Anastira
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The tavern is too bright.
Voices mingling into a perilous slipstream, currents of words and syllables and vowels running together and pulling Carina from one to another; faces reflected in the polished wood of the bar counter, eyes glinting with the confidence of the drunk; lights flickering against the walls, transient, like so many intangible candle flames teetering on the edge of existence. Here, in the dimness, the faces and tapping fingers and red-bitten lips merge into a single monochrome palette, somewhere halfway between brown and gray. But it is too bright. Too bright.
They can see her, and so she knows it is too bright.
A flash of memory, the bitter taste of regret settling against her tongue: I’m sorry, mama, fleeting words whispered where her mother will never hear them. The daggers sheathed at her hip, against her leg, hidden against the beige of her clothing: suddenly heavy, weighing her down, heavier than any chains. There is the strangest feeling - a physical fight to lift one foot and put it in front of another, the ground anchoring her like a magnet, its gravity insurmountable. Her muscles seem to ache with the effort. She is tired. No - tired does not even begin to describe this feeling, the heaviness that sinks into her chest and creates a hollow blackness that paints her vision dark.
The eyes. They watch her. She can feel them.
It is too bright.
Three days ago, a week ago, a month, it all feels like yesterday. His lips so hot against her skin, feverish, she imagines they’re burning a brand into her neck: an incandescent mark of everything he is, everything he was. The memory laps her up like a tidal wave, or maybe a tsunami: the force of it almost knocking her off her feet. She wavers and tips towards a man sitting by the stage. The tattoos on his arms register, vaguely, as tattoos of his face. But when she blinks his face is gone, the tattoos are just swirling incoherent dark lines against a stranger’s skin and they mean nothing to her. Nothing means anything to her.
She opens her voice.
It is strange, how it has come to consume her, this music. Once, she believed she controlled it, the things that flowed from her mouth. But here, now, standing in the middle of the tavern staring at the musicians with their exotic instruments, she knows she is the slave, not the master; she belongs to her music, it does not belong to her. She can feel it flowing through her, pulsing with her heartbeat: soft at first, a funeral dirge sung as a lullaby beneath the undertone of the stage musicians; louder with time, soaring, emptying her lungs of air, her notes rising higher and higher. She takes a step forward. The musicians are staring.
They see her. It is too bright.
She can feel the plucking of the dulcimer like an off-tempo metronome, resonating through her body, pulling at her heart. The dulcimer is like his fingers, playing her skin as he tells her she’s beautiful: she, standing there in the darkness in her plain clothes, and neither of them knowing she’s about to steal six daggers from his father, neither of them knowing this will be their last night. The strings are the sound of her soul screaming as her fingers touch the daggers for the first time, a high shrill keen that falters on the notes, trembles with an inconstant vibrato. The stamping of the gitar player’s foot against the floorboards is the trembles of her heart as it thunders against her treachery, forces her to flee, to walk away from her crime as though forgetfulness can be forgiveness.
Her voice is a wail, notes tripping down a minor scale, harmonics weaving their way through in eerie dissonance, the instruments playing so quickly they almost match the racing of her heart. Her fingers weave themselves together as she sings, tangled tight, as though holding onto herself will save her from her demons. The instruments are so loud, but her singing is louder somehow, a wash of pain and fury and terror and loneliness and god, oh god why did she come here? This was a mistake. Here of all places. Here she cannot hide. Here she cannot escape. Here she will be seen, she cannot stop being seen, if she is hidden she will never be a champion.
She cannot pay this price. It is too high.
She cannot pay it even for freedom.
She closes her eyes, lets herself become a part of the music, tries to feel what it must be like for her listeners: the way it takes her in and swallows her, folds her in its deep embrace. But she doesn’t know what it’s like for them, she can’t know, it is different for everyone: that is the beauty of it. And because she knows the secret of it, the secret of her, there is something lost, a little less enchantment, a little less mystery.
With her eyes closed, the music swirling around her, the unexpected pinprick of pain is sharper when it comes, worse than it would be otherwise - at first, nothing, a numb ignorance of the world around her; suddenly pain against her arm, a single point that explodes like a star in her conscious. She swings back, jumping, everything going abruptly into overdrive, the pain cutting through her focus, causing her music to falter and tremble - all of the breath going out of her at once; and the pain becomes worse, deeper, elongates itself -
There is an ache that fills her up, disembodied, completely separate from the pain: a memory, the forest dark around her, the tree branches like gnarled black claws against the stars, a wailing voice. The feeling of being violated, filled up with something that isn’t her, something that doesn’t belong. Stars glimmering in the black nightcap of the sky, constellations and galaxies and nebulae stretching away into the vast unknown reaches of a world far away, a world without bounds, a world without chains, a world of freedom. The faint, unbidden yearning to fly away into that infinity, to leave all of this behind.
Go away, she tells it. Not now. Go away.
It haunts her in her dreams, when she closes her eyes; haunts her when she pickpockets on the streets; haunts her through every breath of every day. But not now. She can’t let it now.
She still does not understand where it comes from, or what it is.
She snaps her eyes open, and her hand is on one of her daggers by instinct, the curved edges of the winged hilt spreading against her fingers. Columba. It would be so easy to lift it from its sheath, to defend herself against the pain.
No. Not in here. Not in the tavern, close quarters, too many people around, so many eyes -
Something has cut her, she realizes hazily. Her arm. There is blood in her vision, blood dripping from her skin, red and hot and she can almost taste it in her mouth, the strange salty iron tang, she can almost feel it sticky in her throat. There is someone standing in front of her. A shadow. They are all shadows to her, but this one especially - the dark of her clothing, the dark of her hair. She thinks the figure speaks to her. It is strange, blurred, slim in her vision, she cannot quite seem to grasp onto it - but everything is blurred now, the tavern around her, and the pain is somehow sharper than she had imagined possible. She closes her eyes. She is faint, the world spins. A carousel going round and round, and she at the center, her fingers tight around Columba like a lifeline.
She hears sounds, a whisper of them, something close to syllables but not quite registering as words, but it does not matter...she can see the intention in the way the shadowy figure looks at her. She can hear it in the figure’s voice, too - a woman’s, high and lilting, the words rising and falling almost like music, like a strange kind of lullaby. There is an apology hidden in those syllables somewhere. She knows she should flinch away from the woman’s hands as they tend to the smiling red mouth of the wound, wrapping it carefully, almost tenderly. She knows she should run, pull Columba from its sheath and let it loose. But she can’t, she is frozen in place, it is almost as though her own music has turned its power on her - and she doesn’t know how to bring herself back to life.
Or maybe, maybe she is only numb because she has taught herself to be numb. Because it is too painful to remember the last time someone seemed to care.
I am sorry, she says, not knowing whether she says it out loud, if it is to herself or to her demons or to the woman bandaging her arm. I am sorry for the music.
She closes her eyes against the pain, against the touch she is too numb to feel, and there is only darkness.
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Musca. Musca, my little fly -
I have done the unthinkable, she whispers. Please -
It’s okay. - the shushing of his voice, the gentle track of his fingers tracing constellations against her skin. His voice divides itself into syllables, into poetry: we are galaxies, each of us, a map of stars in the dark, and when our galaxies collide we are like supernovae blooming in the night - she wants to listen, tries to listen, but it is so hard, he seems to slip away from her like water through her fingers, like grains of sand. Musca, his voice carves through the dark.
I am Carina. These unspoken words - she feels them inside her, welling up: this final gift, this final curse from a woman she has never known, the woman who abandoned her. She wants to say it out loud, but something stops her.
Carina. She did not understand it, in the beginning, but now she does. Carina: the nebula, the constellation, the keel of a ship prodding forward through the night. As though even her mother, walking away from the tiny newborn girl, knew, somehow, that that would not be the end. That Carina would go on through the dark, with the dark.
There is music inside of her, too, she finds: not the music of humans, not the music of instruments, but something deeper - the music of the cosmos, a cosmic noise translated through her lungs into something tangible, something human. She feels it in the metronome of her heart, the singing of the blood in her veins, the rhythm of her footsteps. She feels it as she walks away from him, as she turns into the shop with the daggers shining in front of her, as she flees that night with the blades tucked into her belt: Canes Venatici, she calls them. Her hunting dogs.
The music never stops -
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Now tell me… what purpose did that melody serve?
Her eyes snap open. The pain of the cut is piercing again, almost like the sharp scent of strong drink cutting at her throat and her nostrils. The girl from before is staring at Carina, still wrapping the cut, but this new voice does not belong to her. Around Carina, every sound within the tavern seems heightened, amplified. Without thinking she focuses on the other figure in front of her, tries to detect the rhythm of their heart pulsing at their wrist, sweat gathering against their white skin. But she finds nothing. The tavern is too loud, the music inside of her is too frantic, she can’t seem to focus.
Instinctively, she changes her presence, projects herself as smaller, frailer, more fragile. Anything to be invisible - unseen.
I am not a threat, she wants to whisper.
“I’m sorry,” she says, instead. “It was just a...I like to sing. Sometimes I -” She blushes like a child, suddenly bashful. Makes herself seem even smaller. “My mother always said I sang too much.” It is not even a lie. Even here, she can remember the smell of the herbs hanging on the walls, the rise and fall of the herbalist’s ululating wail as he told Jendayi that Carina was gone, what she had done, how she had taken the daggers. Carina lifts her eyes shyly to the figure in front of her, voice falling to a murmur. “But Cailean always loved it when I would sing.”
The white-skinned one inches closes, and it takes everything Carina has to keep her hand from straying to Columba, to keep herself from recoiling from the strange white skin, the purpled veins. She finds herself wishing it were Cailean instead. Tell me...I came to this city on the promise of splendor. Aer voice is neither woman nor man, something in between - bright, eager, with a vigor that is almost infectious. She finds herself clinging to the words for no reason, drinking them in like ambrosia. Of a battlefield where warriors from across the land sought to impress the gods themselves for the honor of a single wish.
The creature licks aer lips - aer tongue, a paled red; aer mouth like a canvas bleached of color. Carina shivers.
I watched. I saw. I left unimpressed. A bloodbath where most survived and the winner walked away with faint flowing hair. A parlor trick when I was promised wonder. The emphasis on the last word, wonder.
She can feel aer breath on her face, hot against her skin.
For the last year, I’ve been waiting. Back then, I did not know for what, but today your song gave me an answer as to what I seek. Where shall you next perform? A voice such as yours deserves to be heard by all.
An end to the words, a finality. They tug at her uncomfortably - the idea that she could have inspired a creature like this. If only it were Cailean - but Cailean would never come to a place like this. A city built on a tradition of bloodshed. It hits her like a wave, all over again, how little she belongs here, how out of place she is; this is not her, it was never her. But it is her last hope. To impress the gods for the honor of a single wish, as the white-skinned one would say.
“I came because I need help,” she whispers, the words catching at her throat. “I need to win these championships, or I’m lost.” She can feel tears stinging at her eyes, salty-hot, and she blinks, turning her gaze to the woman beside her instead, the girl who had bandaged her arm. “I think maybe I’ve always been lost and I just didn’t know, or I...I don’t know, maybe it’s the opposite, I’m not as lost as I believed. I left my...my home behind -”
Home. There is something about the dark-clothed woman that makes Carina feel as though maybe, maybe she will understand. That she will feel Carina’s pain. The names tattooed on Carina’s heart like a promise, like a regret: Cailean. Jendayi. Cailean. Jendayi. An ostinato of two broken hearts repeated endlessly in her mind.
Why did she leave them behind? Why did she walk away?
She pulls her gaze back to the white-skinned one. There are so many questions she should ask, so many things she should ask about. This one has seen the championships before, knows the city. Maybe ae could help her. She should ask aes name - but she feels frozen in place, unable to move her lips. Petrified by everything around her. It is too overwhelming. She has only been in this city, this Bren, for so little time, a few hours, and the idea of stepping into an arena is terrifying.
It will be different once her life is on the line, she knows that. But not now. Now, she is a coward. She is afraid.
She cannot go into that arena alone.
Without hearing the rest of what ae has to say, without knowing she’s even quite saying it, she turns to the woman next to her, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Please. Please, I don’t know who you are, but walk with me to the arena. I can’t do it alone.” Her eyes widen, huge, glassy with tears, and there is almost a cadence of song, a suggestion of poetry in her voice. “Please walk with me, at least to the gate. I know civilians can’t go inside, but I...I can’t go alone.”
“I’d love to,” the woman says. Her name - what is her name? Why does Carina not know? “I was planning to enter, myself. I know there can only be one champion, but...maybe we can work together. It’d be nice to have a familiar face in there.”
Carina bites her lip. She knows, she knows she should say no. An alliance - what a pretty idea...but if they both enter, they are enemies by default. Maybe this woman will die to Columba, or to a less merciful blade - Vulpecula, Sagitta. Or maybe Carina will die at this woman’s hands instead. You cannot trust anyone here, Carina, you are a fool to say yes to this woman, to give into your emotions -
I will stay with you.
Cailean’s voice, a vague memory like butterfly wings brushing against her mind. She falls into the sound of it helplessly, the warmth that floods her, the lullaby music singing in her heart.
Carina, my child, there is strength in you. You must trust yourself.
Jendayi, the faint roughness of her voice edging her words. An exotic tinge to the syllables, syncopating them - one against another. The remembrance of Jendayi’s hands, rough like her voice, holding Carina as a child, rocking her back and forth in front of a murmuring fire.
Carina lifts her eyes to the woman in front of her, the sounds of the tavern receding like a curtain pulled closed as she focuses on the woman’s face, on her eyes. “Tell me your name,” she says. “Tell me your name and I give you my word, we will fight together.”
“My name is Spider Lily...I think just Lily would be better, though. If we end up in the same spot, I’ll stand by you as an ally, and a friend.”
Carina nods - turns away, towards the door, out into the morning sunlight. There is something strange in walking next to Lily: she, standing out in her dark clothes, and Carina in her plain beige shirt and trousers, her daggers hidden. There’s a list somewhere, she knows, that will tell her where to go, which arena she is in; but she doesn’t need that. Not now, not since the night she stole into Cailean’s father’s shop and left Cailean behind for good.
Here, in the open, with her daggers weighing against her belt and her shins, she is simultaneously hidden and vulnerable: revealed by the sunlight, hidden by the crowds. A part of her wants to reach out, to hold Lily’s hand. But she has to walk away, she knows. She cannot enter the arena with this woman.
She turns her eyes on Lily one last time, gives the woman the smallest nod - and then she turns sharply and slips away into the crowd. Stops partway down the street and pauses, her hand snaking past her belt to clutch the crowned basket of Auriga’s gilded hilt. There is the faintest pulse, a gentle tug that draws her through the people, weaving past the buildings crowding around her, insistent.
She enters the arena almost without knowing, without realizing where Auriga leads her.
She is reminded, somehow, almost of a cathedral, or a grave. A holy place almost, sacred in life or in death. The gray of the stone melds gradually into black bedrock, the air becomes hot enough to sear her skin and almost crackling with dryness. Her lungs feel starved, aching, and she gasps in breath, chokes on the taste of smoke and the heavy suffocating thickness of ash, her breath coming out in hacking coughs, her throat raw. The metal of her daggers feels brightly hot against her skin, through the fabric of her trousers and shirt.
There is a wall of lava in front of her, a curtain of it like a fiery waterfall scorching through the air, filling the hall with the smell of it, with its heat. She pauses behind it, releases the hilt of Auriga. Auriga - her first blade, her charioteer. No. Auriga is too impulsive today.
She reaches to her shins and pulls Pegasus into one hand, Sagitta into the other.
The curtain of magma parts. There is a path in front of her, black stone arcing across a glowing river of lava. The arena stands in front of her: opening out like a cavern, a maw of blackness rimmed with the fire-light of the lava, an abyss. Her heartbeat hiccups in her chest. The music inside her: syncopated, racing, so fast she feels as though the rhythm of it blurs together into one never-ending drumroll, her hands sweaty, her jaw clenched against the taste of ash and smoke and fire and, yes, her own death. She will not survive this. She is not strong.
Are there others in this arena? She cannot say.
A stalactite plunges from the ceiling, piercing the ground. The stone floor shatters, a high-pitched drumroll. In her head, it registers as a different kind of music, almost bell-like, twinkling. A column of magma in its wake and then - then nothing, the floor reformed, a brittle black expanse in front of her.
She tries to think of Lily, of her comforting voice and her pact.
Her fingers clench tight around her daggers, so tight it hurts.
She steps forward onto the stone bridge.
Cailean, she thinks, and it is as though he is there beside her, forgiving, believing. His hand against hers, joined around Pegasus, inside the twirling wings of its hilt. My Musca, his voice says. My little fly. I’m not worried about you, you know.
She closes her eyes, her fingers white-knuckled. You should be.
No. In her mind, his voice caresses her music, joins its harmony. There is darkness inside you. But you are like a moth drawn to a flame. You are drawn to the light. A sensation, a fragment of memory, the softness of his lips against her neck, the gentle warmth of it almost cold compared to the heat of the arena. Use your wings.
Just her imagination, she tells herself, it’s just her imagination. But the knot in her stomach unwinds. She opens her eyes.
The smell of chrysanthemums in the windows, white jasmine curling against the walls. Jendayi, her hair flowing thick and black in curls and braids across her shoulders, against the coffee-brown of her skin. Her eyes brilliant like amber in Carina’s mind. Strike sweet and true, my child. The darkness belongs to you; make it your light.
If she lets her mind wander, she can almost feel Jendayi in the hilt of Sagitta, a different kind of warmth.
She checks her daggers one last time, each of them in turn: her left side for Cailean, sweet Columba and fleet-footed Pegasus and brilliant Auriga; her right for Jendayi, arrow-headed Sagitta and confident Vulpecula and all-knowing Circinus. And then she steps forward, off the bridge, onto the island, and behind her the bridge shakes and crumbles from the edges, sinking into the roaring heat of the molten lava.
And so she calls forward her daggers, her hunting dogs, her Canes Venatici; and she turns, seeking, to see if Lily stands within the arena walls.
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