Tell the Wind and Fire (5 page)

No wonder the people who could do no magic were scared of Dark magicians, and not of Light. Besides, there were always more of the Light magicians—ten times more. We were always stronger, and we were told that meant we were better.

The long-ago people who would become the first council of Light decided that those who practiced Dark magic were too dangerous to be allowed to live with the rest of us, even though we needed them close by.

The Light magicians, those among us who were first and best at accessing the new power, built walls around portions of our city. The Dark ones are kept in there, and with them all those who have ever had Dark magicians in their families, who might have Dark children.

They are not trapped. That’s what they say, out in the Light cities.

I learned what they say in the Light cities when I was fifteen, but I was born in the Dark city of New York. Those of us who were born Dark or come to live in the Dark ask each other, “Buried how long?”

The Light cities are right, I guess. Buried is different from trapped. The trapped believe they can get out.

My dad was born in Light New York. He graduated from Columbia at the top of his class as a Light medic.

Dad was—and still is, sometimes, when he remembers—a dreamer. He believed in leading the whole Dark city into the light, in providing Light medical care for those within the Dark city, in doppelganger rights, and the acceptance and reintegration of the Dark back into the Light.

After he graduated, he applied for and was granted a pass into the Dark city, where he immediately got a job at Maimonides, the only big hospital we had.

That was where he met my mom. She was born in the Dark, like me, but she was a Light magician.

Unlike me, she never got her rings. She always had to hide that she was a Light magician, because her father was a Dark one. He had been discovered doing Dark magic in the Light city, and his life had only been spared because my grandmother stood between him and the crowd who would have killed him for being what he was. His whole family had been exiled to the Dark city, and my mother had been born there.

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.

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.

The cages cast coronas of darkness even by day. The smell of blood permeated the cemetery. Magicians stood underneath, absorbing power, catching the blood in vessels, reaching up to press their hands against the bars.

Inside the cages were the bleeding, moaning animals that pain had turned people into. I looked at the cages long enough to know which one held my father, and then I looked away.

In an ever-expanding ring around the cages were mourners. Not mourners for the dead in this cemetery, but mourners for the living trapped in their cages. Some of those who loved the caged were so racked with misery that they looked barely human, crouched around their pain, faces distended, screaming until their hoarse, cracked voices sounded like birds: they looked as bad as the contorted creatures in the cages.