The Fire Children
First published 2015 by Ravenstone
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
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.
Y
ULLA 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 household.
“‘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?”