August 18, ’89 (5 years before the Fire)

The teenage artist’s eyes seemed to follow the lock of her own dark hair as she moved it from her brow, and Farisa found herself unsure of whether she had said the words she had intended. And were they the right words? I’m Farisa. I have to get to know you. She had been too forthright, had she not? Could she have said it with more coolness and distance, more irony?

“Hi, Farisa.”

“You’re drawing, I see,” Farisa said.

“Uh-huh.” The girl leaned back to look at her own picture, nearly complete. She pressed the edge of her foot into her sandal. “I am.”

“Daughters of Ardelyn, right? Sixteen Winds?”

“Aye.” The artist held her drawing in front of herself, at various angles. “Sorry. I’m a bit taken in by my work.”

Farisa made herself smile. “I see that.”

“I’m Raqel.”

“It’s splendid to meet you, Raqel.” Farisa touched the girl’s drawing. “The daughters should be darker. They would look like me.”

Raqel said, “You are right, I suppose.”

“I don’t mean to criticize. Your drawing’s... it’s really good! It’s almost perfect, in fact. It isn’t accurate, is all.” No, Farisa. You just met her. You can’t say things like that. She could have talked for hours about the Sixteen Winds and its historical context, but she was old enough to know that most people, while polite about the matter, did not share her intense focused interests. “I... oh, forget it. It’s very hot today.”

“It is very hot, I agree.” Raqel smiled, and paused. “It’s almost September. I prefer autumn.” Her left hand sorted pencils in pairs, ordering them by color from purple and green to yellow and red. “Colorful. Not stifling.”

“Me too.” Farisa touched her inner wrist with her other hand. Her pulse was quick. “May I see some of your other work?”

Raqel, blushing, closed her sketchbook. “No.”

“I didn’t mean to be—”

“Rude? You weren't.” Raqel’s eyes moved, as if she had recognized Farisa as a close friend from a prior life, but had yet to make up her mind about the person she had become in this one. “Art’s very personal for me. That’s all. I’m flattered by your interest.”

“I understand.” Farisa paused. “Have you finished the Tales?”

“I’m still working through the second volume. I had the absolutely brilliant idea”—Raqel rolled her eyes—“to write my T-Level on Sixteen Winds, so...” She shrugged.

“I’m told you can get into university with an S these days.”

“True. You can.” Raqel, after a glance at the clock, stood up and gathered her pencils. “I’m aiming for the best, though. Chan-Zadik or Cait Forest.”

“Cait Forest? Wow. That’s ambitious. I’m impressed. You must be really...” She stopped herself.

“Don’t be impressed yet. Who knows if I’ll get in?” Raqel tilted her head. “Cait Forest is far away, but they have the best art department on the Continent. ‘The young must study their forebears, lest they repeat others’ mistakes—’ ”

“ ‘—and fail to invent their own.’ Mona Tezhnari.” Farisa reached out, nearly touching Raqel’s arm, but withdrew. “You know, I see her influence on your style.”

“I have to go, but it was great to meet you.” Raqel looked around. “We absolutely must meet again.”

Farisa’s skin cooled. Had she made a friend? Could she be, in fact, a normal girl? She supposed no such thing could be done in a day, but she was developing a skill of observation, and could speak with confidence for a full sentence or two. Smiling, she said, “No sooner than when you finish Sixteen Winds, Raqel.”

As she walked away, Raqel turned her head. “Do you come here often?”

“You won’t have a hard time finding me.”

#

Farisa and Raqel fast became friends, after spending several cold, snowbound months in the coffeeshops and art museums of Foundry Hill. Today, though, the first buds of spring were showing and, in spite of the stray flurries settling and melting on Farisa’s denim jacket, it was not cold by Tevalon’s standard, so they walked Heroes’ Wall, the southern edge of the Old City, under a sky of breaking high clouds.

“So...?” Farisa adjusted one of her wool gloves. “Have you finished the Tales?”

Raqel stepped over a puddle. “I have.”

“Well? What did you think?”

“Of which story? There are so many.”

“I’m exquisitely curious to know your thoughts about the frame story—Rhazyladne and Urmahn.”

Raqel smiled and said, “Well...”

Long ago, when Loran’s Blue Pyramid was still blue, there lived—according to the Tales, that is—a “dlayo of all the sea can see”, a monarch so rich even his slaves rode white horses, by the name of Urmahn. So busy in trade and conquest, he had not given a moment’s thought to marriage or posterity until a riding accident on his thirty-second birthday, one that nearly killed him, leaving him convinced of his need for an heir. As his father had done, and as his father’s father had also done, he arranged for one hundred and forty-four virgin suitresses to be presented, and chose as his queen the one he found most beautiful. The others, per custom, were beheaded—an unfortunate necessity, but a merciful act, for a woman who had been so publicly rejected would be unable to marry. Alas, as a conqueror of nations, Urmahn had become accustomed to variety in all things, so he grew bored of his first wife. After a fortnight, he suffocated her with a pillow, that being more humane than to leave her in life with the stigma of divorce.

The brief marriage had produced no heir, so he needed another bride. On the next new moon, another 144 women were presented to him. As before, he selected one; as before, the other 143 were killed. And, as before, the new wife failed to hold his interest for very long, so he took her life as the moon turned full. This continued, every month for twelve years, a hundred and forty-four women killed each time. When he had exhausted the supply of high nobility, he sought brides from the low nobility. When there were none of those left, he opened his search to the merchant’s daughters, then the light-skinned captives from Polar Ocean ports, and finally even the dark-skinned slaves from the Pegasus Islands...

“Who would have been my ancestors,” Farisa said.

Raqel, reversing the usual scene, seemed not to know what to say.

The world became so bereft of marriageable women, men of adventure went off to more remote, more dangerous places each month—Mount Alma, the Black Atoll, Tevalon. (Raqel chuckled. “I suppose we are exotic, from their perspective.”) Some had even set sail for the inaccessible Antipodes. Then, as now, no one who got within a thousand miles of the broiling equator lived to tell of it—it was said that, so far south, even the ocean smelled like fire.

Enter Rhazyladne, the hundred and forty-fourth wife. The new queen announced that she would not consummate the marriage unless the other suitresses were spared execution. Although Urmahn questioned the decency of forcing them to survive his dismissal, he was so smitten by Rhazyladne’s wit and beauty, he reluctantly conceded, allowing them to live, a decision that scandalized society at first, but was, in a time not much further on, deemed to have been the correct one.

On the royal couple’s first night together, Rhazyladne told a bedtime story, a sinuous tale about an elfin girl whose tears became pearls, over nine nights. This became “Soraya’s Despair,” the first of the Tales. Each story led into a new one, and her tales featured such fanciful occurrences as witches mothered by dragons, man-eating plants, and cursed ancient cities “with the sun in the north”—a ridiculous notion, because even a child knew the sun only crossed in the south. The dlayo could not help but become enraptured. Always eager to know how a story would end, he would demand his queen hasten the telling. Every time, she would refuse, instead saying, “Your mind is the place you make it.”

Kill me, dlayo of all the sea can see, and live with no ending to these tales but your own.

Rhazyladne did not tell her stories quietly. Instead, she made sure she was overheard by the palace guards and minders, who told them to their children, and this repetition went so far that, within a year, even the second-sale merchants selling olives and dates were familiar with the queen’s inventions. Scribes copied them like scripture; block makers had the stories printed and published. The kingdom’s people fell so in love with her Tales that the saryk prushni, the chosen priest of the common people, declared that no child but Rhazyladne’s could ever be Urmahn’s heir.

The queen’s stories built on and referred back to each other, settling in the mind so as to suggest an underlying structure, a grand message but a still-incomplete one. As soon as she finished one tale, she would begin another one, never letting her king have total resolution. This went on until the spice moon of their marriage’s fourth year, when she finished “Zara and the Silver Cat,” the last of her stories. She had followed every plot, settled every conflict, and described every setting her imagination could create. She confessed that she had told herself naked; she had nothing left to bare, and dreaded the fate that would come upon her, as it had Urmahn’s other consorts. The Tales, however, had civilized him. He declared that, seeing better now than in his past actions, he would spare Rhazyladne and take no more wives. So the king and queen lived...

Farisa spat the words out like coffee dregs: “Happily ever after.”

Raqel shrugged. “You would prefer a tragedy?”

“I love the idea, I do.” Farisa looked over a parapet as a gyrfalcon crossed the boreal sky. The sun had broken out; beyond a field of winter-pale grass, a silver lake glimmered. “It’s a beautiful concept. A storyteller heroine, on her wits alone, wins. She doesn’t use violence. She doesn’t trade favors or climb a social ladder. She invents the world that saves her. There’s so, so much in her character that I love. She deserves more than to be a prize for some warlord.” Farisa put her hands on Raqel’s shoulders and looked directly at her. “Don’t you agree?”

Raqel said, “Perhaps you should have written my T-Level.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Farisa said. Her arms fell and the girls resumed walking. “I’d never get into Cait Forest. I’d be there for ninety seconds before they all figured out I don’t belong.” She stopped to collect fresh snow on a granite ledge, then lobbed it over the wall. “It’s obvious I’m not their kind.”

“Not to me,” said Raqel as they went up a flight of marble stairs, slick with snowmelt.

“As for the Tales, I would have chosen a different ending. I don’t consider the existing one happy at all. There is no justice in it. Urmahn killed a hundred and forty-four women, a hundred forty-three times. That’s twenty thousand, five hundred and ninety-two—”

Raqel chuckled. “Did you do that just now?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s supposed to be a story of redemption, Farisa.”

“Redemption?” The volume of Farisa’s own voice surprised her. “What does his redemption do for the twenty thousand murdered women? Also, what is his crowning achievement? He’s a wife murderer who stopped doing wife murder. Rise and applaud, ladies and knights of the court. We have a veritable eidolon of restraint.”

“Can we really apply modern standards to a story that old?”

“Are they modern standards? Did the people of the past not know that murder was wrong? In any case, we have only our modern minds to read with.”

“Right,” Raqel said, having taken on a distant tone, as if distracted by something in the corner of her eye. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Farisa noticed a bald man in a baggy jacket coming toward them.

Raqel took her by the hand. “Turn around. Don’t let him see you. We have to get out of here.”

#

They had taken a staircase down the outer side of the wall, stopped midway on a landing, and come into the corridor inside, rather than atop, the wall, which they followed for half a mile before emerging into outdoor light, now bright as they came along Tevalon’s eastern fringe, overlooking Zadka-Mazita hospital.

Farisa said, “Who was that?”

“He works for Duriad,” Raqel said. Farisa had not once heard Raqel call the man, Father. Raqel continued. “It’s that, or Duriad works for him. I don’t know which, but I’ve seen them together, and I know he’s not a good person. He’s not... from here.”

“I’m not from here,” Farisa said.

“You know what I mean. You grew up in Tevalon, but that man, I am pretty sure, is a Globbo.”

“Your father works for Globbos?”

“He has taken on a couple as clients,” Raqel said.

Unlike most of the world, Tevalon had independent judges. The Global Company, everywhere south of the seventieth parallel, had recognized the inefficiency of a justice system that distracted people from daily labor, solely to have them decide on cases where, most of the time—or all the time, if one accepted the Company view that even to inconvenience the economy by being falsely accused was also an offense—the person on trial was clearly guilty. It was costly and time-consuming to have such processes, when most offenses could be solved via direct payment or labor extraction, leaving no need for middlemen. Tevalon, on the other hand, still had juries and courts and advocates; Duriad was a barrister.

“What sorts of charges?”

“Drunkenness, fistfights. Crop and garden damage, sometimes. Nothing bigger, to my knowledge.”

“Still, your mother must hate that.”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

Farisa had met both of Raqel’s parents, and knew that Beth had studied the Black Eighties—“the time,” the Ta-Kha-Vra, “the three letters”—in college, and would hold no love for Alcazar Detective Agency, private security firm and progenitor of the Global Company.

“It’s the same fight, every time. Duriad says it was a hundred and ten years ago. That the Global Company is not Alcazar. To Mother, though, it’s personal. She’s read so many diaries of Vehu men and women who died in the camps, and she always says that it could happen to us, today, even though we’re in Tevalon. And then Duriad says that it can never happen again because, while the Company was founded by Alcazar people—”

“We are too interconnected by economic need to repeat the mistakes of the last century.”

“How’d you know? That is exactly his reasoning.”

Farisa checked the top button of her jacket. “It is what people believed the last time.”

“Anyway, you’ve seen Mother. She reads. A lot. Whenever ‘White Spear Press’—”

“Which everyone knows is a Company imprint.”

“—puts out those pamphlets, saying we Vehu are causing plagues or earthquakes or forest fires, it’s a bad day for Mother. Then Duriad says, ‘Don’t worry, they only print that stuff because it sells.’”

“I’m sure that doesn’t help.”

“No, it doesn’t. His favorite argument is that, because the Company employs a few of us, it would be impossible for those times to happen again. Apparently, I have a cousin who is a Z-5 who has even met Hampus Bell and insists he is a nice man.”

Farisa removed a glove and stretched her fingers. “Why would your father work for Globbos? He doesn’t need the money.”

“Unless he has a secret second family he loves more than us.”

“Raqel,” Farisa said. “Don’t be absurd. Of course he doesn’t.”

“He says even the worst in our world deserve a vigorous defense before the law. I suppose he has a point, but I’ve never heard him express that sort of sympathy before, not until he started working for the Company. Did you know that when he was a prosecutor, he put a six-year-old Igna boy in jail?”

“For what?”

“Stealing eggs. Duck eggs.” Raqel snickered. “Two years in jail for five white and three brown duck eggs. I don’t know why I remember those details, it was so long ago. The boy would be our age now. Duriad was gleeful about it, and yet when it comes to the Global Company, which has stolen a lot more than a handful of duck eggs, he says we need to take a broader view and that the Company deserves gratitude for—what were his words—creating a ‘middle slice’ of society for all who follow the rules.”

“I’d like to ask him what rules he thought my parents broke,” Farisa said.

“You should.”

Farisa chuckled. The man was twice her size and always seemed ready to strike someone. “I’d sooner steal from a bear.”

The two continued walking. The wall curved, bringing them to face north, so the sun was now behind them, lighting up the water droplets that fell from red-fringed cherry trees.

Raqel said, “Anyway, thank you.”

“For what?”

“I feel better whenever I talk to you.”

“Yvec,” Farisa said.

“You’re saying ‘yvec’ now?”

“Is a foresta not allowed to?”

“It’s cute, is all.” Raqel raised an eyebrow. “Hey, do you remember when we met? It was so hot that day. Five flags, I think.”

Farisa chuckled. “Five is not that hot. I’m told it gets to seven in Loran, where I was born.”

“So, Farisa… what is it?”

“What’s what?”

Raqel touched Farisa’s arm. “You said you’d give the Tales a different ending. What is it?”

“Oh, that.” Farisa laughed. She reached inside her jacket and blouse and scratched her shoulder. “I haven’t written it yet, but when I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

She would wish, later in life, she had been able to keep that promise.

#

A season later, Farisa and Raqel were on another of their ambling walks, time of day lost to them—the sun had been up forever, and seemed like it would never set—through the Old City when Raqel’s neighborhood postman waved at them.

“He’s cute,” Farisa said.

“Yvec. He’s at least twenty-five.”

The man approached. “A letter came for you, Raqel. It looked important.”

Farisa interjected. “I wonder if it’s...”

“It probably is,” said Raqel.

They thanked the postman and hurried back to Raqel’s house, out of breath by the time they got there. The letter sat, already warm from its time there, in the hot metal box. Raqel grabbed it and the two women ran upstairs to Raqel’s second-floor bedroom.

Farisa watched as Raqel opened the letter. “Well?”

Raqel’s lips moved as she read: “…and your distinguished academic record, I am pleased to offer you admission to Macska College in Cait Forest, in the major of studio art, with second-year status. Classes will begin on the first of March.”

Farisa threw her arms around Raqel. “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you.”

“Six out of six. Got in everywhere.”

“I figured you would.”

“Well, that’s one of us.”

Farisa looked aside. A part of her had hoped that Raqel would choose Chan-Zadik, less than a day’s ride from Tevalon, but Cait Forest, with its proximity to the galleries and wealth of the South, had so much more to offer an ambitious young artist that, as Raqel had secured admission, no other choice could be justified.

Raqel said, “You look sad.”

“I’ll miss you, but I will write. You have to go.”

Raqel folded the letter and looked out the window. “You should have applied.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten in. I haven’t been inside a school since I was seven.”

“Fay, you grew up in a library.”

“Farisa.” She paced around Raqel’s bedroom. “Not Fay.”

“You’re smarter than I am.”

“Don’t flatter me. Even if I had gotten in, how would I afford it?”

“There are scholarships. I got one.”

“You? You don’t even need a scholarship because—”

“My father is rich, not me. What, you think Duriad Ahava would pay to send a daughter to school?”

Farisa looked outside. A pair of sparrows had landed on a branch.

Raqel tapped Farisa’s arm. “Hey, what’s the name of that man... you said he was your father’s best friend...?”

“Claes Bergryn?”

“I bet he knows people.”

Farisa snickered. “He may well.” Claes knew more people, high and low and low-below-low, than some people knew there were people. “Sure, he could have got—he could probably get me in somewhere, but wouldn’t that be cheating?”

“You’ve been in Tevalon too long. That’s how everything’s done in the South. It’s not what you know, it’s who you—”

“—blow.”

“Farisa!” Raqel laughed. “Don’t be daft.”

“Bad joke.” Farisa crossed her arms. “I’m happy in Tevalon. I am.”

“I believe you, but—”

“I...” Farisa started. She had lived in the Library for a while, but recently she’d been taken in by Arvi and Skaya, who lived on a forested hill just north of the Old City’s walls. The house was full of books, Skaya’s cooking was excellent, and she loved that big goofy dog of theirs. “I have a home, for the first time in my life. I could spend the rest of my life here.”

“I know, but the North can be—”

“We’ll find a way to see each other. I’m sure of it.”

Farisa heard it first. The sound was not wind and not summer insects and it was definitely not children playing. It scattered and spread at the speed of human hurry; once it arrived, it seemed to come from everywhere.

The front door slammed open.

Duriad shouted, “Raqel! Basement, now!”

Raqel rushed downstairs. Farisa put her shoes on and followed. Beneath the house, a corridor led to a cement-block shelter, a spare space underground shared with the neighboring homes. Wooden chairs had been lined up against the wall.

“What’s going on?” Raqel asked.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Get in quick,” Duriad said as he shut the door and lit a cigarette.

“Not down here, Dad.”

“Plenty of air if it’s just us. Haven’t smoked since my army days, but now’s a time if there ever was one.” He turned to Farisa. “You’re that girl, aren’t you?”

Farisa lengthened her arms and said, “I’m a girl.”

“Dad,” said Raqel. “Please tell us what’s happening.”

“The yovah-gehemnit Ignae.” The orange sprite of his cigarette was the brightest object in the room. “We ought to weld every gate of the Old City shut.”

Farisa thought about Arvi and Skaya. “What about people up north?”

“If they’re real Vehu, they’ll come inside the gates. We can make space if—”

An old woman came in, reciting prayers at breathless speed. Her husband, as he grabbed two wooden chairs from the shelter’s corner, said, “I think we’re going to be here for a while. There’s more than one.”

Duriad’s pacing accelerated. Raqel and Farisa looked at each other for mutual comfort before sitting down. Farisa’s face flushed. Raqel touched her neck before asking, “Dad, where’s Mom?”

The man’s hand grabbed its shaking twin. “Market.”

“The Summer Market?” asked the old man in the corner.

“It wouldn’t be the Winter Market, now would it?”

“Yvec.” The old man’s face hollowed out. “I’m sorry.”

Farisa said, “I’ll pray for her.”

Duriad scoffed. “What do you people even pray to?”

#

Beth Ahava—at first, only in the reconstructions of others, as her own memory would not return for some time—had been walking down Seventh Street, her arms full of leeks, rhubarb, and strawberries, when a pulse of light lit up the spaces between buildings. The air cracked like a breaking bone. An invisible man threw her to the ground. She could see people screaming but heard nothing. She forced a deep, painful breath before consciousness left her grasp.

She would have been certain no time had passed, but the sun had moved through at least a third of the sky, and she had been taken to a makeshift field hospital in a park she would have recognized on any other day. A doctor was asking her incomprehensible questions while lifting her head. “Do you know...?” “What is...?” She found herself fluid in time, no more able to hold herself to a moment than an ocean wave to stand in place, and her next instance of solidity hung on some other day’s morning. Indoors. Bright sun through a tall window. She recognized the wallpaper—her grandmother had printed it, and donated it to Zadka-Mazita Hospital.

The first time Farisa saw her was July 1, six days after the attack, although Raqel had gone to the hospital several times. Tevalon’s newspapers wrote about nothing but the event—two people, a little girl and an old man, had been killed, but thirty-six had been injured.

Raqel’s mother lifted her head as Farisa followed her daughter in. “Hi, Farisa.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Ahava.”

“It’s good to see you. How’s the mood in town?”

“Sad,” Farisa said. “People are sad, and scared.”

“Confused,” Raqel added. “No one expected this from Ignae.”

“They never liked us, but you’re right,” Beth said. “Their holy sites are all east of the Naya, and what is it that their religion says? ‘Hell is being remembered.’ They mean it literally, you know. The mind of a living person is too sordid a place for a soul.”

“All true,” Farisa said. Tevalon’s Vehu, though conservative in many ways, tended to exalt the brilliant and strange, whereas Ignae preferred never to stand out, and avoided using personal names unless they had to. “Such belief produces few poets or statesmen, but also makes them unlikely to do...”

“This sort of shit,” said Raqel.

Beth lifted her head. “Did you hear that they were teenagers? One of him died, killed by his own bomb, and the other three refused to surrender. All dead, and stupidly dead, and sure to be remembered.”

“Hell is being remembered,” Farisa said.

“Everyone is forgotten eventually,” added Raqel.

Beth added, “You know, I’ve been to Ignarrusk. Their god has a single eye in the center of his face, so he looks like a—”

Raqel protested. “Mom!”

“Cyclops. I was going to say cyclops.”

It became clear that five minutes of conversation was all Beth could handle before needing to sleep. The two young women made a daily habit of visiting around ten o’clock.

On the seventh visit, they arrived to find her husband there.

“They found a fifth conspirator,” Duriad said. “Alive.”

Beth shook her head. “Sixteen years old. They found him shaking in an abandoned brewery.” She folded up a newspaper and set it aside. “He’s been returned to Ignarrusk, where he’ll be put to death.”

“They say that,” Duriad said. “They’ll receive him as a hero.”

Beth sat upright in the hospital bed. “They won’t.”

“If they do kill him, it’ll be to keep him from telling anyone who planned this. It was their own High Council. You think teenagers are capable of this?”

Farisa noticed Raqel’s eyes rolling back.

Duriad continued. “Of course not. This whole thing was probably planned a year in advance.”

Beth said, “It’s the pamphlets. It’s White Spear Press. It’s the Global Company. The young are starting to believe all the absurdities printed about us.”

Duriad smiled as he said to Raqel, “This is why women shouldn’t talk.”

Before they left, the doctors took Raqel aside to speak to her.

Farisa asked, “What did they have to say?”

“They said Mom can go home tomorrow.”

“Is she... is she all better?”

“As much as she’ll ever be. The nerves are never the same, I’m told.”

Alas, this proved true. Beth had used to volunteer for a dozen charities, always keeping herself busy, but was now housebound, afraid her crippled hearing would cause her to be robbed or hit by a carriage or worse. One had to speak to her loudly and at half speed, or she would not understand what one said. The women’s hair had turned white and her eyes tended to twitch, both at the same time, as if she were about to sneeze, and the shutting of her eyes always looked like it hurt. Raqel often found her mother at night, sobbing in the living room downstairs. On her worst days, the woman would forget Farisa’s name, or lose track of her speech mid-sentence and stall in silence, or lapse into the casual use of slurs like “tarsha” and “nyrrit”, despite Raqel’s objections.

The daughter kept a journal to record her mother’s health. Farisa looked inside, early in September, to find that days of regression nearly matched in number those of progress. Duriad, who had never been religious before, began to speak of the bombings as divine retribution for modern impiety. There had been so much outbreeding—in his words, “yovah-gehemnit miscegenation”—that Vehu all over the world “now look like the places they live.” The man inveighed against the Library of Tevalon, which he considered “a den of sorcery” as it had existed before Vehu arrival, and he castigated his neighbors for their relaxations, even those blessed by tanarou for thousands of years, of ancient laws made in southern climates where the rising and setting times of the sun were not as extreme as here. Senseless violence, he argued, would continue until these heresies and irreverences ceased. On the day of the attack, Beth Ahava had been wearing one of those modern dresses with sleeves so spare, one could almost see the woman’s elbows!

Raqel said, “He refuses to believe that bad things sometimes happen for no reason.”

#

October 1, ‘90—Farisa’s seventeenth birthday—coincided this year with the last day of Exile, the somber Vehu holy week that moved on a year-and-a-half schedule, it was said, because even God found it too exhausting to place in every year. Men, if able-bodied and not committed to other work, went into the wilderness and carried stones uphill every day from midnight to sunrise. Women lit candles for seventy-three generations of dead. Prayers were said according to a strict cycle, and some people spent the entire day in temple. All this was done under a fast that allowed only one midday meal, derived solely from grains available when the chorae had been written: bulgur, quinoa, and millet. Maize, once thought extinct, but recently found feral in the Bezelian highlands, was a topic of liturgical controversy.

Exile was a period of respectful, quiet atonement, but the Lifting of the Fast, at sunrise on Exile’s last day, was a jubilant occasion. Feasts and dancing would go on all night, no matter the weather—in summer, the young would go for midnight-twilight swims; in winter, they would sled down Observatory Hill or watch the aurora.

Three hours before the Lifting, the afternoon was warm, despite a solar arc closer to the sun’s diffident winter one than the high arch of June. The city’s mood had been subdued by seven days of contemplation and fasting, so Farisa and Raqel found Rabbit’s Run, parallel to the Eastern Wall, nearly empty as they walked down it. They wore henna tattoos on their back wrists: Farisa, a stormcat; Raqel, a lamb.

“I’d like to make mine permanent,” Farisa said.

Raqel looked back. “It’s not against your religion?”

“What is my religion?” Farisa was unsure what her parents had believed. Loran, even though the island had barely twenty square miles of area, hosted more than a million people of twenty-six different ethnicities. Her native faith could be, she supposed, whatever she decided.

Raqel, mocking the accent of Ettaso’s South, said, “My religion is to have a good time.”

“Oh, stop it.” Farisa nudged Raqel’s arm. “They won’t all be like that.”

“My father calls Cait Forest a den of vice. The whole South. He says the sun turns people into perverts, and yet he also says the Vehu should go back to Terosha, since the chorae were written there, and take the land back from the ‘tarshis’ and ‘nyrrits’, never mind that—”

“Your ancestors were as dark as me,” Farisa said.

“You should tell him that.”

“I’m sure it would be a delightful conversation.”

Raqel paused. “There is no point talking to him about anything. He just doesn’t want me to go to Cait Forest because he can’t stand the thought of a woman being smarter than him.”

“Your mother is smarter than him.” Farisa paused. There was no value in adding the words both she and Raqel were thinking. On her good days.

“Aye, she is. She’s alive because she has never let him know it.”

The girls continued to saunter down Rabbit’s Run, where one could find the best art galleries north of the sixtieth parallel. Though small compared to Southern cities, Tevalon made the most of what it had, and it did culture—especially music—well. The girls couldn’t afford to buy anything, of course, but Raqel liked to stop in and see the paintings, to find out if there were new techniques worthy of study.

Today, though, their main interest was the perfume shop, tucked almost invisibly into a painted stone wall, between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The woman at the counter wore a blue turban and silver earrings.

“It’ll be hard to smell it today,” said the clerk. “The whole city smells of incense. But give me your hand.”

Raqel did so. The woman used a pipet to put a drop of clear fluid on her wrist.

“What do you think?” Raqel asked Farisa.

She sniffed. It wasn’t her favorite odor. She whispered, “Smells chemical.”

“Didn’t you say to me once—”

“I know, I know. All matter is chemical.”

The clerk said, “You girls are fasting?”

“I am,” Raqel said.

Farisa smiled awkwardly. “I’m… as you see, something else entirely.”

“That’s fine as tea.” The perfumer mouthed, “I’m a convert.” To Raqel, she said, “If you’re fasting, try this.” She put a drop on each girl’s wrist. “You too,” she said to Farisa. “Tell me what you think.”

The tincture smelled of lavender and lime. “It’s nice,” Farisa said.

“If you wear it under your nose, you won’t be as hungry.”

Raqel asked, “How much?”

“Book says four grot, but I’ll let you have it for three.”

“I’ve got two ten.”

Farisa sorted through the contents of her pockets, excluding what she’d set aside for the bakery. She had also bought a present for Raqel’s parents, so her finances were tight. “I’ve got sixty-one cents. How’s two seventy-one?”

“That works for me,” the merchant said. “One other thing. Is this your first time observing?”

Raqel nodded. Observance of Exile wasn’t expected till age nineteen, but she had wanted to do it here, properly, before going south for college.

“Mine as well.” The woman poured from a glass bottle into three shot glasses. “So we can’t have alcohol for a couple hours, but I’d like to offer some nonalcoholic vodka.”

“Nonalcoholic vodka?” Farisa asked. “Isn’t that just… water?”

“You got me.” The merchant extended her shot glass; all three clinked. “Zohn-wyetz!”

A hundred and twenty? I’d be happy if I see twenty, thought the mage. Farisa spotted a clock. It was almost four. “We need to get going. The bakery closes soon.”

They thanked the perfumer and were on their way. Rabbit’s Run grew more crowded as they approached Walnut Street, a boulevard connecting two of the Thirteen Temples. The black-clad people were polite as they hurried down the cross street, but insistent on completing their circuit on time; the sun would set in less than an hour.

Farisa said, “Why do so many people wait for the last day?”

“They don’t.” Raqel took Farisa’s hand and led her through the crowd. “The most devout do it every day. One can always be more Vehu.”

The street, beyond Walnut, was lined mostly by single-family houses and only an occasional storefront. An island of grass, protected by stone edging, bisected the road, discouraging fast carriage traffic. A third of the maples and oaks had changed color, mostly yellow and orange—the scarlets and deep reds would not come until a week or two from now.. Children played a game that involved tossing a rubber ball into a high-hanging hoop. It was good to know kids still did things like that.

“Your mother seems to be getting better,” Farisa said.

“I think so, but I do all the work. I pick up her medicines. Dad refuses. It’s his ploy to keep me from going to Cait Forest. He’s afraid I won’t find a decent Vehu man there, and he still believes a woman is ‘dry cake’ if she’s not married off by twenty.”

“Has he presented you any suitors?”

Raqel laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You could meet a boy at the dance tonight.”

“‘Meet a boy’? What is this, chora school?”

Farisa smiled. “You know what I mean, Raqel.”

“If I ‘met a boy,’ how likely would he be to let me go to college?”

“If he’s the right one, he’ll want you to go.” The girls came to a crossbar intersection with Namyr Lane, where they turned left. “He can always go with you.”

Raqel took a few steps, then stopped. “I’m exhausted, Farisa. Duriad does nothing for Mom.” She shook her head. “It’s too much. I’m not even eighteen.”

Farisa nodded. “You are the model daughter.” But how would I know? I’ve never been one.

Raqel resumed walking. “Never mind. I don’t mean to unload. I’m just cranky from the fast.” She grabbed Farisa’s elbow. “Speaking of it, you should join us for the Lifting.”

“I’ll be the only foresta.”

“Don’t be silly. I would never let you be alone on your birthday.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time I was.”

Raqel stepped ahead as a narrowing of the street, due to a stall where a short old woman was selling autumn mushrooms, forced them into single file. “You know my mother adores you.”

“On her good days.”

Raqel looked back, her eyebrow slightly cocked. “Do you have other plans?”

“I don’t,” Farisa admitted. Arvi and Skaya were out of the city—she had a key to their house, but it would be quiet—and the Library had closed at three o’clock for the holiday.

“Then you’ll eat with us. I insist. The weather’s been nice, so Mom will be in good spirits.”

“I’ll go,” Farisa said.

“Good. Now let us slow down a moment.”

“Why?”

Raqel stepped back from the street on a patch of grass. “I’m going to paint this. Do you see it?”

Farisa stood beside her. The sun, orange behind the city spires, gave Namyr Lane’s cobblestones a golden glow, as if they had been cut from the same stuff. “I do. I couldn’t paint it as well as you, but I do.”

Raqel stood for half a minute. “I think I’ve got it etched in memory. We can go.”

They reached the bakery, five minutes before it closed, which happened to be next door to the place where Farisa had come yesterday to buy her gift for the family. The cheesecake was heavier than Farisa had expected it to be, which made her glad they were able to talk one of the uptown stagecoach drivers into giving them a ride for free. They returned to the Ahava house right on time for the Lifting of the Fast.

Once inside, Farisa couldn’t help but think of how different the salon space felt. Seasons and lighting only accounted for a quarter of that effect. Beth could no longer handle crowds or noise; conversation and festivity had become luxuries they could not afford. Instead, they used a small table that sat four—the daughter, the parents, and Farisa. Eight green candles were lit. Beth led prayers, before anyone could eat, as her mother and grandmother and grandmother’s mother had done for thousands of years. Although her day-to-day speech had taken on a monotone since summer, when she recited the chorae, she recovered the inflectional range of the fiercely intelligent woman she had been when Farisa had first met her.

And then they could eat. They used a swivel turntable because, technically, it was still Exile until the meal was over, so one had to stand while eating.

“This is delicious.” Farisa took a second helping of the paprika chicken, served with yams. “What’s your recipe?”

“Ha!” Beth laughed. “Like I’d tell anyone.”

Raqel said, “You promised to give me your recipe book.”

“In time.”

“I’m going to college soon, remember? Their cafeteria is expensive. I’ll need to cook for myself.”

Duriad spoke his first three words of the night. “You’re drinking coffee?”

“I’m sorry.” Farisa put her mug down. “I didn’t know that it was—”

“Not you.” He glared at his wife.

“One cup is all,” Beth said. “A scent of an old blue day.”

Farisa , though she had no desire to say anything, found Duriad’s objection absurd. Beth was in her late forties, but had not a pound on her body that didn’t belong there. If coffee were her sole vice, her secret to graceful aging, she ought to have all she wanted.

“I’ll have some too,” Raqel said, showing solidarity, as Farisa knew her best friend rarely drank it.

Duriad hunched and scowled like a collapsing rain cloud.

Once they were finished eating, Beth said, “Shall we do gifts?”

They both nodded.

“I’ll go get the ones I bought,” the woman said.

While Beth was gone, Farisa nudged Raqel. “When is the dance?”

“Ten thirty. We have plenty of time.”

Feeling an urge to say something ridiculous, Farisa mouthed, “Tonight might be my first kiss.”

“You’re into my people, now?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Vehu boys?” Raqel gave that Raqel look, with the parallel lines on her forehead softly expressed, of someone working out a puzzle, or memorizing a scene to paint it later. “Really?”

Farisa scratched her upper arm. “You don’t see it?”

“Handsome, yes.” Raqel lowered her voice. “Intelligent, sure. But you know how, when kids grow up together on a dori, even though they’re not related, they see each other as brothers and sisters? All of Tevalon feels like that to me.”

“But in the South...”

Beth returned and sat down. “What are you girls giggling about?”

Raqel smiled. “Nothing, Ma.”

Beth leaned forward, hands on the table. “I’m glad you two have found each other. I’m glad you’re friends.”

“Thanks,” Farisa said, shifting her weight.

“What I hope you understand,” Beth said as she rapped her temple with a knuckle, as if dislodging bad air from her head, “is that while you can be good friends, you will never be best friends.”

“We are best friends, Mom!” Raqel gave Farisa the too-tight hug one gave a too-cute cat.

“What I mean, qita, is that when the time comes—”

Raqel rolled her eyes. “Oh, this.”

Duriad, after a pause, said, “When you get married, you’ll need a First Chantress.”

“I have one!” Raqel said.

“Ridiculous.” Duriad smacked the back of his hand into the other palm. “A foresta, First Chantress at a Vehu wedding. One of these days, you’ll say you want to marry a woman.”

Raqel and Farisa traded glances before laughing at the notion.

“Maybe I will,” the daughter finally said.

“Ten years after that, people will be copulating with dogs on the street.”

The dry autumn air seemed to harden until Beth broke the silence. “We really should not let ourselves get idle. Gifts!”

Raqel said, “You need to do the—”

“Oh, of course.” The woman struck a bronze ramekin with a tiny mallet. Its tone beat against itself, loud to quiet to loud to quiet again. Exile was now over. “Who shall present first?”

“I got something for Raqel,” Farisa said. She produced a shimmering red cloth with a lion’s silhouette printed in gold along its fringes. “A saria.”

Raqel asked, “Is that the one you wear diagonally?”

Farisa nodded.

Duriad glared at Farisa. A saria could be worn with a full blouse, and some Lorani women did, but her culture didn’t consider the female midriff immodest, so many wore it, artfully, to conceal the navel just-by when standing; to expose it just-by when sitting.

“I love it.” Raqel beamed. She gave Farisa a long, tight hug. “I’d wear it tonight if it were warmer.”

“Don’t become a Loranian dancer,” Duriad said.

Farisa said, “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Ahava. Zhivohn dlayoeen takes years to learn. It’s not the sort of thing that happens by accident.”

Beth scratched her neck, under her good ear. “It’s beautiful, Farisa.”

“I’m next,” Raqel said. “This is from both of us. We got it from your favorite bakery.”

“The one on Namyr Lane?”

“Where else?”

“I’ll get it,” Farisa said. “Pumpkin cheesecake.”

“Oh!” Beth said. “I love it. Thank you girls so much.”

“We already had pie,” Duriad said.

“We’ll have it later.”

“It’ll go bad.”

“There’s plenty of room in the icebox,” said Beth.

“Only because there’s no ice.”

Raqel said, “Stop being difficult, Dad.”

“You don’t have to worry about spoilage,” Farisa said. “This time of year, even when it’s hot, it gets cold at night. So open the icebox before you go to bed, then close it in the morning. The cheesecake will last at least a week.”

Duriad forced a smile but his eyes didn’t move.

“Farisa,” said Raqel as she rustled a paper bag. “I got these for you.”

Farisa, who had not expected gifts, this holiday not being hers, was giddy to receive the package. “Books,” she said. “Four of them.”

The first one was T. C. Teller’s new novel, Blackwood Prairie. “I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this.” Second was Robert MacEddon’s Apocalypse Road. “Oh, I’ve heard this one’s fantastic.” The third was a petite hardcover with rules and strategies for a litany of card games, some obscure. “Oh, it has ehrgeiz! I’ve always wanted to know how to play that.”

Raqel beamed.

“I’ve never seen this one before,” said Farisa. She recognized an old brown hardcover with no jacket, bought at the used-book fair held on Goshawk Avenue in the second week of every September. “From Narwhal Pier, by Aisha Zamadi.”

“It’s science fiction,” Raqel said. “It’s set in an undersea dome. Cats have become sapient and rule the world.”

“She really does know me,” Farisa said. “You’re the best, Raqel.”

Duriad stretched his fingers on the table.

“Our turn, I suppose.” Beth went into an adjacent room and came out with a wooden box. “I did manage to get half a mile out of the house today.”

“That’s great,” Farisa said. Two months ago, Beth was still unable to get beyond the front yard without being struck by a panic that seemed, to Farisa, similar to the Blue Marquessa she suffered, as a mage.

“Pull up the lid, Raqel.”

She did. Inside were eighteen square glass jars of different-colored pigments. Raqel’s teenage coolness gave way to giddiness. “Thank you, Mom!”

“Those look expensive,” Duriad said.

“They might be,” said Beth.

“A real artist mixes her own paints,” Raqel explained.

Beth produced a smaller box she’d hidden under the dining table. “I also got you these, too. Cedar pencils, blessed by a tanari for good grades.”

“I don’t rely on luck for grades, but thank you.” Raqel hugged her mother.

As if she were apologizing, Beth said to Farisa, “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you. I didn’t remember you were coming until—”

Farisa smiled. “Being here is enough of a gift.”

“My cooking is the gift; my company is passable.”

“Don’t be silly, Mrs. Ahava. Oh!” Farisa had almost forgotten. “I did get something small for you, though.”

Raqel’s father visibly shifted in his seat.

“It’s the least I can do.” Farisa walked to the coat rack and reached in her jacket for the amulet she had bought, also on Namyr Lane, the day before. She had sold her winter gloves to afford it. Like most Vehu door charms, it had a circular frame in emerald green where a choral passage had been written in gold Lyrian letters. The back field depicted a night sky with seven stars and a light-blue spiral. In the foreground, a leopard prowled.

“The Leopard of Tevalon,” Farisa said as she handed the charm to Beth. “That’s Chora 241, I believe.”

Raqel’s mother smiled, but when Duriad drummed his fingers on the table, she shook her head. The husband snatched the amulet out of Farisa’s hand. “We don’t need another one of these,” he said. “We have a box full of them.”

“If you don’t want it—”

“I’ll take it,” Raqel said. “It’ll hang on my door when I go to university.”

Duriad stepped in front of Farisa and jabbed the air two inches in front of her face. “You are not one of us.”

Farisa’s stomach tightened and her shoulders pulled back.

“You insult us with this gift.” Duriad’s face reddened. “Again. You are not one of us.”

Farisa said, “Neither was the Leopard.”

He shattered the door charm on the floor. threw the door charm to the floor and it shattered. “What’d you spend on that piece of trash? Four grot? Five?” He reached into his pocket, then threw crumpled bills at Farisa. “There’s six. If you paid more for it, that’s on you.”

Farisa’s breathing hastened. Pain shot across her chest as her heartbeat galloped through her shaking arms. The room darkened. Candle lights doubled themselves in her vision. Her buzzing brain caused her face to tingle, a hundred points of pain. She noticed that the lit fireplace had more vigor than usual, its flames leaping higher than they naturally would.

I’m dangerous, when I feel this way. I need to get out of here before—Oh, fuck. She’s already here.

The Blue Marquessa, skin gray in spite of her name, and nine feet tall with rotting hair, clucked her tongue.

Farisa ran outside. She would stand for no one to see her in this state, certainly not Duriad, who would take it as a victory, and if the absurdity were true of the Marquessa being real—each visit, it seemed more possible—then she certainly could not lose control of herself and put in danger two people she loved.

The Marquessa said, You don’t belong Farisa. You’re always where you don’t belong always where you don’t belong. Stupid, stupid, stupid Fay. Nine grot to buy the family’s approval, to make them see you as their own kind, you failed. You failed. Nine grot for broken glass that Beth will have to clean up, you stupid little girl, you stupid little girl with the social grace of a street child, what is wrong with you Farisa what the shitting pile of feral fuck is wrong with you, you absolute toddler, you absolute freak—

Farisa, in her furious spring, had collided with the lawn’s waist-high fence, forgotten how to work the gate, and slammed her solar plexus into it as if she could bodily bash her way through.

“Wait!” Raqel stood on her front porch. “Farisa! Don’t go!”

Farisa returned to awareness. The misty night rain chilled the backs of her hands.

Raqel came and wrapped her arms around her. “I love you, Farisa. I love you so much.”

#

The Marquessa’s visits lasted no more than five minutes at their worst, but each of those three hundred seconds drained her as much as a night without sleep.

“Stay here,” Raqel insisted.

“Your father hates me.” Farisa was shivering. The air had dropped a flag and a half since sunset, and the rain was turning into that hard near-winter kind.

“He probably hates his own dick, but he hasn’t cut that off.”

Farisa smiled. “Still, it’s his house. I’ll go home. I’m in no shape to go out tonight.”

She had been looking forward to the dance parties and open-air music that would accompany the Lifting, but the Marquessa had a tendency, when she arrived, to come again, so Farisa could not risk exposure to crowds and loud noises, let alone the fast-pulsing lights—steam-powered limelight wheels had been introduced last summer and were still in fashion here—she found intense even in normal conditions.

“We don’t have to,” Raqel said. “We can stay home.”

“Where will I sleep? You only have one bed.”

Raqel’s hands were on Farisa’s shoulders. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to let you sleep on the floor of your own house.”

“We’ll figure it out.” Raqel led Farisa back inside. “Mother will draw you a warm bath.”

“Are you sure?”

“Duriad won’t bother you. He’ll be sulking in his den all night. It’s all he does. You won’t even see his shadow.”

Farisa said, “Very well. I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Raqel smiled. “No.”

They returned to the house and, once the bathwater was ready, Farisa slipped in. Soft warmth really did release tension from her neck and shoulder muscles, really did allow her to drift away from herself, letting quite some time pass as she forgot, for the moment, the sound of the glass amulet breaking, the red hatred on Duriad’s face.... She felt calm. She dried off. The incense in the air smelled good.

Before leaving the bathroom, she put on the nightclothes Raqel had left for her: terry-cotton slippers, flannel pajama pants, and a nightshirt imprinted with the face of a cat.

“Do you feel better?” Raqel asked when they met in the corridor next to the bedroom.

“Much,” Farisa said. “I realized I’m thirsty. I need a glass of water.”

“There’s some downstairs.”

It was nearly eleven. Duriad was nowhere to be seen; he avoided his wife’s difficult evening hours with a conductor’s regularity. So Beth sat alone, in the living room, by light of a small table lamp, hands shaking as she struggled with a glass jar of white pills.

“I’ll help you with that,” Farisa said.

“I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t be.” Farisa smiled. “It’s not your fault.”

“Raqel told me about your… condition.” Beth’s eyes widened in fear. “It sounds similar to mine.”

I am not sure it is, Farisa wanted to say, but she thought it might be rude. The doctors in these parts, having treated the victims of mining explosions, had all seen this kind of nervous exhaustion, though none had found a way to cure it. In that way... “Maybe it is, a little bit.”

“An explosion isn’t like fire. There’s hardly any heat at all. Nor is it long and rolling, like thunder. It’s a pop, but louder than you’ve ever heard. The air, inside you and outside and all at once, shatters.”

Farisa noticed that a sheaf of papers had fallen from Duriad’s desk.

“Let me clean this up,” she said as she gathered and squared up the pages, noticing in Duriad’s business no specific offense but a disturbing aura, the scribbling of a man who had decided his wife had already passed on. That’s what the world does when someone falls ill, isn’t it? Farisa realized then, with enough precision to act, what Duriad was up to and, considering the harm his plans would do to Raqel, she spoke.

“Mrs. Ahava.”

“Beth.”

“You’re going to get better. You have to. For Raqel.”

“The doctors say they have done all they can.”

“I know,” said the teenage mage. “And I believe them. They have done all they can do.”