Fireheart Tiger Read online

  “I’m all right,” Thanh says. “I just needed some air to think on what Pharanea said.”

  “Ah.” Eldris smiles. She doesn’t believe Thanh, but the lie wasn’t meant to be believed. It was just social grease, intended to keep wheels turning. “Walk with me awhile, will you?”

  Thanh looks back at the throne room.

  Eldris shakes her head. “They’re going over documents. Pharanea isn’t going to bring anything new to the table.”

  Thanh says, slowly and cautiously, “You could just be trying to trick me.”

  Eldris’s gaze rests on her, blue and unreadable. “Yes. But why would I leave the room if my advisers were going to do anything significant?”

  “Mother—”

  Eldris laughs. “She’s faced down the Quỳnh and the Ngân Kỳ. Do you really think she needs a chaperone?”

  She does, sometimes. She doesn’t know everything. The thought is an unsettling stone in Thanh’s belly. But Eldris’s blue gaze draws her: the curve of her lips, the bare skin at the nape of her neck, the thought of running her hand over soft, translucent, yielding skin. “Let’s go,” Thanh says.

  They walk along the edge of the raised platform, by the side of the pillars. Thanh doesn’t know what to say: heart too large in chest, acutely aware of how everything about her feels sad and washed out. Eldris—who was never one for contemplative silence—breaks it without a trace of shame or regret. “How have you been?”

  Thanh thinks of fire in her bedroom, of the long, long nights remembering what it felt like to be left to burn in the palace in Yosolis. She’s so desperately lonely, in what should be her home. Sometimes she wishes Giang had come back with her. Thanh hadn’t known Giang, not exactly—they only met the night of the fire, running through burning corridors—but she’d have had someone with her who understood. But Giang smiled at her and squeezed her hand, and disappeared into the crowd the moment the royal family came for Thanh. Not altogether surprising: What servant girl wants to be noticed by her masters? Fame is a double-edged sword. “I’ve been all right, I suppose. Busy.”

  Eldris laughs. “I can see. Good. It’s high time she finally recognized that you’re of age.”

  And no longer young enough to be a hostage, Thanh supposes. Two years home, a princess in her own right, with responsibilities of her own. She shouldn’t be so resentful: it’s unfilial and improper and she knows Mother had no choice if she wanted Ephterian support to maintain her throne against the usurper dynasty and the hunger of neighboring countries. She knows that Ephteria—of which Eldris is part—didn’t give Mother a choice. Yet still . . . still, she feels like she’s twelve again, watching the shores of Bình Hải recede, Mother standing expressionless on the quay, eyes shining with the reflection of the lanterns, watching her go and making no move to stop it, barely showing any sorrow or any other emotion. “How have you been?” she asks Eldris.

  An expansive shrug. “Busy. The palace is still being rebuilt, but it’ll take years, so in the meantime Mother has taken over Countess Sosheria’s Winter Palace.” She grimaces. “It’s cramped and there’s so little privacy I want to scream sometimes.”

  “I know the feeling,” Thanh says, awkwardly. They’re in the gardens behind the throne room now—a series of courtyards with flowers and ponds and carefully cultivated miniature landscapes from mountains to river shores. “It’s the same here.”

  “Is it?” Eldris’s voice is sharp. She looks around, a hand on her sword, casual and without a change of expression, but Thanh is sure that she’s marking people, the guards behind the longevity walls, the ones monitoring the small solitary pavilions by lotus ponds. They’ve left behind their escorts and Thanh’s handmaidens, but solitude is nothing but a carefully maintained facade. “Nothing changes, does it.” She laughs, and it’s utterly without joy.

  Thanh’s heart misses a beat. “You weren’t so cynical.”

  “I suppose not,” Eldris says. She looks at Thanh, cocking her head. “And you weren’t this staidly formal. Is something the matter?”

  Thanh thinks of Mother; of their beleaguered kingdom and negotiations from a position of absolute inferiority; of fire in teacups and in her rooms, always laying low and waiting to take from her. She thinks of Eldris, who’s now sitting on the opposite side of a negotiation table and with whom she shouldn’t be fraternizing. “You know,” she says. “How everything has changed.”

  “Ah.” They walk through courtyard after courtyard, going deeper into the garden. She stops at last, leaning against one of the pillars of a small pavilion, watching the pond: this one has an artificial island imitating a mountain, with a miniature temple clinging to its summit. Eldris looks around her, and finally shrugs, as if it’s all out of her hands. “Thanh. Do you know why I’m here?”

  “The Grand Tour,” Thanh says, without thinking. Once, the Ephterians sent their golden youth to southern countries—to find sun-drenched ruins and dark-skinned, exotic locals to breathlessly write home about. Now the world has shrunk, and the far South—Bình Hải, Ngân Kỳ, and their neighbors—is the only adventure that will sate the depth of their thirst.

  “That’s what I need to do.” Eldris laughs, sharply. “A chance to grow into the ruler of the country, for my advisers to meet your mother and bring their grievances to her.” The hand on her sword has clenched, white-knuckled, over the hilt. “It’s so nice to hide motivation in plain sight.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  A sharp, wounding look from Eldris. “No, you don’t, do you? Thanh, you’re the reason I came here.”

  The reason.

  Everything freezes. Thanh’s heartbeat rising and rising, a panic in her throat, everything sharpening and narrowing to Eldris’s face and Eldris’s hands, now gently cupping her face—barely a pause to see if Thanh flinches, and then Eldris’s lips are on hers, a cold shock that travels all the way into her chest. Thanh gasps, coming up for air. “You cannot possibly—” she starts, and has to stop, because Eldris kisses her again.

  She tastes like snow—sharp and bracing, the cold giving way to a stinging sensation at the back of Thanh’s throat—and Thanh is back, abruptly, in her bed in Yosolis, in the Winter Palace, Eldris’s hands gently peeling off her dress and her undershirt, sliding it off her shoulders and then coming back to her shoulders and down again, stroking Thanh’s skin again and again as if she could slide that off, too. Until desire rose warm and unbearable, as it is rising now, a warmth in her chest and between her legs that constricts all thought. “Eldris—”

  “Sssh,” Eldris says. She lays a finger on Thanh’s lips, stilling them. Her smile is wide and infectious. “I’ve gone hungry for far too long, Thanh. And so have you. Haven’t you?”

  Something comes undone, then, within Thanh—a tight knot loosening at last, bonds slashed through, air into compressed lungs. She smiles, surprised to feel it doesn’t hurt, and draws Eldris to her, feeling the weight of her on her arms, the reassuring solid presence—and every thought and worry melts into nothingness.

  * * *

  Later—much, much later—they lie tangled in the gardens, on the hard surface of a pavilion. Eldris brushes branches from Thanh’s undone hair. “My sweet princess,” she whispers. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Thanh doesn’t want to move. Moving means facing Mother, means going back to the negotiations and thinking of the best path forward. Moving means facing the fire and what it’s doing to her life. “Do you ever think of the fire?” she asks.

  Eldris stares at Thanh for a while, her hand still woven in the dark mass of Thanh’s hair. “The palace one? No. I can’t afford to spend my life afraid.”

  Afraid. Thanh tastes the word in her mouth, snow and ashes and bitterness. “You think it would happen again.”

  A shrug, from Eldris. “Fire is always with us. It keeps us warm in winter. And the pipes clog badly, regardless of what we do. Although”—she frowns, thoughtful—“that one didn’t start in the walls or the hearth. According
to Mother, it started in her library—in those little glass cases with the curio collections.”

  “The curios,” Thanh says. She remembers in their headlong flight entering that room Giang falling to her knees in front of the glass cases, screaming she’d come from there. In Thanh’s dreams Giang always catches fire, but in real life Thanh pulled her up—gasping at the unexpectedness of warm weight on her arms—and dragged her out into another courtyard and then into the gardens.

  Something in the memory, though, just doesn’t sit right, like a faint pain in a tooth, something she can taste at the back of her mouth. “Eldris,” she says. “Do you remember that servant girl I asked you to search for?”

  An arched eyebrow. “Vaguely? I recall it was not a productive search.” They never found her. Eldris with the full might of the royal agents scoured the city, and no one ever came up with that name or with that description. Eldris frowns. “It was odd, actually, come to think of it. No one remembered a Hải girl employed anywhere in the palace at the time.”

  “I remember,” Thanh said. “We fought over it.”

  Eldris grimaces. “Yes.” She’d asked Thanh if she was sure of what she’d seen, in a tone that suggested she thought Thanh had hallucinated the whole thing. She couldn’t grasp, either, why a serving girl was worth paying attention to, at all. “That’s behind us.”

  Is it? Thanh wants to say it, but she’s afraid it’ll break the moment. Eldris never liked being contradicted. She always got so frightfully angry when that happened. And she’s right in one thing: it’s weird that the earth seems to have swallowed Giang utterly—that she appeared and was gone without so much as a trace—and weirder still that Thanh keeps being so bothered by it years after the fact.

  Where did Giang come from?

  Again, that unease, as if Thanh were standing at the edge of a chasm and peering inside.

  Eldris’s hand rests, lightly, on Thanh’s cheek, a touch of shivering warmth that makes Thanh ache to kiss her. “Anyway, the fire doesn’t matter. There will be other fires, my love, and we will survive them all.”

  My love. She can’t—no, she did say that and Thanh isn’t imagining it at all, and is it different from their sleeping together? “My love,” she says, tasting the words like an unfamiliar delicacy.

  “You disagree?”

  “No,” Thanh says, hurriedly, braced for Eldris’s anger. “Of course I don’t—” She wants to say, Of course I love you, but it’s too much, too fraught, and the only thing that comes out is the words that came out back in Yosolis, when she ended their casual affair before Eldris could grow bored. “We can’t do this.” Even more so now, when Eldris is here—as what? As an ally who could turn enemy on a whim? As an antagonist in the negotiations that Thanh is leading?

  “Can’t do this? I’d say we have.” Eldris leans on one elbow, watching her fondly—and under her gaze Thanh feels herself melting again, suddenly larger and more confident, seen and valued.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you meant, back then.” A frown. “But you know what you feel, Thanh.”

  She doesn’t. It’s all huge and fearful and out of control. “Eldris . . .”

  “You love me. Don’t you?”

  Thanh hesitates, but doesn’t it ring true? Isn’t Eldris the more perceptive of the two of them? “It feels a lot like love,” she says, and sees Eldris’s smile.

  “Good. Then that’s all we really need to be happy, isn’t it? Life is too short to be ringed by other people’s expectations of proper behavior.”

  “You’re a princess of Ephteria. The heir to the throne. You—” You have better things to do with your time than bed a barbarian—for that is all Thanh will ever be to the court of Yosolis, a curiosity, a savage from a land of huts and scattered villages. Thanh has better things to do than to consort with her opposite number when she should be rescuing them from the greed of Ephterian merchants.

  “Ssh.” Eldris lays a finger on Thanh’s lips, stilling them again. “You worry too much.”

  Words press themselves behind Thanh’s lips, but Eldris still holds them closed. She runs her finger on them, gently and insistently. Thanh stifles a moan. She finally manages to grab Eldris’s hand before Eldris can slide a finger into her mouth. “Mother—” she says.

  “What your mother doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

  “So we’re having a hidden affair?” The word feels alien and almost wrong.

  “You want to call it something else?” Eldris’s face is grave.

  “I don’t know what to call this at all,” Thanh says, with stark honesty.

  “Fair. Then consider: I don’t know what to call it, either, but it’s not a fling to me. This”—she lifts Thanh’s hand up to her own lips, kisses it slowly for a stretched moment that Thanh wishes would never end—“this is utterly serious. Think on it, will you?”

  * * *

  Thanh wakes up gasping from a dream of Yosolis, feeling an unfamiliar, uncomfortable warmth.

  The fire is on her hands, licking at a fragment of Eldris’s hair that must have got caught beneath her nails.

  No no no no.

  She opens her mouth to scream, and it flickers out, leaving a faint warmth on her skin. She screams anyway, before she can think. “Leave me alone! What do you want from me?”

  A silence. For a moment she feels absurd and alone, but then something glints, on the wood of her bed.

  It’s a patch of light like the reflection of a new year’s lantern, and then it grows, little by little, expanding as it does—a fire in the hearth, the crackle of wood and the smell of burning filling the room—and then it’s the shape of someone huddled on her bed, and Thanh’s heart stutters and stops in her chest.

  Who? What?

  It’s Giang, the serving girl. The one she was with when they escaped the fire at the palace.

  How—?

  She’s disheveled, dark with soot and ashes, her feet bleeding, as if she’d been running with no shoes ever since that night so long ago.

  “Giang?” Thanh reaches out before she can think, and then the Giang-shaped creature looks up, and her eyes are white and luminous, and her skin translucent like celadon, a thin layer of brown over the shape of fire.

  “You’re not her,” Thanh says. A fist of ice tightens around her heart, squeezes it into unbearable pain. “You can’t just take her shape. You can’t—please stop—” Words won’t come—there’s just a sharp, nauseous heaving squeezing the breath out of her, over and over again, emptying her mind of everything—not the fire, not the nightmares—she can’t bear this anymore. “Please. Just leave me alone—”

  Warmth on her, fleeting. When she looks up through eyes blurred with crying, the fire is still wearing Giang’s shape, and holding something on her finger: a single tear, which she looks at as if it were a puzzle. It’s already evaporating. “You don’t remember me,” she says. She sounds confused. “In the attic.” And, when Thanh still doesn’t speak, “In the cabinet room. I held your hand when we came out of the palace.”

  Thanh’s blood freezes. Taking Giang’s shape is one thing. Knowing their history . . . “You—” she starts, and then stops, because the words catch in her throat like barbed quills.

  Eldris’s voice says, in Thanh’s memory: It was odd, actually, come to think of it. No one remembered a Hải girl employed anywhere in the palace at the time.

  “I don’t understand,” Thanh says.

  Giang hasn’t moved. She’s looking at Thanh with an odd hunger. “I am the fire,” she says. “The one in the cabinets.”

  “You—” Thanh starts, stops again—and then flings herself, bodily, into the abyss. “You burnt the palace? You killed—”

  “It was an accident!” Giang’s face twists and flames flare beneath her skin. “I didn’t mean to—” She takes in a deep, shaking breath, her eyes turning the white-orange of molten metal, quiets again. “They locked me in,” she says, finally. “Took me from the temple and brought m
e to the palace. They put me on display.” She opens her hand and on it is a small amber pendant in the shape of a tiger—a curio Thanh remembers from the cabinet, an old and rough Hải carving. A trader must have brought it to Eldris’s mother, never guessing the glint of fire in its heart was a living elemental, or that the temple’s spells had kept it safely imprisoned.

  “On display.”

  “You know what it means,” Giang says, and Thanh’s heart twists in her chest, because she does. Because she remembers being trotted out in elegant dresses: a well-behaved, elegant child, the one the patrons would coo over, the little savage from the South being brought to civilization, saved from the barbarism of her own people.

  “I didn’t burn the palace!”

  Giang’s laughter is bitter. “I didn’t mean to.” She closes her eyes and the light in the room dims. “One of the serving girls opened the cabinet and touched the carving. I could move. I could jump. I could escape”—she hugs herself, desolately—“except I didn’t know where to. Except all the corridors looked alike and people screamed, and there was smoke and fire everywhere . . .” Her voice trails off. “I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t mean to.” A pause. “I didn’t remember that everything I touched caught fire.”

  Thanh thinks of the orchids falling to ashes. “You didn’t disappear in the crowd. You’ve been hiding. In this room?”

  Giang grimaces. “First in Yosolis, and then here. In this room. I followed you when you left.”

  “You followed me?” Thanh’s breath catches in her throat. “You. You’ve been burning all those things around me.”

  “I didn’t know where to go.” Giang’s grin is sheepish, but her gaze is desolate. “I have to burn,” she says. “I have to feed. But it doesn’t have to be that bright. It doesn’t have to be . . .” She pauses, again, as if words were hard to get. “It doesn’t have to harm.”