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Do you know that without fire you cannot wish? I doubt you have even thought of it. It is true. I wished so hard when I was a child, I wished for everything I could think of—but most often I wished for fire. Eventually, in my desperation, I wished without letting a Khaigha scribe it in his book: I wished for a bird to love, to hold in my hand, with a blue head and wings of ice. I wished for the briefest life of all Djinn. I wished for a mother, a real mother, with fire in her eyes.
But still I was alone and scrabbling in the ash while other children blazed on the boulevard of beryl like ridiculous, idiotic fireflies. Someone noticed the smudge of black against the carnelian wall and I was made Queen before I was two years old. There was no competition—no Djinn had been born dead of flame in years. I sat alone in my Alcazar, inching closer to the fire, trying to catch a sleeve aflame.
Khaamil was as newly crowned as I. He was entirely perplexed as to what to do with the vast hearth that was the central hall of his Palace, and I tried to help him—those born to fire are so often useless with it. I helped him to keep it clear of ash, to keep it banked and ruddy, to keep the black streaks off his brass pillars. He told me wild stories about his wishing exploits: He loved a woman in the north with horse-hooves, and blessed her with an unfailing orchard of limes; he loathed a man who stole three of the green fruits and cursed him with never-ending hunger. I flushed black with jealousy; he mocked me, mocked my lack. He told me tales about the wind-Djinns and the water-Djinns—and I had no idea what he meant.
“Who raised you, girl? Djinn that come from Star-burned winds, Djinn that steamed up from Star-scalded oceans. We all have our tribe, everyone knows that, and now that we’ve the libraries to ourselves, we can discover just exactly who is who—imagine! I could know the very name of the wind that bore my grandfathers!”
“No one raised me,” I mumbled. “My mother burned out bearing me. My father wished himself after her.”
Khaamil started. “That’s not approved!”
I smiled wryly. “What can they do to him?”
“Well, let’s find out who you are, then! Where you come from! Genealogy is such a lot of fun.”
I looked at him dumbly, rather taken aback at the idea that poring through a lot of old books with more dust than pages could be fun. But then, it probably was, for them. The excitement of knowing that at any moment, a stray lock of hair could ignite the whole library. But the pages would stay cold and pulpy beneath my fingers, and I would smudge them black. I followed him into the vaults of my Alcazar, for where else would we keep such fragile records but in the cold and the black, in the halls of my house? We are obsessive about records—how can we be otherwise? We live such a brief time, and it is so easy to forget.
The library was drafty; its ceilings were high as the topmost branches of a sandalwood tree. The rafters were blasted black with forgotten fires, with the handprints of the Djinn who had once hollowed out this place, when Kash was made of dirt and daub, instead of carnelian and brass. Those scorch-marks mocked me, howled their derision in the high, screeching voices of white-eyed rats. There were no shelves, only iron grates which might have held an evening’s fire, but instead held books, old and dead. The Djinn do not write fanciful tales or epic poems of valor and sacrifice—what glory is it when one flame consumes another? No more than that which graces any pile of wood and scrap of spark. Kashkash forbade us to write of any exploits but his, and the poets tired quickly of this. Thus our books are few, and precious. I ran my fingers over them, and tried to ignore the insult of the rafters. The pages were fine as ash, made from the skin of salamanders, and the words were charcoal.
Khaamil hovered over me as I read, played with my sleeve. I curled a tendril of smoky hair behind my ear, and looked backward through the books, back and back, parents and grandparents, with names I could hardly pronounce, while Khaamil exclaimed in delight if he saw a Djinn that connected us, that made us cousins a hundred times removed. As I pored into older books, sewn together from ash and soot, I saw my ancestors shrink, become drier, burn hotter. I saw them wither back into the grass they had been, I saw them blow seed and wave in a wheat-scented wind. And I saw a Star fall, with broken feet, and I saw her stumble weeping through a field, and I saw shadows fly up from her footsteps.
Khaamil’s eyes widened. Tears trickled down my face—mute salt water, not fire, not flame. I cannot even cry like a Djinn.
“But that’s Kashkash’s book, it’s his line. You’re descended from the same scald, the same Star. I think that makes him—”
/> “Nothing, it makes him nothing! Didn’t you listen to the King of Flint and Steel when he told you? Kashkash is nothing; he was the burning scrim of oil on the trash of our Shaduki towers, and I am nothing like him!”
I slammed the book closed. I did not want to know. I did not ask to know. And in the days to come Khaamil learned not to ask me about it. I may lack flame, but I can smother the fire of any of them in ash. Only once did he put his hand to my hair and tell me he had fire for both of us, that he would make me burn. I put my hand into his smoke, and he felt my cold, he felt the softness of ash falling on his heart, and shuddered, and did not suggest it again.
But as I drifted through my own halls, as my pillars grew gray with ash, I could not forget the Grass-Star, how sad she had seemed in the beautiful illuminations, rimmed in fire on the page, her eyes flaming tears, real tears of naphtha and boil, how her poor, broken feet had bled on the grass. Did I come from the blood, or the tears? Did I come from her shattered stumps? Or did I come later, when that man had wrung her out, and she was dark as I—did she touch some insignificant blade of grass with her last pathetic press of light, and did some sickly, flameless shadow issue, and was this my grandmother? In my dreams, the Grass-Star spat at her husband, and her saliva rolled itself into a pale and bloodless baby who cried for her, though she did not hear, and that sodden child was I. When I did not dream, I searched the books of the gratings and the blasted vaults for her—where might she lie now, a deathless Star at the core of the world?
Khaamil was worried about me. His flames make him soft. While I slept on the finger-scalded floors of the vaults, and blind, gray-clawed doves pecked at my hair, he hovered like a grandmother, twisting his beard in his hands.
“Kohinoor,” he said one night when I knelt by a grate whose claw-feet had rusted red as heart’s fire, “let me help.” He swallowed, his flame-eyes wide and dear. “Let me wish for you, and I will take what punishment the Khaighal can find in their white tails.” He took my hands and I looked up into his face, bright and eager as a young salamander in his first saddle.
“I just want to know her, Khaamil. She ought to be here, in Kash, with her children, seated on a cushion of silk like blue fire, hearing their voices sing new songs, songs which make the ears glow. She ought to be piled with red jewels, and red fruits, and held to the bosom of so many Djinn who would love her. She would put her hands to me and I would burn, I would have her silver fire licking at my ribs, and we would sing together of the dark at the beginning of the world.”
My eyes ran with hideous salt tears, wet and colorless and useless. Khaamil put his painted palms together and raised his eyes to the rafters. The rats squealed and ran—and on a golden grating we had never seen before was a book of such colors that in that blackened place it seemed a peacock among sparrows. It was bound in lambskin and malachite, and its pages were written in clam-ink—the story of a carnelian box, and a crocus-farmer who kept it in her family, down and down the years. But flowers have poor memories, and the book only knew that the box had passed out of its home country, and into some lowly, unkempt city at the bottom of the world whose towers were red and hideous, and who did not deserve her.
The next day the Khaighal took Khaamil’s eye.
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
KOHINOOR GLARED AT ME OVER THE TOP OF HER salamander’s wide, mottled head. “The Ajans never once answered me. The Duke did not respond to a single missive. When the Khaighal investigated, they discovered the degenerate state of the city, and determined that Kashkash would not have let such a rich corpse lie in the desert, picked over by flies. Though the knowledge came through Khaamil’s well-meant treason, they agreed that we should be allowed to invade. I would find her. I would touch her.” The Ash-Queen’s voice deepened into a canine snarl. “And then the old Queen died, and an ignorant gutter-coal took her place, who could care no more for history than a flame cares for a match.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “She is gone.”
“She was mine,” Kohinoor whispered, her gray eyes pleading. “How could you take her from me?”
“She wasn’t your mother. Or mine. It was an accident, the Djinn that came from her steps, just an accident. You had no right to her.”
