The House of Flame Lilies Ch. 07

Her smirk faded, shifting into a genuine, soft smile that made her lips swell like apple. "You're very beautiful, my little one."

His chest rose, his cheeks prickling. He gazed up at her and felt drawn, but he closed his fists in his lap and concentrated. "I have more."

"Tell me."

He bit his lip. "I want you not to keep secrets from me."

Her face flickered. "An old woman has a lot of secrets, Sparrow."

He nodded solemnly. "Then I want to know you, not just a face you think you have to show me." His words came a little stumbling, forming on his lips as they left them, as he let his heart speak. "I want you to respect my feelings for you, to trust that they go beyond whatever you think might frighten me. I know you want to protect me, but when you hide yourself to make me care for you, isn't that in a way you submitting to me? Doing me a service? If it's my role to belong to you, then give that to me in full. Don't insult us with submission to only half of yourself."

He stopped with a tremble on his tongue. She was looking at him with something deep, something at the centre of her. She nodded once.

He released a breath with a small shudder and coursed on, a wanting sigh on the edge of his voice. "And make my submission meaningful. Use all of your powers." He saw her jet pupil bloom like a dahlia. He rocked forward and whispered his wish as if into a genie's bottle. "Wield me for your deepest desires. Enjoy me entirely. Leave no stone unturned. Cherish me and defend me and teach me and explore me and own me." Her fingers drifted apart in her lap, the glint of her nails making his skin tingle. He shuddered harder, a touch breathless. "I want to be exciting to you. Don't make me an easy half-person. Let me serve you with everything I have. Let me know my place and my worth with a clear head. Let me know that I'm choosing you in my heart every day I'm alive. I want to feel special. And I want to feel that with all of myself."

Vestalia's lips parted. Her eyes sparkled. Sparrow searched her face without breathing. She was looking at him like a dream still playing in her memory as she woke. She reached out and ran her curled fingers tenderly down his cheek. He caught a tendril of her perfume on the inside of her wrist. She nodded.

He laid a trembling hand over hers to press her touch to his cheek. "I have one more."

She raised her eyebrows invitingly.

He swallowed. He ran his thumb over her hand on his face. "Will you give me something no one else has?"

She tilted her head.

"Something I can hold onto, if ever I doubt myself," he explained. "Something that says we have a bond."

She paused. Her quiet deepened until he had to fight not to scratch her marble-still hand to bring her back. Her eyes darkened and drifted to the sooty shadows on the rug. Fire danced on her face. Sparrow watched it. He could almost see the ghosts of ancient figures whirling in her pupils, dancing long forgotten dances, singing and brawling and kissing in a long ruined city. Then her face settled, took on a strange tranquility. She flicked her dazzling gaze back to him, smiled, and leaned forward in a swish of chiffon to whisper a word in his ear. The word was like an incantation, foreign and binding. She leaned back and held his gaze with a glimmer of satisfaction at the confusion on his face. She tickled him under his jaw. He wriggled and shot her a keener questioning look. She skimmed his lip with her thumbnail. "That was the name I was born with, when I was human."

Sparrow's heart stopped.

"Never call me it," she said strictly. "Never say it out loud. Only to yourself." She softened and shimmered. "It's something only you and I know in all the world."

Sparrow's heart turned to honey in his chest. Tears pricked his eyes again, but grief seemed a distant memory. His smile emerged hesitantly on his face. She returned it warmly. It spilled over him and he let out a sobbing laugh and flung himself forward at last to wrap his arms about her waist and bury his face in her belly. Her luxurious scent overwhelmed him, a dam breaking on temptations that his body could finally welcome.

She stroked his hair, the sensation rippling down him. "Sparrow," she murmured, "I have one condition of my own."

He nodded into her softness.

Her fingers made sparkler trails over his scalp and neck, trickling down his back. "Tell me you love me, Carissime."

Sparrow didn't think for a moment. "I love you, Mistress."

He could hear the crack of tears and the muffled sniffle in his voice. He could hear her teeth pointing in her smile. "Then we have an accord."

He breathed. He hadn't realised how much he'd been struggling to breath all these days, the last of the mountain blizzard finally evaporating in his lungs. He clung to her and the wonderful feeling he had been pining agonisingly for since his banishment crashed over him. The feeling he'd craved like no other all his life.

"Welcome home, my own, darling Sparrow."

*

The sun dwindled later in the mountains than in Skarpo. It bled like a fresh wound into the crevices of rock and stained the grass bronze and the stone ruddy. It flashed across Sandu's proud face, her eyes sunk into the gash of shadow from her broad-brimmed, leather hat. She dusted off the patch of the wooden slats she was seated on, up on the low roof of the village church. She'd stayed for the day to help them fix a leak, her hewn muscles now smouldering with the day's labour. It was a pleasing feeling, locking a good deed into her body. She scooped her rough, tumbling hair under her hat and wiped a sheen of sweat off the back of her neck. Her shirt was sticking to her. The fresh air had been a little damp with not quite-breaking rainclouds, burned up in the rush of sunset.

As she'd worked, she'd asked casual questions of the villagers, mostly about Father Petru, under the pretence of curiosity about her kindly host. They had all said the same, dull eyes lighting up. The good father was a father indeed, they were not just his flock but his children, he cared for them so well. She would not find a truer soul anywhere on this earth. Such a clever man, he could have made something fine of himself in the cities, but he blessed us and stayed. None more than Father Petru made you realise that God is Love. She huffed uneasily, remembering Cristian's tale the previous night. Had she been taken in by a doting parent? She flexed her shoulder blades and leaned back to look out across the mountain range, heels and buttocks digging into the tiles to stop her sliding down the steep slant. The jagged, leaping landscape slashed across the peach-grey sky. An eagle was wheeling in the distance, spiralling down, down, down with fanning wings, like falling Lucifer, the flare of fire in its feathers. It screeched and pierced the winds.

"Captain!"

Sandu looked down to see a perfectly square man, with a scarred jaw like hacked pine. He wore a colourful, finely embroidered tunic and waistcoat, but the detail of the elegant stitching was buried under an immense, brown, fur coat. Sandu almost expected it to have claws and teeth, he looked like he was being eaten by a bear. The man waved to her and beckoned her to come down. She gave the fixed patch of roof one more reassuring pat and heaved herself down the ladder, landing heavily in front of him. Their thick, scuffed boots pointed stiffly at each other.

The man extended a hand as square as his frame, the knuckles chapped and a little bloody. Sandu eyed them. She took it and shook firm. His grip was like the jaws of a dog.

"Vasile, I presume," she said flatly. "The Headman."

The man nodded, a jovial smile breaking out under his copious moustache. "I'm sorry to only be introducing myself just now."

Sandu waved away his apology. "I'm pleased to meet you, whenever it happens."

He nodded genteely. "I must thank you, for your help fixing our roof."

She shrugged. "The least I could do for your hospitality."

It was his turn to give a politely dismissive wave. He scratched his bald head. There was another scar along the line of his skull, long and dented, outlining the shadow from his ear. It looked old, the skin wrinkled around it, fading under the mottling of sun and age. He glanced sideways, to indicate her wandering gaze. "I tell the children I got it fighting the bear that made this coat." His voice rumbled and rolled like kegs of ale over cobbles, a twinkle in his eye. "But in truth, it was a foolish tumble on the rocks as a lad."

Sandu's eyebrow quirked sardonically. "Children fall on the rocks too often up here."

The twinkle snuffed out. He grimaced grimly. "Come and stretch your legs, won't you? You've been crouched on the roof all afternoon."

Sandu nodded, picked up her discarded coat from the foot of the ladder, and hauled it on. The stakes in the lining clattered. She ignored Vasile's curious peek. They fell into a heavy, tramping step through the village, Vasile waving and grinning at passers by. Women shook out dry laundry and dumped it into baskets, adjusting the kerchiefs around their hair and hitching their layered skirts. Men carried firewood and hunched sharpening tools. Children raced, tripping and squealing and being shouted at to come and wash, darting like fireflies in and out of the deepening shadows. The scents of cotton and grass and sparking iron skipped through Sandu's senses.

"Your community is a good one," Sandu said warmly, watching an old woman wiping the face of a youth as he squirmed in embarrassment.

Vasile smiled widely, his stubble crackling. "Better than their fortunes. It was a tough winter. Bless them, they don't show it. They forge on. They bear up."

"They thank God for the spring."

His smile slid on his face, like a tavern sign coming off its hinge. "Does God send the spring? I rather think winter is his favourite season."

Sandu frowned, her hand straying to her rosary, warm on her sweat-streaked chest. "Why?"

"Does he not celebrate a birthday in winter and a funeral in spring?"

She grunted a laugh.

He sobered, his green eyes roving around the calm bustle of the village as they ambled between the squat cottages. "No, I mean that in spring, people are happy. Sure, they attend the feast day services, but their minds are outside, bubbling in the cooking pots and spinning on the spits. They're making charms and wearing ribbons and dancing and getting married and cutting the throats of little lambs, hail and hearty and digging their feet into the soil. People are all Pagans in spring. But in winter? When things are sparse and desperate and dark? That's when they want to be in church. They pray and pray in winter like they never would in spring. I sometimes think that God is a shrewd businessman and he makes his money off the lean months."

A sharp cold stole up Sandu's damp back, icing the droplets. "Or rather," she said sternly, "God forgives our spring distance and stays close to us when we need Him most."

Vasile's face didn't move. He kept looking affectionately around him. "Perhaps." He didn't sound convinced. "Either way, at every moment He is deciding, does He want a full table or a full church?"

Sandu's breath came a little shallow. She watched him. The sun was behind him, catching in his moustache. It pressed on her eyes. He smelled powerfully of fur and some herbal musk.

"Petru always says one ensures the other." He sighed heavily, bristling the fur on his boxy chest. "I think, why must they be conditional on each other? Why must they be in opposition? Why not just give us both? We're good folk. Don't we deserve both faith and food? Don't we deserve that just for being human?" He didn't seem to be talking to her anymore. He was speaking distantly, his gaze drifting from the people around him and up to the furnace of the sky. It turned his face beetroot.

Sandu drew herself up tall, taller than him. "Deserve is a dangerous word on Earth. It is reserved for what comes after."

Another gusting sigh. "Ah, yes. After..." His eyes hardened. He looked down.

They walked in silence for a moment. Goats bleated somewhere out of sight.

Vasile folded his hands behind his back. His tone rolled into one of well-mannered caution. "Captain, if I may, Father Petru said something that rather surprised me."

She cocked her head up to look down at him from under her hat. "Oh?"

He drew himself up too and met her eye. "That Sang Mortel is going to extend its reach into the mountain."

Sandu closely watched his face as she answered. "Yes."

She got nothing from him. "Does that not violate the treaty made by your predecessor?"

Her voice turned clipped and formal. "That treaty was my predecessor's mistake."

"Did you ever meet him?"

"No. I was ordered here after his death."

"Where from?"

"Schegischone."

Vasile nodded sagely. "A troubled city."

Sandu set her jaw. She knew that the tales of monsters and devilry plaguing the region around the place of her birth were widespread even beyond this country. No one ever questioned why the corruption hadn't spread. "Less so, since Sang Mortel got its foothold there."

He put up a hand in apology. "Of course, I don't doubt your order has made quite an impact. I imagine you were one of a whole generation trained to hold the citadel. An adolescent army chaining themselves to the gates of Hell."

Sandu heated. Her hands balled in her pockets.

"It's a Roman organisation, no?"

"French."

"But under the Roman Church? It's Papist? Not Orthodox? They had to rebaptise you, I assume?"

"Why? Is that an issue?" She stopped abruptly and turned to face him with her ember-brown eyes flashing. Her gaze gauged into him, investigating every line of his face, every fleck in his irises.

Vasile threw up both his hands and recovered his genial front. "No, no, forgive me, Captain. I do not mean to hound you with questions. It's only doctrine, after all."

"It's faith."

He shrugged. He folded his hands behind him again and pulled them back into their gait. They were getting further and further from the bustle of the village. Crocuses flattened under his dense boots. "Anyway, I did meet your predecessor. Once. I don't remember him well, except how tired he looked. I was a young man then, barely more than a boy, and my father was Headman. I remember them holing up in our house for hours and talking over that treaty. It was difficult, but my father did agree to it."

Sandu's brow creviced. "I was under the impression he would have had little choice."

"I couldn't say. But he did defend it when it was questioned."

She kept frowning, peering into his impassive, scarred mask. "Did he ever tell you why?"

He exhaled measuredly through his nose. "Because mountain folk know the mountain. Valley folk know the valley. City folk know the city. We don't need to be protected from our own land."

She ground her teeth. "Headman, with all due respect, Sang Mortel does not propose to protect you from landslides and drought. What we fight is not your own. It is not any human's."

"But it is not universal." He shuffled his feet as he walked. "What is here is here. What is in Schegischone is in Schegischone. What is in Skarpo is in Skarpo. We do not wish to be sheltered under your branches. How will the sunlight reach us?" He looked up at her with severe sincerity. "This is how villages wither."

Sandu felt a stab of anger in her gut. She tensed against it and spoke with simmering patience, lowering her voice. "If you are worried about your village withering, may I remind you of the poison within it that may not have been allowed to grow were Sang Mortel patrolling your territories."

All the joviality fled Vasile's face. He turned grey and his eyes darkened to the green sheen on a crow's wing. "So you have been turfing up gossip. Well, good, because recent events illustrate my point exactly. A problem arose in the village. I dealt with it. It is over."

"After a girl lost her life."

"And I suppose it has never taken a death to force your hand?"

Sandu clamped her mouth shut. Vasile glared at her, his fur coat hulking around his broad shoulders, the tendrils like needles. She rolled her jaw and held his gaze firmly. "I find it strange that a Headman would protect a treaty that left his people without needed defences."

He snarled in his chest. "I find it strange that a Sang Mortel captain would break a treaty that held the darkness at bay."

"Not here," Sandu pressed. "This village and too many others were given up to the monster's hunting grounds. You may not wish to be in Skarpo's jurisdiction, but would you really prefer hers? Is it not crueller that you were allowed to die so that Skarpo could live undisturbed?"

"Fine! Break it then!" Thunder clouds gathered on Vasile's ruddy brow. He scowled at Sandu with a look that could crumble granite. "We'll see who gets punished for the breach, Skarpo or me and mine!"

The eagle screamed in the distance.

Sandu purposefully smoothed her stance and blinked the ferocity from her eyes. Vasile huffed and looked away, stubbled lip jutting. He rubbed his baldness with his rough palm and shook his head. When he spoke again, his tone was grave, but gentler. "I apologise, Captain. We are all still wounded by Forina's loss."

She eyed him. She nodded. "I have work to do in the mountains and in Skarpo. Let's revisit this when both of us know more."

He looked at her with a flicker of something in his eyes. Was that... fear? It was too fleeting to tell. He jerked his chin in agreement and smothered his hands in the fur of his coat. "Thank you again, for fixing the church."

She forced a humourous twist to her mouth. "Is it permissible for Catholic hands to mend an Orthodox roof?"

He snorted. "We'll allow it this once."

She smiled coolly and tipped her hat to him. He nodded once more, turned in a heap of crushed crocuses, and stamped back into the heart of the village.

She watched him go with her smile slipping from her face. Her pulse thumped resolutely. Suddenly, Cristian didn't seem so unreliable.

Dinner with Father Petru and the sour bundle of Ioana was peaceful and warm. The priest chatted pleasantly, expressing his gratitude over and over for patching the leak. It was with a friendly joke and a tissue paper chuckle that he gestured his acquiescence for her to once again go outside to smoke her pipe.

Once again, she did not smoke.

As soon as she was under the effervescing stars, she whipped out of the cottage's shadow and marched towards the church. It was a wooden structure, dark under the glowing moon, its sharp corners and spire silhouetted like the spines of still living evergreens. The layered skirts of the roof stacked like overturned ships into a deep slant that made the rectangular building itself look short and driven into the ground. The spire was topped with a worked shape like that of an ornamental vase. Among the plain shapes of the homes, it looked like an elaborate origami folded from the page of a storybook.

Sandu reached the door and looked about her. The tallow glimmer of a few candles illuminated the small windows, but the square was deserted. She pushed on the plain, rectangular door. It shifted with a scuffing noise. She pushed it open and slipped inside.

The scent of wood immediately enveloped her, quaint and comforting. The hush of the church was even deeper than that of the village; it was like stepping inside a whisper just before it died. A vein of moonlight seeped from the crack in the door, but darkness welled ahead of her like she had never seen. Her stomach shifted uneasily. She took another breath. Something in the air was... off. Her gut tugged at her. She felt her way through the dimness to a small sideboard with a thick, clay candle holder balancing on it. She scooped the tinderbox from her coat and struck a spark. It hopped onto the wick and the flame burst to life and flickered in a cold breeze that brushed her hair and made her shudder. She pocketed the tinderbox, picked up the candle, and began to walk down the aisle.