Feral made a sound that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Kem, I think.”
“Really? Kem?” Sarai wrinkled her nose. Kem had been with them since the beginning. He’d been a footman before the Carnage, and still wore the livery he’d died in, which to Sarai’s mind suggested a distinct lack of imagination.
“Why?” Feral asked Sarai, waggling his eyebrows. “Who would you kiss?”
In a tone both arch and light, Sarai replied, “I kiss dozens of people every night.” And she touched a spot just above the outer curve of one cinnamon eyebrow. “Right here. Men and women, babies and grandparents. I kiss them and they shudder.” Her voice was like ice, and so were her hearts. “I kiss them and they grieve.”
“That’s not kissing,” said Feral. He had been teasing, merry, and now he wasn’t.
He was right, of course. It was not kissing, what Sarai did to people in the deep of night. “Maybe not,” she said, still arch, still light, “but it’s as close as I’ll ever come to it.” She pushed down her shoulders and lifted her chin. End of discussion, her posture said.
Feral looked like he might press the issue, but all of a sudden Ruby’s voice grew louder. “Well, let’s just see about it, shall we?” she said, followed shortly by a singsong call of, “Feral, where are you?”
Feral froze like prey in a raptor’s shadow. “Oh no,” he said.
Ruby appeared in an arch of the arcade, looking like one more orchid in the forest, her slim form a stem upholding a bloom of riotous hair. Feral tried to melt out of sight, but it was too late. She’d spotted him. “There you are. Oh, hello, Sarai, hope you slept well. Feral, I need you for a second.”
Sparrow was right behind her. “You do not need him,” she said. “Leave him alone!”
And the chain of events that followed was a perfect illustration of the minor chaos that passed for life in the citadel.
Ruby seized Feral by his collar and yanked his face down to hers. He struggled. She held on, mashing her lips against his and doing something to his mouth that looked and sounded less like kissing than devouring.
The temperature dropped. The air over their heads churned and darkened, a cloud coalescing out of nowhere, gray and dense and gravid with rain. Within a second the gallery was full of the wild tang of ozone and a fullness of moisture that made them feel they were inside a storm even before the first drops burst forth, fat and full and very cold, like the bottom dropping out of a bucket. Sarai felt the frigid spatter, but Ruby was the target, and the girl was soaked in an instant.
Her gasp freed Feral’s lips from suction. He wrenched himself away and staggered back, glaring and wiping his mouth, which was undevoured but glistening with spit. Ruby tried to skitter clear of the cloud, but it pursued her.
“Feral, call it off!” she cried, but he didn’t, so she charged straight toward him, cloud and all. He dodged and ducked behind Sarai, into whom Ruby caromed in a plash of sodden, icy silk.
It was Sarai’s turn to gasp. The rain was arctic. “Feral!” she managed to croak. The cloud vanished as it had come, and Sarai pushed away from Ruby, shocked and streaming. Beneath her feet the floor had become a wide, shallow lake. The orchids glistened, rivulets of rain streaming from their fleshy petals. Her own slip was wet-dark and clinging to her body, and she was now thoroughly awake. “Thank you so much,” she said to Feral, who was still wiping the saliva off his face.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, surly.
When they were little, they’d thought he made the clouds, and why wouldn’t they? There was no one to explain it to them, or Sarai’s gift to her, or the girls’ gifts to them. The gods had died and left them to their own devices.
Feral wished, and clouds appeared. Even before he’d known to wish for them, they’d come, tied to his moods and terribly inconvenient, to hear Great Ellen tell it. How many times had the nursery flooded because when this little boy was angry or excited, clouds filled the air around him? Now he could control it, more or less, and called them on purpose. Sometimes they were rain clouds, heavy and dark, and sometimes airy tufts of white that cast delicate shade and twisted into shapes like hunting ravids or castles in the air. There was snow from time to time, always a treat, and hail, less of a treat, and sometimes sultry, muggy vapors that smelled of growth and decay. Occasionally, perilously, there was lightning. Sarai and Feral were ten or eleven when a paper kite appeared with some fog, and they realized he didn’t make the clouds. He ripped them out of faraway skies. He stole them.
Cloud Thief, they called him now, and this was his part to play in keeping them alive. The river was out of their reach and rain was seasonal. Their only source of water for much of the year was Feral’s clouds.
Ruby’s riot of hair had gone otter-pelt sleek, still sluicing off the remnants of rain. Her white slip was plastered to her body and quite transparent, her small nipples and the divot of her navel plainly visible. She made no move to cover herself. Feral averted his eyes.
Ruby turned to Sparrow and conceded, with evident surprise, “You know, you’re right. It’s not like kissing ghosts. It’s warmer. And . . . wetter.” She laughed and shook her head, fountaining spumes of rain from the ends of her hair. “A lot wetter.”
Sparrow didn’t share her laughter. Stricken, the girl spun on one bare heel and darted back out to the garden.
Ruby turned to Sarai. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, perfectly oblivious to what had been clear to Sarai for months now: that Sparrow’s affection for Feral had changed from the sisterly feelings they all had for him into something . . . well, to use Ruby’s words . . . warmer. Sarai wasn’t going to explain it to Ruby—or to Feral, who was equally oblivious. It was just one of the ways life was getting more complicated as they grew up.
She slapped at her wet slip and sighed. At least hers was dark gray, and so hadn’t gone see-through like Ruby’s, but she would still have to change. “It’s almost dinnertime,” she said to Ruby. “I suggest you get dry.”
Ruby looked down at herself, then back up at Sarai. “All right,” she said, and Sarai saw the telltale spark in her eye.
“Not like that—” she said, but it was too late.
Ruby burst into flames. Sarai had to lurch back from the blast of heat as Ruby was engulfed in a crackling, deep-orange column of fire. It kindled in an instant, like lamp oil kissed by a spark, but died more slowly, the flames receding until her form was visible within them, her flesh absorbing each lick of fire one by one. Her eyes were the last reservoir of flame, burning as red as her name so that she looked, for a second, like a temple icon to an evil goddess, and then she was just herself again—herself and only herself, nary a shred or ashen tatter remaining of her dress.
They called her Bonfire, for obvious reasons. While a baby Feral might have caused inconvenience, a baby Ruby had had a more dangerous effect, compounded by the volatility of her nature. It was a good thing, then, that their nursemaids had been dead already. Ghosts were not combustible, and neither was mesarthium, so there had been no risk of her setting the citadel alight.
“All dry,” said the girl, and so she was. Her hair, unburned, was wild once more, still crackling with the fire’s kinesis, and Sarai knew that if she touched it, it would feel like a bed of coals, and so would her bare skin. She shook her head, glad Sparrow had missed this display.
Feral was still standing with his back turned. “Tell me when it’s safe to look,” he said, bored.
Sarai told Ruby, “That was a waste of a dress.”
Ruby shrugged. “What does it matter? We won’t live long enough to run out of dresses.”
Her voice was so casual, so matter-of-fact, that her words swept past all of Sarai’s defenses and pierced her. It was more of a shock than the rain.
Won’t live long enough . . .
“Ruby!” said Sarai.