"I want my mother back,” she whispered.
* * *
"Do you miss your homeland?” Aesva asked Denai the next evening. It was a banal question, but Aesva could think of nothing else to say. They walked together at the rim of the practice courtyard. The sun, bright orange above the westward wall, lay cradled between two mountains. A light rain was falling.
"I no longer remember it,” Denai answered. "But I think, if I could remember it, I would miss it. Anakeil says it was very beautiful.”
"Was it hard? Leaving it behind when the Sky-King brought you to his palace?”
"Only somewhat. I was much younger then, and I did not cling to the past as I do now.” She looked at Aesva with an odd expression in her eyes. "It is the great tragedy of adulthood, that one clings to the past rather than embracing the future.”
"Why is that a tragedy?”
"Because the past is a poison, child. The past has no power to heal you.”
"Oh.” They walked in silence along the flagstones. Although the dancers were not practicing this morning, Aesva seemed to hear the clack of castanets, rattling like bones. "The Sky-King clings to the past as well, doesn't he?”
"Say rather, that he rejects the future. It was necessary, once, when our borders were unsafe and he had no thoughts for anything but survival. After that, it became habit, and led to ninety years of conquest. Now, it is a shackle.”
Aesva stopped walking.
In a moment of clarity, a dozen insignificant memories clicked into place. She could see the knot that bound the king to the dancers, now. They were his lifeline, an anchor against the tides of a future he did not know how to navigate.
The threads of that tangle led from the Sky-King to Aesva, and from her to the tamarins, and Aesva knew what she must do.
Even though part of her did not want to do it.
Denai had stopped walking along with Aesva. She was staring into the rain, unnaturally still. Within her motionless chest, Aesva's Gift revealed the pocket of nothingness that should have been a heartfire. It was a hard thing, looking at this woman who was dead-and-yet-not-dead. It was harder still to realize that she would never come back. Could not come back. Not in the way Aesva wanted.
Distantly, within the walls of the palace, a gong sounded. The Sky-King was summoning his dancers to perform. Denai turned at once to follow the summons.
"Goodbye, Mother,” Aesva whispered to her retreating back. The words stung like needles against the raw inner edges of her heart, but the hollowness that followed brought release. Yes, she thought. Let it begin with me. I, too, must release my hold upon the past.
She stood in the growing darkness, heedless of the water that trickled along her hair. Her perception seemed clearer than usual tonight. She crossed the courtyard to a place where the outer wall had crumbled with age. Pale fragments of sky peered through gaps in the mortar. In the cavity left by a fallen stone, a tamarin lurked. Its tail lay gripped in its fingers; its chin rested on its knuckles. Through streamers of falling rain it seemed almost a phantom; as hazy and quiescent as a neglected dream.
Aesva reached up and lifted the tamarin from its perch. She cradled it in her fingers, startled by the vibrancy of its heartbeat. Its fur warmed her stomach as she carried it beneath vaulted arches, through empty corridors and into the Sky-King's dining hall.
The torches were already lit. The babble of discussion mingled with the sound of drums and the swishing skirts of the dancers. Aesva walked between the pikes of the door guards before they roused their attention enough to realize that she was a child and hence forbidden here. Sputtered protests erupted behind her but, to her mild surprise, no rough hands grabbed her shoulders to drag her from the hall. Perhaps the king's Khondui was at work, clouding men's minds to aid her efforts. She glanced about with her Gift, but in the midst of so much light and sound and color, it was difficult to tell whether a pocket of emptiness lurked.
She carried the tamarin past the long benches where the lords and ladies dined, towards the high table where the king sat with the evening's honored guests. A hush fell over the hall as she ascended the dais.
The Sky-King straightened in his chair. He seemed to Aesva to be two men locked within the same body. One was old and weary, with eyes lined by too many duties, scarcely able to look farther than his dancers and the triumphs they represented. The other was... vibrant, but disoriented, like a man reaching for a reflection and distressed by his inability to grasp it.
Aesva raised her hands. The tamarin leapt from her fingers and scampered across the food-laden table. The Sky-King stood, startled, and stepped backward. His chair skidded loudly. The tamarin crouched at the edge of the tablecloth and jumped onto his chest.
It landed with a thump and gripped tightly. The king raised a hand to swat at it, but it scampered up his arm, across his back, and onto his shoulder. It crouched there, its muzzle held near his ear as though whispering secrets.
An unexpected stillness came over the Sky-King. In his face, Aesva saw the flicker of unbidden memories.
Across the hall, the dancers ceased their motions. The eldest of them straightened and grew translucent. A silent wind tugged at her hair, then lifted particles away like sand drawn by river currents. Within moments, she was gone.
The lords and ladies of the hall stared in wonder — or perhaps it was horror — at the empty space where the dancer had stood. When they turned back toward their master, they were horrified anew.
The Sky-King was crying.
Shining droplets traced his cheeks and fell, sparkling, toward the floor. They splashed against the tiles like muffled thunder, and with each moist explosion another of the dead dancers straightened and faded into dust. Along the rafters, the tamarins gathered and watched with eyes that gleamed in the shadows.
It was difficult, afterward, to say how much time had passed. It seemed to have been mere moments, but when Aesva cast her eyes towards the windows, she saw that the twilight sky had been replaced by morning sunlight. The rainwater had dried from her hair and clothing.
At length the Sky-King raised his head and uttered a dismissal. The lords and ladies, the guards, and the honored guests all fled, relieved to put distance between themselves and the odd occurrences in the dining hall. In the end, only three dancers remained before the Sky-King. Three dancers, and the dark-eyed Aesva, who did not weep although she wanted to. Denai was gone forever.
"You may return to your homes,” the Sky-King told the dancers. "I will no longer hold you here.”
The women nodded in unison. Fabric swished as they departed. They were the youngest of the dancers, Aesva realized; those whose natural lifespan had not yet ended. Their heartfires flared briefly as the door shut behind them.
Aesva stood alone before the Sky-King.
He regarded her for the space of ten heartbeats. "Thank you,” he said at last. "I... will not dismiss you, for I did not summon you. But you, too, are free to follow the yearnings of your heart.”
"What will you do now, Mighty One?”
"I do not know.” An odd, almost involuntary smile touched his features. "For the first time in many years, that does not seem such a bad thing. Live well, child.”
He stepped down from the dais and walked toward his chambers.
All around Aesva, tamarins dropped from the rafters like a silken rain. They struck the floor and frolicked in all directions until the hall seemed like a glittering silver ocean. One of them darted through the open door to the balcony and its fur became blinding in the morning brightness. In the sunlight at last, it leapt to the railing and raised its face to the sky.
THE END
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