Here Be Dragons: A Firelighter's Tale Read online

them. They’re like these little castles we wear on our feet—these silly protective shells.”

  “You wear sandals.”

  “Mine are cages.” She shifted it back to him. “Look at you—with those wooly socks. And these dreadful boots—oiled so even the rain can’t get in.”

  “Damp socks are most unpleasant.”

  “Oh, to live in a barefoot world!” She stretched to the accompaniment of bangles and lay back, pleased with warmth and closeness, clenching and unclenching her toes.

  “I don’t mind being barefoot with you,” he said, his voice soft, his tone too earnest for such a silly statement.

  She laughed at him. He joined her, seeming unaware that he was the subject of her amusement. “You’re such an idiot,” she teased.

  “Sometimes. But now I’m just happy.” He curled an arm around the back of the chair and rested his head on it. “I’m always happy with you.”

  She let that remark hang. He didn’t follow it with anything. She didn’t look at him, didn’t try to read his expression. Instead, she enjoyed the ensuing silence, staring at the flicker of shadows on the ceiling, blissful, amber light behind her lids when her eyeblinks lengthened. A tiny thought intruded on her contentment, niggling, persistent, willful. “Why did you leave?” she asked, whispering. But Tern had fallen asleep, hanging all amok in the chair like some overgrown, wearied child.

  ooo

  She roused slowly to find him awake, already washed, dressed, and shaven, restless and alert. He stalked back and forth, almost too tall for her ceiling, filling her small flat with annoying male energy. He smiled that half-faced smile when he saw she was awake, though, and stood straight and still. “I would have made breakfast, but I couldn’t make sense out of anything. I was afraid I’d make something that turned us into giant toadstools or covered our toes with green fur.”

  She stretched and scrubbed her hair out of her face; it had attacked her sometime during the night. Now, it sulked about her in a frizzy black mess that stuck to her skin and curled around her wrists. “I didn’t expect it,” she yawned. “I’ll make something.”

  “Can we go out?” His tone was almost pleading. He added as she balked, “I have money.”

  She shrugged. He leapt at the door. Motionless, she watched him tug on his boots, every line of him taut and eager to be outside. “You know, if you just want to leave,” she said, “I have no problem with that. I enjoyed seeing you agai—”

  “No!”

  She blinked. “Tern?”

  He stared out the closed door as if he could see through it. “I mean— Can’t you come with me?” He turned, hat in hand, to face her. “Not just to breakfast…but to see her. Candle? Please?”

  The sight of him then, returned and grown, worldly and looming, afraid to see his own mother by himself, touched her. She assented, accepting the plea as if it had been an invitation to meet the queen, and pulled herself together.

  Beyond the door, a light, warm rain fell. She covered her head with a shawl. Kelway, moist and hot as a lover’s breath, greeted them with wet streets and greenish light, and the smells of salt and rot and desperation. Tern offered to shield her with his coat, and for a moment she paused, pressed beneath his arm, surrounded by the pleasant scent of him, foreign-spicy-wool-man smell—the wide, wild ocean and lands far away—before shirking free. “I’m a Kelwayen; I don’t melt,” she told him.

  ooo

  He stopped in the long corridor, outside Ember’s room, head bowed before the heavy, reinforced metal door, unmanned. “I can’t,” he whispered.

  “You came all this way,” she said. “You won’t be able to see her like this again.” She opened the door for him.

  With bent arms, they shielded themselves from the brightness that poured through the doorway. Together, they walked into the silvery light. It flashed about the room as they entered, blue then violet then whiter than white. “Mother?” Tern’s voice echoed in the empty brilliance. The light flickered yellow, shrank, turning green and pale, like the rain-drenched sky outside. In the subdued glow, the features of the room became visible. Small, square, windowless—bleak as a prison, it contained few objects and was furnished only with a rush mattress, a simple nightstand, a small trunk, and a single chair. Ember, a small, frail woman in her middle years, sat in the chair, facing the wall closest to the outside, as if looking out the nonexistent window. Shadows danced on the wall beside her, behind her back. Slowly, they coalesced into shapes—birds—seagulls flying, silent and ethereal.

  “Hello,” she said, still focused on her blank, windowless wall. Shadow gulls amassed behind her. On the nightstand, water bubbled in the washbasin.

  “Hello,” said Tern shyly, standing stiff and wary beside the bed. “I heard, that is Cuttle—Father—told me—he wrote to me…. I wanted to see you.”

  Shadows poured over the wall, drizzled like rain, and smeared the gulls. Long sinuous shapes pulled apart from them. Snakes writhed up the ceiling. The trunk creaked open. Shifts of pale linen, soft pinks, greens, and yellow, crawled out and hid beneath the bed.

  Ember turned. Her silvery blue eyes studied him. “You look like a nice young man,” she concluded and turned back to her blank wall. The shadow snakes dripped down the other side of the room.

  “It’s Tern.” Emotion clenched his voice tight.

  “Tern!” Light flashed like lightning, silent lightning. It flickered around the room and banished what remained of the snakes. The water in the basin steamed. “What a beautiful name! Someone must have loved you, little one, to have fastened that to your lapel.”

  Tern stared at her without moving, but the white plume of the hat clutched between his hands trembled. Candle’s heart broke for him. Her resentment and anger fled beneath the soles of her feet. She stroked his coatsleave and stepped up beside him. Ember smiled at her. “Candle! How are you, child? What have you brought me today?”

  Candle flushed. “I visit her sometimes—on feast days and such. She likes ginger biscuits, and sometimes I bring her lavender soaps.” To Ember she said, “I’m sorry Auntie Em, I didn’t bring any treats this time. Do forgive me.”

  Ember held her hand out for a squeeze. Yellow light flooded the room as Candle took her hand. “Your warm presence is a treat, dear one.” She nodded at Tern and whispered aside her hand. “Look at this delicious young man come to see me. Isn’t he a sight? I can’t fathom what he’s about, but he says his name is Tern.”

  Candle knelt beside her. “He’s worried about you, Em. He’s afraid for you. Of the Lighthouse.”

  Ember tilted her head at him, birdlike. The gulls returned. “I want to go to the Lighthouse.” The shifts flew around their feet. “Did you bring me a present?”

  He handed her the white feather from his hat. She fanned her cheeks with it and smiled. “I want to go to the Lighthouse. I’ll die there, but I’ll be able to see the ocean again. I’ll be able to hear the birds and see the sky. It’s no good to shine too brightly, here. Shine, and they’ll lock you away. Better to burn in the Lighthouse. Better to shine and burn.”

  ooo

  They left the Asylum in silence. Candle coaxed Tern to the ancient, unfinished bridge beside the seawall. He took quick, long steps and kept his head down, his hat pulled low. The Asylum had dimmed his Light. He reminded her of the sun obscured by clouds. Kelway, also, seemed grimmer and darker than before, the sky heavy with clouds. The wind off the ocean blew cool.

  They stood together on the abandoned bridge. Tern gripped the railing with both hands, leaning forward as if he were about to be sick. Candle squatted beside him, huddled in her shawl, wringing her skirt between her hands. The ocean heaved around them, gray as a dead woman’s lips.

  “Why did we come here exactly?”

  “It’s the Bridge to Nowhere. Or to Everywhere. To the end or the beginning—we never could decide. You used to like it. Or you seemed like you did.” She touched the toe of his nearest boot with a fingernail. He didn’t notice. S
he could have mashed it with her fist, and he probably wouldn’t have felt it. He wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t listening. He stood beside her, far away.

  “You kissed me here.”

  He fixed his full attention on her. “I kissed you? When was that?”

  “Before you left. Here. You don’t remember?”

  He turned away. “Those days before—everything’s hazy.”

  “I remember. You kissed me, and the next day you were gone.”

  “It didn’t happen like that.”

  “Yes, it did!”

  “That isn’t how I meant for it to happen.”

  “Well, that isn’t the same thing,” she said crisply. She wanted to hurt him suddenly. “It certainly wasn’t what I wanted either. You were less than romantic, just all desperate and drunk.”

  The barb didn’t wound the way she thought it would. He stared at the sea, seeming to see something she could not. “I must have been trying to prove to myself—” He shrugged like a horse trying to rid itself of flies. “There are many things I can’t remember clearly. Maybe I don’t want to remember. Cuttle was…cruel…in every possible way.”

  Understanding dawned on her. She felt the blood drain from her face. Not knowing what to say, she laid a hand atop his. Finally she offered, “I had an uncle that did things…made me do things. I know how...I know. It’s all right.”

  He turned to her, his face wild and angry. “Small wonder you despise me. I savaged you and then