The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  * * *

  “It’s a pity I can’t see her face,” Torin said. “It would prove that you’re not a fool, and that she’s not a spy.”

  “I’m not,” Ronan said, his patience straining at the edges, but holding.

  “I’m not,” Penny said, her patience already exhausted. She’d dreamed about some day meeting her father, and this filthy, bitter man was a letdown. Penny had too many other worries, she wanted to know what had happened to her mom, wanted to know why she’d been left to rot in some dark cave, and why Ronan had kept that from her. She wasn’t going to waste her time trying to convince this man she was who she said she was. She had Ronan. She didn’t need him.

  “I wasn’t there when my daughters were born,” Torin said, looking straight past Penny, as if she wasn’t there, “but Tynan told me what happened. Twins, one alive, the other dead.”

  “I know that,” Ronan said. “I arrived after you were gone, before the others. Susan resuscitated Penny, helped her breath again. Diana was able to hold a living child in her arms before she died.”

  “And my brother never tried to take her?” Penny knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. His mind was made up, and he still thought he could change Ronan’s. “Tynan would never have left a living heir on Old Earth.”

  “Your brother never knew. The traitor did one honorable thing before she switched sides and returned with your brother. She covered up Penny’s continued existence and arranged for her to be taken away. She’s the reason I lingered in Dogwood. The magic that bound the Phoenix Girls is strong. I knew it would bring her back someday.”

  “And you never attempted to enlighten me, old friend?” Torin rose and lunged in Ronan’s direction, stopping only when the chain that bound his ankle pulled tight. “Flanna is lost to me, Tynan claimed her as his own daughter and convinced her I betrayed her mother to her death. She came down to see me once, just once. She snuck past the guards and broke in one morning. I woke up, and there she was. I knew who she was, and when I tried to speak she struck me down with her wand. I thought she might kill me, but she didn’t.”

  Penny stood between them, but might have been invisible. She did nothing to call attention to herself. She listened in utter absorption to this strange family history.

  “What did she say to you?” Ronan asked.

  “She called me a traitor.” Torin slumped where he stood, seemed almost to shrink. “Then she spat on me and walked away.”

  He finally looked at Penny again.

  “And now you tell me I have another daughter, miraculously returned from the dead after fourteen years.” Penny watched as his stony expression began to crumble. His anger wasn’t gone, but muted by a stronger emotion. Sorrow. “I would never have believed you capable of such casual cruelty.”

  “I never would have believed you capable of such willful ignorance,” Ronan spat back at him. “I came to you under no obligation but that of friendship. I came to tell you about your returned daughter, and to free you if I could...”

  Torin barked laughter at Ronan.

  “Do you think I’d be foolish enough to risk my own imprisonment if I were not certain?”

  After long and thoughtful consideration, Torin answered. “We are parted by many years, and they have not been kind years to me. I am not foolish enough to presume to know your mind.”

  They sat in silence for a time, Torin bound to his side of the dark cell, Ronan to his, and Penny in between. Some of the terror of awaking in unfamiliar darkness, her hair cut off and imprisoned as much by the inescapable mask as the walls around them, had fallen away from her. But any comfort she might have taken in Ronan’s company, or by a reunion with her long lost father, was mitigated by Ronan’s anger and her father’s refusal to acknowledge her existence.

  She was kept from exploring her prison by the darkness around them, only the dim light from above kept the darkness from crushing her, allowing for the dim circle where she sat and waited for what would come next.

  What came next was light in slow stages, growing brighter so slowly that she didn’t notice until the cell’s walls were visible. She searched the ceiling for the source of the new brightness and spotted a half dozen openings shining light down into the cell.

  Penny stood and paced, ignoring both Ronan and her father as they watched her. She stood beneath one of the openings and looked up, squinting at the sudden brightness of sunlight.

  “It’s done with mirrors,” Ronan said. “One of Erasmus’s ideas. Every room in the citadel is lit this way in daytime.”

  Torin laughed.

  “I wonder what the old fool is up to. I haven’t seen him since before…” He shook the chain hanging from his ankle, as if it was the dividing line between one life and another. Probably it was. “I hope he made it out alive. I always liked the old man.”

  “You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Ronan said.

  Thinking about Erasmus and remembering one of his other mirrors, Penny recalled the scene she’d witnessed in the Conjuring Glass, her laughing mother dragging her father into frame, what she’d called him.

  “Mom called you Big Red,” Penny said, turning to face her father. “My nickname is Little Red.”

  He stared down at her, into her eyes, then cleared his throat and turned away.

  Penny rolled her eyes and turned from him. She searched the rest of her prison, taking in its dimensions, looking for an obvious weakness she could exploit, which she quickly realized was a ridiculous exercise, since it was a prison and she had no experience breaking out of them.

  It was a rectangular stone box, the length of the gymnasium at her school, about half the width. The walls were made of stone blocks almost as tall as she was, the floor of smaller blocks, and the ceiling massive slabs of stone that spanned the room’s width.

  There was a shallow trench that ran with sluggish water, starting at a small opening at one end of the cell, ending at the other. The holes were maybe large enough for her to stick a hand in, but no more. Chains with manacles were spiked to the walls every twenty feet or so awaiting prisoners, all but two empty. Beneath each chain was a small hole in the floor, and when Penny looked down one, she saw nothing but darkness. The stink wafting up from it was awful.

  Penny wondered briefly why they hadn’t bothered to chain her up, and decided they probably didn’t consider her a flight risk. She couldn’t find anything that looked like a door or window until she looked up at the ceiling again.

  There was the one open square in the stone ceiling with a barred iron gate, the only way in or out that Penny could see. There wasn’t much to see on the other side.

  “Hello!” Penny shouted up at the ceiling and waited for someone, anyone, to appear.

  “You can shout yourself raw,” Torin said. “No one will come.”

  “He’s right,” Ronan said. “I’ve been here...”

  Ronan fell silent and cocked his head to the side, the picture of concentration.

  “How long have I been here?”

  Torin shrugged.

  Penny waited with crossed arms, trying to be patient and failing.

  “I don’t know,” Ronan said, then turned back to Penny. “We haven’t had a single visitor since I arrived. “

  “They dropped us down here so they could safely forget about us,” Torin said. “This is the deepest hole in the Galatania, reserved for those few of us they can’t kill.”

  Penny’s spine went cold at her father’s casual talk of death and killing.

  “Why would they want to kill us?”

  “Most of the usual reasons,” Torin said, but wouldn’t elaborate.

  “And why can’t they?”

  “Because it would be mean?” Torin seemed determined not to answer her questions.

  She ignored him and asked Ronan.

  “Why can’t they?”

  “Because you two are Fuilrix born,” Ronan said. “You have the Fuilrix blood, and I am your father’s familiar.”


  “It’s an old taboo,” Torin said. “From the days of the Blood King. His son’s successor decreed that no Fuilrix could spill Fuilrix blood. Not even a sitting king could break that taboo with impunity. If Tynan killed me they would overthrow him.”

  “Tynan?”

  “My dear elder brother,” Torin said. “Your uncle, if you are who you say you are.”

  “Oh, she is,” a voice sounded from above, and all three stiffened in recognition.

  The iron grate above them squalled as someone opened it, clanged to the floor of the room above them, and a head descended through the opening on the end of a long, serpentine neck. A familiar horned snake’s head with the crimson brand Penny remembered too well.

  “Turoc!” Ronan lunged forward, but stumbled when he reached the end of his chain.

  “Didn’t you tell me he was dead?” Torin seemed barely to care.

  “Not dead,” Turoc said. “Banished from the physical world, existing as a sentient ripple in formless space... but not dead.”

  He dropped down from the opening and landed coiled, tensed to spring. Penny saw that the arm he’d broken and shed during their fight in Aurora Hollow had re-grown, as had the tooth Rocky had knocked out.

  “It seems I left just enough of myself behind in the physical plane for the master to recall me back to it.” Two of his four arms held wands. He kept one trained on Penny as he spoke. “It is satisfying to see you brought low, little one.”

  Without pausing to consider the consequences, Penny charged. She called on her Phoenix Fire, as she had the first time she’d faced this monster, and charged.

  “Penny, no!” Ronan shouted.

  Penny ignored him and leapt, but her Phoenix Fire did not come. There was no heat, only the continued chill of the dungeon, and Penny felt her fury at the monster cool as well when he reacted to her charge with a grin. His blast caught her in the air and threw her back to the stone several feet away at Torin’s feet.

  A moment later Torin was on his knees, hunched over her.

  “Stop it, Turoc!”

  “Don’t fret, Torin. I only hurt her a little.”

  “What did you hope to accomplish?” Torin scolded Penny, pulling her close.

  “Your Phoenix Fire won’t work here,” Ronan said, moving to place himself between Turoc and Penny. “This cell is warded against shamanic magic, so unless you have a wand hidden up your sleeve there isn’t much you can do.”

  Penny glared at Turoc and called him a name that made Torin laugh.

  “Don’t be rude, child.” A new voice joined the discourse, and a moment later the person it belonged to descended through the ceiling door into the dungeon on a floating metal disk. Penny saw black leather boots, black pants, long crimson robes, and then a face framed by long waves of dark hair. She knew the face from pictures in her mother’s old photo album, her yearbooks, one of the laser-etched crystal spheres on Susan’s memory tree.

  She landed next to Turoc, her levitating metal plate clanking loudly on the stone floor, and Penny was frozen in shock.

  She looked upon the face of the traitor Phoenix Girl, the one who betrayed her friends and stole their memories from them.

  Tracy West.

  “Hello, Miss West,” Ronan said, and looked back over his shoulder at Penny. “This is unexpected. I never thought to see your face again.”

  “I wanted to see the child,” Tracy said. She seemed to study Penny, as if she could see through the mask to the face behind it. “So you are the one causing so much trouble for us?”

  “She’s my daughter,” Torin said, and gave Penny’s shoulder a squeeze. “You didn’t expect her to be helpful, did you?”

  Tracy didn’t respond to Torin, only stared at Penny. After a long scrutiny she smiled, then pulled a wand from her robe pocket and pointed it at Torin.

  “Tracy, don’t!” Ronan shouted.

  “Move, Penny,” Torin said, attempting to shove Penny out of the way, but Penny held onto him.

  “Don’t hurt him!” She hated her plaintive tone, hated that she was begging, but hated even more the thought of losing her father hours after finally finding him. “Please!”

  Tracy said nothing, but a second later the clank of chains drew Penny’s eyes to the floor. She found her father’s manacle lying open on the floor, his ankle freed. She pointed her wand at Ronan’s and he was freed of his manacle.

  “What is this,” Turoc said, now training both of his wands on his prisoners.

  “I’m giving them freedom of their cell,” Tracy said, stowing her wand back in her robe. “They’re free to roam these four walls. It’s the last home they’ll ever know.”

  Turoc seemed unhappy, but acquiesced without further argument.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” Tracy said. “You have some catching up to do.”

  Penny stayed planted in front of her father as Tracy rose up through the ceiling. Turoc followed, springing up through the opened iron grate.

  It clanged shut, and Penny finally relaxed her protective stance.

  She turned to face her father again, I told you so on the tip of her tongue, when strong arms wrapped around her and lifted her from the floor. She couldn’t see his face, but could hear the tears in his voice when he spoke again.

  “My girl,” Torin said. “You’re alive!”

  * * *

  Dawn came to Dogwood, a small town on Old Earth, and its first light fell through the windows of an attic bedroom in a house sitting high on Clover Hill. The bright shafts banished the darkness, but did not rouse them.

  One of the figures was a tall and gangly girl with bronze skin and long black hair. She lay in a tangle of limbs and sheets, her mouth open, letting out short snorting snores with almost clockwork regularity. The light crept down the wall as the sun rose higher, and when it fell over her face she gave a slightly louder snort and flopped over onto her stomach, her face turned away from it.

  The other girl was shorter, with freckled pale skin and long curly tumbles of fiery red hair. She lay like a posed life-sized doll, legs straight, arms folded over her chest, mouth closed, only the slow, regular inhale and exhale of breath and the slight rise and fall of her chest to indicate that she was indeed a living girl. When the light fell over her face, her eyes snapped open and she gasped. She bolted upright and scanned her surroundings, her body tensed for action, hand groping for a wand that she finally located on a small table next to the bed.

  Then she remembered where she was, and relaxed, but only a little.

  This was not her room, not even her world. The large pale ball hanging in the previous night’s sky, the moon it was called, had fascinated and frightened her. There was no moon in her world, only the bright outline of the midnight sun spinning like a ring in the darkness. The things surrounding her in this room were strange. There was a small flat box on the table next to her bed with numbers glowing like cold fire. Even as she watched the numbers changed. This thing told you the time of day, she knew that, and the tall, hooded object next to it made light without fire or magic. They used E-lectrisity, which she knew about from her lessons. People had tried to use E-lectrisity where she came from, but it didn’t work right in her world. Either the devices didn’t do anything at all, or they caught fire, or sometimes exploded.

  E-lectrisity in this world was like magic in her world. But there were some places in this world, special places, where magic worked, and those places drew special people to them.

  This was one of those places, the creekside grove where she’d come through to this world was a special place of enormous power, and like all such places in this world, it was important to her father. He was king and protector of the people in their world, and his first duty was to keep his people safe from the savages of Old Earth, the people who had warred against them, killed and enslaved them, and finally driven them to retreat through one of the ancient Worldgates.

  The Worldgates were all gone now, extinct for hundreds of years, and magic had fled this world with the
ir extinction, but there were still the thin places, places where the worlds were close together and the veil between them thin enough to part. Aurora Hollow was one such place, and an especially important one. Important enough that the Reds had built their citadel, and then the entire city of Galatania, around the place where it connected to their world. House of Fuilrix’s sepulcher contained many historical and magical artifacts, but the most important thing it contained was their end of that secret path between worlds.

  In the past her family had simply guarded it, monitored any magical activity on the other side, and ensured that the heretical Phoenix Girls, a name that she was sure was rooted in the equally heretical Phoenix legend, didn’t discover the true power of the place. Her Uncle Torin’s defection and betrayal had changed that.

  Torin had allied with the Phoenix Girls, tried to use them to kill his brother, her father, the true king of Galatania. They had taken her mother and her newborn twin girls. When her father had come to rescue his wife and daughters, his wife was already dead, and only one of the babies still lived.

  Or so it had seemed.

  Her sister had returned, not dead, only hidden away all these years, and she had resurrected the order that had killed her own mother.

  Her sister was safe now, in her true home with her true family, and the time had come to punish the Phoenix Girls, to end them and their threat against her family, forever.

  She yawned, set her wand aside, and lay back down.

  Revenge could wait a few more hours. She’d had a very long night.

  She woke a few hours later with the tall bronze-skinned girl, Zoe, shaking her shoulders. She had to fight the urge to strike out, and forced a smile.

  Zoe regarded her strangely. “You feeling okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t usually grin like a lunatic when I wake you up,” Zoe said and plopped back onto her bed. “It’s creeping me out.”

  Maybe I should have hit her.

  “Susan says breakfast is almost ready.” Zoe pulled on her shoes and stumbled toward the strange floor-door that led down to the rest of the house, and let the unfolding steps down to the floor below.