A Shadow in the Fire

  The library lay dormant, a fine layer of red desert dust on each book. No spiders crept along the shelves. No webs adorned the uneven pages or the brass and wood scrolls. 

  Drey sat at a solitary table, disturbing the dust on a single wooden stool. A trail of footprints in his wake betrayed his location if anyone chanced to look for him in the library.

  On the table sat his tools for the day’s exploration: a glass, fire-hewn pen with an exquisite and precise tip; a vial of red, clay-based ink; a rough slab of parchment; the Babylonian scroll.

  It was this which excited him most: Someone, some poor mortal Babylonian sap, had taken the time and effort to fill a scroll with inscriptions detailing the practice of Samhain, a Babylonian holiday about warding off the spirits of those who had died over the past year.

  The fire in his palm, Drey kept to a soft glow. Terrified as he was to accidentally ignite the scroll, he preferred to strain his eyes rather than brighten the flame. 

  It was a slow process. Sometimes he only managed to translate a sentence a night, through guesswork and his scant knowledge of the Gallic tongue. His mother had kept a child — Aodhán — from there for over a decade before he died in her care, and Drey had learned what he could from the boy.

  It was easy for an immortal of Drey’s lineage to survive long stretches in the desert without food or water, but for a mortal, a brief drought was all it took to crack the lips and crumble the flesh.

  It was Drey’s hope to learn enough Gallic that he might slip away to Babylon and find the boy’s family, explain what had passed.

  For now, he had to learn the tongue slowly, line by line, scratched out on his parchment in elegant Elesarian, crossed out and rewritten repeatedly. He bent over the book. Lasair.

  He knew that one well enough — flame, fire. The boy had been terrified of flame, but Drey had taught him to love fire at night, the safety it imbued. 

  Translating lasair proved more difficult. Elesarian, unsurprisingly, had scores of words for fire. They described size, temperature, color, density, and intention of the magic wielded. The scroll only provided the word flame. What was he meant to do with that?

  The other words in the same sentence read daoine còmhla. He knew these words, somewhere in the bowl of his mind. He was sure of it. Somehow, they would help him understand the meaning of lasair in this context. He closed his eyes and called forth a memory of the young boy playing pins-and-stones with a group of other children. What had the boy said? Daoine. But what did it mean? Children? People? Everyone? Hey guys?

  Perhaps the next word would offer more insight. He searched his mind for a memory of that word spoken aloud but—

  Behind him, in the vast bowels of the library, something scraped against the floor.

  He extinguished his fire by closing his hand into a fist. He dared not breathe, even though the pressure built inside him. His mother had feral Salamanders visiting, and she was capable of any manner of insanity with them. The Salamanders themselves, rarely adopting their human forms, hissed and clawed unpleasantly during the state dinner. It was Drey’s fervent hope that they would leave by morning.

  It was Drey’s slightly more fervent hope that they would leave without stealing anything from the library.

  Something slithered to his left, and something else scuttled to his right. A chair moved.

  It decidedly was not his mother creeping around the library. It might have been a child, but Drey’s suspicion was the feral Salamanders. They could see fine in the dark, which meant they likely knew he was here. That meant they were toying with him, with his poorer night vision.

  “What do you want?” he called into the abyss of the library. He saw no point in showing false confidence — all of his self-assurance was genuine. He could handle a sword. He could handle a firefight. He could handle hand-to-hand, if he had to, such as Salamander hands were.

  In a wheezy voice, one of the Salamanders said, “Your mother, the Queen, sent us to collect you. She wishes to play a game.”

  Drey would rather burn down the library than play one of his mother’s games. Unfortunately, doing so would only delight her and rob him of his last refuge at the palace. He closed his eyes and counted backward from eight.

  “What fun,” he said. Briefly, the only sound in the library was wood on stone as he drew his stool away from the table. He left the scroll, parchment, pen, and ink undisturbed. If he made any effort to protect them, his mother would likely assume he had something he wanted to hide from her.

  In truth, he would have loved for her to read them, to learn about the world from a source besides her own limited experience.

  The Salamanders followed him from the library through the dark palace. The night was deep and velvety, forcing Drey to light his way with fire magic. Despite the hour, his mother was in the throne room, a bonfire at the room’s center to dance the shadows against the wall. 

  She sat in her ornate chair at the fireside, rather than on the dais where her throne stood, cold and empty. “Drey,” she greeted.

  He dipped his head. “Mother.”

  Her white-blonde hair was, as usual, pulled back into a rigid knot at the peak of her head. Her eyebrows were arched, though barely visible against her alabaster skin, and her lips were decorated in a deep crimson color this evening.

  A host of feral Salamanders surrounded the fire. Some sat within the ring, their forms glowing like embers.

  “The Salamanders would like to take you home with them,” she announced. “I have told them that I do not like this plan. It was meant to be a fair trade — three of their blondest youths for one of our finest, but they had the audacity to ask for my heir. What do you think of that?”

  Drey knew little of the lifestyles of these feral Salamanders, save that they rarely adopted their human forms and placed as much value on learning as his mother did. Nevermind that he could not bear to be separated from his wife or his children for an indeterminate amount of time.

  “I prefer not,” he said, wary. Her simplest questions often had the most venomous outcomes.

  She smiled, saccharine and winning. If he had not known her all his life, he might not have been so frightened by that smile.

  “I thought not. So I have devised a game. You see, I suggested an alternative, a far more amenable alternative, but then I thought it would be fun to make it a game of chance. Do you consent to a game of chance?”

  What choice did he have?

  “I consent.”

  Her smile only grew, her white teeth a sharp contrast to her red lips. “Thank you.”

  Around and in the fire, the Salamanders swished their tails in appreciation.

  “The game is this:” his mother said. “Hidden somewhere in the palace is your son, Cato. You must find him before the sun crests the horizon. You must find him without using any fire magic or other light assistance. You must find him alone. And you must not wake anyone in the course of your search. If you find him, he stays here and all of our friends return to their homes. If you fail to find him, our friends take him with them and leave three of their own for breeding purposes. What do you think?”

  Cato was an infant, barely three months old. Fourth in Drey’s line, with the least blonde complexion, he likely held the least value to Drey’s mother. Unlike Drey, she valued only the heirs in a line. The rest were toys at her disposal.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked. 

  “Why were you translating dull scrolls about Samhain?”

  Drey blinked in the firelight. “You can read the Gallic?”

  She laughed. “Of course I can. Aodhán was here for a decade. Do you think I learned nothing from him?”

  She had learned, where Drey had failed to learn. He closed his eyes and nodded once, twice. “And what has Samhain to do with this game? With my son’s fate?”

  “I believe you know the tradition on Samhain, to build a bonfire in order to keep the spirits of the dead at bay. To call the sun back?”

  Bonfire. That must have been what lasair meant. People, together, bonfire. Somehow, his mother had found the meaning easily while Drey struggled with the translation. 

  Now he nodded. “I know the tradition,” he lied. What he understood, more than the knowledge of Samhain, was the lesson his mother meant to teach him: I will always be there first. I will always know more than you. You will always be powerless.

  It was a lesson she had taught him time and again, since birth.

  She smiled. She was beautiful when she smiled, her face expressive and her eyes full of delight. It was this face that had taught Drey to fear beauty.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Are you ready to begin?”

  “No. I would prefer less…permanent consequences. My failure or success should not impact my son’s life in such an irrevocable way.”

  His mother tilted her head. “Do you wish the game to have no bearing on the outcome? Or do you wish for a chance to keep him here at the palace?”

  It was always this way with her: She would walk him up a metaphorical volcano and offer him the chance to leap from a cliff, or into the volcano’s crater. The far more sane option of walking back down the mountain was never offered, never considered.

  “I wish to keep my son here at the palace, safe in the arms of his family.”

  His mother smiled again. This one was not beautiful because it did not reach her eyes. It was meant to cut into Drey, sharp as any knife, and lay his soul bare. “Then I suggest you find him before I can see the sun.”

  Drey closed his eyes.

  His mother called out to the hall, “The game begins now!” She counted down, “Vet, pon, nil, ok, paszh!”

  Drey stood frozen in indecision and misery. If he participated in the game, his son might be gone forever. If he did not participate, his son would certainly be gone forever. Zaed, maorekel.

  “Zeszh!” His mother roared. Now!

  He opened his eyes and met her pitiless, soulless eyes. They were filled with a cold amusement. Cato was nothing to her. Drey was barely more than that.

  “Run, little boy,” one of the feral Salamanders wheezed.

  He did not run, he walked into the hall with what little dignity he had managed to hold onto in all these years.

  The hall was dark, a gaping maw of blackness in either direction. Something skittered to the right. The hairs on his neck stood on end. Were the sounds meant to lure him away from Cato? Or were they unintentional?

  Nothing his mother did was unintentional. The noise was to the right, so Drey went left.

  He crept along the hallway, trying to remember the exact layout of the benches along the walls, the location of every uneven stone. He tripped, and fell to his knees.

  Something in the distance wheezed a laugh. 

  The darkness was alive with sounds, but his sensitive ears did not pick up a single cry or grunt that might have been an infant. What if she had medicated him?

  He stood and dusted the pain from his knees before returning to the blinding firelight of the throne room. Salamanders were dancing. One young man, in particular, was dancing with Drey’s mother, while another Salamander beat a wild tattoo on a tongue drum.

  She stopped dancing when she saw him. “Yes?”

  The young man, who couldn’t have been older than Drey, rested his palm on the Queen’s waist. 

  “Have you given him any sort of sleeping draught?” Drey raised his eyes to meet his mother’s. Her crystal-blue eyes were alert, her pupils dark and heavy with the sort of hunger she should have saved for Drey’s father and not for this young Salamander man.

  She laughed. “No.”

  “He can be roused, then,” Drey asked. He puzzled through what this might mean. “He might cry if he wakes?”

  She nodded. “He is likely to.”

  “Is he one of the people I am not allowed to wake?” Drey asked.

  His mom clapped her hands together, expression lit with glee. “Clever! But no, that is not the trap.”

  There was, then, a trap. If this was not the trap, it implied something else was.

  Drey glanced around the throne room at the feral Salamanders in their revelries. None of them would help him. They had been ordered not to, by the rules of the game.

  They stared at him with pitiless eyes; they wanted his son. He could feel it.

  And his mother? She wanted that young man in her bed.

  The game was rigged. Drey could sense it in the mood of the room. He might search all night — and he would search all night — but he would not find his son before the sun crested the eastern horizon.

  With trepidation, he ducked into the shadowed hall.