly loosed. Behind them, Alexa murmured, “Oh, here it is…A plain clay lantern Psyche might have used; no magic in this one. What are you looking at?”

  “Jenny!”

  She started, bumped her head on the window frame. Miss Lake stood below, staring up at them. Will drew back quickly; Jenny sighed.

  “Yes, Miss Lake?”

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “I’m—”

  “Come down, please; don’t make me shout.”

  “Yes, Miss Lake. I’m helping Alexa. I’ll come down in a moment.”

  “Surely you’re not in Mr. Ryme’s studio! And was that one of the village boys up there with you?”

  Mr. Ryme appeared then, glanced up at Jenny, and said something apparently soothing to Miss Lake, who put a hand to her cheek and gave a faint laugh. Jenny wondered if he’d offered to paint her. They strolled away together. Jenny pushed back out the window, and there it was again, stronger this time in the swiftly gathering dark: a pulse of greeny-pale light that shimmered, wavered, almost went out, pulsed strong again.

  “Oh…”

  “What is it?” Alexa demanded beside her, then went silent; she didn’t even breathe.

  Behind them, Will said softly, briefly, “Jack O’Lantern.”

  “Oh,” Jenny said again, sucking air into her lungs, along with twilight, and the scents of marsh and grass. She spun abruptly. “Let’s follow it! I want to see it!”

  “But, Jenny,” Alexa protested, “it’s not real. I mean it’s real, but it’s only—oh, how did my father put it? The spontaneous combustion of decayed vegetation.”

  “What?”

  “Exploding grass.”

  Jenny stared at her. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It is, a bit, when you think about it,” Alexa admitted.

  “He obviously told you a tale to make you stay out of the marshes.” Her eyes went to the window, where the frail elfin light danced in the night. “I have to go,” she whispered. “This may be my only chance in life to see real magic before I must become what Mama and Miss Lake and Papa think I should be…”

  She started for the door, heard Will say quickly, “She can’t go alone.”

  “Oh, all right,” Alexa said. Her cool voice sounded tense, as though even she, her father’s bright and rational daughter who could see beneath the paint, had gotten swept up in Jenny’s excitement. “Will, take that lantern—”

  Will put a candle in an old iron lantern; Jenny was out the door before he finished lighting it. “Hurry!” she pleaded, taking the stairs in an unladylike clatter.

  “Wait for us!” Alexa cried. “Jenny! They’ll see you!”

 
That stopped her at the bottom of the stairs. Alexa moved past her toward the apple trees; Will followed, trying to hide the light with his vest. As they snuck through the trees, away from the tables, Jenny heard somebody play a pipe, someone else begin a song. Then Alexa led them through a gap in the wall, over a crumbled litter of stones, and they were out in the warm, restless, redolent dark.

  The light still beckoned across the night, now vague, hardly visible, now glowing steadily, marking one certain point in the shifting world. They ran, the lantern Will carried showing them tangled tussocks of grass on a flat ground that swept changelessly around them, except for a silvery murk now and then where water pooled. Jenny, her eyes on the pale fire, felt wind at her back, pushing, tumbling over her, racing ahead. Above them, cloud kept chasing the sliver of moon, could never quite catch it.

  “Hurry—” Jenny panted. The light seemed closer now, brilliant, constantly reshaped by the wind. “I think we’re almost there—”

  “Oh, what is it?” Alexa cried. “What can it be? It can’t be—Can it? Be real?”

  “Real exploding grass, you mean?” Will wondered. The lantern handle creaked as it bounced in his hold. “Or real magic?”

  “Real magic,” Alexa gasped, and came down hard with one foot into a pool. Water exploded into a rain of light, streaking the air; she laughed. Jenny, turning, felt warm drops fall, bright as moon tears on her face.

  She laughed, too, at the ephemeral magic that wasn’t, or was it? Then something happened to the lantern; its light came from a crazy angle on a tussock. She felt her shoulders seized. Something warm came down over her mouth. Lips, she realized dimly, pulling at her mouth, drinking out of her. A taste like grass and apple. She pushed back at it, recognizing the apple, wanting a bigger bite. And in that moment, it was gone, leaving her wanting.

  She heard a splash, a thump, a cry from Alexa. Then she saw the light burning in Will’s hand, not the lantern, but a strange, silvery glow that his eyes mirrored just before he laughed and vanished.

  Jenny stood blinking at Alexa, who was sitting openmouthed in a pool of water. Her eyes sought Jenny’s. Beyond that, neither moved; they could only stare at each other, stunned.

  Alexa said finally, a trifle sourly, “Will.”

  Jenny moved to help her up. Alexa’s face changed, then; she laughed suddenly, breathlessly, and so did Jenny, feeling the silvery glow of magic in her heart, well worth the kiss snatched by the passing Will o’ the Wisp.

  They returned to find the villagers making their farewells to Mr. Ryme. Mr. Woolidge’s carriage had drawn up to the gate, come to take Sarah and Jenny, Papa and Miss Lake to his house.

  “There you are!” Sarah exclaimed when she saw Jenny. Alexa, staying in the shadows, edged around them quickly toward the house. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Trying to catch a Will o’ the Wisp.”

  Her father chuckled at her foolishness, said pedantically, “Nothing more, my dear, than the spontaneous combustion—”

  “Of decayed grass. I know.” She added to Mr. Ryme, “You’ll have one less face to paint in the wedding party. Will won’t be coming back.”

  “Why not?” he asked, surprised. His painter’s eyes took in her expression, maybe the lantern glow in her eyes. He started to speak, stopped, said, “Will—” stopped again. He turned abruptly, calling, “Alexa?”

  “She’s in the house,” Jenny told him. “She slipped in a pool.”

  “Oh, heavens, child,” Miss Lake grumbled. “It’s a wonder you didn’t lose yourselves out there in the marsh.”

  “It is, indeed, a wonder,” Jenny agreed.

  She stepped into the carriage, sat close to Sarah, whose chilly fingers sought her hand and held it tightly, even as she turned toward the sound of Mr. Woolidge’s voice raised in some solicitous question.

  PATRICIA A. MC KILLIPwas born in Salem, Oregon, received an M.A. in English literature from San Jose State University in California, and has been a writer since then. She is primarily known for her fantasy, and has published novels both for adults and young adults. She is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award: for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Ombria in Shadow (which also won the Mythopoeic Award). Her many other novels include the Riddle-Master trilogy, The Changeling Sea, and the science fiction duo Moon-Flash and The Moon and the Face (reissued by Firebird as Moon-Flash). Her recent books include Winter Rose, Od Magic, and Solstice Wood. She and her husband, the poet David Lunde, live on the Oregon coast.

  AUTHOR ’S NOTE

  I’ve been doing research lately into the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who worked in mid-1800s England, and who dedicated themselves to reviving fantasy and wonder with their art. One of the paintings I learned about, by Arthur Hughes, is called Jack O’Lantern. This surprised me because I thought that was a particularly American term signifying fiery, grinning pumpkins on Halloween. So I did more research, and incorporated that painting into my version of the Pre-Raphaelite world, with its mystical, romantic, and otherwise unconventional views occasionally hampered by the stricter and stodgier beliefs of the Victorians.

  Carol Emshwiller

  QUILL

  Mother says, “Don’t sing. Don’t dance. Don’t wear red.” She says, “Simplify!” She says, “We don’t eat bugs. We don’t eat crawdads.” Aren’t they simple enough? She says, “We…our kind…doesn’t do that, doesn’t do this.” We heard it in the egg—so to speak. So to speak, that is.

  We do eat eggs.

  Sometimes when we’re playing too vigorously, Mother says, “No high notes.”

  Mother says we’re unique. We don’t know whether to feel left out or included in with special people. We keep wondering, if we climbed high enough up or far enough down, we’d find another group like us just as special and if they’d be all right to make friends with. We plan to go find out but right now the littlest one of us would need help.

  A stranger came out of the woods and stared at us. We were dressed right, yet he watched as if we were strange. We acted normal. We played human-being games just to prove we were completely proper. I’m too old for this kind of play but the little ones like me to do it. I was the man this time, though I’m female. I stamped around and took big steps. But how many times have we seen a man?

  But this stranger isn’t the first, though he’s come the closest to our houses. Not long ago we saw three men, climbing up along the stream. At first we didn’t know what they were. We thought some sort of humped-back creatures. But then they took their packs off and we saw they were men. They didn’t see us, though we followed them all the way up.

  They had beards. We laughed but only afterwards so they wouldn’t hear. Mother wondered what was so funny. We made up something else even sillier than beards.

  Tom, though. He’s getting hair on his upper lip. I saw him cutting it off with little scissors he stole from Mother’s sewing kit. They don’t work very well for that, so there’s some of it still there. That’s called a mustache.

  This other man that stared…We saw him first from across the lake, the one we call Golden because of the golden eyes of the frogs. Mother doesn’t like us to call it that. The idea of gold makes her gloomy. The river we call Silver, though that’s where gold is. We found some but we knew better than to tell Mother. We hardly tell her anything in case what we do “just isn’t done.” Or maybe “just isn’t talked about.”

  We have to be out here by ourselves so as not to be tempted by the way other people live. We might do what they do and “they’re not our kind.” But we couldn’t be a different kind if we wanted to. We don’t know how.

  Mother says, “Every day is a lesson.” We knew that a long time ago. Jumping rock to rock is a lesson, especially when we fall. Not testing stepping-stones before you step on them—that’s a lesson. Watching lightning strike the tallest trees, though not always. Building a little hut of reeds. Making fires in the rain. You have to know how.

  Mother doesn’t know any of those lessons. I’ll bet she co
uldn’t even make a fire when it wasn’t raining. I wonder if she even knows how to swim. I’ve never seen her near the lake except to gather rushes for mats or cattails for supper—those, our kind is allowed to eat. She hates to get her feet muddy.

  We have secret places for dancing and singing. We stole a pan for a drum. We have scraping sticks. We clack stones. We only make our music beside the stream so as to hide the sound in case Mother should come out that far, though that’s unlikely.

  Morning is lessons. Numbers mostly. You can’t fault numbers. Some of us are not good at them. If we complain, Mother says, “That’s the way it is.” Spelling…I’m not good at that. Geology I’m good at. It’s all around us. I like to know how things got this way.

  Mother wants us to know things such as honesty and generosity, but we had that all figured out on our own a long time ago. We know what’s fair and what’s not. We know you have to give to get. Sometimes we argue all afternoon about the rules of whatever we’re playing and never get to play it, so we know we have to give up and give in.

  Afternoons, when Mother takes a nap, we rush out before she can think of something else for us to do. We don’t come back till dusk and sometimes later. Now and then some of us spend all night in the woods. We’ve built ourselves little houses of reeds or twigs and branches. We know all the caves and cozy piles of rocks. She doesn’t worry if a few of us are missing. We wonder, though, if she knows how many we are.

  Every day, first thing, we’re supposed to give thanks for what we have, but also that we have but little. Thanks for beans and corn and apples, and especially for living right here in a safe place. And thanks to Mother for the simple life. And thanks to Mother for Mother.

  That stranger walked into our part of the forest, sat down, and stared. He has paper and pencil. He might be writing or drawing. We can’t tell from here.

  But we quacked when we should have cawed.

  He knows there are no ducks around. We came out in plain view then. Across the lake from him. That’s when we did what people do. Except instead of talking, we quacked.