The Firebird's Vengeance

by Sarah Zettel

  “Oh.” Anna kicked her heel against the flagstones.

  “I must take the minister back to Hung-Tse,” Mae Shan continued. She was trying to make sure Anna understood. Anna did, but she felt sick to her stomach anyway. “He is the last of the Nine Elders. With him there, we can begin to rebuild what has been lost. He has the authority to choose the new emperor, before … the worst comes to be.”

  Anna thumped her heel against the stones a few more times, trying to bang away some of the sinking feeling inside of her. “Are you glad you will be going home?”

  “I will be sorry to leave you.” Mae Shan said in her most serious voice, so Anna knew it was true. The pain in her stomach eased a little.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Mae Shan was looking at her. Embarrassed, Anna stopped kicking the stones, and tried to study them instead. They were all different sizes, cut to fit close together, but there didn’t seem to be any pattern to it, like the stones in the walls.

  “Do you like her, your mother?” asked Mae Shan.

  Anna squinted up at her. “Do you?”

  Mae Shan nodded once. “Yes. I do.”

  Anna found she was glad to hear that. She was able to look into Mae Shan’s eyes, and she saw, just by looking at this person she’d gone so far with, who she’d save and who had saved her, that if she’d said no, Mae Shan would have found a way to take her back to Hung-Tse too.

  “She’s going to teach me to swim.”

  Mae Shan smiled and Anna thought she would have relaxed her shoulders, but she didn’t want to disturb the minister. “That will be fun.”

  “That’s what she said.” Anna paused. Mae Shan looked down at the minister leaning against her. Asleep, he had a nicely shaped face. His tattoos obscured most of his features, but the dragons and the phoenixes made him look strong. She hoped he’d be all right. She hoped Mae Shan would too. Her face had turned serious and tired.

  She wanted to say how she’d miss Mae Shan, but the only words that would come out were, “Are you sad?”

  Mae Shan sighed. The wind strengthened again, rustling the previous year’s leaves and this year’s flowers. “I’m afraid. I don’t know what’s happened to my family. I don’t know when I will be able to find them.”

  “I didn’t know you had a family, aside from Lien …” Anna stopped. If he was Mae Shan’s only family, then she had none. He was dead, with Father and with the holy madman and almost with Mae Shan. She bit her lip. When would she be able to stop thinking about that?

  “I have five … no, I have four brothers and sisters.” Pain crossed her face, and Anna remembered her bowed in prayer in the scroll room with her uncle. She had never asked her who she’d been praying for.

  “You should go home then,” Anna said out loud so she wouldn’t think about that anymore either. So much to think about. So much not to think about.

  “Thank you, mistress,” Mae Shan said solemnly, but there was a light in her eyes that made Anna want to smile.

  “You’re not my guard anymore.” It made her both sad and happy to say that. “I think you can call me Anna now.”

  Mae Shan inclined her head. “Thank you, Anna.”

  “Will you be at breakfast?”

  “If the minister wakes in time.” That was Mae Shan, always taking care of someone else. She was very good at it. The minister would be fine as long as she was with him. Anna had reason to know.

  “I’ll bring you some food if you’re not there,” Anna promised.

  “Thank you, mistress … Anna.” Mae Shan smiled.

  Anna smiled back, turned, and ran down the path, not toward the kitchen, but toward the dining hall, where her mother would meet her. It would be all right. It was spring, and her mother had a house where they would live together, and they’d talk and she’d learn to swim and write letters to Mae Shan. The air smelled of spring and breakfast, and Anna ran as fast as she could toward her new life.

  Ten thousand li away, in the city of T’ien, a red fox padded through the streets and where it passed, emerald grass, bright with dew, began to sprout between the stones.

  Epilogue

  The summer’s night had thrown its quilt over Bayfield, turning the air thick with heat and damp. Mosquitoes whined outside Grace’s screened windows, trying to get inside to find their supper. Grace sat up beside her lamp, mending her gypsy skirt. She needed to get back to work soon. There had been some gossip about the time of Bridget’s … visit. How anyone had found out her niece had returned was beyond Grace. Frank would not have said a word.

  Frank. He’d been by to see her several times, and he had gone again, without answers to his many questions. She wanted to speak, but she couldn’t, and she couldn’t even say why. It was as if she were waiting for something.

  Perhaps she was. Grace lowered her sewing to her lap with a sigh. She stared at the worn green satin shining in the golden lamplight. No, there was no perhaps. She was waiting. No matter how many times she had tried to tell herself there was nothing to wait for, she could not stop.

  She got up and went to the window. If she turned her head just so, she could see the lake and the sparks of the lighthouses marking the safe way out past the islands. She counted them and found the Sand Island light. It burned as bright and steady as the others. The new keeper was in residence with his family, and the work of the place had resumed. Had anyone told them about Bridget? Surely. But what had they said? Did his wife’s face pucker with disapproval when she heard the rumors the town had to offer? Or did she shake her head with pity? What would the keeper and his family do if Grace marched up to their door and told them the truth?

  A knock sounded on Grace’s door. She jumped, pressing her hand against her heart as it pounded hard against her ribs.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  The answer came and it had a smile in it. “It’s me, Aunt Grace.”

  Grace ran to the door and threw it open. Bridget stood there, looking neat and normal in her grey shirtwaist dress and white apron. Grace felt her mouth drop open. “You came,” she said, amazed. “You came.” You kept your promise. You remembered.

  “I’m sorry I was so long, but there are … issues of time in these things. May I come in? If I’m seen, there will be talk, I’m sure.”

  Grace stepped aside. Her head was awhirl. She did not know how to name what she felt. It was close to elation. She had not wanted to believe Bridget would simply vanish again, but part of her was sure that was what had happened. That was the rift in her that would not heal.

  She closed the door, and latched it, as if she thought Bridget might suddenly change her mind and try to flee. “I … I was just thinking of you,” she stammered. Collect yourself. This is ridiculous.

  “I’m not surprised.” Bridget brushed at her apron. “In order to … make my crossing I had to call to you, in a way.”

  “I see,” said Grace, although she did not. “Will you sit? Would you like some tea?”

  Bridget laughed, and Grace found herself smiling at the sound. This was absurd, but she did not know how else to act. Bridget did sit, however, perching herself on the edge of Grace’s horsehair sofa.

  “How are you, Aunt Grace?”

  A quick, meaningless reply came readily to Grace’s tongue. She forced it back. Now was not the time to fall into the old ways. “I hardly know.” She set her sewing in her work basket and took her own seat again. “I … I think I’ve been recovering. Getting used to being myself again. Trying to make up my mind about what to do with myself.” Her fingers knotted themselves together. “But I haven’t been able to.”

  “Well.” Bridget clasped her own hands together, leaning forward, working up her courage, Grace thought. “You could come with me.”

  They sat there, face-to-face in the dim, overcrowded parlor with all the paraphernalia of Grace’s profession and deception surrounding them. For the first time in her adult life, Bridget held out her hand to her aunt.

  “I wanted to ask you before but … it
was so uncertain. I wasn’t sure there would be a place to invite you to. But it’s all done. The Firebird’s … gone, and Anna … Anna’s safe.”

  Grace felt her heart constrict. “She is alive then?”

  Bridget nodded and Grace thought she had never seen anyone glowing with such happiness. “Alive and well, and running a bit wild, I’m afraid.” She shook her head, but her expression was all mother’s pride. “Will you come back with me, Aunt Grace? Come and meet your great-niece?”

  This was it. Grace knew it. This was the moment she had been waiting for all these months. For Bridget to speak the words that Grace had wanted with all her soul to hear from Ingrid and never had. This was the conclusion of all that had begun so many years ago.

  When Grace straightened back and shoulders. “What would happen if I did?”

  “Well, you would stay at my house, at least at first. Then we’ll see about finding you a place, or you can just keep house with me, with us. Whatever you’d like.”

  “You have a house there?”

  Bridget colored a little. “As it turns out, I’m quite rich. My father, Avanasy, was elevated to the nobility by Medeoan’s father and he got some … appertanences to go with his title. Medeoan held on to the estate … she had planned to give it to me, but things got complicated. Anyway, the current emperor declared Avanasy’s property and fortune to be my rightful inheritance, and there turned out to be rather a lot of it.”

  Bridget stood, her hand still outstretched, and crossed the room to where Grace sat. “Come with me, Aunt Grace. You’ll have a home and we can finally be family.”

  But we are, Bridget. We are.

  Grace looked at her niece, and took her hand. The weight of years of anger slipped from her back, and Grace knew she was truly free at last. Now she could make her choice, without a score to settle, without an imagined slight to redress, without fear of what her mind held or her eyes saw.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”

  “You’d be welcome.” Bridget squeezed her hand. “I promise. By the others, and by me.”

  “I believe you.” Grace felt herself smile. “But I’ve spent almost fifty years in this world hiding from what I am, and what I have been. I think it’s high time I found out just what I’ve been hiding from.”

  Bridget expelled a sigh that did not not sound either relieved or melancholy. She sounded … satisfied.

  “Then, will you come with me as far as the lakeside?”

  Grace’s eyes narrowed. “To say good-bye?”

  Bridget’s smile grew wistful. “Among other things. Please walk with me, Aunt Grace.”

  Grace peered searchingly at the younger woman for a moment, but her niece’s face gave nothing away, not even to Grace’s experienced eye. Well, if you’re going to learn to trust, you’d best make up your mind to do it. hadn’t you?

  “Let me get my shawl,” she said.

  Wrapped lightly in the warm summer night, the two women walked down the empty streets under the light of the full moon. Bridget steered them away from the wharf that was crowded with the noise of men’s voices even at this hour. Instead, they walked down beneath the shelter of the bluff to where the grass turned to sand. Grace found herself remembering her girlhood, so long ago, standing on the island sands, telling Ingrid all the fine things she planned to do with her life. She was going to Madison. She’d go to teacher’s college. She was going to Chicago. She’d become a nurse. She’d marry a millionaire who would take her to New York City and maybe all the way to Europe. There was more than one young man in Bayfield, she’d boasted, who would take her as far as Madison, and then she’d be on her way.

  But the ghosts and the voices had been too many, and the young men had been as false as she, and she had shut herself away from them all.

  Ahead of them spread the great black and silver lake. Above stretched the sky with the moon and the millions of silver stars. This had been the edge of the world for as long as she could remember. She was not surprised to hear Bridget say this other place, this Isavalta, lay beyond it.

  Bridget put a hand on Grace’s shoulder, silently urging her to stay where she was. Bridget herself walked forward, right to the restless edge of the water. Careless of her boots and hems, she took one more step so that she stood with one foot in the water and one on dry land. She pulled what looked like a small ball of yarn or twine from her apron pocket. Looping one end around her wrist, she drew back her arm and hurled the ball out toward the center of the lake. The slender line payed out, shining silver in the moonlight, and finally drifted down to the water, and promptly sank into the darkness.

  “I have come to the edge of the world,” she said in the strange, singsong voice she had used to work the charm that had taken her away that last time. “I stand with one foot in the world of my birth and one foot in the world of my blood. I weave the line of silver, of moonlight, and of blood and I make the great cry. Let the wall be breached by this my command. Let the breach be healed by my further word. Let my mother pass the breach and let her stand forth. This is my word, and my word is strong.”

  Grace felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. At the words “my mother,” her tongue froze to the roof of her mouth. Something was happening, she had no doubt of it. She felt it in the fiber of her soul, but what that was she could not have said, and she was afraid to guess.

  Around them, the moonlight seemed to blur, as if her eyes had suddenly filled with tears. She wiped at them, and when she lowered her hand, Ingrid stood on the waters before her.

  Not Ingrid aged as she should have been, but Ingrid as she remained in Grace’s memory. Tall and straight, with their mother’s auburn hair, and her working dress and apron tidy. It was impossible that she should be there, but she was real just the same. Grace had no room for doubt in her.

  With a cry, she ran forward, splashing into water up to her knees, both hands flung out to embrace her sister standing so calm and smiling in front of her. It had been so many years, she had lost count. It had been the measure of Bridget’s life and longer, and …

  And Ingrid was long, long dead.

  Grace pulled up short, up to her knees in the lake that was still icy cold despite the summer’s warmth. Still, she did not shiver.

  “You’re a ghost,” she said to Ingrid.

  Ingrid nodded once.

  “But you’re true. Bridget brought you here.”

  Again, Ingrid nodded. A wind blew, and it did not stir a hair on her head or ruffle her apron hem.

  “Can you speak?”

  Ingrid smiled. A very little. The gift of our family has always been sight.

  For a moment, she stood and did nothing but stare. Here it was, the moment she’d wished for. Ingrid was back. She could say anything, ask anything. A thousand imagined conversations poured out of her memory, but none of them moved her voice.

  Instead, she said, “I’m sorry, Ingrid.”

  Forgive me, Grace. I wanted to come for you.

  Grace embraced her sister. It should not have been possible, but it was. From deep memory she knew the warmth of Ingrid’s arms in the featherlight touch of her ghost. The bitter years washed away in the waters of the lake, and she was seventeen again, and she cared for nothing, and she loved her sister.

  After a time, Ingrid pulled away, a warm breath of spring passing Grace’s cheek.

  Bridget is growing tired.

  “Yes, of course.” Grace wiped her cheeks. This time the tears were real, and they must have flowed freely for some time. Her face was as damp as if she’d dipped it in the lake. “This can be no small thing she’s doing.”

  No, but she is very strong, my Bridget.

  “I would expect that of any daughter of yours.”

  Pride rolled in waves from Ingrid’s shade. Be happy, Grace.

  “I will,” she said, and she knew it to be true. “Good-bye, Ingrid.”

  The ghost’s attention turned briefly from Grace, and back on the shore, she saw Bridget nod. />
  “This is my word,” said Bridget. “And my word is firm. I draw back the silver line, and I heal the breach. This is my word.”

  Slowly, as if it were a heavy towline instead of a slender thread, Bridget drew the string from the water, inch by inch. The lake’s cold finally soaked into Grace, and she realized that if she did not move now, her feet would be completely numbed and she would not be able to move at all. She cast a last glance toward Ingrid, but the ghost had already faded into moonlight. It was all right. They had said all that had needed saying, and no parting look was truly required.

  Clumsy, cold, and wet through, Grace hiked up her hems and waded to shore. She minded none of it. She felt seventeen again. No. At seventeen her heart had been callow and careless. Now it was full to the brim with a strength and security she had never thought to claim as her own.

  On the shore, Bridget drew back from the water, and stowed her reel of thread in her pocket. Even in the moonlight, Grace could see how she shivered.

  “Let’s get you home,” she said at once, as if Bridget had been the one in lake water up to her knees while Grace had just wet one boot.

  Bridget shook her head. “I need to get back to Isavalta. If I don’t go tonight, it will be months before I can try again.”

  “But you’re exhausted. How can you manage …?”

  “Sakra is …” Bridget broke off with a wave. “Suffice it to say someone is holding the door for me. I will be fine, Aunt Grace. You must trust me in this.”

  “I do, but …” She reached out, letting the gesture finish the sentence for her.

  Bridget understood. “I will be back, Aunt Grace, and don’t worry. I will be able to find you wherever you’ve gone.”

  “Good.”

  There did not seem to be any need for another word. Grace embraced her niece, a true, warm, strong living embrace. Then Bridget turned away and cast out her line again. This time it did not fall into the water. It stayed straight and taut as if it had been caught by someone in the darkness Grace could not see. Bridget walked out across the waters, and she was gone.