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He laughed quietly, so as not to wake the child. “At first I was afraid to leave, to go back into this strange city, with its empty streets and alien sounds. I cowered here. I kept eating mice. But finally I peeked out of the door, and saw the Parish overtaken by all these saints of Ajanabh, who stayed, and danced in the ruins. I know something about that—and so I went to dance, as well. In the Carnival of the Dawn I am the sun’s best blaze, and in my flames the city sees each day born again. I am not a phoenix, but I do my best.”
“You act as though you do it all by yourself!” The child sat up suddenly, long hair tumbling around her face, her arms crossed over her chest, glaring at the great Firebird.
“Well, I did, my dark-eyed darling, before you came along.” Lantern looked up at me, his golden eyes bright with pride. “Children change everything, don’t you know?”
The child, as I could see her clearly now, was extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were wide and clear and brown as good kindling, her hair braided loosely, long and soot black, her nose fine and flared, her chin cut sharply as a gem. I do not know very much about human children; she was certainly no woman grown yet. But she was not a baby, either, and I saw corded muscles in her arms—I could certainly believe she danced. Winding up her right arm and one side of her chest, covered in minimal fashion by scraps of red cloth, were intricate tattoos, painstakingly pricked into her skin: the long, forked black outline of a dancing flame, painted all the way up to her neck and licking at her cheek.
“Still,” I mumbled, “she cannot be your daughter. Those are not true flames; she is no true child of yours.”
The girl narrowed her eyes at me, full of hate and disdain. “What do you know?” she hissed. “Who are the parents of plain, smelly smoke? He is my papa, as true as anything you have known in your life.”
Lantern looked uncomfortable.
“Perhaps it is time,” he said miserably. “Perhaps I have indulged you like a little mouse.” The child looked stricken, her eyes filling with tears as easily as a child’s will. “She came back, you see. After all that time, she came back to me…”
THE TALE OF THE
CLOAK OF FEATHERS,
CONTINUED
I HAD LEARNED TO DANCE IN THE CARNIVAL, and all my feathers were full again. The cloak was closed safely away, and I owed fealty to no one. It was almost as though none of it had happened, almost as though I had never seen the world through a cage. But I could not quite bear to take the cage down, to dash its bars in and tear up the blue cushions. I told myself that it reminded me of what happens when a thief is not careful—for did not all this begin in Ravhija’s orchard, when I was so careless as to be caught with my mouth full of cherries? But I think in truth I was afraid of it, as though it were a living thing that had swallowed me up for all those years, and was still too dreadful to approach.
So it was that I was roosting in the ruins of the bell when she came.
I heard her coming up the stairs, a slow shuffle, a panting. When I think on it now I know it must have been so hard for her to climb those steep and winding steps. But climb she did, and stood before me, radiant and sorrowing and old, older than I had imagined, being but a silly bird who thought she would be just the same as when I knew her, just the same as before. This is the folly of all lovers, I suppose.
My goose was there, with silver hair and a little coat of goose feathers, and long gray skirts. My Aerie, whom I had loved so long ago, when she was a spellbound goose and I did not know what a cage was. My Aerie, so long lost. She did not need to speak; I knew her, even walking in that ridiculous woman’s body—but what was not ridiculous about that moment? An old woman and a bird: as though a goose and a Firebird were not impossible enough. She had passed beyond all possibility of touch, of nesting, of flight, of the sky and of me. I laughed, a hoarse, barking, anguished sound. We stood facing, each swallowing slowly how far we had come from the other.
In her arms she held a baby, wrapped in gray cloth and scraps of fur. I hardly saw it for seeing her.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t ask to get old, or grow arms and legs. I would have been happy just to stay with you. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“My feather—”
“I know, my darling bird, I know. We could neither of us help it. Ours was a very sad story—perhaps the bedraggled opera down there will perform it one of these days. But being a woman is not so bad, and if I had stayed a goose, I would not have lived long enough to find you. Geese are brief creatures, and often silly.”
She told me then all she had done since we parted, how she had known Stars and passed out of the world and in again, how she had delivered the Star’s child and borne it out of the dark. I told her of the spider and the mice and the Star at the heart of the city. We would have let our adventures pool between us all night, but the child in her arms awoke and began to squall. She gave it her knuckle to suck and it quieted a bit. She looked up at me through her wispy hair, which was, in her old age, not unlike long, thin feathers.
“I brought her for you, all this way,” she said.
“A child?”
“You wanted chicks so much, when I flew with you. You wanted them more than you wanted me. When this little thing first tugged at my hair, I knew where she would be safe, I knew you would look after her, I knew you would want her. She is not a chick; she has no feathers and no beak and she will never fly. But then, neither will I, any longer.”
I looked at the swaddled girl, her big dark eyes blinking sleepily at me, her shock of black hair like burned grass. She was not very much like a Firebird, but my heart was always gentle, and when the tiny thing reached out with her chubby red hand to clutch my warm bronze beak and I heard her laugh, I remembered all my cousin’s orange eggs, I remembered the ash-nest and the desert trees, and I knew that poor orphan for my own, my solace, my hatched egg, my girl.
“I would have come looking—” I began.
“You would never have found me.”
“She is beautiful.”
“I know.”
Aerie, businesslike and brusque, sniffed a little, and began to root through the broken planks and bolts of silk and shining things the mice had left to find enough shards to make a cradle. While she searched, I sang quietly to the child, and she gurgled along with me, after a while.
It was nearly morning when the cradle was finished, a ramshackle but strangely pretty thing resting on two long, golden cello bows and rounded shards of bell, built of red wood and stone, bedded in the Weaver’s cloth and hooded with the lid of a chest that had once held piles of coins which had caught the mice’s magpie glance. She laid the child inside and went back to the cloth to cut a blanket.
