“Red flames in the palace!” roars Master Tekoa, making all of us jolt. “Red flames, kindled from within! On the night of fire, more will come to scorch him!”
There’s a moment of charged silence.
Then he blinks.
The darkness slips from his eyes like honey sliding off a spoon. Though the chill in the air around him disappears, my arms are still pricked with goose bumps. I hug them, staring openmouthed.
“You’re—you’re all out of form,” Master Tekoa says, looking round with dull surprise at our stunned faces.
I clear my throat. “Master,” I start, “are you feeling all right? You were talking about… fire.”
He looks blankly at me before seeming to understand. “Ah. Yes. Qi fire, our internal energy. What you are practicing in these lessons to control.” He steps to the front of the pavilion, the sunlight at his back outlining his edges in gold. “That will be enough for today.”
Wren places a hand on my arm when I start to question him. “There’s no point, Lei. I don’t think he knows what just happened.”
As soon as we leave the pavilion, Zhin addresses us all, looking worried. “We should tell Mistress Eira and Madam Himura. Something really seemed wrong with him.”
Her sister nods.
“Maybe he’s sick?” Mariko suggests.
“Or had some kind of magical fit?” Zhen offers.
Blue rolls her eyes. “Clearly.”
“A spiritual trance is not something to joke about,” Chenna says sharply, shooting Blue a stern look that makes her pout and look away.
“Well, I don’t think we should tell them,” Mariko says. “It’s just another thing for Madam Himura to punish us for.”
“You mean, punish Nine,” Blue retorts. “It was her Master Tekoa was addressing, after all.”
The other girls glance round to where I’m trailing at the back of the group. Though I can tell they don’t like the way she said it, I can also see that they’re not entirely unconvinced by what Blue said.
“Well,” I say, in a voice much more casual than I feel, “at least we know Master Tekoa carries a… flame… for me.”
The twins snort. Even Mariko stifles a laugh, and Blue shoots her a furious look. Only Wren and Chenna don’t laugh.
At least my joke seems to have broken the tension somewhat. Before long, the eeriness of Master Tekoa’s turn starts to drain away in the warmth of the day and the familiar surroundings of Women’s Court as we head back to Paper House. The events at the pavilion start to seem unreal, a strange, shared daydream. Aoki tells everyone about her brother’s sleep-talking—“Once he was convinced I was a giraffe called Arif”—but I’m only half listening.
A memory has come back to me from a few summers ago, when a fortune-teller arrived in our village.
She was an old cat-form demon with ragged fur and blind eyes, filmed over like curdled milk. She set up a booth at the side of the main road, just a simple table with a hearth in its center. Even though I was meant to go straight back to the shop after my errand, I stayed to watch as a young woman from our village knelt down at her table and handed over a fistful of coins. There are many ways in which fortune-tellers divine insight: tea leaves, the lines in a person’s hands or paws, burning paper offerings, the analysis of dreams. This one was an osteomancer. She made the young woman carve her question into a bone before tossing it into the hearth. I remember my shock at the black inklike spill that spread over the cat-woman’s eyes as she drew the bone from the fire, running her clawed hands over it to read the cracks.
I was so spooked I ran all the way home. Some part of me always believed I had imagined it. That the change in her eyes was some trick of the light. But seeing it happen to Master Tekoa, I know now that it was real. It must be what happens when someone falls into a fortune-telling trance.
Despite the sunshine, a shiver runs down my neck. If Master Tekoa’s prediction is right, fire is going to destroy the palace. But what’s even scarier is that it seems he thinks the fire is already burning within—of all people—me.
EIGHTEEN
SLOWLY BUT SURELY, LIFE BLURS BACK into the routine of palace life.
With the King away on official business for over a month—something to do with rebel activity in the South, according to the rumors—and no strange happenings after Master Tekoa’s prediction, I lose myself in our steady rhythm of classes and dinners and nightly entertainments. My teachers notice the improvement in my efforts, and Mistress Eira congratulates me about it one day, telling me she’s proud that I used what happened with the King as a turning point. And she’s right. It was a moment of awakening for me.
But not in the way she thinks.
Though it only takes me a couple of weeks to replace the weight I lost during my confinement, it takes me much longer to get back to my normal self—or at least something that passes for normal now. I’m cast in the shadow of that night with the King. The memory of it hovers close, a constant presence at the edge of my consciousness, like moon-shimmer on the surface of a lake.
Even though the King is out of the palace, I get the sensation sometimes that he’s watching me. Yet when I turn around, it’s only to find an empty corridor or the quizzical face of one of the girls.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Wren asks me one afternoon when I stop midconversation on our way to a lesson, looking round my shoulder with the certainty that the King will be there, just behind me, head cocked and a loose grin on his face.
Forcing down a shiver, I keep walking. “Yes. Sure. Never better.”
“Lei.” Her fingers brush my arm. “Be honest with me. You haven’t been right since what happened with the King—”
“Of course not!” I hiss, jerking away. Aoki’s chatting to Chenna a few steps in front of us, and she glances over her shoulder. Lowering my voice, I go on, “I mean, it was awful, Wren. And it’s going to happen again someday. I hate this, this… waiting. I don’t know if I can keep it up.”
Wren nods. “It’s the same for me. But it’s all we can do.”
“Is it?” I reply quietly.
She stiffens, looking away with pressed lips.
I want to ask her how she can stand it. Whether she dreams of freedom the same way I do, in the small of the night, when the darkness is broken only by moon-silver and thoughts of home, and of her and the other girls—the futures we could be having, if only we could escape from the palace. But I swallow my words. I know her answer already, because it is the same thing that holds me back every time I dream of escape.
Their blood will be here. Do you understand me? On your hands.
We walk the rest of the way in silence.
Our history and politics teacher, Madam Tharazi, is an old lizard-form demon with dull scales the color of fallen leaves. Her room is on the ground floor of a house on the southwest side of Women’s Court, small and warm, kept shadowed by lowered shutters and the gnarled trunk of a maple tree growing outside the window, its knotted branches reaching over the house like a tree spirit’s bony arms. It always feels like dusk in her room, and I often catch the other girls dozing in her lessons. It doesn’t help that Madam Tharazi is the most lax of our teachers, her eyes half glazed as she lectures on one topic or another. Most of the other girls probably know all about Ikhara’s history and politics already. But I always pay attention. These lessons are one of the only times I get to learn about the world beyond the palace walls, and I cherish them, needing to remember that there is a world outside.