If there is a story to be found in the flames, I do not see it. I see only the way the fire eats, and eats, and eats, and does not care what it consumes. Wood, herbs, paper wishes —
horses. Fires are for sacrifices, and the only one that matters is that borne of flesh.
Isolt is looking for her sister in between the flames.
The smoke is burning her eyes as she steps closer, and closer, and closer — pressing in until she can see the fires dancing across the backs of her eyelids every time she closes her eyes. And every time the fire changes colors she opens her eyes again and looks — and looks and looks and looks.
But she does not find her.
There are shadows in the fires, and other shapes, things that are weighted with deeper meanings she does not understand. None of it makes sense to her, and none of it matters without her twin beside her. She does not understand why the fire is so hungry, or why the people around her stop to feed it with wood as often as with herbs. She does not stop to ask it.
She does not stop at all as she weaves between the fires, close enough to feel the heat of them singing her hair. And she is not listening to the singing, or the cheering, or the music that weaves like smoke between them all. She is lost, lost, lost, and with every second that passes she feels the ache inside of her chest grow. It feels like —
oh, it feels like her heart is being torn apart, like the other half of it is floating away somewhere on the smoke that spirals up into the sky, somewhere she cannot reach or follow.
She sets her jaw, feels her teeth grind together. And when she sees the storm-colored girl from before, the one with death draped around her shoulders and hanging in the shape of a crow from her brow, she does not hesitate. All her aching is growing teeth, and claws, and desperation, and if she cannot find her sister to ease it — then this, this will do.
“Why are you here?” The words sound like an accusation hanging from her teeth. And her blade begins to tap, tap, tap against her hip as her tail curls up and rests there on her flank.
Isolt wonders if it bothers her as much now as it did in the forest.
Rook thinks that the scars will stay forever, two ugly puncture marks ruining the perfect white of my stockings.
He thinks this reproachfully, with just the right amount of glee to remind me that he hates me, as if I would ever forget, while he drops a pile of purple berries by my head. They bounce and burst on the damp moss carpet. I gather the good ones up before they can flee.
"You're wrong," I say to him angrily. Scars had no place on my body; Ma had banished them from ever settling. Whenever I had gone home with a skinned knee or cut lip (and only after Elder or one of her empty-headed acolytes refused to see to me) Ma would pull me after her to the yard with the glass greenhouse, her lips pressed in a line, and kill two butterflies in the butterfly garden, one blue, one white. From the song I knew that one butterfly was enough, but that she had killed two to make me feel bad.
A butterfly for a cut, a starling for a bone. Three mice born at twilight, for health you've never known.
I hold one of the purple berries up to a fragment of sunlight and watch as it sparks off of the dewdrops clinging to the berry's skin. Frowning, I throw one at Rook and he snags it out of the air with his mouth, swallowing with exaggerated gusto. I am warier now of eating the things Rook forages for me, without first waiting to see if they will sicken him.
You underestimated her. He ambles towards me, but not before stamping his hoof down on a black beetle skittering across the dirt. Admit it.
I freeze my face as Rook kicks the beetle's crushed body away, a spindly leg still twitching. Without looking I pelt one of the greener, harder berries at his eye. He ducks it easily, and if his deer's mouth was capable of it, I know it would be busy twisting itself into a smirk.
"Her mother must not have raised her very well," I sniff. "Are all outsiders like her?"
Rook snorts. Worse. I toss a pocketful of berries into my mouth.
—
“Why are you here?”
Elder used to say, when we were bad enough to anger her, that the Goddess bound together the fate-strings of those she wished to punish. She would tear down storm clouds large and small and blow them on a southerly wind into the hearts of the bound, setting them at each other like starved tigers in a pen.
When I hear her voice and the unmistakeable slice slice slice of her tail over the crackling of the bonfire, I think of this story and wonder: what deed had she done to deserve the Goddess's punishment?
Was it as bad as mine?
I turn slowly, because to turn quickly is to suggest fear and eventual submission. So I turn slowly, my mask a second skin, bone and feathers and Skyweaver to protect me from red malevolence and death-magic. Rook is silent besides me, his mind distracted by the heat of the fire, the laughter of the crowd, the smell of his childhood perfuming the night. I nudge him. He jumps, startled.
I am silent for a slow heartbeat, more crow than girl, more shadow than crow. There are hellebores in my braid and they are as red as the horn that glints like a saber dipped in moonlight and firelight on her head. I think of hellebores to avoid thinking about other red things like anger; my answer rolls over and over on my tongue until it is the perfect shape, the perfect texture.
"I found you," I say. The lie tastes like berries on my tongue. "Girl-of-death-and-cardinals."
My father does, I know — he tells me so every time he hears the desert calling out to him, like it is looking for the missing bits of sand caught in his soul. He tells me some things in this world are not meant to be escaped.
I tell him the scholars say that about death. And we prove them wrong every time we raise another sparrow, and wolf pup, and bramblebear from their forest graves. We are the fate others cannot escape.
The night feels endless, the fires seem to go on forever with their smoke and flames tangling together into the sky. It reminds her of her twin, the way they tangle leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn each night, the way her own dreams feel like running through smoke alongside her shadow (or sometimes how she is the shadow, formless in the smoke.)
The night feels like a thing she wants to name, because she wants to hold the names of all things close before she lays them into their graves.
And so she searches for it, for the name with which she’ll wrap around the night like a noose. She searches for it in every bonfire, in every silver-eyed shed star, in every whispered prayer over a knotted bundle of a rosemary and lavender offering.
She searches until she finds the girl from the forest, the one wearing death as easily as another girl may wear pearls, and jewels, and silks. And all the while the aching, and the hunger, and the sorrow caught between her teeth starts to crack and bleed. She can taste it on her tongue; each time she swallows it down she imagines it beginning to root in her belly. And Isolt wonders what it would grow into, all these sorrow-seeds: would they become her sister’s dahlias and poppies? Would they grow into golden saplings shivering with rotting and budding leaves in the forest?
Would they grow twisted, and monstrous, like everything else she touches?
She thinks it would make a better offering than the rosemary and lavender and herbs. She thinks she could teach this crow-girl to say the words with her, to pray to death instead of life (to breathe life into all the dead foxes of the world, instead of burying them in shallow graves.)
But oh, it would feel just as good (better, she tells herself) to taste this girl’s death on her tongue instead of sorrow. And it is then that Isolt knows it is not Maybird’s prayers she wants —
she wants something far more eternal than that.
A cold smile hangs onto the backs of her teeth when she steps closer, and closer, and taps out a heartbeat along her hip (the girl’s heartbeat, not her own.) And she drinks in the site of her crow’s head, bathed in red and gold tonight by the flames, eyes dancing brightly in their sockets. It matches the hellebores, she thinks; and later she will imagine what they look like tucked between her teeth.
“Were you looking for me?” She does not bow, or dip her horn, or smile at this girl who was foolish enough to believe herself dead. There is only a warning in the way she lifts her head, so that the smoke might fill the hollows of her horn and dance along her brow. Because she is still searching, and she thinks this girl might fill her hunger just as well as the night would.
The thought makes her eyes feel like twin ranunculi, blooming fire-bright against her skull.
