Sparkers (19 page)

Barak stumbles toward me again, but Channah shouts a word, twisting her fingers, and he strains against invisible fetters. The women's hands move like fighting birds. Channah chokes out another spell, and both her adversaries cry out.

“Listen to me, Marah!” Channah shouts. “The Assembly wants the cure for the kasiri. They will never give it to the halani. If you're captured, the sparkers will die. Now run!”

She looks me straight in the eye and aims a spell at me. My unseen shackles burst even as I pull against them, and I fall headlong onto the street.

“Traitor!” Avimelech screams as I drag myself up. Her face is radiant with hatred, all of it focused on Channah as she sets her fingers into an intricate sign.

Channah's hands are between spells, and she gathers them to her chest, as if to shield herself. Then Avimelech utters a word, and silver leaps from her palms. Channah shudders and collapses. A silent scream burns up through my throat.

“God of the Maitaf!” cries Barak. “You didn't have to kill her!”

I hear the horror in his voice, but then I'm running, darting down the narrowest alleys in Horiel, seeking the places the kasiri won't go. The wind freezes my cheeks, but I can feel the sweat under my arms. Channah betrayed everyone, and now she's dead. Ripples of shock sweep across my skin. I keep running.

• • •

I
T
TAKES
HOURS
to return to our hideout. I dare not venture onto any thoroughfare, choosing only the darkest passages. When I reach the abandoned house, Azariah isn't there. It's long past dusk, and the cold engulfs my bones. Inside I feel an icy nothingness.

I stumble across the bedroom, groping for a violin case that isn't there. I need to play my grief, I need to play to find it. I need the music to teach me how to feel again. I can imagine ripping anguished chords from the strings, the violin screaming while I cannot. But I have no instrument here.

So instead I light a lantern, wrap myself in a quilt, and huddle under the window. I tell myself I'll never see Leah again, but I can't muster any response. I tell myself I saw Avimelech kill Channah before my eyes, but I feel only raw emptiness.

I don't know how long I've been watching the flame quiver in the lantern when I hear the door scrape downstairs. Moments later, Azariah walks gingerly into the bedroom. His eyes are blank and chilling, his coat dusted with snow.

“Marah,” he says tonelessly.

I start to rise, the quilt slithering from my shoulders, but I don't have the strength to stand. Azariah sinks to the floor beside me, and I cling to him, or maybe he clings to me, just to have something to hold on to. My tears fall soundlessly as I tremble against Azariah. At last I let him go, wiping my face on my sleeve.

“What is it?” he asks hoarsely. “Not Caleb?”

“No. I gave him the cure. It works, Azariah, his eyes are brown again . . .” My voice quavers. I can't bear my happiness and grief at once. I feel like I'm going to split open.

“It's Leah,” I say. “I was too late.” Through my tears, everything glitters. I wipe my eyes again and see the look on his face. “What's wrong?”

He takes a ragged breath. “Sarah is dead.”

The pain is like a dagger driven under my breastbone. For some reason, it stops up my tears. Azariah scoots away from me on the floor. He brushes the back of his hand across his eyes. I stand up and edge toward the hallway.

“No, don't go,” he says, looking straight at me, his eyes glistening. I return to his side. I can't imagine Sarah gone. This is all wrong. I want to be with my brother, and Azariah should be with his family.

When he has mastered himself, he says, “It was Melchior who told me. I never even made it to the house. He was coming to the city to tell me about Sarah, and we met on the road. He said when he got home yesterday, Sarah's fever had spiked, and she started fighting to breathe and . . .”

He lets out a shuddering breath and then says in a muffled voice, “She died last night. I can't believe it came to this. If we'd been one day ahead . . . Marah, she was eight years old.”

We sit in the semidarkness, contemplating the unfathomable depths of the world's injustice and wondering if we will ever be able to forgive ourselves.

“T
here's something I have to tell you,” I say in the morning between sips of tea, breaking our night-long silence.

Azariah, sitting under the window with his knees drawn up, looks expressionlessly at me.

“Channah's been killed.” Haltingly, I describe what happened.

“They sent Avimelech after you?” he says. “She's high up, being groomed for the Assembly . . .” He snaps out of his torpor. “Are you sure Channah said the Assembly intends for the halani to die?”

Hearing him say it so bluntly, the shock reverberates in me again. “I'm sure.”

“
Keeping
the cure from the halani? But it's so—”

“It's true,” I say. “When Channah told me, Avimelech called her a traitor.”

Azariah says nothing.

“Don't you see?” I say, gripping my glass. “Channah never went back to the Assembly. She changed sides.”

“If she hadn't been working for them in the first place, we would've finished the cure in time for Sarah,” he says, trembling with rage. “What even made her switch? She just ended up dead.”

Avimelech's changeling remark burns bright in my memory. “Azariah . . . she was born a halan. I think when I told her Caleb was dying, when I asked her why she was doing this, she remembered. Maybe she had a brother once, or maybe she thought of her birth parents—”

“I don't want to hear it,” Azariah says.

I wait until he looks calmer before saying, “I think we should concentrate on two things: getting the cure to people who need it and revealing the truth about the cause of the dark eyes to everyone. Kasiri won't adopt the neutralizing spells until they understand why they're necessary.”

He rests the back of his head against the wall and stares at the ceiling. “How are we going to do those things?”

“Well, we could take the cure to the Maitafi Graveyard.”

Azariah looks at me. “You're saying we should give the cure to your mother to distribute?”

“Yes.” I pray she'll be there today. “We'd have to be careful. But she's bound to know people who need the cure, and she'd be discreet.”

“Fine,” he says. “What about revealing the truth?”

“That's harder.” I set down my empty tea glass and rub my numb fingers, trying to think.

“Maybe if our families helped us, and each person told more people . . .”

I shake my head. “It'd still be too slow. We need something that will reach a lot of people right away.”

“We could preach it in the fanes,” Azariah says sarcastically. “Or print it in the newspaper.”

I sit up straight. “That's it!”

“What?” He draws back in surprise. “Marah, people don't believe half of what's written in the paper.”

“If we print something denouncing the Assembly, I'm sure everyone will want to believe it at this point.”

Azariah pulverizes a crust of bread between his fingers. “Then let's do it tonight.”

• • •

A
FTER
NIBBLING
ON
some bread and cheese, we leave for the Maitafi Graveyard. I clutch the pot containing the cure to my chest. A thin stream of halani on their way to work trickles through the streets of Gishal District.

At the graveyard, we approach the stone building. A diaphanous rope of smoke unravels above the chimney. Inside, a small crowd is gathered in the main room, mostly women in fringed shawls, with a few bearded men mixed in. A man with long hair tied back in a ponytail has his arm around the shoulders of a girl Melchior's age, who is holding a viola. The mourners take no notice of our arrival.

As Azariah and I step forward, I realize everyone is huddled around a table that wasn't there the last time I came. On it lies a slender body draped in blue cloth. I stop in my tracks.

Azariah steers me by the elbow, first toward the counter where Mother is and then into the back room. Here I get another shock. Caleb is sitting on a stool wrapped in a quilt, watching a teakettle on the wood-burning stove in the corner of the room.

I rush to his side, setting the cure on the floor. The quilt slides to the ground as Caleb flings his arms around me. When he pulls back, the gauntness of his face frightens me. But his eyes. They're soft and brown, no longer like black marble. We don't sign. There are no signs. The joy rising in my chest feels like pain.

“He's still weak,” Mother says. “But he's just strong enough to walk, and he wanted so much to leave the apartment . . .”

Caleb holds my hand while Mother makes tea. Crouched in front of him, I struggle to wrap the quilt around his shoulders again with my free hand. Azariah intervenes, pulling it into place and gathering the corners in Caleb's lap.

A sound swells from the front room, the deep-voiced viola singing a solemn line. Azariah and I both turn toward the doorway. The instrument sounds uncannily human, and the melody is stark and austere, like music that might have risen out of the depths of the earth. It stirs something in me. The musician breaks off, and I hear men and women chanting in unison, imitating the preceding line of music. Then the violist plays a new line.

“It's the sung prayer,” Azariah says. “From the service for the dead.”

I give him an odd look.

“I've heard it lots of times,” he says. “Normally it's conducted in the fane, with the whole congregation there . . .”

“They're holding the funeral here because the roof of their fane collapsed under the snow,” Mother says, handing Azariah a glass of tea. She nudges the pot on the ground with her shoe. “What's this?”

I stand up. “It's the cure,” I whisper.

She gives me a startled glance. “Did you go to the Avrams yesterday after . . . ?”

“Mother,” I say, forcing the words out though it feels like coughing up nails, “Leah died.”

My eyes are painfully dry. Mother stares at me a moment and then wraps her arms around me. For a second, I feel like there might be something to hold on to, but the sensation is fleeting.

I turn to Caleb again.
Talk to me
, I sign.
Are you really well? Are you tired?

He shakes his head, suppressing a cough.
I'm really well. I miss you
.

His gaze slides to Azariah, who's standing slightly apart. When he notices Caleb watching him, his eyes soften, but his lips remain tight. I know he's thinking of Sarah.

Out in the front room, hinges squeal, and shovel blades scrape the floor.

“It's time to send the procession to the grave,” Mother says, moving toward the doorway. Azariah goes after her, and I follow him. Caleb starts to rise from his stool.

“No,” says Mother.
Stay by the stove
.

In the main room, she instructs the grave diggers in an undertone. Already, the bearers of the dead are arranging the blue-shrouded bundle on a litter. I look away. By the window, the young violist stands with her instrument held in the crook of her elbow.

“I apologize for the delay,” Mother says, approaching a middle-aged man standing at the foot of the litter. “The head grave digger will lead you to the grave now.”

“My thanks,” the man says. “We have not quite finished the service.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” says Mother, stepping back in embarrassment.

The man nods to a woman standing nearby.

“The crossing of the last threshold,” she announces, her voice papery.

Finding her place in her Maitaf, she begins to read a stanza. This must be the threshold passage, the last prayer Maitafi recite for the dead. Like the prayer to greet the dawn, the threshold passage is one of the Maitafi prayers so well known that every Ashari has heard of it.

The woman falters. She repeats a line, reads another. Then her voice catches and grinds to a halt.

One of her companions draws near. “Here, Devorah, let me—”

But Azariah takes up the new stanza, uttering the words deliberately, his voice very low. He speaks from memory, not even glancing at the woman's Maitaf. His monotone strengthens into a fervent recitation. All the while, his eyes are fixed on the litter.

When he reaches the end of the prayer, he turns and stalks into the back room. The head grave digger opens the door for the litter bearers. The procession files out into the cold.

I hasten to the back room. Azariah is standing in a square of sunlight.

“Drink your tea before it cools,” Mother says behind me.

“We need to go,” I say, turning around. “We brought you the cure because we hoped you could distribute it. We thought you would know who to give it to.”

Mother hurries to the stove and presses a hot glass of tea into my hands anyway. “The woman who read the threshold passage has a son with the dark eyes.”

“Please give some to her,” I say. “And to anyone else. A spoonful is enough.”

“I will,” she says.

Azariah starts buttoning his coat. I kneel in front of Caleb again, wishing I could stay. It's unfair to have only these short snatches of time with him.
Be well
, I sign.

He smiles and nods at the tea glass wedged between his knees.
Oversteeped. Mother forgot it was white tea
.

I laugh and then stop before I cry.

Mother accompanies us to the door. As we step out into the dazzling snow, she says, “You can't stay in hiding forever.”

It's true, but I don't know what to say. So I just wave, trying to reassure her, and Azariah and I leave the graveyard.

The sun seems too bright, making me skittish. Even so, nothing can quell the joy of seeing Caleb well—not Azariah's silence, not the thought of that blue-clad body being laid into the earth forever.

I glance sideways at Azariah. He's biting his lip so hard I expect to see blood. Impulsively, I say, “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“I'm sorry you had to . . . You shouldn't have come. I didn't mean for—”

“Just drop it, Marah,” he says brusquely. A few gritty steps later, he apologizes.

“I didn't know Caleb would be there,” I say. “It must've been—”

“I was glad to see him too,” Azariah says. “I couldn't bear it if . . .”

A fierce ache overpowers everything else swirling madly in my chest, and I swallow hard. For a second, the pain and compassion I feel for Azariah are so crippling I wish the burden were mine instead. But I know I would never be able to let Caleb go so he could have Sarah back.