THE PYRE
BY THE time the sun was up, Rope and Brook had made it back to the Bending Bough. Unable to sleep, they lay together on a grass-stuffed mattress and waited for Jo.
Brook reached out to touch Rope’s face. She felt the bristle of his beard, then slid her hand down to his throat. His pulse made her fingers tremble. She longed for Clouds End and the sea wind and Shale’s grin; she longed to touch Rope and be touched; and all these things she felt inside herself like stones in a stream.
“Almost over,” Rope said. “If Jo doesn’t make it, I wonder if the Emperor’s soldiers will come for us.”
“It won’t be over, even if she succeeds. Jo twinned me. That will not go away, whatever happens with the Emperor.”
Rope scratched his beard. “Everyone thought my name should be Rope, you know. You, Shale, Shandy. Except Foam. He suggested ‘Walrus.’ To make me see that ‘Rope’ wasn’t so bad, I guess.”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s so . . . dependable. Everyone thinks I’m too careful, too slow, too something. But there are things I want as badly as you or Shale or Foam, you know.”
“Like?”
He rolled over and looked at her, and smiled, and stroked her soft throat. Brook’s skin prickled as if before a storm. His fingers seemed heavy against the pulse in her throat. She thought of the time they had kissed in the forest. Her hand flowed over his chest and belly. The sounds of the Arbor—hawkers, couriers, countless conversations—struggled into their room, muffled and indistinct.
Creeping down Rope’s arm, Net rose like a cobweb in a breeze, and then settled, a lace of silver reaching from Rope’s wrist to Brook’s throat.
The shock of Net’s touch shivered away the walls between them. Brook flushed, feeling Rope’s desire rush through her. They could have been one person, so clearly did she feel herself beneath his hand, chest rising and falling, skin drinking skin, one breath that shook in their chests, one heart that sent blood spinning through their bodies. Her hand ran over his shoulder, feeling bone and blocks of muscle as if they were her own.
Rope was part of her story. Rope and Shale and Clouds End too.
How stupid she had been! How blind. She had used her magic to peer into the Mist, instead of looking inside herself, where her real stories lay like bulbs in the dry earth. She touched the children within her, the one she had been and the ones she would bear. Across the world from home, stranded in this city of trees, she was branching, wrapping her arms around Rope, seeing her roots dig down deep into the soil of Clouds End. Seeing her life flower on a thousand branches.
She loosened the lacing on Rope’s woodlander shirt. He pulled it over his head, muscular arms flexing and straightening. She slid her fingers up his chest, tracing the dark swirl of hair around his nipple. Then she sat up and pulled off her own shirt, feeling her heart kick as her breasts fell free. She met his eyes.
“We’re not stopping this time,” Rope said.
Brook’s hands slid to her hips and pushed down her woodlander pants until the first curl of dark hair sprang free. “No.” Naked, they felt for one another with thirsty hands. Brook shivered, pulling Rope’s hand over her breast, dissolving in desire.
Outside, a waiting silence fell in the Arbor. There came a swirl of wind and a dimming sun. The air was electric. Heads turned upward. Eyes widened.
Then the city and sky sighed together and a soft rain began to fall. Cool on ten thousand uplifted faces, raindrops freckled the dusty leaves and touched life into dry smells. Laughter bubbled up throughout the Arbor. Children shouted and snapped their finger-drums. Someone somewhere beat a thin metal gong, sending out showers of bronze.
The rain came down in earnest, harder now, kicking up dust, hissing from the overcast sky, pattering through the Arbor’s million branches.
Rope flinched as the first drop trickled through their roof and landed on his back. “Rain!” Brook cried. Joy flickered through her as pure as the sky, as quick as the glint of light on water. Her fingers slid up Rope’s back and spilled down his arms. Drunk with touch, they kissed lips, shoulders, throats, flesh on flesh, skin sliding into skin like two streams running into a single river.
Brook was a channel, a streambed, and life was pouring though her, filling her up and spilling over her edges. She gasped and closed her eyes and came.
Rope trembled, entering. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes!”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes!”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
Brook’s body was sacred and real as the wind and the hilltop, as real as the trees and the stars. She was a stream and the nighttime. She was an island made from Mist and fire and sea. Her whole body was shaking and she cried warm tears as sweet as rain.
This was the morning of their last day in the Arbor.
* * *
Brook awoke to a bitter smell of burning.
Jo sat on the opposite bed with a cherry-wood pipe between her teeth. She was not an expert smoker, and her mouth pursed in an exaggerated pucker each time she inhaled. Her white hair coiled and writhed around her shoulders, but the breeze that slid into the room with her was not cool as of old, but a thin hot wind like unsatisfied desire. In the lamplight her narrow eyes winked like polished bronze.
Bronze. Silver no longer.
“You’re back!”
Jo’s mouth widened into a grin. The pipe trembled between her clenching teeth, and finally she coughed up ragged laughter. Smoke eddied surprisingly from her nose. “I got tired of watching you two sleep, so I bought this from a shop nearby.” She held up a little wooden box lined with rubber. “Also twenty matches, free with the purchase. You use them to start small fires.”
“Mm?” Rope grunted. “Ng. Wha?”
If she took my shape, no one would ever know, Brook thought. A cold shadow fell across her heart and the resolve she had felt in Garden’s cottage failed her. “Jo’s back,” she said.
“She did it! By the Gull she did it!” Rope fumbled for the lamp above the bed, opening the flue to make a strong yellow light. “The Emperor is dead!”
Jo shook her head. “Not yet. But soon. The Spark has left him and he falls to ashes.”
Brook scooped her clothes off the floor and wriggled into them. Rope blushed and reached for his pants. As soon as he got them on he bounded out of bed. “Wonderful!” he cried, grabbing Jo in a great bear hug. “A fair wind and a full hold it is, to find you back again.”
Jo smiled but her face was haggard. “I am glad to see me too.”
Brook said, “You must be very happy.”
“Come on! Is that all you can manage! We did it! Or rather, Jo did it,” Rope said generously. “Singers will honor your name for as many years as there are islands in the eastern sea. So tell us the story!”
“First we must be off. You two have slept the day away. The sun is setting now, and I have an obligation to fulfill. Hurry up!”
Rope scratched his side. “This is an itchy city,” he announced. “I itch.” He frowned. “Where are we going?”
“To a funeral,” Jo said.
* * *
The Arbor hummed like a vine abuzz with bees. The Prince had been poisoned by a mistress, had committed suicide rather than face the Fire, had been killed by a jealous rival, had fallen from a balcony while intoxicated, had died (if you were very cautious) from natural causes, after a brief illness, after eating something that disagreed with him.
Rowan Hilt was dead, and the war against the sea people was over.
“It is . . . difficult to tell what happened between the Emperor and me,” Jo said as they left the Bending Bough. “Everything true, everything important, lies between words. Or beyond them.”
“A story of the Mist-time,” Brook said softly. “Where things are most real and nothing is what it seems to be.”
“I understand,” Rope said, nodding. “One of those mysterious things.”
Jo laughed. “Yes, most definitely. It was one of those mysterious things . . .” And she told them the story of her flight to the South Tower, and her meeting with the Emperor there. “He had murdered his son and it broke him. He was like a log that splits when you prod it, showing nothing inside but darkness and a burst of flame. He was not strong enough to contain a Hero. No human is. Sere had licked him hollow.”
A troop of servants with torches hurried by, bowing quickly as the light sparkled on Jo’s golden eyes. “So I released him.”
“But you didn’t kill him?”
“She took the Spark,” Brook said.
“Mm. Yes. Your eyes have grown sharper.” Jo looked at Brook then with a strange expression. Part curiosity. Part hunger. “I twinned him then, shifting even as he stabbed me. I shifted around his knife, drawing forth the fire that burned in him.”
There was something autumnal in the air. It wasn’t cold, but the wind seemed fresher and the sun had lost his sting. “A good day for a prince to reach his pyre,” Jo said as they picked their way down to the Arbor’s ground level.
“Why the long faces?” Rope said, studying the women. “The war is over!”
“Nothing is over,” Brook said. Feeling Jo’s emptiness beside her. “Nothing ever ends.”
Rope spat. “I give up! We travel across the known world to get here, do the one thing we have been planning for months, and prepare to return home as heroes. And what do we get from you two? Gloom.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Thank Fathom we didn’t fail!”
Jo dipped her fingers into her tobacco pouch, lowering her voice as a trio of woodlanders in sumptuous mourning dress hurried by. “But were we right to succeed? Perhaps the war would have ended without our interference. Perhaps the Emperor was right, and I have condemned hundreds or thousands of innocent woodlanders to the Fire.” She struck a match and breathed in the flame. “Hilt died, and I made his death pointless. Before it might have been a tragic necessity. Now it is only a horror.”
“It was madness!” Rope cried.
“How can we know?” Brook said softly. “How can we know that the Emperor was wrong and we were right?”
A curl of smoke wavered around Jo’s white face. “We cannot.” She glanced at Rope. “Remember that puppet-play? Who is to say what happened after we left? Perhaps word went back to the Emperor that an agent of Bronze Cut had doused the flame and made a mockery of the Imperial message, sending a challenge to the throne. Perhaps that was what drove him to slide a length of steel along his son’s throat.”
“That is not fair,” Brook said. “You can’t blame Hilt’s death on Rope.”
“You are telling me what is fair!” Jo laughed. “I took the Spark. Was that what I wanted? I am of the air. Why should the people of the sea mean more to me than those of the forest? Was it really my idea to taste the Emperor’s knife, to take his burning? Or did I do it only because I love you?”
“Wouldn’t that be enough?”
Jo looked at her twin with gleaming golden eyes, feeling the Spark in her breast like a splinter of flame. “I fear the cost may be too great.”
* * *
The funerary parade issued from the Palace at sunset. The air shook with the tolling of great bronze gongs, stately and inconsolable.
The Emperor led the procession, followed by a cadre of six noblewomen with proud, sorrowful faces. Behind them came a throng of servants bearing on their shoulders a vast tower of polished bamboo. Flowers had been wound into its every crevice, tongues of flame-blossom blue and yellow, black and indigo, violet, cinnamon, and dreadful gashes of red poppies and scarlet columbine. Atop this swaying tower Rowan Hilt’s corpse rocked in a palanquin of thorns. From it rolled a scent of weeping honey.
It was full dark by the time Jo, Brook, and Rope joined the crowd of mourners at the city gate, heading south. They flowed midstream in a river of torches. Children ran by with sparklers flaring in their hands. The mute fire wardens put out a hundred blazes that leapt up around the parade. “This is crazy!” Rope said. “This morning’s rain was only a spit on a campfire. It’s still like tinder out here. They will burn down the whole forest!”
Next to them a woman with a lacquered helm turned from her companion. “The Emperor’s son can be mourned no other way.”
Jo bowed gracefully; a moment later Rope and Brook gathered their wits and did the same. “Our thanks,” Jo said. “We have not been to the capital before, and our rituals are less elaborate.”
The woman’s partner, a middle-aged man with bone-grey hair, bowed his welcome. “Ash Splinter. The lady is Ash Bough. The sorrow we must witness is as intricate as the Imperial gardens.”
A third woodlander joined the conversation, a portly young man with a secretive face. “Or perhaps we celebrate a painful joy as complex as roots stirring at the long-awaited touch of rain.” He shrugged. “Maple Stem.”
“Are you of that mind?” Ash Bough asked frigidly.
“The Emperor has called the army back to fight the fire. The cruelest cut makes way for the fairest blossom, so it is said.”
Ash Splinter smiled without warmth. “And the aptest maxim makes way for silence.”
Jo grinned, but Rope felt dull as a dogfish. He knew that somehow they were talking about Hilt’s death, but he was baffled by the woodlanders’ brittle smiles and slanted words.
They climbed a long flight of steps carved into a high mound south of the city. The citizens of the Arbor ringed the howe with murmurs manifold as the voice of the sea. Behind them the gongs slowed like a dying heart that staggers and stops. In the center of the hill’s flat crown, lying atop its wooden tower, Hilt’s body came finally to rest.
“Switch!” hissed a voice from the darkness.
Ash Splinter and Ash Bough looked around in consternation. Maple Stem bowed. “A pleasure,” he murmured, backing into the crowd. “I have a sudden wish to observe the sacred rights from the other side of the hill.”
“As do we,” Ash Splinter remarked, taking Ash Bough’s arm and guiding her away.
“But we have not had a chance to give you our names!” Jo said suddenly.
“Quite all right. Perhaps later—”
The haunt was implacable. “I would not dream of such discourtesy.” Ash Splinter paused and smiled with obvious annoyance, glancing ever so briefly at a lean man who approached from a part of the hillside now oddly unpopulated.
“My name is Jo. Rope and Brook are my companions. I pray you, will you suffer our company a little longer? We would doubtless benefit from your perceptive commentary on the mystery at hand.”
“We are but dilettantes,” Ash Bough said quickly. “We would never presume.” She bowed with careful courtesy to the newcomer. “Particularly when you have a chance to profit from the observations of so profound a sage as Bronze Switch.” She took a step backwards as she spoke. Ash Splinter had already vanished into the gloom.
Switch was a slender man nearing the end of his prime. His eyes were hollow and his face gaunt, as if years of hardship and fierce passion had burned all excess away. His lidded eyes glowed bronze. Something about him made Rope uneasy, a quality of hidden danger, as if fire would spray forth from those golden eyes if the woodlander ever chose to widen them.
The newcomer bowed to the departing Ash Bough and laughed. “I am anything but profound,” he said. “You will not need my help. Island eyes are weak under leaf-shade, but when the Spark flies there will be light enough to see.”
“How did you know we were islanders?” Jo said.
“I had occasion to stay in Delta for some years. I heard the sea in your voices.”
The Palace mourners chanted around the funerary tower. A ring of musicians answered, playing a lament of curious savagery on tambras and chiming stels. One by one the Bronze women approached to lay gifts upon the funerary pyre: instruments, wreaths, lacquered bracelets and garments of silk, a kite, liquor and weapons and bottles of scent. A songbird in a wicker cage who poured out his heart as if knowing what was to come. Last of all came the Emperor, bearing a puppet within a paper cage, its shadow thrown by a gulping candle.
The crowd had drawn away, leaving the islanders alone with Bronze Switch. “Why do they burn the Emperor’s son?” Rope asked. “It seems mad to make a fire after this drought.”
“Perhaps it is, but fire is the only fit end for the noble. The Emperor’s son could have no less.” When Switch spoke again his words sheathed a sharp memory. “In the forest, I think, we know more of desire than do those who live by the cold damp sea. In a tree you see the record of a thousand lusts. Every leaf and twig is clawing at the sun; every root is seeking out the rain. We desire love, and wealth, and plenty, and the power to wither others, or make them grow. In our thirst for knowledge we trick the mute world into speaking her secrets. Desire drives us, and dares us to be great. And consumes us in the end.”
Brook said, “But desire sometimes leads to evil.”
Switch smiled unpleasantly. For the first time Rope noticed he had a sword at his side. “Of course. Every Spark calls up a host of shadows. For instance, I could kill you all. Here before these hundreds. You have no seconds and no clan.”
Rope gripped the hilt of his notched sword.
“The Spark burns fiercest within a Bronze,” Switch remarked. “Most of us do not survive. Some compulsion drives us into risk, or atrocity.”
“Yet discipline is necessary,” Jo said. The stranger turned to her and his eyes widened. She was no longer a woman, but a lean man, even taller than Switch.
“True,” Switch said. “But discipline may slip. It has happened before. A Bronze has given in to impulse. Has slain several men and a woman too. For some slight offense, just enough reason to reduce the penalty from death to exile for five dreary years beside the mumbling sea. It has happened.”
Jo nodded. Now she wore the Emperor’s face. She reached out with a man’s thin hand, fevered and dry as burning paper, to stroke Switch’s cheek. Her curving bronze fingernails came to rest just below his jaw, where the great vein beat hot within his throat.
Switch’s right hand was resting on the pommel of his sword, light as a mantis on a blade of grass. Awkwardly, Rope unsheathed his sword, knowing it would be no more use against this lean woodlander than it would against the sea.
Switch hooded his eyes. “Happily, discipline is the great virtue of the mature Bronze.”
Jo’s voice was a knife sliding from a metal sheath. “I think the Emperor’s son would agree. Were he still alive.”
Switch stood very still, not speaking. His life beat below the haunt’s long nails.
The Prince’s dirge stopped, leaving a great silence. A torch flared into life and passed its flame. One by one a ring of red fires sprang up around the funeral tower, gleaming like wolves’ eyes. The crowd held its breath.
The firelight drained slowly from Jo’s hand, leaving it white as salt. It dropped to her side. “I think we should flee the call of the flame.”
“Perhaps that would be as well.” Switch bowed crisply to Brook and Rope, but his eyes returned to the haunt as he backed away. “May you find whatever your heart desires.”
Brook reached for Rope’s hand. “I can tell a curse when I hear one.”
After Switch had gone, the other woodlanders muttered and did not come near the islanders.
Standing alone before the funeral tower, the Emperor drew back his head and gave a long, shuddering cry that curled into the night like smoke, bitter with loss. A second time it came, and a third. Then three times the circle of torches wailed, shaking off sparks of grief, and three times all the citizens of the Arbor cried out, three roars hurled at the stars. And when the Prince had been mourned nine times, the torches leapt spinning into the air and the flowers exploded in a burst of flame.
Oils had been sprinkled on them, both the sweet and the bitter; swiftly were they devoured. Heat rolled from the burning tower. Higher the blaze rose, and higher still, until the thorns on the palanquin burst into spikes of flame, and Hilt’s cage became a lace of fire. The night shook with hot thunder and a mad wind rushed amidst the burning flowers.
The Emperor stood alone before the blazing tower until a spar fell crashing to the ground. Then he took a pair of tongs and reached into the flames, pulling out embers from the fire and placing them in a brass box held by a waiting servant. Only when the box was full did he suffer an attendant, wincing in the blistering heat, to guide him from the hilltop. His people followed, looking back in fear and awe.
Brook watched the Emperor leave. One withered hand rested on the brass box. “I wonder what will happen to him?”
Jo’s voice was like the wind in a broken tower. “He will be cold, I think. Cold as Ash was, now that the Spark has left him. It was the Spark that made all this, the murder and the madness and the war itself.”
Behind them the pyre hissed and creaked, swaying drunkenly. Then, with a roar like the angry sea, the tower collapsed into itself, hurling a comet of flame at the heavens and spreading a cloud of stinging sparks over the fleeing onlookers. As people rushed around them Jo stopped and held Brook’s eyes. “The great has become small, you see. I have the Spark now. Now all that was between the sea and the forest is between you and me.”
It is the same story, Brook thought. But the leaves have fallen, and the tale will finish among the roots.
I wish I did not love her.
I wish I could end it with a single cut.