Tell the Wind and Fire(12)

He told the truth. He was punished for that courage, but people are always punished for courage.

My Aunt Leila and my Uncle Douglas took me in. We all knew that my mother was dead, that any Dark citizen could disappear and be lost forever with no excuse. Nobody cared if the buried died.

But Dad was a different matter: he was a prominent Light citizen in the Dark city. People would notice. They could not simply let him disappear, so they made him an example instead. They punished him in public.

I said before that Dark magicians use blood for their spells. What they did to my father is one way to get it—the most horrible way, which grants Dark magicians the most power, which gives them both blood and death.

The Light Guard imprisons the condemned in heavy black iron cages hung high in the trees in Green-Wood Cemetery. The victims are transfixed in place with long iron spikes, slowly dying, as the worst Dark magicians come drink their blood and drain away their life force.

The Dark magicians permitted to do this are those who collude with the Light guards, who are willing to betray their fellows for the Light Council’s favor, for this rich reward.

They are only allowed to use criminals.

Which meant they were allowed to use my dad.

Dark magicians get power from all blood, but they draw the most power from the blood of Light magicians. My father, a powerful Light magician, was the richest possible prize for the Dark magicians who served the Light best.

People came from all over the Dark city to see people caged. The Light guards encouraged it: they thought witnessing the ultimate punishment was a deterrent to crime. I do not think people went to learn good behavior, though. They went because of the endless morbid hunger people have for the pain of strangers. I had never gone there before—my gentle father would never have taken his child there in a thousand years—but I’d seen recordings, heard the cheering of the crowds drowning out the caged ones’ screams. They watched the recordings in the Light city too, and they knew justice had been done.

When we heard that they had caged my father, I remember sitting in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen. My mother was already gone, and now I lived completely in a nightmare. Everything that had been familiar and beloved was suddenly hideous to me: the boiling kettle shrieking with anguish, my aunt’s eyes black as ink, the red tea towel a bloody flag. Uncle Douglas said heavily, “There is no way to save him.”

But I found a way.



I should have said my Aunt Leila and I found a way.

The night my father had been sent to the cages, I was lying on the pullout sofa in Aunt Leila’s office, staring dry eyed at a crack in the ceiling. I felt as if the crack might open into a great yawning abyss and swallow me up, erase all traces that our family had ever been. I wanted it to.

Aunt Leila came in, walking softly with bare feet on the worn carpet, and lay down beside me, not touching me but curled around me like a parenthesis closing around a word. Aunt Leila was not often affectionate: this was a big deal for her. I turned slightly and looked at the locks of her very straight black hair crossing my hair like bars, and at the edge of her dark eye staring up at the ceiling crack.

“Do you remember the story of how they almost beat your grandfather to death when they found out he was practicing Dark magic in the Light city?” she asked.

I had heard the story hundreds of times, so of course I did, but Aunt Leila never said anything unnecessary. I knew this was important.

“That Grandma got in the way. She threw herself in front of him,” I answered, my voice a thread, barely hanging on. “Yes.”

“The mob caught him before he got to his house, and she saw him being beaten and went to run out into the road. Her family tried to stop her. They said, He broke the law, you mustn’t, there’s nothing you can do, think of your baby, stop, you can’t do it, please stop. And she said . . .” Aunt Leila prompted.

“Tell the wind and fire where to stop,” I answered. “But don’t tell me.”

“Would you stop?” Aunt Leila asked. “Or would you do what needs to be done?”

I wanted to cry, suddenly, as I had not been able to cry for days. But I didn’t want to cry in front of Aunt Leila, who was the strongest person I knew. It was impossible to imagine Aunt Leila ever crying.

“I’d do anything,” I said. “But I can’t fight the cages, I can’t get in the way of the . . . of the spikes. There’s nothing I can do!”

“There’s something you can do,” Aunt Leila said. “It’s just something different. You have your own weapons. The question is, are you willing to use them? Are you ready to do whatever needs to be done?”

Aunt Leila stopped looking at the dark jagged line in the ceiling when she said “weapons.” She looked at me instead. She even touched me, in a light, thoughtful caress: not my skin, but my hair, and the stones in my rings.

Tell the wind and fire where to stop, but don’t tell me.

“Look at you,” Aunt Leila murmured. “I could put your face on a banner and march into the Light city. They won’t even want to stop you.”

The next day, I went down to Green-Wood Cemetery. I passed through the main gates, which had spiky towers and fretwork like lace made of stone and which resembled the entryway of some villain’s fortress. Inside were rolling hills, gravestones like spires, even a lake and a pyramid. And past the bronze statues, hanging from pear trees and golden rain trees and dogwood trees, from branches that formed massive arches and leaves that were golden clusters, were the cages.