The Emperor picked up another locust by its brittle wings. “But are men happier? No. Only in a position of greater certitude. It is Sere whose shadow I am—his light and his substance conjoin to create me. I too am caught up by inexorable forces. I too am a shadow on the screen we call The World As It Is.”
The Emperor stilled his swing, and his gaunt face was as a mask of beaten bronze, chiselled in shapes of care, lit from behind by a leaping flame.
Jo! Jo, the candles called. Laughing, laughing. Will you fan the Fire, daughter of air? All flesh is wax—the wick and the burning are all that matters.
She forced her dry lips open. “Your puppet-play is illusion. I am not bound by its lines. The moon is in you, old man. You are longing for death.”
The Emperor stirred his fingers slowly in the locust bowl; husks clicked and rustled. “You are only my shadow and a woman. The man who seizes his chance can twist his shadow to his own purpose. I must bend you to my will, as the sea must become the shadow of the wood.”
“You woodlanders are all alike, using poetry to dignify your desires. There is no mystery in evil. You are no race of monsters.”
“My duty is to my people!” the Emperor snapped. “Can you imagine I have not been tempted by compassion? Now, even now, with my clans succumbing to the Fire, I grieve for those islanders who must die . . . Yes. Death calls for me. I ache for dissolution. All things weary of life. All things long to surrender to the freedom of the clouds and stones.”
“Silence waits at the end of every speech,” Jo whispered. “Come. Come to me. I will teach you the secret that waits beneath the pines. I will show you what the Smoke knows in its circling.”
He stood upright, angry hands clenched around the cables of his swing, staring at Jo. “You are evil,” he said. “I should have known they would send me a beautiful death.”
Bees crawled on Jo’s moon-white flesh. Softly she said, “I spoke this hour with your son.”
The Emperor shuddered. “What did he say?”
His grief was real. Not a flicker from behind the Smoke, but a father’s anguish, and she took pity on him. “He knew only what the dead know. Red dust and silence.”
“He will see his pyre today.” The Emperor’s voice was thin as paper, as flame. “Would you do me the honor of joining the ceremony? I would have my Death attend on his.”
Jo stepped forward and laid a gentle hand on the Emperor’s hard shoulder. Her touch was cool and soft as flowers. She knew then she would have to draw out the Spark that ate the Emperor hollow, the Spark that had cast a host of shadows over him and his son and his people. She must pluck it from him like a bee’s sting that festered in his flesh. She winced, letting his heat surge into her body.
The hard candles blinked.
Stammering, the Emperor said, “My son had that arrogance that goes with being young. Knowing the portents as well as I, he sensed his danger, but still he gave his heart to Bronze Cut.” The Emperor looked with wonder at his strong right hand. “Hilt did not know the terrible things old men can do.” His fingers closed around the haft of his knife.
Jo’s touch passed through him like ice water. He hissed and flinched beneath her hand. “Avoid introductions to Death! So fascinating an acquaintance must soon become a friend.”
“Your shadow-play is over. I will show you winter’s heart. I will teach you what the cold moon knows.”
“But why?” the Emperor muttered, rocking back and forth with nervous energy. “Why do I not call the guards?” His shoulder beneath her fingers was taut as a straining hawser. Pride and despair were tearing him apart.
Jo fought back her fear, knowing she had to take his fire, dreading the terrible pain. “You called women formless, old man. The shadows of shadows. But it is you who are weak, to think that any human can be only one thing. I choose not to hold a single shape and I am strong, as strong as the wind that carves every mountain. As strong as the sea that drowns every fire.”
The Emperor straightened and slapped her hand away. “Do not presume!”
Jo shook out her white mane, and a host of bees whirred into the air. “Shall I show you your shadow?” Hidden behind a veil of floating hair, her features blurred. When she looked up again she wore Hilt’s face, blood leaking from his dead neck. “Is this what you desired?”
“Monster!” Gasping, he pulled out a long-handled dagger with a ruby hilt. Its point was sharp and flecked with fresh blood. Leaping to his feet, he jerked her head back with one hand in her hair. The dagger’s bitter point slid against her stomach.
Jo heard the candles’ hot voices, felt the shivering strength of the Emperor’s arms, was surrounded by his scent: grief and withered leaves. His dry hands were spider-fingered. She listened, as a heart-drum drove pulses of burning pitch through his veins. She drew his Spark into herself, as a wind draws upon a flame.
He screamed and drove the knife home.
And she was shifting, shifting, wearing his mask, plucking his sting. She was him, two forks of one flame, two Emperors now, staring down as the knife slid in and out of her shifting flesh. They blazed up together into one great burning.
She twinned him then, from the grieving mask outside to the charred hollow place in his heart where the Spark raged. She sucked out that burning thing—call it madness? Genius? Destiny? Desire? She drew out the twist of flame that drove him to his enormities and swallowed it into herself through his knife and his rage and his burning eyes.
He would live on with his fires banked. But Jo screamed, covered in dying bees, as the Spark passed into her like desire: like freedom: like death.
CHAPTER 18
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 he
r, 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 age
nt 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.”