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CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
THE CARNIVAL OF THE DAWN SANG WITH A hundred open throats beneath the gentle shadows of Simeon’s elbows. When I returned to Orfea’s courtyard, Solace and Lantern had gone before me, and left me to find my way by the sounds of drums and flutes, trumpets and lyres and pipes and shouting, the sounds of so many voices. It was not difficult. I rounded a tall lamp-post whose capital was shaped like a fish, mouth flinging a spume of flame into the air, and the cobbled street below the wall was alive with folk, alive with Ajans, and the colors caught my eyes like hooks.
Jugglers tossed iron pokers and scarlet flowers and the occasional child into the air, fire-eaters swallowed their trade, masks were donned and removed—and there, I saw Arioso pulling the edge of his jackal-face away to the delight of a young boy, but I could not tell what was underneath. Painters leapt madly at Simeon’s back, throwing pigment against him with the abandon of mating herons, their hands a bristle of frenzied brushes. The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink:
Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!
Singers stood in clusters around trumpeters and pipers, voices high and low echoing by, and the howling, and the keening, and the barking of countless
creatures. A woman with a parrot’s green and scarlet head cawed out the hours, and a man with a tiny wolf on his shoulder howled a duet back to her. And the dancers—oh, the dancers! Everyone danced, a flurry of legs and arms, leaps I could not begin to follow in the throng, and Agrafena, Agrafena dancing and playing amid them all. But she was modest, after all things, and many others played louder, danced faster. Near a fountain that trickled water from the mouth of a fox-faced woman there was a girl all in red dancing with a man in a green coat, whose legs were like those of a gazelle, and she wound her long black beads around his throat while he bit her gently on the cheek. A red lion cavorted at their side. Spiders leapt from lamp to lamp, trailing iridescent webs behind them. Did one have needles for legs? I could not see.
But there in the center of the square was Lantern, his tail flaring and flaming, and within its snapping ribbons danced Solace, her eyes shut in ecstasy, stepping deftly between the orange-red feathers, throwing her arms out, her head back, her black tattoos glowing wet and bright in the glare of her father’s light. When Agrafena stopped to shear a frazzled thread of her hair away, the two of them rested, and Solace ran to me. She was soaking wet from head to hip, her hair plastered to her skull, wrapped around it in long ropes. Her skin was slick and slippery. She looked down at herself and giggled.
“Folio made this stuff, so I don’t burn. It smells a bit sour and bitter, like old beer, but it works. I’m only a little pink when I finish. I used to blister terribly.”
I showed her the empty box, and she nodded. I think I might have stayed there, I might have walked through the Carnival with a child’s hand in mine, eaten apples doused in cardamom wine and told her how once, when I was very young, I had seen the old Queen dancing in her lonely hall, her embers red as bleeding, and I thought she was so beautiful, then. I thought she must be so happy. I might have done those things. I might have even declined to drift back through Simeon’s hands and ridden out the siege with the Ajans, cowering in corkscrewed streets—but a deafening sound cracked open the winds, and then another close behind it, shredding the last threads of blue night and letting the sun in, letting the fire in—for the fire did come, bellowing up before the wall, black and scarlet and vast, and a sound like the ocean. All our faces were lit by it, blanched white. Solace hid her eyes in my waist. There was another terrible sound, another gout of fire, shooting up into the dawn like a dragon being born. And then there was a worse sound, a crying, a snuffling, an awful sobbing as Simeon began to bleed, began to weep, began to call out to Agrafena, terrified and alone.
Agrafena took up her bows and began to play a slow, gliding lullaby, all blue and silver and kind, and she did not cry at all, not at all. The Ajans rushed forward to put their hands to Simeon, to whisper and stroke him and press their cheeks to his back. I went to him, too, and put my palms, split by flowing fire, to the inside of his thumb.
“Let me go,” I whispered, and his fingers parted for me to pass through.
On the other side of the wall I could see the army with their proud plumes, their raven and their swan helmets, their horses with chests belted and bolted in bronze, their shields with a thousand seals and crests that I would never remember. I could see Simeon’s brass eyes lonely and afraid, trying not to weep louder than he already did. Kohinoor stood some ways off from me, astride a great salamander. We have little enough choices in mounts, and salamanders are sweet as kittens, really. They do not mind the smoke, and bear their saddles with grace. His beady eyes flicked between his mistress and me, and his skin glimmered like an oil slick. Beside her were all the others, Khaamil the Hearth-King, his one eye glinting, and beside him the Kindling-King and the Tinder-Queen with her blazing yellow face, and the King of Flint and Steel with his sparks snapping in the wind. Behind them, I saw the wispy white smoke of the Khaighal, anticipating punishments before the day was done. Catapults lazily flopped forward and back, empty. They were angry; it was not difficult to see, though a Djinn looks often angry, even when she is asleep. It seemed wise not to let them begin the lecture, or the execution, and so I spoke before she could; I spoke standing in a wreckage of shattered terra-cotta, splattered in oily, viscous stuff which burned like a Queen’s hair.
“I have it,” I cried, and held up the box in my orange-lined hand.
Kohinoor goggled. “What? How can you have it? The Ajans would not give it up!”
“The Ajans never knew where it was, you old fireplace. But I have it, and I will give it to you if you do not hurt the poor wall further, and go home like a cat who has played all night, and now hears the breakfast bell ring.”
The Ash-Queen’s eyes narrowed to gray and smoky slits. “Give it to me, and we shall see.”
I had not been Queen long enough to be cleverer than she was. She drove her salamander forward, her hair streaming behind her like burning trees. I put the red, gleaming box into her hands; she snatched it away and turned her back to the others, as if to keep it for her own, to look first into it, and share the honor with no one.
She did not howl with rage, or scream curses on my name, or strike me with her black fists. She did not even look at me.
“Where is she?” she said quietly.
“She is gone. She is home. She is beyond you, or Lem, or Kashkash, or any snarling tiger. She is safe.”
Kohinoor shook her head. “How could you?” she half-sobbed, hurt stitching her voice like a dress.
THE
ASH-QUEEN’S
TALE
DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MUST HAVE TO BECOME the Ash-Queen? As you have your hair, and Khaamil has his low and lovely voice, harmonious as two nightingales singing together?
Nothing.
You must have no fire at all in you. You must have no spark, no breath of scarlet, not the slightest shuddering sigh of embers. You must be cold, and gray, and hollow. And so I was. I blew on my hands endlessly, hoping for light, hoping for warmth. I did not want to be Queen, I wanted to flame. I shivered always, I was thin, an orphan, a burnt, discarded branch.
