The Fire Children

  First published 2015 by Ravenstone

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.ravenstone.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-950-4

  Copyright 2015 Lauren Roy

  Cover art by Larry Rostant

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  YULLA WAS BORN during the Darktimes, in the middle of the Scorching Days. Amma had to bear her in the pitch black, they said, the midwife groping between her thighs, blood-slick fingers guided by the memory of the thousand births she’d attended before.

  They’d thought Yulla had been born dead, and the midwife hadn’t even been able to light a candle to see. All the fire was outside: even the tiniest of flames wouldn’t answer the call of a match when the Scorching had come. But then Yulla started squalling, and Abba laughed when the older children shrieked, startled.

  “Amma wanted to dash you against the cellar stones,” Yulla’s sister Kell liked to say. “She was sure a demon had stolen your skin when you didn’t cry. But Abba wouldn’t let her. For seven days she gave you suck, convinced when we came out into the light she’d find she’d been nursing a malsheen.”

  Kell liked to tell stories.

  Yulla wasn’t a malsheen, of course, nor any other kind of demon. At first, she’d been tiny and prone to squalling—Amma hadn’t been able to lift her where Mother Sun could see until she was a week old. For that handful of days, Amma had only been able to eat dried meat and flat bread, and drink nothing but water. Her milk was thin, then, and they feared Yulla would be forever stunted.

  But once she could sleep beneath the sun, she caught up quickly. By the time she was three, Yulla was as healthy as any of the other children in Kaladim. A hair shorter, maybe, and wiry, but her legs were sturdy and her tongue quick. The younger children only knew she was a daughter of the Scorching Days if Kell was feeling mean and teased her in front of them.

  She wasn’t teasing Yulla these days, though; she didn’t have time. Fifteen years had passed since Mother Sun had last sent her children down from the heavens to walk the world like men. Now each day grew longer and hotter than the one before, and the priests and priestesses had begun making preparations for the return of the Scorching Days aboveground and the Darktimes below. They’d remarked on how long it had been since the last ones had come—everyone said they were never less than five years apart, no longer than ten. Though Old Moll claimed once it had been twenty years between Scorching Days, and Old Moll had lived for long and long and long.

  The main streets of Kaladim swarmed with people as Yulla and Kell dodged past a dozen strong men carrying stone trestle tables out into the square. Right now, the tables were covered with stubborn streaks of char from the last Scorching Days. Soon, the city’s children would cover them with brightly painted pictures—pictures that would be destroyed in a few days’ time. Nearly everything the Fire Children touched burned away, except for stone. The plates and food that would be laid out would be nothing more than ash when the people reemerged. The paint would run and melt or simply ignite at the Fire Children’s touch.

  Yulla doubled back and walked alongside the men to get a better look at the table. One of the black marks branched out into five lines. “Is this a handprint?” she asked the man closest to her.

  Before he could answer, before she could lay her own hand along it to compare, Kell came and yanked her away.

  “Stop being a nuisance,” her sister hissed. “We have to go help Amma.”

  It irked her—at seventeen, Kell was only two years older, and yet here she was acting as though she were Amma and Yulla were five again. But her sister knew her well: left to her own devices, Yulla would have wandered into half a dozen stalls. She’d beg a crust of bread from the baker, or let cool silks run through her fingers at the fabric trader’s, or try charming the wine merchant for a sip of her wares. Yulla settled for craning her neck as she followed in Kell’s wake, her eyes drinking in as much of the preparation as they could in passing.

  Much as Kell was trying to act the grown-up, even she slowed her pace when they drew even with the dollmaker’s shop. Old Moll sat outside, carving slivers from a fist-sized block of wood. His apprentices—who were also his grandchildren and great-grandchildren—sat at his feet. They were armed with fine brushes and tiny pots of paint, each hard at work on a miniature table or chair or other piece of furniture. Dozens of waist-high structures surrounded them.

  Yulla gasped, recognizing the shapes of buildings she knew. “Is that...?”

  “Kaladim.”

  “Can’t we stop, just for a minute?”

  Kell’s usual withering look was undermined by her own eagerness to see. “Fine,” she said, “but just for a minute.”

  They picked their way carefully to the little buildings on the outskirts of the miniature city. Old Moll looked up and offered them a toothy smile as they approached. “Did you come to see your house, girls?”

  “Our house is here?”

  Old Moll nodded. “When we’re done, we’ll have the whole city laid out.” He pointed at one of the houses. Two of his grandsons appeared at his gesture, and carried it over to Kell and Yulla. The boys were somewhere between her age and Kell’s; Yulla couldn’t help but notice the sweat sheening on their skin from the searing noonday heat. She caught herself staring and felt the flush creeping onto her cheeks. Not that it mattered—both of them had eyes for Kell.

  Relieved and (though she’d never admit it) a little jealous, Yulla turned her attention to what they held between them on a square of scrap wood.

  It was her house, down to the chipped stones in the north corner where Abba’s cart had gotten away from him once. It opened up to show the rooms inside, laid out exactly as they were at home. It wasn’t furnished yet, but someone had painted the walls the same colors as their own. Yulla bent closer, to look through her bedroom window, and got a better look at the construction.

  “This house is made of stone,” said Yulla. The walls were no more than half a finger-width at their thickest, held together by a thin layer of mortar.

  Kell snorted. “Of course it is. It’s for the Fire Children to play with.”

  “But they can come into our houses while we’re in the dark anyway. Why do they need little ones?”

  Old Moll spoke before Kell could. “Tell me how the Fire Children understand our world, Yulla.”

  “They consume our offerings. What they touch burns, and they understand our things by destroying them.”

  “Exactly. Now tell me how the offerings are made.”

  She thought about home, of the bustle of activity that had occupied the last several days. The rugs had been rolled up and brought down into the cellars. Amma had made the girls pack away the plates and cups and carry them down beneath as well. Their furniture, their clothes, their possessions—nearly everything had gone below, to the warren-like rooms where the Fire Children weren’t allowed. The last things to go would be the beds, the night everyone went below. Already the family’s voices echoed off the empty walls and bare floors upstairs.

  Not everything had been stashed away, though. In the kitchen, Amma had set mismatched plates and cups out for the Children to use. A carpenter had delivered a table and chairs earlier that week, made from thin, inferior wood that would never withstand the wear and tear of even a moderately busy h
ousehold.

  “‘We leave some things above,’” Yulla said, reciting from the lessons, “‘for the Children to do with as they please, so they might learn about us and our existence. The rest we keep for ourselves, the fruits of our labors and the gifts Mother Sun has given.’”

  “Do you see the quandary?” asked Old Moll. “If we take all we own below—the fruits of our labors, Mother Sun’s gifts—how will they truly know about our lives?” He beckoned to one of his great-granddaughters. She clambered up into his lap and held up a square of woven yarn no bigger than her hand. “Lovely work, my girl,” he said. He passed the sky-blue swatch to Yulla. “What does that remind you of?”

  It took a few seconds before Yulla saw the cloud-like tufts of white yarn near the top, and some darker stitches that might have been birds. “It’s the tapestry in the Worship Hall, isn’t it?”

  “It is. We wouldn’t want the real one destroyed, so we make the miniatures for the Fire Children to burn.”

  Sensing an opportunity to show off, Kell butted in. “But we leave some fine things out, too,” she said, as though Yulla hadn’t been sitting right beside her while the priestesses lectured about the Scorching Days. “Our prosperity comes from Mother Sun, so we give some of it back to her as thanks.”

  Yulla knew what Kell was thinking of. This morning, Amma had laid a set of jewelry atop her dresser—a pair of lapis lazuli teardrop earrings and a necklace made of a dozen gold strands that shimmered when the wearer moved. Both girls had admired them as their mother set them atop a black velvet square. Amma had worn them only a few times, on the most special of occasions. Kell had hoped to borrow them someday, but now she never would.

  “Come on, Yulla.” Kell shackled Yulla’s wrist with her bony fingers. “We have to get home to help Amma.”

  Yulla waved her thanks to Old Moll and his apprentices, and hurried to avoid being dragged along by Kell.

  THE INSIDE OF their house was cool. Amma had the curtains pulled to block the worst of the day’s heat, and the stone walls and floors had retained some of the prior evening’s desert chill. Yulla took advantage of the empty front room (and Amma’s current absence) to close her eyes and perform the step-step-spin, step-step-spin of the versam. She wouldn’t turn sixteen for another year yet, but ever since she’d seen Kell perform it at her celebration, she’d been practicing when open space allowed.

  On the third turn, she collided with something at once soft and solid. She staggered back more out of surprise than lack of coordination, but she went down with an ungraceful oof regardless.

  Aunt Mouse peered down, a grin playing about her lips. Aunt Mouse was as tall as Amma, but rounder. A frequent fixture in their home, she could be found in their kitchen helping Amma more nights than not. Kell called her Aunt Moon sometimes, especially when she and Amma told the girls to run along so they could talk. The stories said the Scorching Days came because fat Sister Moon came to visit Mother Sun. Sister Moon blocked out the light for days on end, and Mother Sun shooed her children away so she could catch up with her sister, a lot like Amma and Aunt Mouse.

  “We thought you girls had run off and joined the witch-women,” said Aunt Mouse.

  Kell snickered from down the hall. “We wouldn’t. Yulla’s scared of them.”

  “I’m not,” she said, as Aunt Mouse helped her up. Though in truth she was, a little. Amma said they were harmless women who knew small, harmless magics. They sold charms for love and luck and happiness in the market. As far back as anyone could remember, the witch-women had lived in Kaladim, sometimes as few as three of them, sometimes as many as a dozen, but they were always a presence in the city. Old histories told of the priests seeking out their wisdom to settle disputes, and of the farmers asking them to read the stars and predict the best time to plant. It seemed everyone had a story about how the witch-women had helped their family in generations past. They were nothing for a girl of fifteen to fear.

  But Kell told other tales, from the time Yulla had been old enough to appreciate—and be terrified by—darker stories. She said the witch-women had their own secret temple, where they worshiped dead Father Sea. The desert had once been an ocean, Kell said, whose waters had been even higher than the spires of the Worship Hall. When Mother Sun discovered his affair with the goddess of the wind she’d boiled him away. The witch-women had sworn that one day, they would find a way to avenge him.

  Starting with us, Kell had said. Starting with the people Mother Sun shaped from the earth to repopulate the world after her rage and grief were spent. Yulla used to wake from nightmares about the witch-women, gasping for breath as though she were drowning.

  “But what if they do want to hurt us?” Yulla asked. The Darktimes were coming, after all. Who knew what terrible things they could do in the pitch black? What if they were only biding their time with their ‘harmless’ spells and potions? Plenty of harm you could do in the dark.

  Kell entered the room and rolled her eyes. Aunt Mouse gave her a look, the kind that said you know better. “Have you been pouring your nonsense into Yulla’s ears again?” Kell started to protest, but Aunt Mouse ignored her and looped an arm around Yulla’s shoulders. It wasn’t so long ago she’d have scooped her up instead, but Yulla was too big for that now, and both of them too old for it. “Think on this: the witch-women are Mother Sun’s children, too. They’re made from the same clay as you, or Kell, or me. Any harm they brought upon us, they’d draw down on their own selves, too. What possible purpose could that serve?”

  Yulla had no good answer for that, though she wasn’t fully reassured.

  Aunt Mouse let her go and knuckled her back. “Come on, then, girls. Since you’re not witches’ apprentices, you can come help your Amma and me set up the cellars.”

  The girls had swept the steps leading down into the earth that morning, and had spent a good couple of hours clearing away cobwebs. Most of the time, the cellars were for storage: old furniture; things Abba meant to fix someday; toys Yulla had nearly forgotten since she’d outgrown them. Now that the Scorching Days were coming, though, Amma and Abba had been hard at work turning them into living spaces for the family.

  Oil lamps lit the rooms. Amma had infused them with lavender and vanilla to freshen the stale air, but musty smells still tickled Yulla’s nose beneath the sweet. It was even cooler down here than upstairs. Most of their possessions were pushed up against the walls—no sense setting up more than they’d need for a week or two—but Amma and Aunt Mouse had arranged a couch and some cushions and Abba’s favorite chair atop a thick rug. In the smaller alcoves, pallets were set up for beds.

  Amma stood at the sideboard when the girls and Aunt Mouse filed into the room. Jars lined its top, filled with dried fruit, pickled vegetables, and jams. Amma’s fingers fluttered over the top of each, left to right, as she named their contents. When she reached the end of the set, she started over, memorizing them so she’d be able to find what was where when the light was gone.

  “Dates,” Amma chanted, “Apples. Olives-kumquats-figs. Almond paste, pickled beets, honeycombs, pig.” The ‘pig’ jar was Abba’s salty, smoky boar jerky. Set next to them was a basket of the flatbread that Amma and Aunt Mouse had spent the last couple of days baking. At the end of the sideboard, three enormous jugs stood sentinel. They were nearly as tall as Yulla, each filled to the brim with water.

  Amma finished her litany and smiled at the girls. “We’re nearly done.” She pointed toward the alcove that would serve as their bedroom during the Darktimes. “Go on and see. You can change it around if you’d like, but quickly. You need to learn the space.”

  Kell pushed past Yulla, but Yulla was smaller, and quick. They reached the entryway at the same time.Yulla sidled backwards so Kell could go first—being first wasn’t worth one of Kell’s bony elbows to her belly.

  The arrangement down here was similar to their bedroom above: beds side-by-side with a small table in between. Of course, down here they’d be sleeping on pallets; their bed frames had b
een broken down and propped against the far wall. Amma had made an effort at comfort, heaping blankets and quilts in thick piles.

  The walls were the same bare grey stone as always. The ceiling in here was lower than the one in the main room; Abba would have to duck if he came in to kiss them goodnight. Yulla traced the long straight groove left by a workman’s chisel. Its edges were smooth; the cellars had been hewn from the rock hundreds—if not thousands—of years ago.

  “Look at these.” Kell had hopped off her pallet and was peering at the wall behind the table. “Help me move it.”

  When they pulled it out, they revealed a whole town populated by stick figures chalked on the stone. The buildings reminded Yulla of Old Moll’s replica-town: there was the Worship Hall with its spires scraping the clouds, there the market; the lookout tower rose above it all, a tiny figure keeping watch within. The house in the middle was bigger than the rest of the town. The artists had left the facade open, so you could peer inside. Below the line that served as the street, someone had drawn the cellar rooms as well. Skinny double-lines branched off on either side of those, leading to the chambers beneath the houses next door.

  Tunnels connected all the cellars of Kaladim. They kept the citizens connected during the Darktimes—it was how the midwife had arrived to help Amma through her labor fifteen years before. Yulla and Kell had spent several of the last few days sweeping the cobwebs from the passageway ceilings. Where their tunnel split from the main one, they’d met the ropemaker. He’d been hard at work replacing the lines that served as guides through the darkness, but he’d taken a moment to show the girls how to tie a half-hitch before he’d sent them on their way.

  Yulla walked her fingers along one of the chalk tunnels. It ended in a room with three stick figures. She thought they might be dancing. “Who do you think these are?”