Anastira
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Carina counts to the rhythm of a heartbeat.
One - Circinus rematerializing at her belt, its compass shining angrily, the lava-light turning its hilt into a watching eye.
Two - Spider Lily erupting, a miniature firework, so many beautiful colors, and oh, Carina wants to hold this moment in her memory forever, the beauty of it: this canvas of blood, of life, all of it dissipating into fire and flame, Jendayi would love it. Jendayi would be in awe.
Three - the pain of Spider Lily’s explosion, searing, the smell of burning fabric and her own singed skin. If she closes her eyes, it is like basking in the fire at home, the smell of jasmine and white chrysanthemum, the heady fragrance of dark wood.
You wanted me to kill you, she thinks. But I refused. And this is my punishment.
I will die here, she realizes suddenly. I cannot escape this.
Four - shedding burning cloth to the arena floor, her projection shifting even as her lungs burn, the suffocating choking taste of smoke, bitter. Her projection changing: a woman, not quite tangible, not quite mortal; instead of clothing, she is sculpted from wild flowing lines - a spirit, almost, an elemental made of transparent silvered smoke that curls and wreaths itself around Spider Lily’s fire.
Five: a body, hurling towards her through the flames, this strange paradox of elements - a frozen corpse flying through the air into the middle of Spider Lily’s bonfire tapestry.
Carina’s mind goes blank.
____________________
She remembers:
Kneeling on the ground, the dirt dark under her nails and against the lines of her palms, the pale, wintered sun casting her shadow long against the ground. Her hands curled against the loose soil like claws. The daggers laid out in front of her, reflecting the sunlight like malformed mirrors, staring up at her defiant.
She is alone here, alone with the short tundra grasses shivering around her, a collective shuddering sway beneath the swooning fingertips of the wind. It has been two days since she left Cailean’s father’s shop in the middle of the night with these daggers that did not belong to her. She can feel her feet burning from walking so long, her eyes burning from exhaustion. Everything on fire.
She is cold. She cannot remember ever being so cold in her life. She was found at the foot of the mountains, where the trees clustered like a convent, faithful; where the sawtoothed peaks gave way to rolling hills and valleys and the beginnings of stepped farms cascading down towards the smallest of the villages. But here, in the middle of the pass, there is no temperate warmth. She shivers, and shivers, and the short grasses shiver with her, and everything hurts.
A corpse of a dove lies next to her dagger, frozen in a snowstorm. Her stomach burns with hunger.
I am going to die, she thinks, but the realization doesn’t hurt the way it should. She is numb to it, numb to the cold and to the fire. A part of her wants to die. Then, maybe, Cailean would find her body here, next to her six stolen daggers, and he would retrieve them. He would have left knowing she had paid the price of betrayal.
Please, please let me die.
She whispers it again and again and again, feels the music of it rise within her like peace. Her fingers pass over the hilts of her daggers, letting their magic seep into her skin, and she can feel it, the anticipation. She has already guessed Columba’s power - she knew the first night, when she hunted a rabbit for food and accidentally cut her finger. A shallow cut, but it should have hurt. It should have stung as it bled.
But there was no pain.
She reaches for Columba’s hilt, the beautiful pale dove’s wings as delicate, as fragile as the body of the bird lying next to it -
Her fingers brush Auriga.
A flash of pain, a hunger: the cold cut through with a fire, but not a searing fire; a gentle warmth, Jendayi’s voice singing her lullabies. So strong she feels as though her heart’s being pulled from her chest with the strength of her longing. Oh, God, please -
when the black night
calls at last my name
my dreams
wake in sleeping
when the summer’s hearth is burning
in my arms
my child, be safe with me
my love
winter’s solstice stays its hand…
____________________
Carina wakes with a start. She is not cold. She is not frozen. She is on fire, her skin burns with the heat of it, the flames of the cloth licking against her ankles.
She steps away from the discarded fabric, clutches Pegasus and Auriga, her belt settled against her hips, the leather of her shoes warm against her skin - as though she’s walking on the dying embers of Jendayi’s hearth.
Jendayi’s voice echoing in her head: remember what I told you -
____________________
“Life,” Jendayi says, her voice a murmur as she stirs the fire with her hands: “life is about shattering the wine glass.”
Carina lifts her head. She is eight years old, and already she’s been punished twenty separate times for pickpocketing. Caught. “A wine glass,” she says, not understanding. She has seen the trick, of course, a singer poised on a stage with a delicately fluted glass standing in front of her, a note sung high and loud, the glass shattering onto the floor with the force of the sound. But what does a singer and a pile of broken glass have to do with life?
Jendayi closes her eyes.
“It is like this, Carina. Everyone is staring at you - they always stare at you. You know what it’s like when you sing.” (Here she smiles, a wry smile that curves one side of her mouth more than the other, her eyes flickering with a glint of amusement.) “You can’t help but draw attention to yourself, except when you’re pickpocketing. Then you become invisible. How?”
Carina swallows. “I don’t want them to see me,” she says. “So they don’t.”
“Yes. But when you’re singing - when you’re singing, you can’t hide, can you?”
Carina feels it, then. She may only be eight years old but she already knows the feeling of terror, panic fluttering its deadly wings like a butterfly caught in her chest. A bird trying to beat its way free of her ribcage. “I…”
“But your music is your greatest weapon.” Jendayi’s eyes are sad, irrevocably sad, and somehow the child Carina does not quite understand what Jendayi is about to say. Or, maybe - she doesn’t want to understand, doesn’t want to hear these hopeless, deathly words from this woman who worships life, who worships all that is living. “Sometimes you have to shatter the wine glass, Carina. Take what you have and use it to break something - something or someone. To protect yourself. Something so reckless, so shocking that all they can do is stare at the broken pieces you’ve left behind, so they’ll forget about you. They’ll look at it, at all of those little pieces, your beautiful destruction...and once they’re remade, they will forget they ever wanted to hurt you.”
____________________
The child Carina does not understand. She does not see why she would need to defend herself, what could be so horrible she would have to break the world around her.
But standing in the middle of the arena with Pegasus in one hand and Auriga in the other, Carina feels. She understands. She knows, in the way you can understand the vague silhouette of something without truly seeing it - and then that silhouette comes into focus and becomes a person, a creature, a thing. Suddenly understood, suddenly known.
She stops, catches her breath, closes her eyes, letting her projection falter briefly. Focuses on the fox, then on Spider Lily, counting the seconds that go past. Feeling their heartbeats, the emotions welling up inside of them: tiny little signals, vital signs that give away the conflict, the pain, the contradictions. She could do it, she knows. She could use this focus and take her music and reach into them, inside of them, tap into the deepest parts of who they are and try to break them apart from the inside out. Take the paradoxes that make them who they are and play them against each other, a music of dissonance, a music of discordance, a music of ruin.
Defend yourself, Carina.
There are those that would betray you.
Shatter the wine glass -
No. That is not what it is about. Jendayi, stirring the flames with her hands, raising her eyes to meet Carina’s. The bouquet of jasmine and chrysanthemum. Love, loyalty, purity, happiness. Jendayi would not want Carina to break them, not like this. This is not what she meant by shattering the wine glass. She meant something else entirely.
Jendayi’s voice echoing, over and over again, If you see a flower, Carina, you are never alone, you are with me; if you see a flower, Carina, you are never alone, you are with me -
Carina looks towards Lily, Spider Lily with her flowers, with her fire. Towards Taria with her cleverness, her fox’s mask -
It hits her like a thunderclap, the realization, the pull of Auriga in her hand, and she stops singing suddenly, her voice cutting off into abrupt silence.
The daggers. The way they pulled her in that night, glinting on the wall in Cailean’s father’s shop. The way they settle so perfectly in her hands, the weight of them.
Jendayi, explaining magic to Carina for the first time: magic is a misnomer. It is merely ordinary talent and skill -
Cailean, staring at a fire dancer whirling under the festival lanterns: Cailean’s eyes gleaming as they catch sight of the sword. Carina standing behind him as he turns to look at her, the music spilling out of her mouth. The roughness of his hands, the way he’d always slip out at night from the back door of the shop, the burns that appeared overnight on his fingers and palms and disappeared just as quickly.
The truth she has failed to see for so long.
These daggers were not meant to harm. They were meant to protect. They were always meant to protect - meant to protect her.
____________________
It is night when he comes to see her, it is always night; she is a creature of the night, hates the sun. In the dark she can’t see the burns on his hands, but she can feel the wrappings he’s put on them when he reaches out to take her hands in his. She lets him fold her against him, listens to the beat of his heart, lets the music inside of her attune itself to the rhythm of him, the music that is Cailean.
“You’ve done it again,” he whispers.
Yes. She has. She’s been pickpocketing. She doesn’t even nod her head; he knows already.
“This isn’t you.”
She closes her eyes. Focuses on his heartbeat. Lets the lullaby of it lull her half asleep.
“My father, maybe he could - maybe he could help you. He makes things, magical things.” There is a knowing in his voice, the kind of knowledge that terrifies her, she doesn’t want him to see what she really is inside. “I know you’re not that girl, Carina, but I’d do anything, you know that, I want you to be free -”
She wants to be free, too. To shatter the glass cage with her voice alone, the power of her will and her music.
“Just...if you need anything. The shop, we have things…”
He kisses her. It is a gentle kiss, soft and fleeting, the kind that lasts an instant and seems to last an infinity, and she clings to it, the innocence of it. His hands squeeze hers gently and then he walks away, his silhouette disappearing from her, and maybe it’s this exact moment that she remembers, years later, standing outside the window of the shop where Cailean had once bound a dove’s broken wing. Maybe it’s those exact words, or that gentle kiss playing inside her head as she works the lock, her pickpocket’s fingers moving across the mechanism like a shadow, letting her inside.
She slips across the room like a ghost, searching. For Cailean, maybe, but he is not here.
She feels the daggers like a sudden piercing throb of her heart, an irresistible pull.
Did Cailean know she would come this night? Is that why those daggers were on the wall, waiting for her, waiting to pull her in with their enchantment? Her fingers, prying them from the walls one by one, their hilts shining in her hands. Auriga, Sagitta, Vulpecula for Jendayi - Columba, Pegasus, Circinus for Cailean. But they were never for Cailean, they were never for Jendayi.
They were for her. They always had been. They were made for her; Cailean made them for her himself.
That is why she remembers, standing in the middle of a molten arena with betrayal in her heart, the one thing she overlooked that night, the truth hidden bare in front of her eyes: his silhouette in the darkened window of the workshop, watching her. Knowing she has stolen the daggers. Letting her go.
Knowing she will not be gone for good.
____________________
His voice, his words: I want you to be free. Did he know she would have to leave him to understand? That it would take fighting in this arena to realize the things she should have seen from the beginning? The daggers were his way of giving her the space she needed, the gift of being able to walk away from everything she had ever known, without being helpless. So that she would be protected when she came here, to this battle to the death, to understand what it was she’s misunderstood for so long.
I am meant to be here, Carina thinks, spinning around her wildly, her eyes raking across the black obsidian of the arena, the white-hot of the lava, the fox and Spider Lily’s dancing figures. But the boon I’ve asked for is not meant to be given to me. All this time I’ve thought it was the elemental darkness that took me and caged me and made me a slave, but it was me. It was the violence, the murder, the lust for revenge, the betrayal, the distrust. That is the real darkness inside me.
Shatter the wine glass. Break them, Jendayi had said, but - she’d told Carina to remake them, too, hadn’t she? Your beautiful destruction...so once they are remade, they’ll forget they ever wanted to hurt you -
Carina has misunderstood for so, so long.
She is not supposed to break them - not for good. She is supposed to break them free. Give them what they have lost, what they are missing, so they can remake themselves, so they can finally be whole.
The fox, Spider Lily - they are not her enemies.
Her enemy is the very thing that brought her inside the arena, her own greed, her own misunderstanding. She is her own shadow. She is her own slave.
She knows, suddenly, what her boon must be.
Shatter the wine glass, Carina.
I’m not worried about you, Musca. You will always search for the light.
She wants the pain to stop. The loneliness. She wants to touch the fox and Spider Lily and so many others, to make them feel something that is not anger, or fear, or sorrow, or even the kind of sophomoric comfort of a lullaby. She wants to make them feel again, something bigger than themselves, something that doesn’t hurt.
She reaches back through time, a shifting clock with its gears wound backward, her memories like the pages of a book: focuses all the joy, all the love, all of the purest most concentrated happiness she can, distilled - sweet summer mornings with dew on the grasses and speckling the leaves of the wide-trunked trees, snow carpeting the mountains in wintertime and sparkling frost in the villages, festival lanterns strung across pathways and music filling the streets, the feeling of flying. A song of hope, a song of remembrance, a song of pasts and a song of futures. Please, she thinks, please, Spider Lily, do not try to die. It is too early. There is life in you.
She lets her song flood outwards towards the rest of the arena, spreading out from her like ripples in a lake, weak at the edges. This is me, she wants to say. This is who I am. This is who we are.
The warmth of the sun beating down on a meadow, the exquisite melody of a river mingling with birdsong mingling with the rustling of wind through branches, flowers making a brilliant carpet of the ground. Come with me, she wants to say. Stop fighting. Stop hurting. Let yourself dream. There is more than just this boon, more than just this fight -
Shatter the wine glass.
Closing her eyes, she abandons her focus on Pegasus and lets herself fall into Auriga entirely, raises the blade up and plunges it as hard as she can against the ground. And in that moment she sings with all the freedom and all the power her lungs can hold, a high loud shriek that strains her throat and aches like a sore, leaves her gasping - and as she dances away from the fox and Spider Lily, a stalactite from the ceiling cracks with the strength of her voice and separates completely, falling, a plunging black arrow of death, a supersized Sagitta splitting open the ground of the arena -
The lava billows upwards, and in it Carina sees the fierce warmth of Jendayi, the brilliant fire of Cailean’s love.
This is for you, she thinks, staring at the fox and Spider Lily. You are people too. Her projection shifts and changes into something different, surreal, a tall slender woman who stands not with Jendayi’s warmth but with constellations in her eyes and stars beneath her skin, her hair flowing long and dark and wild and free, barely human. Her image, this vision, like a universe of galaxies and nebulae and supernovae condensed into one mortal body.
Her gaze flickers from one competitor to the next, around the arena, the light of the lava burning against the starlight shards of her eyes.
You were not mine to take, but that does not mean you will not be free.
She sinks to her knees, her face turned to the ceiling of stalactites, Pegasus dropping from her hands to the floor and disappearing in a flash. She will not run anymore. She closes her eyes, a swirling form of stardust, an infinite universe with Auriga laid delicately across the palms of her hands - and she sings.
____________________
Cailean’s hands pause, trembling. The air of the workshop shimmers with the heat of his forge. Her music twists inside him, a siren’s song.
Carina, his lips whisper.
Jendayi reaches out, touches his hand gently. “She is strong.”
He closes his eyes. He remembers: the cool of her hands, the warmth of her lips. He knows, somewhere far away, Carina will feel this memory, too, through the lifeline that is Auriga. Somehow, the magic will connect them. She will feel his love. They are tangled together by the irrevocable gravity of a black hole, forever balanced on the event horizon.
She is strong, Jendayi’s voice echoes.
He smiles:
I know.
I feel it, too.
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