The Girl at Midnight (4 page)

Caius rested his hands on the mantel, dropping his head so his long bangs obscured his view of Tanith. He was tired. Tired of this conversation, tired of trying to convince Tanith of the burning certainty he felt about his course of action, tired of ignoring the pointed glances and curious whispers of his own people as the days came and went with little to show for them.

“The firebird is real.” He had been singing this song for a hundred years, and still Tanith refused to be swayed. “It’s real, and it’s our only hope of ending this war.”

The hand that came to rest on his shoulder was small but strong from years of handling a sword. He hadn’t heard
her remove her gauntlets, but she must have. He was tired, and it was making him slow.

“The firebird is a myth, Caius. A fairy tale. Nothing more. You’ve lost sight of what’s important.”

The absolute gall of her
. He turned to face his sister. “If this isn’t important, if finding the firebird is a waste of time and resources, then what is important? What’s important to you, Tanith, if not ending this war as quickly as possible?”

“Victory,” she said, without a hint of hesitation. It was so easy for her. It always had been. He envied her that simplicity. How comforting it must be. “You know as well as I do that this cease-fire is a farce, and it’s only a matter of time before open war erupts, especially if they keep sending spies into our territory.”

“Like we send spies into theirs?” Caius asked.

“You say that like war is supposed to be fair.”

“I’m not that naive.”

“Could have fooled me,” Tanith said. “Tell me again how much time, how many resources you’ve wasted on this fruitless search?”

“I don’t consider the expenditure a waste. I’m trying to help our people by putting an end to this war. The firebird is prophesied to do just that.”

“I’m trying to do the same, but prophecies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Our people need tangible results, Caius. Not fairy tales.”

Fairy tales
, Caius thought.
If I never hear those words again, it’ll be too soon
. “Have you ever asked yourself why you fight?”

Tanith shrugged, firelight glinting off her soiled armor. “I fight because I must. The Avicen began this blood feud.
I’m going to end it. Their greed for power stole ours. The Drakharin once had enough magic to transform themselves into dragons. Real dragons, Caius. We once soared through the skies and breathed fire on our foes.”

Caius’s lips twitched into a ghost of a smile. “Now who’s quoting fairy tales?”

Tanith cupped her palms and blew into them. A tiny ball of flame erupted, hovering over her skin like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Some of us still breathe fire, Brother.”

“You summon it,” Caius said. “A fine distinction. And even if that old tale were true, destroying the Avicen won’t bring back what we’ve lost.”

Tanith clapped her hands, and the fire extinguished. “Believe what you want. I believe in what I can see and touch. Even if destroying the Avicen won’t restore our magic, it’ll make me feel better. I want justice for our people and an end to the Avicen threat. Those are the things that should concern you, Caius. Not a magical bird you read about in a book.”

Caius rolled his neck and arched his back, stretching. He needed rest and soon. “I did not read about it in a book. I read about it in several books, thank you very much.”

“Yes, and half of them were written by Avicen. Mind your sources, Brother. They aren’t to be trusted.”

“I’m sick of fighting.” Caius’s voice was quiet, but he knew Tanith would hear him perfectly well, though whether or not she would listen was another matter entirely. “Aren’t you?” It was a foolish question, for he knew what her answer would be, but still, he had to ask.

Tanith canted her head. Torchlight caught the delicate iridescence of the scales that trailed along her cheekbones.
She blinked at him, red eyes gleaming in the firelight, and said, simply, “No.”

The word hung in the air between them, a neat and tidy summation of the rift that had been growing for years. It hadn’t always been like this. Once, they’d been inseparable. They’d galloped around this very same fortress, carried aloft on invisible horses, clashing blunt wooden swords as they played at a war they hardly understood. But the girl with the unruly golden curls and chubby hands made sticky from sweets was a far cry from the woman who stood before him now, magnificent and terrible, proudly stained with the blood of her foes. His sister had grown into something beautiful and savage and absolutely foreign to him. He missed her sometimes, the girl she had been before years of battle and bloodshed had forged her into steel.

Tanith’s eyes softened around the edges. For a moment, she was his sister again. Not his general, but his sister. “We need to act before the Avicen do. If we wait any longer, I fear what it would mean for the Drakharin. I want the best for our people, same as you.”

With a heavy sigh, Caius stepped away from her. He’d had enough of her and her doubts. “Thank you, Tanith, that will be all.”

Tanith studied him, her expression hard and unreadable. Caius waited for her to protest her dismissal. As the highest-ranking officer in the Drakharin army, Tanith was more accustomed to giving orders than taking them, but there was one person she did not outrank, and that was Caius. He was the Dragon Prince—the youngest ever elected to the position—and had been for a century. He’d proved himself worthy of the title through years of battle and politics. His
sister occasionally needed reminding that it was his head, not hers, upon which the crown of the Drakharin sat.

After a full minute, Tanith extended her arms, sketching out a shallow bow. “As my prince commands.”

If Tanith’s insincerity were gold
, Caius thought,
I’d be a rich man indeed
.

Echo was glad she’d skipped the burrito. As the dark of the in-between gave way to the soft, golden glow of the Ala’s chamber, the contents of her stomach roiled as if she were at sea, even though they hadn’t traveled far. The Nest lay right below the library on Fifth Avenue, but as far as Echo knew, she was the only human aware of its existence. It always felt this way, traveling with the Ala without a man-made threshold to anchor her passage. The Ala remained as unruffled as ever. Her black feathers were smooth and silky, as dark as the in-between itself. Maybe the Ala carried a little bit of it inside her. It would explain how she could wrap it around herself like a cloak and travel wherever she pleased, threshold or no. Echo gave herself a moment to adjust as the last lingering tendrils of the in-between faded in the air like smoke on the wind.

“What’s this about a firebird?” Echo asked, rubbing soothing circles on her stomach. “I thought that was just a
human fairy tale. Pretty sure I read about it in a book of Russian folklore.”

“Every good fairy tale has a kernel of truth to it.” The Ala led Echo to the heart of her little nest, with its odd array of mismatched furniture, tapestries, and pillows. Bowls of assorted sweets were strategically sprinkled about the room. The Avicen sweet tooth was the stuff of legend. Echo had many a memory of losing herself in that sea of pillows as she begged the Ala for just one more story—and one more cookie—before bed. “And more than a few human myths are pulled from our own legends. You should hear the things they say about me. In certain parts of Serbia, they believe that a demon named the Ala eats babies and controls the weather. Baby-eating.” She punctuated the word with a short, sharp laugh as she settled on a wicker chair in the center of the room and beckoned for Echo to join her. “Preposterous.”

“I always knew there was something fishy about you.” Echo set her backpack on the floor and grabbed a whoopie pie from the plate atop the small wooden end table before collapsing face-first onto a chaise longue upholstered with a burgundy velvet that smelled faintly of lavender. No nausea was so great that it couldn’t be cured with a whoopie pie. Voice muffled by the couch, Echo added, “Now, are you gonna tell me about the mystery paper you pulled out of that box or what? The suspense is killing me.”

The Ala slipped the parchment from her pocket and unfolded it with careful fingers. “This, Echo dear, is the most important map you’re likely to see in your lifetime.”

Echo sat up and propped her feet on the ancient cedar chest that doubled as a table. As was the Ala’s style, it matched nothing else in the room. She reached out a hand
and wiggled her fingers. After a moment’s hesitation, the Ala relinquished the map. It was small, with ragged edges, as if it had been torn from a larger whole, creases gone as soft as cotton where it had been folded. The colors had faded to a range of sepia tones, but the barest hint of blue clung to a river that laced through the center of the map, interrupted by a phrase written in neatly drawn kanji. Circled in brown ink that must have once been red was a modest home in the district west of the river. Echo ran her fingers along the kanji, and though her grasp of written Japanese was only slightly better than her Mandarin—which wasn’t saying much—she recognized the words. She’d seen them often enough on her own maps, tucked away with the atlases she kept in a dedicated corner of her room in the library. The slash of blue was the Kamo River in Kyoto. Near the bottom edge of the map, someone had written a few lines of text in neat block letters, along with what Echo assumed was a date: 1915.

She squinted at the text and read, “ ‘Where flowers bloom, you’ll find your way, through the darkness and the flames, but beware the price that you must pay, for only the worthy will know my name.’ ” She scrunched her brow and looked up at the Ala. “I don’t get it. What’s so important about a hundred-year-old map of Kyoto with a weird rhyme on it?”

The Ala took the map with reverent hands. “I know the Avicen who wrote it,” she said. “And I believe I know why it was written.” She stood, placing the map on the coffee table between them and went over to the bookshelf nestled in a corner of the room. Books were squished along its length, packed in tighter than they should have been. Echo remembered pulling them off the shelves after the Ala had taken her
in and reading the ones she could understand. Some were written in Avicet, a language that still eluded Echo after all these years, but the Ala had read to her at night, translating as she went. They were mostly historical texts, detailing the development of Avicen culture over the years; some covered the Avicen’s migration to the eastern part of North America and the reasons why they’d stayed even when human metropolises began to boom along the coastline, forcing them below ground. When Echo had asked why the Avicen stuck around, the Ala had merely tutted and said, “We were here first.” A few books detailed the Avicen’s political structure—an oligarchy headed by a Council of Elders comprising six of the community’s oldest members, of which the Ala was one—while others, like the one the Ala took off the shelf, dealt with esoteric mythology. About three inches thick, the leather-bound tome was written in a form of Avicet so old that few could read it.

“Wait a minute. If an Avicen left this map behind, then why is the rhyme written in English?” Echo asked.

“As with so many of the young ones, English was her first language,” the Ala replied. “Avicet is so rarely spoken these days.”

“Young?” Echo took another look at the date. “This is a hundred years old.”

“Youth is a relative concept.” The Ala returned to her seat, flipping through the book’s weathered pages. “Here.” Her fingers landed on an illustration near the center of the book. She angled it toward Echo. Without knowledge of old Avicet, Echo couldn’t make sense of the words, but the image caught her attention. A bird, outlined in bloodred ink, hovered on the page, as if frozen in flight, its golden wings
upraised, feathers transitioning to flames at their tips. Tendrils of black smoke clung to its clawed feet as it rose above a pile of ash, beak open in a silent screech.

“This,” the Ala said, “is the firebird.” She pointed to the words scribbled beneath the illustration. “ ‘When the price is paid,’ ” she translated, “ ‘the worthy will know my name. When the clock strikes midnight, the end will come.’ ”

“The end?” Echo frowned, looking between the Ala and the book. “This is starting to sound ominous. I don’t know if I can handle ominous on an empty stomach.”

The Ala leaned toward Echo, serious and somber. “According to our prophecies, the firebird will bring about the end of this war with the Drakharin, but the nature of that end is up to whoever controls it.” With a swat at Echo’s boots, the Ala added, “And get your feet off my table.”

“Pause,” Echo said, putting her feet on the ground. “Rewind. Explain to me how a bird is supposed to end a war.”

“The firebird isn’t exactly a bird.”

“No, of course not, that would be too obvious,” Echo mumbled, biting into the whoopie pie. “So what is it?”

The feathers on the Ala’s arms ruffled in frustration. “We don’t know. Not exactly. Some say it’s really just a single golden feather capable of granting wishes. Others claim it’s the name for a creature that became extinct long ago. There’s even a small subset of scholars who believe it’s a bird that can breathe fire.”

Echo quirked an eyebrow. “Kind of like a dragon?”

Pride gleamed in the Ala’s eyes. “Clever girl. Avicen and Drakharin mythologies have been known to overlap on occasion. What we do know is that, whatever its form, it is
neither good nor evil. It can be used to accomplish great things. But greatness is not always good.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Echo picked at the bits of cream filling drooping over the sides of the whoopie pie. “One ring to rule them all, I get it. But I’m still not clear on why the Avicen and the Drakharin have been at war for so long. I mean, they hate each other, but like … why?”

The Ala leaned back in her chair, running a hand through the long, soft feathers on her head. “The Drakharin blame the Avicen for their slow fade in power over the years—a spurious charge. As if such a thing were even possible, but desperation makes people believe crazy things. Magic courses through this world like an unseen ocean. It flows, in and out, like a tide. When the Drakharin felt that tide receding, they wanted someone to blame. Animosity has simmered between our people over petty grievances for millennia, so the Avicen made a convenient target. I doubt it was as calculated as that, but the seed of that idea grew until no one questioned its validity. Now fighting fuels more fighting, and hatred breeds more hatred. It almost doesn’t matter why the war began. We’ve fought for so long that I fear we’ve forgotten how to do anything else. But I know, in my soul, that the tide is changing. The firebird is no simple legend told to little Avicelings before bedtime. It is rising. I can sense it like the surge of a wave on the horizon.”