Tell the Wind and Fire(11)
Families who produce both Dark magicians and Light magicians are very rare. We pretend it never happens; we all know that when it does happen and the council hears about it, the whole family disappears. We keep the Light and the Dark separated by walls, by beliefs, by blood. We pretend it is not true that sometimes people find each other through anything.
You can’t get Light medic training in a Dark city, but my mother worked in the hospital anyway, did what Light magic she could do undetected. It’s forbidden to do Light magic unless you’re certified, unless you have the rings. I’ll never have as much power as my mother, but I can do things she was never allowed to do. She could work miracles, but with rings she could have saved thousands of lives.
Light magic works better than Dark for healing, unless the situation is desperate, the patient on the very threshold of death. Then, only the Dark can fight back the last darkness.
My dad found out my mom was doing Light magic, but he didn’t turn her or her family in. He taught her how to do more. He helped her do better. She was better than he was, he always said. She never wore the magic rings, but my father bought a necklace for her on the black market: one beautiful, fire-hearted diamond hanging from a silver chain. She never wore it outside the house, but sometimes at night we would close all the shutters, draw every curtain, and she would do magic that made that diamond blaze.
Mom and Dad considered themselves married, though Light magicians cannot legally marry people from Dark magician families. Mom pretended she lived next door with her parents and her sister and her sister’s husband, not with us. On paper, I was the child of my father and a dead patient who’d had no Light or Dark magic in her veins. Mom and Dad would talk sometimes about getting fake papers for Mom, going to the Light city and getting her rings. Dad would get cards from his best friend from med school, Penelope, and she would always write “Hope to see you in the next year!” on them.
I never really believed we would leave. It would have meant leaving our whole family. I thought I would be buried all my life. I was used to Light magic being something my parents taught me behind blackout curtains, our family secret. I was a Light citizen from the day I was born, because any children of Dad’s were qualified to be Light citizens. When he saw I was a Light magician too, he applied for certification for me and got me my rings, but I could stay because he was the chief surgeon in the hospital by then, and as far as the law was concerned he was my sole guardian. By the time I was fifteen, I had still never passed through the gates of the Dark city.
Light guards were posted at the gates, checking paperwork and making sure no unlicensed Dark citizens passed into the Light. The Dark city was ruled mainly by the Light guards, acting on behalf of the Light Council. Working directly under the Light guards were the most powerful Dark magicians. The magicians who made themselves useful to the Light were rewarded with blood, and blood to Dark magicians meant power. Everyone else in the dark, everyone weak, everyone powerless, walked in fear.
As a girl born buried, I knew never, ever to make eye contact with the Light guards, to walk the other way with my head bowed at the sight of anyone carrying a whip and wearing the snow-white uniform with its glittering insignia. We all knew stories, of friends of friends, of relatives, who had suffered at the hands of the guards and their interpretation of the Light laws.
Nothing bad had ever happened to me as a child. I was much loved, cautioned but always fiercely protected. The worst sights were kept from my eyes. Sometimes my parents seemed busy all the time, but I always had my Aunt Leila to look after me. She would take me with her on walks around the Dark city, under a shining clock enhanced by the guards’ Light magic, distributing pamphlets condemning the laws of the Light Council under the guards’ very noses. She was tall and stern and never afraid of anything, and I wanted to be just like her.
I think I would always, no matter what my life was, have been a scared child. I remember long nights in my childhood, lying awake and feeling as if a heavy weight was pressing on my chest, thinking about all the small things I had done wrong and all that I feared for the future. But I never feared what actually came to pass. My nightmares were not big enough to encompass all that. My parents told me that my imagination was too good, but it turned out that even my racing, scared imagination was not good enough.
The Light can destroy the Dark. They say that in both cities, but it sounds different in the Dark.
It was just the way life was. I listened to my mother and father and my aunt and my uncle discussing injustice, knew that Aunt Leila attended rallies about the Light Council’s laws, but I did not think those laws would have any further effect on my life than they had already. I obeyed all the rules, and I thought that would keep me safe.
Until they took my mother away.
She used to go into the bad part of town and heal the people there who needed help and yet would not go to a hospital: people on dust, vagrants, criminals. Aunt Leila always said she was a fool for going, that she would get caught using Light magic or be suspected of different criminal activity. My father always begged her to be careful, and she always said she would be, and she was always back before morning.
Until one day when she was not. She never came back. We never saw her again.
My father hoped the Light Guard had merely taken her into custody. He went to get her back, and when he asked where she was, the Light guards said she had broken the council’s laws and that he would not see her again. My father spat in a guard’s face and insulted the whole Light Council: he said their laws were wrong and that they had murdered her. He marked himself a traitor.