The Firebird's Vengeance

by Sarah Zettel

  Bridget’s knees gave way and she sat down abruptly on the horsehair settee. It was obviously no good to protest that Aunt Grace did not, could not possibly know anything of this, but that was what she very much wanted to do.

  “She died at the lighthouse,” said Sakra gravely. “It would be so.”

  “But surely as empress, she was bound to Isavalta,” said Bridget. “She should be able to cross back.” It was wrong to be speaking of such things here, in these shabby, showy, decidedly unmagical surroundings.

  “Perhaps not, she held the reign falsely for many years.”

  “Hold your tongue, Southerner,” snapped Aunt Grace and Bridget saw Medeoan looking out from her pale eyes. “It was not you I sent for.”

  Sakra fell silent at once, and Grace pressed her hand against her forehead. “She’s here. She won’t be quiet. I shouldn’t have listened. I should have …” She squeezed her eyes closed. “It’s too late now. Far too late.”

  Slowly, Bridget reached out and took her aunt’s hand from her brow and held on to it. It felt strange. She had never made such an intimate gesture to Grace before, and had never foreseen a day when she would want to, but she was the only one who could offer the comfort the older woman so obviously needed now.

  “Aunt Grace.” Bridget spoke her name firmly, hoping to ground her in the here and now. “Tell me what happened.”

  Bridget listened in dazed silence as Grace related her story, from hearing the voice during one of her fake seances, to convincing Frank to take her to the lighthouse, to Medeoan talking her into … what?

  “I thought I was only bringing her back with me.” Grace tightened her grip on Bridget’s hand. “Freeing her from the lighthouse. But she has not left me. She comes into my dreams when I am asleep. She comes in the day when I try to see my clients. She’s living her life over, in my mind. She wants you, but she couldn’t reach you, so she drives me to distraction, and plays out all her regrets over, and over, when she’s not asking for you.”

  “But …” Bridget swallowed. This was no good. She could not go through this entire interview stammering like a schoolgirl. Aunt Grace was no fraud. She could do as she said, had done as she said. Accept that. Move on. “What is it she says she wants?”

  “A chance to redeem herself apparently.” Grace pulled her hand out of Bridget’s and laid it in her lap, gazing down at her fingernails. “She says her land, this Isavalta of yours, is in grave danger and she wants to help. And I don’t care about any of this,” she added dully. “Just tell me you’ll do what she wants and take her away.”

  Bridget opened her mouth and shut it again. Take away the ghost of Medeoan, the sad, insane, grasping dowager empress who had caused Bridget to travel to Isavalta in the first place? The idea that the woman was here, now, listening in the back of her aunt’s mind left her chilled.

  “It is a complex matter, mistress,” said Sakra. “In life, the Dowager Empress Medeoan was dangerous and vindictive. It may be she is still so in the Land of Death and Spirit.”

  Grace closed her eyes. “I don’t care what you do with her, just get her away from me.”

  “You may be sure we will not leave you in distress.” Sakra glanced at Bridget as he spoke.

  “No. No, of course not,” Bridget said hastily. Her grievances against Aunt Grace were old and long-standing, but not enough to leave her haunted by Medeoan.

  Or could it be a ruse? Could she and Medeoan’s ghost be working together? Why? What would the dowager’s shade have to offer her? Bridget bit her lip. After all this time, it was so hard to trust Aunt Grace.

  Almost as if Bridget had spoken aloud, Grace lifted her head. Her eyes were full of Medeoan, and Medeoan’s anger.

  “Do you think I would believe you care?” spat Aunt Grace, and the ghost within her. “You did not come back because you care about me! You did not come back because you knew your work was unfinished and you knew the fate I had been condemned to! Oh, no, you came back for your child! Would you see your child? Would you? Then you shall!”

  Grace blundered to her feet, her shoulders hunched, her head thrust forward like a crow in the cold. She blundered forward blindly, tripping over rugs, barking her shins against a chair.

  “Aunt Grace!” Bridget leapt after her, a split second before Sakra. Grace tore the fringed shawl off the the blue glass sphere she used as a “gazing crystal,” and slapped both hands hard against it. Bridget closed her hand around Grace’s wrist, and …

  And she saw.

  She saw herself, as a young woman, hardly more than a girl. Despite the darkness surrounding this young self, she instantly recognized her old room in the keeper’s quarters of the Sand Island lighthouse. Young Bridget lay awake, looking hungrily toward the window, watching the moon rise over the lake. Bridget knew which night this was. She could feel the anticipation of her younger self.

  The young Bridget judged the time was right. She rose, tall and slender in her substantial white nightgown, and pulled on her shoes. She paused a moment to check her face in her mother’s silver hand mirror, to pinch a blush into her cheeks and make sure her braided hair hung dramatically over her right shoulder. She took up a long shawl against the cold rather than her normal oilskin coat, but did not bother with candle or lamp. Carefully, she tiptoed down the spiral, wrought-iron staircase, pausing fearfully at an imagined stirring, and crossing her fingers that the weather would remain fair, and that the light had enough oil to get through for at least the next hour.

  Outside, thick clouds scudded across the dark sky, lending the half moon a Halloween look. Bridget needed no more light than that to hurry down the stairs that led to the boathouse and the jetty, and the hollow underneath the cliff that could not be seen from the lighthouse.

  No, no, stop. Don’t, thought Bridget, but whether it was to her younger self, or the vision that unfolded she didn’t know.

  He came forward, but did not quite leave the shadows. Young Bridget saw the sweep of black hair, the shape of the strong face and body, and knew him to be Asa, the fisherman who had courted and won her to this meeting. Older Bridget looked close and saw and felt a stab at her heart like a knife.

  Beneath the facade of Asa waited Valin Kalami. The sorcerer who had brought her to Isavalta with flattering lies, the man who would have murdered her to suit his own ends, he was the one who embraced her younger self. It was his mouth she kissed with heedless passion as he pressed hard against her, already lowering her to the ground.

  Why? Why!

  But she knew the answer. For the power. She was powerful, she knew that, and Sakra and Mistress Urshila had tried so many times to tell her that raw power was a lure to a sorcerous soul.

  Anna, her innocent Anna, was Valin Kalami’s child. A sob broke from Bridget’s throat and she tried to tear herself free.

  “No!” commanded Aunt Grace in a deep voice, quite unlike her own. “See the man. You cannot refuse now to see.”

  Aunt Grace’s hand clamped around Bridget’s like an iron band and Bridget knew that even if she closed her body’s eyes, her mind’s eyes would still see what played out before her.

  Night again. A different night, because now the moon was no more than a thumbnail sliver in the clear sky. Again the keeper’s quarters, but this time the front room, Kalami, not bothering to disguise himself as Asa this time, slipped through the front door. He carried something wrapped in a blanket under his arm. He concealed himself in the thickest shadows to wait but he did not have to wait long. Footsteps rang on the iron stairs, two people going up to the light, then silence.

  Kalami smiled in the darkness. With infinite care, he opened the whitewashed fire door that separated the quarters from the tower stairs. Cautiously he stole upward, one soft step at a time.

  This would be the dangerous part. There was no place to hide on those stairs. But no other door opened, and no footsteps descended. Kalami reached the second stairs and stole through the door. He crept to Bridget’s room, to the cradle, and the sleeping chil
d that lay there.

  Bridget felt a tear trickle down her cheek, but she could not move. She could not do anything but watch.

  Kalami laid his burden on the bed and unwrapped it. At first, all Bridget saw was a bundle of twigs and dried flowers. Then she saw Anna, lying unnaturally still on the bed. Slowly, patiently, Kalami lifted the true child and cradled her in the crook of his arm. He dropped the counterfeit in her place, so it fell, arms and legs akimbo, eyes staring dull and dead at the ceiling.

  Death would be better than watching any more.

  Kalami wrapped sleeping Anna up tenderly in the blanket and hurried down the stairs.

  It wasn’t until he was out of the house that the baby woke and began to cry, and by then, Bridget knew, her younger self would hear nothing, because by then she had found the counterfeit, and her own cries drowned out all other sound in her ears.

  And the vision faded, and once again Bridget faced the distorted reflection of Aunt Grace’s parlor in the side of her blue glass ball. Her cheeks were soaked with tears and her ears rang. She jerked her hands free of Grace’s grip and pressed her palms against her eyes, shuddering.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  She heard Sakra murmur something, and a chair scraped and cloth rustled. Then, Sakra’s familiar touch rested on her shoulder, but Bridget swatted it away, retreating to the windows before she was aware she had moved.

  She felt filthy. She felt robbed. There had been only a few moments of that night she could think of without guilt or regret, and they were now gone. Kalami. Not Asa, with his laughing eyes and teasing ways who seduced a lonesome young woman, but Kalami who had lied to her and attempted to own her. He was the one who had given and then taken her daughter.

  If he ever came within her reach again, she’d strangle him with her bare hands. If he was dead in the Shifting Lands, she’d hunt his ghost down and tear it to shreds.

  “You never cared for me, despite your blood, so I can only hope I have helped give you something you can care for.” Aunt Grace’s words were crabbed and full of mockery. Bridget whirled around and saw only Medeoan, aged and angry.

  “You witch!” she shouted, grabbing Medeoan by the shoulders and shaking her hard. “I should have killed you myself for what you did to me! Where is she? Where is my daughter?”

  “Bridget, stop! I know where she is!”

  Sakra pulled her back and Bridget blinked, and the image before her shrank in on itself and became Grace again.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I tried, I tried. I’m sorry.”

  Bridget backed away, gripping the collar of her shirt so tightly the buttons strained. Anger, pity, confusion, and a hundred other feelings swept through her. She couldn’t stand to look at Grace anymore, not for another second. She knew herself to be as close to losing her mind as her aunt seemed to be. It was too much, being in this place. Fifteen years of pent-up frustration at Grace who had stood aside and done nothing boiled inside her, mixing with her fresher fury at a woman who had done far, far too much.

  She faced Sakra instead. “How could … how could you know where Anna is?”

  “The day I first saw you, I had just received news from my friend Captain Nisula that he had seen in the women’s palace of the Heart of the World a young girl with black hair and tan skin who was said to be the daughter of Valin Kalami. She was being held there as guest-hostage against his good behavior while he and the Hung-Tse planned the overthrow of Isavalta. That may very well be your Anna.”

  The Heart of the World? She knew about the empire on Isavalta’s southern border from her studies with Mistress Urshila and her talks with Sakra. Urshila acknowledged it to be a place of learning and sophistication, but called its people treacherous. Sakra, speaking privately, said he had once believed it more civilized and comprehensible than Isavalta. It was certainly much older.

  This was where Anna was? A hostage? The image of a little girl who was her baby in chains was almost more than she could bear.

  Sakra covered her hands with his. “She was being well treated, Bridget. I swear. Despite what Mistress Urshila will have told you, they are an honorable people there.”

  “Oh, yes,” sneered Medeoan’s voice behind her. “So honorable they sponsored Valin Kalami to betray me.”

  Bridget felt something vital inside her snap in two. In a single instant, her blood turned to ice in her veins. One step at a time, she turned around. Medeoan stood before her in the translucent shell of Aunt Grace whose green eyes were terrified as they looked at Bridget.

  “Get out, Medeoan,” Bridget said. She reached inside, she reached outside, she felt the magic in her, distant but she could touch it. It was hers, this place was hers, and she would not be jeered at by this dead woman who had ruined Bridget’s life before she even drew breath. “You’re dead and gone! You’re nothing! Get out!”

  All unshaped, the magic swirled around her, a cold wind that somehow seemed to blow away breath itself. “Get out! Get out!”

  “Stop!” Sakra ducked between them and brought both hands down hard on Bridget’s shoulders. “Bridget Loftfield Lederle, stop this!”

  Awash in her own magic, Bridget barely heard him. She would do this thing. From memory she heard Aunt Grace’s own words. For once, one of you will do what I say! Medeoan would no longer be permitted to interfere with her, or with her family.

  Aunt Grace, Medeoan shining through her very skin, raised her hands, seeking to divert the invisible current of Bridget’s power, but she was too late. The outpouring of strength brushed the gesture aside. Soon, her power would fill the room, flood every crevice and cranny. Her power, her strength, would encompass everything, and everything would bend before her will.

  That understanding sent a shock of exhilaration before Bridget, and she stretched farther, throwing open the gates within her, dragging in the power around her. The walls shook. The countless china knickknacks rang like chimes as they rattled against each other, crashing one by one to the floor as the glass in the picture frames above them cracked and snapped, dagger-sharp pieces dropping like ice on top of the fragmented porcelain. A chair shuddered, dancing across the floor as if pushed by drunken hands. The gazing crystal rocked heavily on its stand, thumping back and forth, a bass note under all the fragile ringing destruction.

  Destruction, all the world changing shape, magic pouring forth like breath, like blood from her veins. And it was glorious. She could break apart the whole world, shatter it into pieces and remake it the way it should be, with Medeoan gone to Hell itself if she so chose and Anna beside her. All things were within her compass, and no one was going to determine their shape but her. No one.

  The window frames creaked as the glass within them shuddered. Aunt Grace screamed again, and a thin trickle of blood ran down her forehead. Good. Good. Break her apart, let the ghost out and seal her tight again …

  Slowly, beneath the ringing, cracking, screaming, swirling, breathing, bleeding that was all her own, Bridget became aware of words. Steady, careful words, words of peace, words of stillness. Deep words that sought to bind up the glory of her power, that meant to unmake her remaking.

  That meant to stop her.

  Bridget’s power poured out fast, and faster yet, but now there was a dam between her flood and the world. She could see nothing but obstruction and wrong shaping, nothing of her, nothing but what she would, could, must make. Must break the dam of words first, then the whole of the world, must break, must, must must …

  But the wall of words grew thicker, and stronger, and Bridget realized it was binding up her own power. The more she poured out, the stronger it became. She was fighting herself, and she would not break. A new scream sounded, torn from her own throat as the wall surrounded her, and the power rose around her like water in a well, ready to drown her utterly, but she could not stop, not even as the walls pressed closer and her hands lashed out to beat off a force that was not solid, barely real, but so strong, strong as blood, as water, as waves in a gale, swee
ping her off her feet and covering her over until she could not breathe and all the world went away.

  Sometime later, Bridget woke to a blinding headache and the realization that she was a mess. Sweat soaked her clothes, and bile stained the front of her shirt. Its bitterness filled her parched mouth.

  She lifted her head, deeply, completely ashamed of herself. Sakra knelt before her, straight-backed, his long face calm but his eyes wary. Dark blotches showed on his skin, like the beginnings of bruises, on his cheek and around his eye.

  Beside him, huddled on her knees, was Aunt Grace. A thread of blood traced a ragged, red line down her utterly white cheek, but her terrified eyes were all her own.

  “Don’t, please, no more,” begged Grace so pitifully that Bridget’s empty stomach curdled. “She can’t help it. She tries, but death is the last change, and she is only what she was when she died and when she died she was so torn. Don’t.” She wagged her head slowly back and forth. “Help us. Help me.”

  Bridget moved her lips, but not a single word came to her. She managed to push herself up onto her hands, but it was Sakra who wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Yes. We will help you. But you must rest now. Come.”

  He raised Grace up. Supporting her weight, he walked with her, brushing past the beaded curtain with his shoulder. He would have had no hard time guessing what that curtain covered. Bridget heard the whisper of heavy cloth and the creak of a bed’s frame and springs. Trembling, Bridget pulled herself up onto the settee. The horsehair pricked her palms like so many tiny pins. She tried to sort out what had happened. She remembered the sounds of shattering glass and breaking porcelain, but as she looked around her, she saw all the photos whole in their frames, and the little knickknacks standing in their usual jumble.

  Had none of it happened? Or was this Sakra’s work?

  Sakra reappeared from behind the curtain. One look at his exhausted eyes and Bridget knew which of those things was true. Sakra had stopped her torrent, and healed her damage, and it had cost him heavily to do so.