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“Is she one of mine? It is so hard to tell, these days!”
“N… no, Father. She is visiting the court for the wedding, like so many others.”
“Then, welcome, child! Be sure to speak well of us when you return to your foreign court. Tell them how good my son has been to you. Tell them my daughter welcomed you at her wedding. Tell them,” his voice faltered slightly, but so slightly no one would have thought it was anything but the good, sweet wine, “tell them we were kind to you.”
“I am sure she will, Father.”
The Sultan leaned in to the two tremulous children, his long, curled hair wafting its scent of cedar and frankincense into their eyes. “And,” he whispered, “look after my son, young lady. A boy can get his head turned quite around on an evening such as this.”
The girl nodded, her voice long having fled her throat. The Sultan nodded their dismissal, and the boy led his scarlet friend onto the dance floor again, but the girl could not go on. Her weeping and her shaking was too great, and the boy took her away from the crowds, away from the chestnut canopies, and into the snow again, where she thrust her hands down into it, watching it melt under her heat. She looked up at the boy and he lifted her veil gingerly. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyelids shining like ink.
“If I weep long enough,” she whispered, “do you think the ink might wash away, like a painting left in the rain? Do you think I could walk among those fiery people every day, among your drunken aunts, and your cousins, do you think I could sit beside your father and be called beautiful without my veil?”
“No,” he answered gently, “I do not think that.”
She laughed shortly and wiped her nose. “Neither do I.”
He drew her cloak close around her and dried her tears with the corner of his sleeve. The porphyry bracelet knocked lightly against her cheek. She looked up at him with a stare full of red-rimmed urgency, and closed her eyes.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
THE FIREBIRD AND HIS DAUGHTER AND I WALKED through an empty city. I saw those places the night’s tales had laid out in my heart: the Dressmaker’s Parish, the opera house, the Clock-makers’ Square and the little house with so many locks, the church which was not a church, the churning river in more colors than I could count if I had a ledger and a thousand years. I thought I could see the Sirens’ tower, impossibly high, off on the east end of the clustered red edifices.
We walked a wide and well-kept street, which skewed and counter-skewed as everything else in Ajanabh does, but this one, it seemed, less than usual. In fact, as we went, it widened, until we passed through an ample court peopled with a hundred silent statues, each face frozen and perfect in red stone, fluttering slate fans and clutching snuffboxes of agate and marble and malachite. It was the same one Agrafena had led me through, and once again I was chilled. But the Firebird did not seem to even notice them, and walked around the menagerie as Solace and I, being more graceful of foot, walked through, marveling at the sad, exact faces, each its own, with flared noses and slender ones, high brows and glowering, lips full and meager. We touched their cheeks, and the stone was full of little flecks of quartz that flickered in the dim predawn light. They were hard and warm and unyielding.
“They look like wives,” I said, laughing, and Solace looked at me as though I were well and truly mad.
I would have left that grove of folk and thought no more of it than I had the first time, a wonder in a nest of wonders, if I had not heard her scrabbling in the corner of the square, mumbling frantically, a chisel in each hand.
She was probably beautiful, when she was youn
g. Her hair was long and stringy and white, showered with stone dust, her worn face lined like a discarded map when no one is any longer interested in the treasure it promises. She had a snaggle-edged shawl knotted over her head, and her rags were brown and stiff and filthy. She was missing a tooth, and her feet were bare on the road.
“I suppose we ought to be glad she never grew up!” the old woman barked. I think her voice was fine once, but it sounded now like a harp with a broken spine.
“I’m sorry, old mother, I do not know what you mean,” I answered her, keeping my distance.
“He told me once, when there was a shipment of brandy in and it was very, very late. That’s when he liked to talk, you know, by the big fireplace, under that stupid, ugly old head. He told me where his wife went, and I suppose we ought to be glad she never grew up, or it would have gone badly for the butcher’s boy when she turned up all green and fire-breathed!”
Solace covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes wide. The old woman trundled over and chiseled a bit of a spindle-waisted statue’s eyebrow. “I made these for her, all of them. Over the years, you know. I didn’t,” her voice thickened like cream, “I didn’t want her to be lonely, you see. I couldn’t bear for her to be lonely. I couldn’t bear for her to be like me. She’s here somewhere, in the crowd, where she always liked to be. She’s here somewhere… but I forgot.” The crone’s blue eyes, filmed and rheumy, were full of tears as she looked around her. “I just forgot,” she whispered.
Solace dashed off without a word and I was left with the madwoman, as she scratched at her scalp, her eyes lost and dark. “Where is my Basilisk,” she hissed at me. “Where is my baby rock-foot? Why didn’t he come back for me? Why doesn’t he look at me the way he looked at her?” She stumbled a little on her thick feet and I caught her, though she choked and sputtered in my smoke. She righted herself and set to the sandstone bustle of another figure. “Where are you, you old lizard?” she choked. “Why don’t you come back?”
While she worked, I told myself not to touch her, that she would not understand. But all the same I saw my dark hand, my blazing fingernails, reach out to her doddering head. I stroked her hair, and cupped her head in my hand. Perhaps she was just mad enough not to care, but she rested her head against my palm and closed her eyes, tears seeping out over the deep creases.
“I’m sorry, Orfea,” I whispered.
Suddenly, Solace hooted and laughed from far off in the menagerie, and I took the old Duchess’s hand and followed the noise as one follows the sound of a pheasant in the brush. We found her standing next to a tall sandstone figure, red of cheek and ankle, long-haired and high-browed, her fur-lined dress whipping sharply around her as she turned to stare, hurt and puzzled, at something on the ground.
