Sparkers (12 page)

I pull the book toward me, and the page I'm holding starts to rip at the edge. I jerk my hand away, but Azariah simply twirls his fingers over the tear, murmuring, and the fibers of the paper knit themselves back together. Impressed, I reach for a pen.

We begin to translate, consulting my grammar to check constructions or to use the dictionary. Azariah's swift mastery of the Hagramet alphabet amazes me, but he doesn't know many words. He's torn between his impatience, which would have me forge ahead, and his desire to learn the language, which requires me to explain everything I do. It takes us a good ten minutes to translate our first two sentences.

Magic is all around us; it is a single, uniform ?. In some places it is more abundant and in some places scarcer.

Wonderful, a treatise worthy of one of Aradi Mattan's history lectures.

“Single, uniform what, I wonder?” Azariah says, jotting down the unknown word in his own notebook. “This reminds me of a description in a Xanite manual.” He rises and crosses to a bookcase, tilting his head to read the titles.

“Shall I go on?” I ask.

“Please.”

I tackle the next few sentences, my translation littered with question marks, but the gist seems consistent with my very basic understanding of magic. Then I reach an easier passage.

With each spell, the magic produces secondary ?, both beneficial and harmful. After a spell is cast, the magician performs a special spell to ? the harmful ? to become harmless. Magicians have cast these ? spells for as long as they have cast spells, in order to protect the kingdom. People are ? to the harmful ?, some more than others. The abandonment of the ? spells in the forty-third year of the Agrav Dynasty led to a surfeit of harmful magical ? in the air. After many years, a plague of ? destroyed the House of Agrav. When

“Look at that!” Azariah exclaims.

I start, unaware he was reading over my shoulder. “What?”

“Aren't you reading this?”

I skim my translation. “It's about your secondary residues, your by-products.”

“It says they're harmful!”

“So?”

“Well, it's odd, isn't it?” He gestures at the notebook. “All this describes exactly how I cast my spells. It suggests a thousand years ago magicians in Hagram used magic more or less the same way Ashari do today. Except I've never heard of any by-products that are considered harmful, or these special spells that sound like they neutralize them.”

I rest my head in my hands. “It's probably not really the same. A lot has happened in the last thousand years.” Hagram collapsed, for one thing. Then centuries later, Erezai rose in its place, only to split into independent city-states of which Ashara is only one.

“Everything else fits,” Azariah insists. “Remember, Erezai's magicians considered themselves the heirs of Hagram.”

I reread my translation. A surfeit of harmful magic in the air. A plague that destroyed a dynasty. I glance back at the original text, and the word
eyes
jumps right off the page.

. . . the eyes become black.

“God of the Maitaf,” I say, and someone knocks on the door.

A
zariah and I share a look of horror. The next instant, he sweeps books, pens, and notebooks into his desk drawer. We draw ourselves up and stand side by side in front of his desk.

My head pounds. Black eyes. The dark eyes.

“Come in,” says Azariah.

Councilor Betsalel sweeps in and pauses at the sight of the two of us standing stiffly apart.

“My,” she says, her lips curving upward, “a secluded study is a fortune, isn't it?”

Azariah blushes at once. My stomach boils with panic. As Sarah slips into the room behind the Seventh Councilor, I adopt my perfect medsha posture and stretch my mouth into a smile.

“May I help you?” Azariah asks Gadi Betsalel.

She crosses to his bookshelves. “Your sister is showing me around. Your parents tell me you have an impressive library for one so young.”

When she fingers the spines of some of his books, he tenses. Sarah yawns. I pray the councilor will go away so I can return to the Hagramet text. Leah's black eyes smolder like cold embers in my mind's eye.

Gadi Betsalel seems to spend eons inspecting Azariah's collection. She asks him some questions, but she doesn't seem interested in his replies. When she finally leaves, Azariah locks the door, swearing under his breath.

“What an evening,” he says, returning to the desk. “I'm sorry.”

“Azariah, it's true,” I say. Now that the Seventh Councilor is gone, I can't stop shaking.

“What?”

“Just before you closed the book, I read something else. The plague during the Agrav Dynasty. It's the dark eyes.”

“What?”

“It says their eyes turned black!” I cry. “The harmful magic. The illness. Black eyes.”

His mouth opens silently. Then he swallows. “It's happening again?”

“Yes!”

“But . . . but the . . .” Dread transforms his face. “The magic is the same. Somewhere, somehow, we lost the neutralizing spells. And the harmful by-products have built up in the city.”

I speak over my thudding heart. “It's strange, isn't it? The truth about the illness is in some book only you have, written in a language that's not only been outlawed but is so rare most people wouldn't recognize it.”

Lost in his own thoughts, Azariah doesn't seem to hear me. “We've all been casting spells for years, never knowing this poison was accumulating around us. And now there's too much for us to tolerate. I almost can't believe it, except . . .”

“Except for the eyes,” I say.

“Right.” He lights up with sudden understanding. “That's why the illness isn't contagious! It has nothing to do with spreading microbes. It's about the level of tainted magic in the environment reaching a tipping point and—oh! Maybe that explains why children are more resistant, because the magic hasn't been building up in their bodies for as many years as—”

“Azariah,” I say, uninterested in his theories, “my best friend, Leah, has the dark eyes.”

He catches his breath. “I'm sorry.” After a pause, he says, “Marah, we have to tell someone about this. My parents, for a start.”

I'm about to agree when a wave of terror rushes through me, accompanied by a sudden, absolute conviction. “No! Azariah, we can't.”

“What do you mean? It's killing people right now!”

“No,” I choke out. The fear clogs my throat. “We can't tell anyone, Azariah. I know we can't. There's something wrong. The Hagramet . . .” My intuition won't take me any further, but I'm determined to heed it. I won't make a mistake this time. If the feeling tells me we can't reveal this to anyone, we mustn't reveal it.

“What do you mean you know we can't—oh.” Azariah goes still. He looks uneasy, and when he speaks again, his voice is hushed. “It's the sp—your intuition.”

I feel strangely exposed. Shaul's defiant words come back to me.
The intuition is our power.

“Don't be afraid,” I tell Azariah. It's not what I expected to say.

“I'm not afraid,” he says. “I've just never . . . been around the intuition. Up close.”

“I'm used to it,” I say, not without sadness.

“It's uncanny.”

“As long as you believe me.”

He mulls it over while I let the feeling settle inside me.

“Let's keep translating,” Azariah says at last. “Maybe we can learn more.”

I nod.

We stay like that awhile, bound together by dread. The study is silent, the heavy velvet curtains still. On their dark-stained shelves, Azariah's books stand as mute witnesses to our pledge. Finally, Channah comes to take me home.

• • •

A
LL
NIGHT
, I
lie stiff under the covers, picturing poisonous magical residue falling onto my skin like ash from a burning building. I listen to Caleb's gentle breathing and wish I could hide him and Mother away somewhere. Perhaps in a sleepy village in the Ashari hinterlands, or deep in the forest that borders the city. When I drift into slumber, the Hagramet alphabet is branded onto my dreams.

I hurry to Leah's apartment in the morning. For the first time, I feel the weight of history on my shoulders. Here, on the banks of the Davgir, trapped in a crucible of magic formed by the Sohadir and the Shatarai Rivers, a dynasty of Hagram collapsed in a mess of fouled magic. We're drowning in the same brew now, and I can't bear the loneliness of being the only one besides Azariah who knows.

When I arrive, Leah is buried in blankets as usual, her eyes closed, her forehead creased.

“It's me,” I say.

Her black eyes fasten on me at once. “I've been waiting for you, Marah.” Her voice is as thin as onion skin, her cheeks sunken. I imagine tendrils of magic probing her skin and shiver.

“Waiting for me?”

“To release Raspberry.”

I glance at the silhouette of the house finch in his crate.

“I don't want to let him go,” Leah says. “He keeps me company. But I've waited too long. He's ready.” She pushes off her covers. “Help me get up.”

“Get up? You can't do that.”

“Yes, I can. Just to the window.”

So I help her rise, and she staggers across the room, leaning against me. She's lost a frightening amount of weight.

“Open the window,” she says.

“What? No. You'll catch your—” I break off. After a moment's indecision, I do as she says. A chilly blast of wind blows in, rippling Leah's nightgown.

Clutching my arm with one hand, she bends over Raspberry's crate and rips the cheesecloth away. The finch flits up to one of the slats and warbles. Leah coaxes him out of the cage, and he alights on the windowsill, only to fly to her nightstand. I groan. Trembling in the cold air, my friend wheedles until the bird flutters back to the window. He hops back and forth on the sill, tilting his head. Then, without warning, he spreads his wings and soars into the air above the street.

“He's free,” Leah breathes, radiant with joy. “He's the first creature I've ever sent back into the wild. Did you see him fly?”

Unexpectedly moved, I can only nod.

“Leah, I need to talk to you,” I say when she is tucked back in bed. I sink to the floor, wondering where to begin. “Remember how Sarah invited me to dinner with her family? Well, I've been twice more.”

Leah's astonished expression makes her look more like her old, healthy self. “All this for an eight-year-old?”

“It's not just Sarah,” I say. “I'm working on something with her brother.”

“What? The one whose friends broke your violin?”

“No, the other one. His name's Azariah. He's our age.”

“Is he good-looking?” Leah asks, a trace of mischief discernible even in her darkened eyes.

“Leah.”

“Well, is he?”

“Leah, he's a kasir! Besides, that's not the point.” I take a deep breath and tell her about the forbidden Hagramet book and the translation project. Then I describe the Seventh Councilor's visit yesterday evening. When I come to the forgotten spells and the origins of the dark eyes, I hesitate. Last night, when Azariah wanted to confide in his parents, I swore him to secrecy, but right now my intuition is quiet.

“Leah,” I say, “you can't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you.”

When I finish, she sucks in her breath. “God of the Maitaf. Can it be true?”

“We're all going to pay for the magicians' mistake,” I say bitterly. “They've always hurt us.”

“Stop it,” she says. “Aren't kasiri dying too?”

She sighs and gazes toward the window. Then she turns back to me. “Marah, I want you to have my violin.”

I feel a chill deep inside me. “This is about your intuition.”

Leah says nothing.

“You'll need your violin when you're well,” I say.

“You're going to get into Qirakh,” she says. “You'll need an instrument, and I want you to play mine.”

“No,” I whisper, tears welling up in my eyes. I smear them away. Leah reaches for my hand. I don't know which of us is shaking.

• • •

T
HIRDDAY
FINALLY
COMES
again, with the death count approaching three hundred. At the Rashids, Azariah welcomes me in the entryway.

“Melchior's here tonight,” he says. “Not at his friend's, for once.”

Something heavy settles onto my chest. As we pad down the hall, I hear voices coming from the dining room.

“—grades remain disappointing,” Gadi Faysal is saying.

“Why should I bother to raise them, Mother?” I recognize Melchior's voice. “So I can attend Firem University and graduate a puppet of the Assembly? You despise them. Do you want me to follow in their footsteps?”

Azariah mutters something that sounds like
not again
. As we pass the doorway to the living room, Sarah comes dashing out and gives me a hug.

“Will you read me a story tonight, Marah?” she asks.

“Of course,” I say, ignoring her brother's aggravated expression.

As soon as the three of us enter the dining room, Melchior stops talking. I avoid looking at him as I sit down.

The meal proceeds calmly enough until dessert, when Sarah lets something slip about the Seventh Councilor's visit. She proceeds blithely into a story about Channah taking her to the archaeology museum, but Melchior interrupts her.

“Ketsiah Betsalel came to dinner last week?”

The dining room falls silent.

“Are you serious?” he says. “God of the Maitaf.”

“Maybe if you spent a little more time around here,” Azariah says, “you'd know what was going on. Even Marah was here.”

“You let her see a sparker at our table?” Melchior says, appalled. I bristle.

“Be civil, Melchior!” says Gadi Faysal, her cheeks blazing.

“If I'd known Betsalel was coming,” he says, “I would've made sure I was here to prevent you from doing stupid things like that. You always do, when it's easy to send those vultures away happy.”

“It is not your responsibility to navigate politics on behalf of this family,” Banar Rashid says sternly.

“It is your responsibility to attend to your studies,” says Gadi Faysal.

Azariah throws down his napkin. “Here they go again,” he says in my ear. “Let's not stay for this.”

Neither Melchior nor his parents take any notice as Azariah, Sarah, and I leave the dining room.

“Why are they fighting?” Sarah says, distressed. When Azariah rolls his eyes, she seizes my hand. “You promised to read to me.”

I glance at Azariah, who shrugs. “Come join me after.”

Sarah's bedroom has none of the scholarly elegance of Azariah's study. The only sign of any academic pursuits is a desk by the window, where presumably she works on her lessons with Channah during the day. Sarah sinks onto an elongated yellow cushion next to a lacquered cupboard. She yanks it open and pulls out a thick book.

“Sit next to me,” she says. She folds her hands mournfully in her lap. “You don't like me anymore.”

“What?” I plop down beside her. “What do you mean?”

“All you do is study with Azariah. You never talk to me.”

“Yes, I do,” I say lamely.

“Not really.” After a moment, she asks, “Want to see something?”

I nod.

She sets aside her book and cups her hand in front of her, staring intently into her palm. It reminds me of the examiner at Caleb's magic test at the District Hall, except Sarah's gesture is full of innocence and wonder.

A pearl of golden light appears in the hollow of her hand. She blows on it, as though sending off a butterfly. The light floats up from her palm and soars toward the ceiling before vanishing just below the gasolier.

“Oh! That was beautiful. Well done!” The words take me by surprise. Am I praising a budding magician for honing her skills?

Sarah smiles at me. “It's not a real spell, but I can do it every time now.” Reaching for her book, she says, “Now read me a story.”

She chooses a fairy tale about a princess who disguises herself to escape an arranged marriage to an evil king. The story is predictable, but I get caught up in it. Just as I reach the end, there's a knock on the door. It's probably Azariah, wondering where I am.

The door swings open. It's Melchior. He can't seem to lift his gaze from the floor. “Sarah, I want to talk to Marah for a moment. Why don't you go see what Azariah's up to?”

Sarah looks from me to her eldest brother in confusion. “All right.” She kisses me on the cheek before scurrying out.

I stand up and try to slip around Melchior, but he says, “Marah, wait. Please.”

“I don't want to talk to you.”

“I—”

“You called me a sparker at dinner like I wasn't even there,” I say, my voice shaking.