Page 129 of The Ragpicker King
This was nothing like that.
The skin of the King’s hands was black and cracked, like a burning log just before it collapses into the fire. Yet it was not ashy butglistening,scarlet veins of breakage crisscrossing the glassy black surface. Bleeding gashes, she thought numbly, but no—as she looked closer, she saw that it was not blood that seemed to bubble under the surface of the King’s skin.
It was fire.
As he moved his hands, turning them that she might see them fully, the skin flexed, the cracks widening, showing the glow of red embers beneath. As for his fingers... Once, she guessed, they had been long and graceful like his son’s. Now they werefusedtogether, reshaped so that each hand sported three curved, angry-looking talons, each one tipped with a wicked, hooked nail.
Claws.
“Oh,” Lin whispered. Her voice seemed to echo in the silence. She could not take her eyes off the King’s hands—if they could be called such. “Whathappenedto you?”
The hands flexed, turned, talons curving inward as the King made two fists. In Lin’s mind, his voice crackled like a bonfire.
Long ago, when I fostered at the Court of Malgasi, I heard whispers in the night.
A picture began to form inside Lin’s mind. A richly furnished room, a young man tossing and turning on a high wooden bed. All around him, a voice echoed, a pleading chant in an unknown language.
They were the whispers of something tortured. Tormented. Begging for my help. I began to see it when I closed my eyes. A shadowy creature, trapped in darkness.
Lin saw it, too. A thickening of shadows, and within its heart, the glow of two red eyes, too flat and monochrome to be human.
At last, I could bear it no longer. In the dead of night, I went to free it, not knowing who or what it was.
The young man, stocky and tall, his face half hidden by wheat-colored hair, made his way silently down a curved stone stairway, carrying a sailor’s glass lantern. It was dark, the walls gleaming with damp. Lin knew he was underground. She saw the dread on his faceas the lamplight fell on a cage. A massive golden cage that could have held a man or a great beast, though it held neither. Instead, a burning golden creature the size of a lion, the rush of wings, the curve of a long neck as it turned to look at him...
“A phoenix,” Lin breathed.
The Malgasi had captured and preserved an ancient power. For generations they had kept it imprisoned, in a huge cage below their throne room. It was from this source that they drew their awful power. Do you see?
Lin saw. She saw scars across the golden skin of the great bird, saw that one of its eyes was blinded, saw the dark stains that mottled the cage’s floor where blood had been spilled over and over. How many times had the Belmany bled the magnificent creature to power their Source-Stones? How had they whipped and cut at it until it promised blessings and success? Lin felt the pain of it in her heart—a shattering pity, a rage to see such rarity and beauty defaced, defiled.
Malgasi has never been successfully invaded. The Belmany family has held the country since before the Sundering. It is the power of the phoenix that has allowed them to keep their stranglehold on the land. And in that moment, I realized that, through thousands of years, all their power rested on the torment of this creature. And now it demanded of me that I end its misery.
I found somehow that I had a knife in my hand, and almost against my will, I plunged the knife deep into the chest of the phoenix. The blood covered me, and I felt its fire seeping into my own veins.
Lin saw the knife, the blood. The phoenix crying out in release as it died, its torment ended. A fall of blood like burning rubies.
In panic, I ran to the only person who had ever been kind to me at the Malgasi Court, my tutor Fausten.
Lin saw a much younger Fausten rising from his desk, his expression changing from curiosity to terror.
He feared he would be blamed for having told me of the phoenix, though he had not. But he was one of the few in the Court who knew of it,and they would never believe the phoenix had summoned me itself. So Fausten and I made a bargain that night, and he fled with me, before dawn came, back to my country. To Castellane.
Lin saw the young man, now filthy and disheveled, approach the South Gate of Marivent. He fell to his knees before it and kissed the ground. His wheat-colored hair had turned to a pale yellowish white.
I had expected that as soon as I returned to my birthplace, the Malgasi would take action. Against me. Against my city. They did not. I began to see why when I sensed the changes in myself. I was stronger physically, I healed swiftly from wounds, but my mind wandered often in dreams of the stars and sky, of fire and burning. It was Fausten who told me the truth: Every phoenix dies and is reborn, again and again. The Belmanys had prevented their phoenix from dying and returning, keeping it always alive without rebirth, adding to its torment. It had seen me as its only escape from the hell of its cage—it would not die and be reborn as it normally would, but die and pass its essence into my blood. Over years, through me, it would effect a rebirth through transformation. The Belmany family could not kill me without killing the chance that the phoenix would return for them to reclaim.
It was time for Fausten to live up to his end of the bargain. I had given him safety in Castellane, away from the Belmany family. Now he made for me a medicine that would slow my transformation. I would, he promised, remain human for many years—enough time to marry, to sire and raise a son to follow me.
But Fausten was not loyal. I do not know when he turned back toward Malgasi, or what they promised him to betray me. I know now that he began to alter the formulation of my medicine. My mind subsumed itself in dreams, in the music of stars, in the whisper of wings. I heard them awake and asleep. I began to feel the phoenix stir inside me, and I yearned to let it free.
I nearly lost control of it once, during the Marriage to the Sea. I was out upon the water, and the phoenix called to me to Become, to be free ofmy mortal flesh. Had it not been for Jolivet, I would have been reborn in flame at that very moment. As it was, my hands were changed; from then on, I hid them from the eyes of other men.
And then the Malgasi came. After years spent lost in fog and dreams, I realized that Fausten had lied to me. He was loyal to the Malgasi Court, not to me. He had promised to return the phoenix to them. It—I—would be imprisoned again. Tortured again. And so I had him executed.
“Yes,” Lin said. “But then there was no one to make your medicine.”
And without it, I began to change. I saw the massacre in the Shining Gallery. I knew the Malgasi had caused it, but I could not speak of it. I can hardly speak at all. I have now entered the phase of transformation in which the phoenix prepares, body and soul, to become itself anew.
