The Floating Islands (9 page)

He found the door without much trouble: a heavy, abundantly carved door of oak and ebony, the sort of door a First City tower might have.

“You open it,” Kanii told her. “It’ll most likely take you straight to your home, if that’s where you want to go. We call this one the Akhan Bhotounn—that means ‘the friendly one’ in Guaon.”

Araenè thought Guaon was a language of ancient Tolounn, but she wasn’t sure. The words sounded more Tolounnese than anything else. When she opened the door, she found herself looking out at the sun-burnished street in front of her house, framed by its graceful flameberry trees and with its door flanked by pots of red flowers. From the angle, she seemed to be standing in the house across the street. That was, of course, impossible, but she was tempted to step out and look over her shoulder just to see.

But she murmured, “The back would be better,” then shut the door and opened it again. This time it showed her the alley behind her house.

“See?” Kanii said. “Friendly. Though that was especially quick; maybe you have a knack. Be sure and tell it you’re grateful—thank you, Akhan Bhotounn,” he said to it himself, and patted the doorframe.

“Yes, thanks,” Araenè said distractedly. She looked at Kanii, somehow reluctant, now that it came to it, to actually step out through the door.

The plump boy grinned at her. “A fine afternoon, Arei. You can raid the kitchens with me anytime, but next time I’ll definitely show you the hall of spheres and mirrors, all right?”

Araenè opened her mouth, but closed it again without saying anything. She stepped through the door, which seemed to be set directly in a wall she knew was ordinarily blank. It closed behind her with a decisive-sounding click, and then the wall
was
blank. Only Araenè somehow had a feeling that if she should lay her hand on that wall, the door would appear under her hand, open wide to welcome her back.

She didn’t touch the wall but quickly turned, gave a cursory glance around, and climbed up to her window.

Her mother was sitting at Araenè’s writing desk. Her face was braced against her hand; with her other hand she was slowly turning a polished brooch over and over. Whatever her thoughts, she was too absorbed in them to hear her daughter at the window. Araenè, frozen in place, thought her mother looked sad and tired and, oddly, lonely. She’d never thought of her mother as
lonely
in her life.

And what was Mother doing home? Anger mixed with shock and worry: it wasn’t even sixth bell! Mother never came home from visiting so early. It wasn’t fair
at all
that she should pick this particular day to return early—unless, Three Gods be generous, she’d had news about Trei? That kind of early notice couldn’t be good, could it? She needed to go in, find out—surely Mother wasn’t going to sit in Araenè’s room
all afternoon
? In a minute, Araenè suspected, her fingers would cramp and she would topple backward into the alley. Absorbed or not, Mother could hardly fail to hear the resulting crash.

From elsewhere in the house, Cimè called. Mother started, set down the brooch, and hesitated. After a moment she got to her feet, ran both her hands across her hair, checked that her dress fell gracefully straight, donned a smile as deliberately as she might don a garment, glanced in Araenè’s mirror to check that everything was in order, and swished out of the room.

Relieved, Araenè hauled herself through her window and dashed to change clothing. Then she climbed back out the window—remembering, just, to check that nobody was walking through the alley, and indeed she had to wait a moment for a tradesman to deliver a package to the neighboring house—it was much more difficult climbing in girls’ clothing. Especially when she was in a hurry, though come to that, she was already surely too late to bother hurrying.

Araenè made sure she had the bag of apples and went brazenly around to the front entry of the house.

Cimè met her in the front hall, exclaiming with surprise and relief. “Araenè! Where
have
you been? Your poor mother
has
been worried! Oh—you’ve been to the market, have you? Did Ti go with you?”

“I only just stepped out for a minute,” Araenè said, pretending calm. “Really, Cimè, you do fuss. This is a special kind of fruit. No, I’ll take it myself.…”

“Araenè, dear.” Mother swooshed into the kitchen, following the sound of voices. “Did you walk over to Adeila Hanerè’s after all, then? I thought we might have gone crosswise of one another, going opposite directions. Where’s Ti? Didn’t you ask him to accompany you?” She paused to cough, and in the pause her eye was caught by the apples Araenè was carefully transferring to an earthenware bowl. She frowned. “You didn’t go unattended to the market, surely?”

“Only for a moment …” Araenè had meant to sound firm, but found her voice wavering. She lowered her eyes before her mother’s concerned, exasperated gaze.

“Araenè …” But Mother’s voice trailed off, as though she simply couldn’t think what she should say.

“It’s not fair, it’s
silly,
requiring me to have an escort just to step out to the market for a moment! Third City women aren’t treated like they’re too stupid to find their way across the street—”

“Araenè. How Third City women behave is hardly relevant to the daughter of a respected minister. They don’t have any choice, you know, and their behavior
does
hurt their prospects. But not as much as carelessness with your reputation will hurt yours, my dear. I know you miss Trei’s escort, but you mustn’t behave like an ill-raised little beggar’s child.”

If Araenè had tried to answer, she would have said far too much. She borrowed a trick from Trei and didn’t say anything at all.

Mother sighed. “I know you think I don’t understand how you feel, how propriety chafes at you. But I do, dear, truly. Come and sit with me and we can talk about these things.…”

“What is there to talk about?” Araenè found her voice rising. She tried hard to moderate it, with little success. “I know I’ve less freedom than a child’s pet marmoset or the poorest ill-raised beggar children. I know I’m supposed to pretend the walls of this house haven’t any doors. I know Trei is going to learn to ride on the winds, when I’m not even allowed to walk on the earth!”

“Araenè, dear …”

Araenè fled. If she stayed in the kitchen another moment, she was either going to scream or cry. Probably both. She fled to her room and slammed the door hard. Nobody came after her.

Unable to sit still, Araenè paced. She wanted to curse, and might have if she’d been wearing boys’ clothing, but she couldn’t while dressed like a girl. She wanted to cry, girls could, but being a girl was the whole problem and she
wouldn’t
cry. She wanted desperately to throw things, but didn’t quite have the nerve to throw anything breakable and throwing pillows wasn’t satisfying. She flung herself across her bed, but then found it impossible to lie still for more than a moment. So she paced.

And all the time she knew eventually she’d have to open her door and go back into the rest of the house and pretend to be calm, only she thought the pretense was getting thinner every day. Mother might even see how thin the bubble of calmness was that overlay all the violence beneath.

Araenè wanted to climb back out her window and disappear into the maze of Third City streets and never come back out. But that was impossible. So many things were impossible.

When she looked for it, Araenè found the Dannè sphere still resting safely in the secret compartment in the back of her drawer. Though until this moment she had made every effort to avoid even thinking about it, she picked it up now and brought it out into the light.

The sphere seemed heavier than she remembered, and blacker, though translucent where the light caught it just right. It tasted predominantly of ginger, with undertones of anise and lemon; the cumin was almost hidden below the other tastes. Araenè frowned at it. A Dannè sphere. Dannè was the name of a small island at the edge of the Floating Islands, but it was also a person’s name. A woman’s name. Was this sphere named after the island or a woman? Or did the word have an actual meaning? What meaning?

Why ginger and lemon? Or anise and cumin? Why should it taste like anything at all? Araenè scowled at the sphere. The tastes weren’t very well balanced right now: it needed less ginger and more cumin.… As she thought about this, the flavors shifted across her palate. As the cumin became more prominent, the sphere took on a more opaque look. It seemed to vibrate against her fingers, a smoky sort of buzz. Araenè dropped the sphere, which rolled across the floor and under the desk.

For a moment, Araenè just stared after it. She didn’t want to touch the sphere again; wished, really, that she’d just left it alone, tucked away in the back of her drawer. She was tempted now to leave it where it had rolled, only she could hardly have Cimè finding it when she swept.… Reluctantly Araenè crossed the room and knelt to reach after the sphere, but at the last moment she changed her mind and used a cloth to enfold it before she picked it up. The cloth at least muffled the strange taste sensations. Still, she put it down as quickly as she could and rubbed her fingers.

Lying on her desk next to the sphere was the brooch she’d earlier seen her mother holding. It was the special clouds and dragon brooch Mother had given Araenè when she was five. She’d worn it ever since. Of course Araenè always left it behind when she dressed as a boy … but now she wondered what Mother might have thought when she’d found this particular brooch discarded on the desk. It was an uncomfortable question.

5

T
rei woke in warm darkness. At first he thought he was at home. In his own room, in his own house, in Rounn, with Mother and Father in the room below and Marrè down the hall. He thought that in a moment he would hear his mother stir awake and leave her room. The servants would make breakfast, but Mother herself always made sweetened barley broth for his father and sister and Trei, and brought it to their rooms. She added nutmeg, something no one else ever seemed to do. Trei could smell the nutmeg, but other things were wrong. The room felt too big.… He could hear other people breathing in the darkness, too close.… There were outlines of light against the darkness. For one horrified moment, Trei thought he was seeing lines of glimmering fire running down the flanks of Mount Ghaonnè; he thought he saw a great dragon of fire rear up in the midst of the darkness, burning wings spreading wide across the smoke-choked sky—the stone itself was burning—the bitter taste of ash was in his mouth—

Biting back a cry, Trei leaped to his feet, staggered, fell to his knees, caught hold of handfuls of cloth, and scrambled back to his feet. There was no dragon; of course there was not—only a dream, it had only been a dream. There was no mountain, no fiery stone, no ash. Not now, not here. But even once he was sure of that, for one terrible, disorienting moment, Trei had no idea at all where he was.

His sight cleared gradually as he stood panting in the dim light, and he slowly understood that he was standing beside a narrow bed, that it was bed linens he was clutching so hard in both his hands, and that the slender lines of light only showed where windows were shuttered. There were far too many windows, each over a bed like his own, in an utterly unfamiliar hall. But at least there was no fire.

Now truly awake, Trei fumbled up along the wall over his bed, feeling for the catch to the window. The window was placed high, almost too high to reach even standing on the bed, but Trei found the catch at last, put back the shutters, and blinked as brilliant light poured in.

For a long moment, though, he still did not understand what he saw when he turned to look at the room. It certainly was not
his
room. A long hall, it had eighteen beds along its length, counting his own, with boys asleep on five of the closest: pale heads, and brown, and dark. Each bed had two shelves on the wall above its headboard and a chest at its foot. Otherwise, the room was plain. It was nothing at all like home.

Memory came back to Trei, sharp as a knife, worse than any dream. Rounn. Mount Ghaonnè, liquid fire running down its flanks. Choking on the ash and smoke in the air, the soldiers stopping him on the road. The pity and horror in their eyes as they turned back the desperate survivors of the Gods-destroyed city.
“You can’t go down there.… No, not you, either, boy. They’re all dead down there.… The provincar’s closed the road. Where’d you come from, Sicuon? Go back there.…”
Then, after that nightmare journey, his uncle in Sicuon, angry and ashamed:
“Trei, Tolounn won’t offer much to a half-bred boy.… You can’t stay with us.… You can’t stay.…”

Trei sat back down on his bed, braced his elbows on his knees, and pressed his hands over his eyes. He could still see Rounn in his mind’s eye, but now only as he’d seen it at the last: buried under ash, with the thin voices of wailing mourners rising like threads of smoke through the cold air.

Someone sat down next to Trei on his bed and put a hand on his arm. Trei couldn’t move, much less speak, but the other boy was patient. Trei struggled to remember. The Floating Islands, the bridge—the path up the mountain, and the pool at the top—Trei rubbed his eyes hard.

“A hard day and a long night, and a confused waking,” the other boy said quietly. His name occurred to Trei: Ceirfei Feneirè. He was dressed now merely in a simple beige robe with a red cord for a belt. But though he might have lost his white clothing and his violet ribbon, he still had his natural poise. Something else had changed.… His eyes, Trei realized. Trei didn’t remember what color they had been. But now they were black and crystal. Kajurai eyes.

Ceirfei took his hand off Trei’s arm and stood up, looking serious. “You’re the boy from Rounn. I was most grieved to hear about your home. The Gods’ purposes are opaque to us, and thus their actions often seem cruel. I pray the earth lies light above the bones of your family.”

Trei nodded mutely, unable to speak.

“I thought you would succeed,” Ceirfei said. He sounded gravely approving, but Trei understood that he was also deliberately trying to provide a path that would help lead Trei out of memory and back to this hall. “I thought you would find a right thing to do on Kotipa. Well done. Your eyes are kajurai eyes now.”

Trei tentatively put a hand up to his eyes. Though he could perceive nothing different about his sight, he knew this must be true. So he was kajurai. He really was. He should have been excited. Yet it did not seem exactly true, not yet. He wanted to look in a mirror, but at the same time he was afraid of how he might appear. He would look like a kajurai. He
was
kajurai, an Islander, and no longer a boy of Tolounn.… He must
truly
be an Islander if he had passed the kajurai audition, and yet this knowledge was strangely unsettling.

“It’s odd how it feels, when you achieve an important goal,” Ceirfei observed. “It’s disorienting at first, isn’t it?”

Trei nodded. Disoriented. That was exactly how he felt.

“I, also,” Ceirfei said. He held out a hand, helping Trei to his feet. “We might find the baths and breakfast before all this crowd wakens, do you think? That will probably help us both feel more like we’re actually here. I think the baths are probably this way.” He walked away toward the far end of the sleeping hall.

The baths consisted of a stone pool of steaming water and a smaller one of cold, with towels and bowls of soap laid out on one table and folded clothing ready on another. The steaming pool was not as hot as Trei expected, and the cold one was frigid. He washed quickly and dressed in the clothing provided: very plain, by Island standards. Sleeveless gray shirts, black trousers, a red sash.

Ceirfei held a gray shirt up in front of him, eyeing it for fit. If he was dismayed by its lack of color or elegance, he hid his disappointment well. But then, Trei suspected the other boy didn’t care what his clothing looked like, so long as it belonged to a novice kajurai.

“Breakfast,” Ceirfei said, and led the way out of the bathing room and down a short hall. He seemed again to know which way to go.

Round loaves of wheat bread and plates of figs were laid out along a large table in a room adjoining the bedchamber, and a large pot of sweetened rice cereal was keeping warm over a central fire pit. There was nutmeg in the cereal. The familiar fragrance still made Trei’s throat close up, but the bread and figs made him think of his cousin Araenè, of his uncle and aunt. As soon as he thought of them, he missed them. Yet knowing they were probably thinking of him, that they must be aware he’d passed his audition and would be happy for him, made his grief for his lost family less overpowering. When Ceirfei handed Trei two bowls and started slicing bread, Trei found it possible to ladle out the cereal without tears burning in his eyes.

Somewhere close, a door clicked open and then banged closed, and boots rang on the stone floor. Trei set a bowl of cereal aside and looked up. Ceirfei straightened and bowed as Anerii Pencara appeared in the doorway, the second-ranked kajurai Rei Kensenè at his shoulder. Trei echoed the other boy’s bow, a little late and not nearly as gracefully.

Anerii Pencara looked at Ceirfei for a moment, shifted his gaze to Trei, grunted, and walked past them into the sleeping hall. A moment later, they heard his rough voice: “Up, laggards! The morning is well advanced, and here you lie! Up! Baths, bread, and out to have your first look at wind and weather! Up! That means
you,
boy.” There was the scraping sound of a bed being upended, the thud of a boy being tipped out onto the stone floor, and a surprised cry. Ceirfei and Trei looked at each other. Trei found himself smiling, and the other boy grinned.

Rather than following the novice-master into the sleeping hall, Rei Kensenè came over to the table. He leaned a hip against the edge of the table and said cheerfully, “I’ll have some bread, yes, and those figs. Thanks. Well done, novices; we say it’s good luck to wake early and easily after the change.”

Trei wouldn’t have called his own awakening
easy.
He said nothing.

“It
is
luck, most likely,” Ceirfei said, politely deprecating. “After all, someone must always awaken first. Though it was Trei who was up first. He woke me.”

“Did he?” said Rei. He didn’t look at Trei, but gave Ceirfei a wary sideways glance.

The novice-master, having shooed the last of his charges toward the baths, came back into the breakfast room and dropped heavily into the chair at the head of the long table. Ceirfei passed him a plate of sliced bread and a bowl of figs. Trei wordlessly followed suit with a bowl of rice cereal. Master Anerii took the bread and ignored the cereal. Ceirfei lifted one eyebrow and took the proffered cereal himself with a courteous nod, just as though Trei had meant to offer it to him all along. Trei tried to look blandly polite, realized he was copying Ceirfei’s exact manner, and flushed in confusion.

“As you two are up early,” the novice-master said gruffly, looking at Ceirfei rather than Trei, “you will both go with Rei Kensenè to make your offering to the Gods and help him lay out the wings.”

“Yes, sir,” Ceirfei said.

“And we’d best be quick about it,” declared the young kajurai. “Eat, boys, eat—or you’ll wish you had later, I promise you.” He spooned honey over his figs, suiting action to words.

There were candles to light at the Gods’ three altars, and libations to pour—water for the First God, wine for the Young God, and blood for the Silent God. Ceirfei donated the blood without waiting to be asked, nicking his finger with the waiting knife and letting a single drop of blood fall in the basin before the altar.

“That’ll stand for all the novices just enrolled,” Rei assured them. “Especially as, well, never mind. Here we go. Let’s step out, if you please—it won’t do to keep the master waiting, and he’ll want everything laid out just so. Here we are.”

They had arrived at a long underground chamber with a balcony that overlooked the sea and, in the far distance, a shadow that was probably another of the greater Floating Islands. There weren’t any bridges here, nothing but sea and sky. The sun was brilliant in the morning sky, striking a violent glare from the waves below, and yet the light didn’t blind Trei: he found he could look straight out into the blazing light without even blinking.

But the view itself was dizzying. Confusing. Because he could
see
the wind on which the kajuraihi rode. Looking out from the balcony was like … like looking through layers of glass, completely clear and yet visible because of the way light slid across it.… Really, it was not like anything Trei had ever imagined. He could actually
see
the currents of air, the layers of warmer air riding atop cooler, the changes of pressure and density. The long ribbons of cloud looked strange: he could see the layers of air on which the clouds rode and the changes of temperature they both reflected and caused.

And high up at the very edges of Trei’s new sight, dragons flew. He could see them plainly, though they were transparent as ice. Their long bodies coiled and uncoiled, rippling almost like streamers of cloud; their great wings spanned the sky; their heads were fine-boned and delicate as birds’ heads. Trei could see that they both created and rode the winds that swept over the ocean. He felt his heart rise up in his chest at the sight of them. The whole world seemed to shift and tilt under his feet. He put a hand out blindly, bracing himself against the stone of the wall.

“Never approach them,” Rei told them sternly. He reached to grip Trei’s shoulder and Ceirfei’s, compelling their attention. “Never trouble them. Their magic is what keeps these Islands in the air, you know, and it’s their magic we kajuraihi borrow. Always respect the dragons!”

“They don’t mind, though,” Trei asked, a little doubtfully, “that you—that
we
use their magic?” The dragons in the far reaches of Tolounn were not at
all
like these graceful creatures of air: Tolounnese dragons were huge and rare and very dangerous. He flinched from the images of his nightmare—of the gaping wound in the mountain above Rounn, its edges black and charred, the Gods’ furnaces glowing deep within. Of the dragon rearing out of the mountain’s molten heart: a dragon made of fire, with fire blazing in its eyes and dripping from its mouth. Maybe there had never been a fire dragon in Mount Ghaonnè, maybe the mountain had just broken on its own, but Trei remembered the wide and level sea of gray ash where Rounn should have stood and was bitterly glad that these Island dragons of wind and air were so different, bitterly envious that they were so different.

Trei blinked hard and stared up into the wind, trying to erase the image of the fire dragon with the beautiful reality of the dragons of air.

Rei grinned, clearly not noticing Trei’s moment of distracted grief. “No, novice, they don’t mind! Believe me, you use so small a fraction of the dragon magic surrounding the Islands that so long as you keep your distance, they’ll notice you no more than they notice gulls or fish eagles. But it’s not the dragons that concern us now,” Rei added firmly. “Look at the kajuraihi out there. Trei.” He touched Trei’s shoulder again, recalling his attention. “Look now at the
kajuraihi
out there, not the dragons. No, over there. See them? See how they’re lying on the air? How they catch the warmer air as it rises?”

Trei tore his gaze away from the dragons with some difficulty, peered through layers of crystalline air, and nodded uncertainly.

“Kajurai sight is confusing at first. But soon enough you’ll grow accustomed to it,” Rei assured both Trei and Ceirfei, “and after that you’ll forget you ever lacked dragon sight. Now come, let me show you how to lay out these wings. Let’s learn to do it properly, yes? Soon enough you’ll be doing this on your own.”