The Fire Children (5 page)

“No. You’re coming with me.” The bony manacle around her wrist tightened, and Kell said the three words that ended any argument: “Amma said so.”

K
ELL’S FRIEND
S
ERA,
the farrier’s daughter, was playing hostess. Half a dozen girls had taken over the family’s cellar by the time Kell and Yulla arrived. They’d driven the adults away with their laughter; the normal level of hilarity had likely been driven up by the trays of sweet concoctions Sera’s parents had left for their guests. Yulla could almost hear Amma’s
tsk
in her ears:
too much of a good thing, my loves,
she’d say.

But that didn’t stop either of them from taking the sweetcakes they were offered.

For a little while, the visit wasn’t so bad. The girls weren’t as boring as Yulla’d accused. They let her join their game—Sera even picked Yulla over Kell for her team. They told stories, made up riddles, and made music, always including Yulla. She was almost,
almost
, having fun.

Until Kell ruined it.

They were back around to storytelling. The wild energy from all those sweetcakes was finally wearing off, and the girls were too stuffed to start in on another tray. Yulla sat on a cushion a little behind Kell, who had squeezed her most of the way out of the circle. That was all right, though; she was growing bored. No one would notice if she wasn’t paying attention. She might even have been able to slip away on her own, if she kept quiet enough. She’d started forming her plan, trying to remember what was where in Sera’s cellar, when Kell’s voice cut into her thoughts and stopped them cold:

“You all know Yulla was born during the Darktimes, don’t you?”

Yulla snapped to attention. Of
course
they knew; Kell teased her with the story every so often, and her tellings had only grown more frequent these last few weeks as the town prepared for the Darktimes to come again. Most of the time, it only served to annoy her. Maybe she was finally growing that thick skin Aunt Mouse said she needed.

But down here, with the darkness thick upon them like a shroud, the tale felt different. “Kell, stop.”

Kell’s voice dropped lower, so all the girls would have to lean in. “She was born dead, down here in the black, and a
malsheen
crawled into her skin and made her heart beat again.”

A shudder went through the ring of girls. Dorit, who had been sitting closest to Yulla, inched away. Yulla heard the
shush
of her cushion sliding over the stone, felt the breeze cool the air where Dorit’s shoulder had been keeping her warm.

“I’m not a demon.” She gave Kell a warning pinch.

“Maybe not in daylight, you’re not.” Her sister pinched back, harder. Yulla hissed in pain, and a few girls let out excited shrieks at the sound. “See?” said Kell. “This demon’s asleep when we’re up above. It’s like a saw-scale. In fact, it’s
related
to them.”

More shrieks from the girls, as they pictured the deadly viper Kell had invoked. Yulla herself had only ever seen one, out in the desert with Kell and some of the older boys. It had curled itself into a crescent, and the sound of its scales as they rubbed together was like the winds over the sands.

Which was about the sound Kell was making now, beside her.

Yulla sprang to her feet, eliciting screams from the girls. “I’m not a demon, I’m not!”

The shrieks turned into embarrassed laughter as the girls recovered their wits. Still Kell pressed on. “Yes you are. You’re a demon when it’s all dark like this.”

“I’m not! If I were a demon, I’d... I’d...” Yulla searched for something to say, something biting that would make them all stop laughing at her and laugh at Kell instead. Or maybe she should do something to give them all a good scare, like Kell had with the saw-scale sound. But Kell’s tongue was quicker when she was feeling mean.

“... you’d what? You’d cry about it? Is that what you’re going to do, demon-girl? Cry?”

The laughter swelled. Yulla
wasn’t
crying. She was too old for that. She was furious, but there were no tears, no sobs, nothing to make Kell even say it, but there it was. Someone started the chant:
cry-baby, cry-baby.
Another changed it to
cry-demon, cry-demon,
and they all picked it up.

She had no way to stop it.

She could hear Aunt Mouse’s advice, the things she usually said when Kell got mean: “
Ignore her and she’ll stop. Don’t give her the satisfaction and she’ll get bored.
” But Yulla had learned that sometimes that was what the grown-ups told you when they didn’t know what else to say. Things that should work, but didn’t always. Maybe their parents had told them the same—had Amma ever picked on Aunt Mouse like this?—and they just kept repeating it down through the years.

Kell said something else that Yulla couldn’t hear over the blood pounding in her ears, but it knocked the girls’ laughter up to another pitch. They didn’t even need the sweetcakes this time.

She couldn’t make them stop, so she did the only thing she could think of.

Yulla turned and ran into the darkness.

N
O ONE SHOUTED
for her to come back; no one chased after her, spouting apologies. The only thing following Yulla was the other girls’ laughter.

Now that she was alone, a few angry tears fell after all. She brushed them away at first, not wanting to be the cry-baby the girls (
Kell
) had called her. But no one could see her now, and it wasn’t like the tears were blurring her vision as she ran. So she let some slip free and felt a little better, as if they carried her mortification away with them.

Voices called out as she passed through sitting rooms. Yulla didn’t announce herself to anyone, even though she knew it was rude not to. They would only try to stop her and make her wait for Kell or Amma to come get her. She didn’t want to see Kell right now.

In fact, in that moment, Yulla would have been happy if she never saw her sister again.

She stumbled a few times, skinning her knees on the rough-hewn tunnel floor, but she gritted her teeth against the sting, clambered back to her feet, and pushed on. After that, she held tight to the rope guides along the walls. The first several turns she took wildly, paying no attention to the signs that would have told her where she was. When she was too winded to keep running, she slowed her steps and paused.

Her tears were down to a trickle despite the anger that boiled in her chest. Yulla still wanted to put fleas in Kell’s bed, or tar in her hair, but that desperate, scrabbling feeling of needing the ground to swallow her up had faded.

Up ahead was another junction, according to the rope guide at her fingertips. She followed it, plotting what she’d say to Kell when they both got home. It would serve Kell right if she got in trouble for coming home without her.

If Kell got in trouble for losing Yulla, though, Yulla might also get in trouble for running off in the first place.

Her fingers skimmed along the rope until she felt the smooth surface of the wooden sign at the junction. She didn’t know how long she’d been running, or how many turns she’d taken. It had been a while since she’d even passed through a cellar with people in it. The sign should tell her which way would lead her home the fastest—going back the way she’d come might be the long way around, depending where she’d wound up.

At first she thought she’d made a mistake: the wood’s surface was flat, no letters carved into it for Yulla to trace. She pulled it away from the tunnel wall and felt the other side: nothing. Letting it fall back into place, she realized the bottom edge was uneven, as though it had cracked along the grain.

She bent down and spidered her fingers along until they bumped against another chunk of wood. Crowing with triumph, she felt for the letters that would tell her which way lay home. What she found instead was old and worn nearly smooth by the years. She said the letters aloud as she puzzled them out, making certain of their shape beneath her fingers before she released them into the air.

“Seaglass,” she whispered, frowning. But there
was
no sea here; there hadn’t been for thousands and thousands of years.

Could the Seaglass have been like the Sunglass, once upon a time? If this wasn’t someone’s old forgotten joke, she probably had to be near the Worship Hall. She didn’t think she’d come that far to the north of Kaladim, but with all the twists and turns she’d taken, she supposed it was possible.

And if she was near the Worship Hall, how could she
not
take a peek? If she got caught, she could tell the priest she was lost, and they’d take her home. Yulla grinned; her skin crinkled where the tears had dried. Going to the Worship Hall rather than retracing her steps would mean she’d get home well past when Amma wanted them in for dinner. But if the priests
did
have to bring her back, Kell would get all the blame.

Yulla put down the worn sign and set off toward the Seaglass, humming to herself.

T
HE TUNNEL NARROWED
as she walked; the floor grew more uneven. She lost count of how many times she stubbed her toes on loose stones. The passages around their cellar didn’t have any debris like this; during the last few days of preparations, she and Kell had moved freely between the houses—the only things they ever tripped over or bumped into were other people.

Here, though, it seemed no one had come and cleared away the rocks that had fallen since the last Scorching Days had come. She moved more carefully, sliding her feet forward a little at a time. She gripped the rope guide tightly with one hand, her other thrust out before her for balance.

She thought she’d been walk-shuffling for about a quarter of an hour when she came to the cave-in. Like she had every time her sandal had met resistance so far, she lifted her knee up high and tried stepping over the obstruction.

Only this time, she didn’t find smooth ground on the other side. She didn’t even find the other side. Letting go of the rope guide, Yulla bent carefully and patted the air in front of her. Rocks. Everywhere she felt, in a pile nearly as tall as she was, were rocks far too big for her to move. She felt her way across the tunnel. The debris stretched the whole width.

Frustrated, she straightened up.
I’ll be in trouble if I go home alone.
But surely if the Worship Hall were on the other side of this rockfall, someone would have come and cleared it by now? Aunt Mouse said the priests mostly kept to themselves during the Darktimes, but wouldn’t someone have heard the collapse and gone for help?

She thought about how long it had been since she’d passed through anyone’s cellar, then, and wondered whether the sound would even have carried.

I should go home.
It could be dangerous here—if the ceiling was unstable, there could be another cave-in anytime. If no one had heard the
first
one, they probably wouldn’t hear another. Or her cries for help.

But she’d come all this way, and she was still angry enough at Kell that staying to explore for a few extra minutes didn’t seem to matter much. They’d be getting worried by now. Let Kell stew for a bit longer. Let her bear the brunt of Amma and Abba’s worry, let her have to answer
where did she run to?
and
What did you say to her?
a few more times.

Yulla dithered on the edge of the pile-up, knowing she should go home and face Amma’s anger, but wishing she’d at least find something to make the trouble she’d get into worthwhile.

That’s when the breeze stirred against her cheek, and the murmur of voices sounded from somewhere past the collapse.

Cautiously, she moved closer. She couldn’t make out the words, but one voice lilted up at the end, as if asking a question. Another answered in a lower pitch. The faint tinkling of bells reached her, and the sound of something heavy dragged across stone. The breeze gusted, then subsided.

I’m light and I’m quick,
thought Yulla,
and if there are people over there, they can bring me home.
The climb proved easier than she’d thought it would—no loose rocks shifted beneath her. There were plenty of handholds. Still, it was strange going in the dark. She had no idea how high she was when she found the top, but the crown of her head brushed the ceiling as she hoisted herself over. In the tunnels leading out of their cellar, Yulla could have stood on Abba’s shoulders with room to spare. That didn’t seem so high up above in the light—she’d jumped off of higher walls in the marketplace—but down here, not knowing what the ground was like beneath her, she was suddenly scared.

Her heart thumped faster and her mouth filled with nervous spit. Her hands got clammy. “Stop it,” she whispered. “Just stop it.” Her voice bounced off the ceiling and back to her ears, doubling her chastisement. Yulla held on with her left hand and wiped her right on her pants, then held on with her right and wiped off her left. Sweat-slick hands were dangerous.

The slope on this side was gentler, which was good because the rocks were looser. She did all right at first, testing her weight on each new surface as she climbed down, but not far from the bottom the rocks slid beneath her. They’d felt solid enough when she’d eased down on to them, but she’d misjudged. A flat rock tilted, slid, and went skittering down the slope. Yulla flailed for purchase, certain there’d been a handhold there a second before, but it was gone, tumbling away with the rest. She let out a sharp cry of dismay, then her teeth clicked together as she landed hard on her bottom, cutting off the sound. Direction lost meaning as she fell—
down
was all she could recognize, and that only by where the stones jabbed into her on the way.