Here Be Dragons: A Firelighter's Tale Read online

eyelashes. Everything around him turned ugly by comparison. The puddled, uneven street, the cracked mortar and swollen wood of the leaning buildings that had escaped her notice before, stood out in stark wretchedness. The muddy-bottomed children, chasing chickens with sticks, seemed pathetic. The food, perfectly acceptable in the past, was meager and dull. You ruin everything, she thought.

  She wasn’t sure he noticed. He stared at her, mostly, and ate. He stared around her, too, his gaze ticking to different people, but they were only quick, passing glances. He drew stares, as well. No one shone like that without drawing attention. “You don’t belong here anymore,” she told him at length, a little sadly.

  “I never belonged here,” he growled in his tea. “I was always an outsider.”

  “Kelway’s a real city now. That’s what they say. All real cities, nowadays, apparently, have an arena and gambling palace. Not libraries, museums—maybe even an opera house, but cock fights and daggers-in-the-wall.”

  “And ladies in the Lighthouse. You can always count on Kelway.”

  She shrugged, defensive in the face of his hostility, so open, so bitter. “I’ve been inside the gaming palace a few times. It isn’t that bad, I guess. I can’t take seeing the animals tearing each other to shreds, though. The men, I don’t mind so much.”

  He looked at her askance.

  “It’s good for business. I catch the surgeon’s overflow. And the outlaws and the ones without papers. And gambling burns many out; I get those, too.” She said the last with purpose. He might have guessed she was witching; she decided it was time he knew all of it.

  “Burns?”

  She folded her arms over her chest and sat back in her chair. “I’m a firelighter. What? You imagined I worked in the foundry? Or the fish market?”

  He played with his lemon seed, winding it between his thumb and forefinger, and said nothing for a while. “I hate Kelway,” he said finally, softly, as if it were a dark secret. “I’ve always hated it.”

  “You never told me you were leaving.”

  “Some places use mirrors and flames. You don’t have to use a crone.”

  “Your mother?” His selective listening annoyed her, but she sympathized with his concern. “I’ve heard it doesn’t hurt. And it’s what she wants.” She paused. He reminded her of a building storm. “Tell me about your ship. What’s its name?”

  “I arrived here on the Sea Star, but I’m taking a new commission aboard my mentor’s new vessel, Fool’s Leap.” His smile found his eyes at last. “I’ll have to join them in Headpoint next week.”

  She learned everything she never wanted to know about Tern’s blasted ship. And then he described the other ships he’d been aboard—the Hierophant, Crab Dancer, the White Rose—and everywhere he’d been. He told many of the usual tales mariners told: of giant fish, kelpies, dolphins, of islands full of satyrs and water-dogs and women who wore only flowers, of waterspouts and gales and whirlpools. “Stagg’s a true explorer; he wants to take Fool’s Leap as far as she’ll go. She’s smaller than the Rose, but sounder. We’re going even farther off the map this time,” he told her, open-faced and glowing with enthusiasm. “Who knows what we’ll find!”

  She hazarded a guess. “Dragons? That’s what all the maps say: here be dragons.”

  He ducked his head, smiling, sheepish. “I don’t think we’ll find dragons. I wouldn’t mind if we did, though. I’d love to see a dragon.”

  “I still have the one you carved for me that time.” She pulled it from between her breasts, snaked it out of her blouse, and dangled it at the length of its thong. He reached out to touch the crude carving, caressed the worn, smooth wood.

  “It’s warm,” he said.

  “I’m a firelighter. My heart’s fire burns,” she replied softly.

  ooo

  She purchased white lentils and a small, sweet onion for a soup. He somehow invited himself to dinner, filling her basket with bundles of lavender and rosemary and spinach, clusters of red peppers, and a spring melon.

  They walked the steaming brick streets, past the crooked tenements and bars, past the reeking fish market, past the docks and out onto a saltgrass-covered knoll where they could look down on the harbor and the dirty strip of beach, taking the long way back to her home. She told him a few of her more lurid tales, of negotiations with the crime syndicate, bribing the sheriff, assaulting a former friend-turned-thief with the leg bone of an auroch she had found in the salt marsh.

  “Firelighting can be an ugly business,” she explained. “So many are mad for Light by the time they find me; so often they want to take more than we’ve agreed. Some just press and whine, or try to abash me. But a few are so dark, so needy—just black emptiness—and I don’t think all the Light in the world could warm them.” She shivered with the memory of nights spent facing the darkness. He did not seem affected by her tales, did not seem to think any less of her or any more, but she had frightened herself.

  Back in her tiny flat, they made dinner together and ate over different, happier memories, the past they shared—a past drenched in sweet, wan light—the colorless, vapid light of youth, of predawn, of prehistory. After dinner, he sat sideways in one of her two chairs, his long legs draped over one side and his body folded strangely. Like a cat, he enjoyed lounging in bizarre positions. She sat cross-legged on the floor with her skirt piled in her lap, fixing a pipe of sweet herb for them. She lit it with a candle, pulled, and passed it to him.

  “This is good,” he breathed at length.

  “From my garden. I water it with tears.”

  He laughed as she poured whisky in her tea. “Oh, that looks awful.”

  “It’s good,” she frowned. “Keeps the chill out.”

  “You’re a firelighter—you have trouble with chills?”

  His amused tone offended her. Or perhaps it was that word on his lips. “Don’t chide me, Tern. I’m not Cuttle; I can hold my liquor.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if you were like Cuttle,” he said, so earnest she had to look away for a moment. She took the pipe from him. Within moments, a veil of smoke lay between them.

  He pulled himself upright in the chair, spiked his tea, took a manly sip of it, and wretched behind his hand. “Tea is good. Whisky is good. This is horrid.”

  “It probably just needs more honey.”

  “The spoon stands up in it as is, Candle—the last thing this needs is more honey.”

  She raised a toast. “To wealth and truth.”

  He balked at the Kelwayen blessing. “Wealth is filthy, really, don’t you think? And truth is a matter of opinion. Why don’t we drink to something better? To knowledge and beauty. Knowledge, at least, is worth acquiring.”

  “But beauty is as subjective as truth.”

  “No. Beauty just is. Now, whether it’s recognized or not, that’s another matter.”

  She drank in silence, watching him. Those broad shoulders…the way the muscles of his arms pulled the fabric of his sleeves tight when he rested his elbows on the table and propped his chin in his hand. The boy was still there in his eyes, but his features and body looked as if they had been chiseled by sea gales and ocean sun.

  The day before he left, five years gone, he had kissed her. It had been the first time he had kissed her anywhere but on the nose. Although others had used her, no one else had kissed her like that. The thing had been a shock—a groping tentacle of tongue, a deep eddy of mouth, an undertow of despair. Before she could ask him what it meant or talk about it at all, he had disappeared.

  He drained his cup. She let him finish the pipe and watched him as he lounged back in the chair, incandescent in the growing shadows, rendering the lantern’s light feeble. He had brought the stolen daylight with him; it lived inside him. If she tore open his shirt and bit into his stomach, it would be light that poured out, not blood.

  “Cuttle came to see me once,” she said, picking at the edge of her skirt. The lace there had torn and begun to unravel. “He tried to give me a promi
se note. I told him I only accept coin. He’s such an arsehead.”

  “Old Cuttle…. It’s strange. I can be on top of the world out there. I set foot in that house, and I’m six years old again.”

  “What did he do?” she demanded. Cuttle had never been light-handed with the boy, but she could not imagine him harming the man.

  He tilted his head back, sighing, the edge of a gasp or a laugh to it as he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Same old thing. Complained about this and that and how so and so has it in for him and the cow’s got mastitis just to spite him. And then he starts in on how mother’s illness was my fault. And it ended, always, with him taking a swing at me.” His gaze held hers again. “This time I dodged him and sat him down hard in his chair. I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised. He just sat there, staring at me. I left to find you. We didn’t exchange another word…. He was so light, Candle. Like a skeleton. And when I looked at him, staring at me out of those hollow eyes—it was like he wasn’t my father anymore. I felt sorry for him. I hate the man—but that’s how I felt.”

  She turned the conversation to mundane affairs—the sea, the gaming palace, wharf gossip. Although he had removed his shoes at the door, she persuaded him to take off his socks. “You smell like far away,” she assured him when he hesitated.

  He smiled at her blearily.

  “Shoes!” she snorted, uncoiling her resentment like a snake. “I hate shoes. We hide ourselves in