PART TWO
The sky was purple at dawn, the sun clotting behind Simstone Mountain. Upon awakening, Jezebel went to the eastern window and stared down at the amphitheater, now backlit by the rising sun. The Three Dragons Inn had been built into the side of Simstone; only when it was built it hadn’t been the Three Dragons Inn, but instead the manse of an immensely powerful gorgostrine—a holy man of the Twins. It was common knowledge that, on the same spot where the amphitheater now stood, the gorgostrine had once conducted hundreds of twin-death rites: the old Ontish custom that paired adolescents together and forced them to fight to the death.
There were mornings when Jezebel’s thoughts lingered on these past horrors, but not today. Today she tried to focus on her breathing. Once the day wound into gear, she knew it would be near impossible to settle into her body, so she wanted to touch base now: she went through a progression of short inhalations and long exhalations before settling into an even, rhythmic flow, four seconds breathing in, four seconds breathing out. At some point she closed her eyes. She opened them again when the color of the inside of her eyelids turned orange, the sun having topped Simstone.
Time to go. The queen would be arriving in Low Osgood shortly, and Jezebel wanted to reach her destination before the crowds packed the streets.
Outside of Jezebel’s room, the long rosewood hallway was quiet. Mornings in the inn weren’t normally noisy, but often there were a number of early risers among the affluent patrons who stayed there; it wasn’t uncommon for Jezebel to find herself engaged in conversation with an admirer the moment she stepped out of the room. But not today. Save for the handful of actors and actresses who lived in The Three Dragons, the entire inn had been cleared in advance of Queen Portia’s arrival. By evening, every vacant room would be filled with members of the queen’s traveling court. Queen Portia herself was expected to take up residence in the Inn’s tower apartment.
Jezebel descended a spiral staircase, emerging onto a splash of cool black and white marble in the recently renovated foyer. She hurried out the large oaken doors, skipping her ritual glance back at the sculpted dragons watching from the roof. Even without looking, Jezebel could see Teriquay in her mind’s eye, dominant in the center, roaring at all who approached.
The morning was crisp and cool. Jezebel walked briskly down the winding road that led to the Three Dragons Inn, unspooling into Low Osgood. A quarter mile ahead, the alluring form of Lake Wyglass glistened like a chimera, beckoning awestruck eyes to come and see if it was make-believe. The body of water rippled with silver and sunlight, looking less a geographic feature than a portal to dreams. It was the lake that made the Three Dragons Inn possible: the resort town had sprung up around Wyglass’s beguiling charm, first tempting dragons, then royalty, and more recently the wealthy to come and visit. These days The Flame helped drive the affluent to Low Osgood, but the subject matter of the play was so inextricably linked to Wyglass that only a fool would believe that The Flame would have experienced similar success in a different city.
Veering west, Jezebel made her way into the beating heart of Low Osgood, the area the locals referred to as Lowlow, short for Lower Low Osgood. Here, the conditions became considerably more cramped, the smells considerably more ripe, and the sights considerably less refined. All three were in instant evidence as Jezebel pushed herself against the wall of a smithy to avoid a scowling codger driving a quartet of pigs up Black Street. Nearby, a woman made a peculiar song out of a string of obscenities, a large gray rat dashed from one gutter to another, and two boys played knockabout, taking turns boxing each other in the ears to see who would fall first.
Jezebel beat onward, unfazed. Leaving Black Street, Jezebel turned onto the Vanishing, the area where Black, Talc, and Guttergrow Streets intersected in quick order, forming a neat triangle of escape routes. The centerpiece locking the three streets was the highest hovel in all Lowlow, a wooden two-story shack of surprisingly sturdy construction. It was a home, of all things, the residence of the man chiefly responsible for shepherding Jezebel through adolescence after her father died.
Jezebel’s father’s best friend. Bal Whitewood.
Jezebel opened the door and slipped inside. The downstairs was dark, save for where the sun filtered through a stairway aperture. Jezebel hurried toward the light, knowing that was where Bal was waiting.
The back of Bal’s bald head greeted Jezebel at the top of the stairs. He sat on a hard, wooden chair, looking out over the lake through the slats of a rotting porch railing.
“Tell me true, Jezzy,” Bal said without turning around. “Do you think the queen will show her face when she’s winding her way through the Serpent? It’s not likely, is it? She’ll be holed up inside her carriage, hidden away from the prying eyes of the likes of me.”
Jezebel approached and gave Bal a chaste kiss on the back of his bald head. She followed Bal’s gaze to the where the Serpent Road came into view, edging close to Wyglass. “She’s said to be a friend to the common man. I think there’s reason to hope that she’ll show her face along the way. Though she’ll be little more than a blur from here.”
“A glimpse is all I want,” Bal smacked through sandpaper lips. “You’d think my eyes would be sated from the first royal feast, but in my latter years I find that I hunger for a second. I saw her brother too, you know.”
“You saw her brother burnt on the lake. King Reuel and his wife and children.”
Bal nodded vigorously. “That I did. Burnt by the green one, the sly one. The dragonfeeder whispered in Teriquay’s ear and down from the mountaintop she came, eager to kill a king.”
Jezebel took a seat beside Bal in the wooden chair’s twin. A sweet caress of wind rose above the stench in the streets and played at her dark blonde hair. “I play the part of the dragonfeeder in the play. Over at the Three Dragons Inn.”
Bal’s chin labored up and down, but, as Jezebel expected, he avoided the matter of her vocation upon resuming the conversation, choosing instead to revert to his memories of the past. “Your father couldn’t believe it when I told him what had happened. Tanners we were, at Coffyn Castle. The king’s dead, I said, him and his whole family burnt to a crisp.”
Jezebel reached over and touched Bal on the arm. “My father loved you like a brother.”
“That he did. And I him. I told him that I’d take care of you as he lay dying. And I kept that vow. I keep it to this day.”
Their roles of who cared for who had long since reversed, not that Jezebel felt the need to point it out. Bal had taken care of her when it mattered. Back when she was young, and newly parentless. Back when the world was crashing in. Bal had stolen her away from Coffyn Castle when the lady of the castle had wanted her dead, relinquishing his place in the world in the process. And he had never once complained of the sacrifice, not even during the lean years when he had bounced between occupations, not even when he’d been forced to spend a stretch farming leeches. He was a rare sort, her Bal, the only man of his kind she’d ever encountered.
“You’ve done right by me, Bal. I’ll never forget it.”
They sat in silence for a moment, watching the shimmering, sun-kissed lake. Lowlow or not, it was still one of the best views in the city. Directing her attention toward the Serpent, Jezebel could see the first of the spectators lining the road, anticipating the queen’s arrival.
“Queen Portia is coming to see the play,” Jezebel said, treading once more into territory she knew Bal would rather avoid. She had never understood his reluctance to discuss her occupation, but she had respected it nevertheless, believing she owed him the favor of this one peculiar preference. But her impending performance in front of the queen weighed too heavily for Jezebel not to share her worries with the person she trusted most in the world. “She’s going to be in the audience as I sit astride a great wooden dragon and pretend to burn her family to death. Even worse, she’ll watch my transformation into the dragonfeeder. Bal, I know it’s only a play, and I know that Queen Portia is renowned for her wisdom and kindness, but if ever there was a vengeful bone in the queen’s body, who better to punish for her brother’s death than the actress playing the dragonfeeder?”
Bal grimaced. Without seeming to be fully aware of what he was doing, he flicked his hand, as if shooing away Jezebel’s words.
“Bal, I don’t under—”
“This is the price a person pays for courting fame,” Bal interrupted, giving the arm of the wooden chair a little slap. “I’ve tried to warn you, Jezzy. Live a small life. You of all people should know the dangers of bringing attention to yourself. It was years after we fled the castle before I got a good night’s sleep. I worried constantly that the Lady Esme would find us, would find you—”
“The Lady Esme died less than six months after we fled. And it was her superstitions alone that made you worry for my life. The others, even Lord Coffyn, didn’t share her beliefs. You said yourself that we could have returned to no ill harm—”
“And yet I kept us clear away, didn’t I? Because what’s your life to a lord who’d rather not worry that your presence is the cause of every bit of ill luck to pass his way? All I wanted for you was a chance to live your life without having to worry that you’d always be associated with being a lesser twin. I didn’t want anyone to think you a…a…jeyedoshi. But now you play the part of the dragonfeeder, a jeyedoshi if there ever was one.”
Ah. At last, Bal’s reticence to discuss her acting career made sense.
“I’m no jeyedoshi, Bal. You know that. I have no telling mark. I don’t speak to animals.” She laughed as she said it, but even as she laughed, she remembered the day she had tried out for the role of the dragonfeeder, the words Shayla Long-Eyes had said to her the instant she finished her audition. You were born to this role, little sister. And then Shayla had selected her on the spot, sending away the other girls, true actresses all, flabbergasted and confused.
Bal turned in his chair and looked at her. She felt stripped bare by his gaze, his dark brown eyes burrowing into the very soul of her. He stared long and hard, before suddenly, as if coming back into himself, relenting. “My Jezzy,” he said. “I’m an old man now. And you a woman grown. You’ve risen to such heights.” He looked at her once more, but this time only at her clothes, a green linen tunic of a quality cut. She always dressed simply for her outings to the Lowlow, but even so, she couldn’t hide what she’d become. “There’s so little I can do for you. But as you said, you’re no jeyedoshi. Play your part true, and, if Queen Portia is just, she will recognize you for who you truly are.”
Jezebel didn’t respond. She had no idea whether Bal had given her a blessing, or a curse.
*
Bal was old, but he was neither senile nor doddering, so once Jezebel had given him the gift of her time, she took her leave. She could see from the porch railing that the streets were beginning to fill. Later in the day she would see Queen Portia up close at the Three Dragons Inn, but that in no way tempered her desire to watch the royal procession enter the city.
She knew a place close to the water where she would have a decent view. She decided to go there at once. But when she stepped outside Bal’s front door, Shayla Long-Eyes was waiting for her.
For a moment Shayla said nothing, instead allowing the shock of her appearance to settle in Jezebel’s bones. The Long-Eyes had coiled irises of deep blue that verged on purple, and when she looked at people, she gave the impression that she was communing with their thoughts. Jezebel felt instantly guilty, forgetting that she had nothing to feel guilty about. It took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t guilt she felt but fear: Shayla had peeled back a layer of Jezebel’s private life, and now Jezebel had one less place to hide from the Long-Eyes’s gaze.
“The dragonfeeder lived on Guttergrow when she was a child. Have you visited the place?”
Jezebel was thrown by Shayla’s decision to ask a question in lieu of a greeting, but she quickly recovered.
“Yes. I’ve been there. The alehouse.”
“The Spider Hole, they call it, though at the time it was stupidly called The Drunkard. Would you accompany me there?”
Jezebel was flummoxed. She supposed that was Shayla’s intention. “I had hoped to see Queen Portia enter the city.”
Shayla gave her a thin, well-practiced smile. It was the smile of a woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer. “You will see the queen later, will you not? And from a better vantage point than most. Come with me. What I have to show you will not keep.” She turned and walked away without waiting for a reply, heading shortly down Talc before veering sharply onto Guttergrow, which buttressed the back of Bal’s hovel.
Jezebel followed. Unlike Jezebel in her simple green tunic, Shayla was dressed in an exquisite purple samite gown. A long, silver chain hung around her neck. She carried herself with an air of purpose that was difficult to place: when she passed someone in the street, they invariably gawked, struck by her station, only to look away a split second later, unnerved by the same ineffable quality that gave the Long-Eyes her power. Shayla might have been a priestess or a slum lord, a highborn lady or a whore.
Jezebel followed in her wake, unseen.
They arrived at The Spider Hole. It was a squat and dingy abode, sandwiched between ramshackle buildings. Although it was early, a handful of patrons were already quaffing ale, in early celebration of Queen Portia’s arrival. Jezebel followed Shayla across the sawdust-covered floor, toward a mustachioed man on the opposite side of the room. While crossing, Jezebel glanced at the cupboard where the dragonfeeder purportedly had slept when she was a poor orphan girl. The man opened a door in the dusky black that spilled back out into the day, revealing a cramped courtyard full of empty wooden benches. Standing in the middle of the courtyard was a man with a long beard tied into sections by pieces of colored string. He stood awaiting them, holding his hands behind his back, striking a subservient air.
“Madam Shayla,” the man intoned. He didn’t so much as glance at Jezebel.
Shayla gave the man a generous smile. “Jezebel, this is Jodori Flak, from the Blackstar Isles. He is a man of many, shall we say, unnatural talents. I’ve brought him here today to teach you one. The ability to breathe fire.”
Jezebel blanched. It was only then that she noticed the torch lying on the ground beside Jodori, latent with igneous potential. “Breathe fire?” she repeated.
“Yes. When you emerge on Teriquay’s back tomorrow night, you will breathe real fire, for the delight of our queen.”
A pang of fear and a thrill of excitement passed through Jezebel simultaneously. The words at last materialized in her mind as a different sentiment escaped her lips.
“Is it…safe?”
Shayla laughed, a throaty chuckle. “I should hope not. Not entirely, at least. If the queen and her court aren’t for a heartbeat’s breadth distressed, then it won’t have had the desired effect. You’ll be in some danger too, of course, but that’s why Jodori’s here. To guide you on the path between entertainment and immolation.”
The Blackstar Islander nodded with a curt fervency. He turned to Jezebel without looking at her, his sightline skewing high. “Fire is an unpredictable beast, but she can be directed, corralled. I’ll teach you secrets enough to see you safely through your performance.”
Jezebel found herself nodding, agreeing. Even so, another question formed. “Theus, Trudy, and Roger—are they aware? I suppose we’ll need to practice at least once onstage, later tonight, for their benefit.”
Shayla’s response was studied, calm. “No. They’re to be kept in the dark. The first knowledge that they’ll have of the fire will be the moment you breathe Teriquay’s flames over the tops of their heads.” She paused. Smiled her cat’s-grin smile. “The moment will be sublime. Beautiful. Performance will blur into reality, and for an instant both the audience and the Queen of Ragar Or will exist in the same suspended space that held King Reuel and his family before Teriquay’s flames ushered them into oblivion.”
Jezebel unconsciously held her breath. In her mind’s eye she was atop the wooden Teriquay, watching the flame billow over the heads of the imitation Salks, hearing the astonished and frightened cries from both the actors onstage and the crowd beyond. Jezebel had played the part of the dragonfeeder for so long that it felt as if the girl were a part of her very being; here was an opportunity to tap even deeper into the experience, to go beyond becoming the role and elicit, at the crucial moment, the same primal fear the dragonfeeder had once demanded from those caught beneath the dragon’s flame.
“I’ll do it,” Jezebel said.
*
They practiced with watered wine. Jodori showed Jezebel how to pocket the liquid at the front of her mouth, how to close off the back of her throat. Then, over and over again, Jodori bid her spew the wine into the air toward an imaginary torch held at a sixty-degree angle, forcefully and tight-lipped with a raspberry pucker and “harder, harder!” Once or twice droplets of spewed wine landed on Jezebel’s chin, causing Jodori to shake his head and lament the envisioned loss of her beautiful face. “Now the fire has fallen, you see, and now your face is aflame, and now you are screaming, and now you are dead, or if alive, wishing it wasn’t so.” Then he would demonstrate once more, and afterwards have her grab hold of his bone-dry beard, upon which no droplets of wine had fallen.
At last, Jodori stepped away from Jezebel and declaimed, “It is time.” He reached into the pocket of his green-and-black cloak and retrieved a leather-skin pouch. “Lamp oil,” he said. “More effective than watered wine.” He sighed, seemingly apropos of nothing, before going to work on the torch. Within minutes he had the torch lit, striking iron onto flint near the torch’s pine-pitch/cedar bark head. “Tomorrow Shayla will provide the torch. It will be lit for you.” Jezebel had lit a torch before, but she nodded in agreement, knowing that during the madness of the play, stopping to light a torch would be next to impossible.
Once again Jodori retrieved the leather pouch. Moving to a clearing in the middle of the courtyard, he took a pull from the pouch, lifted the blazing torch into the air, and, in quick succession, spewed three short blasts, bringing a trio of fireballs into existence. The heat from the fireballs warmed Jezebel’s face. She felt a sort of giddiness overcome her at the thought of bringing the element into being.
“Now, you,” he said, handing over the torch. The flame danced at the torch’s end like a restless spirit, awaiting the instruction of her breath. Once the torch was secure in Jezebel’s hand, Jodori handed over the leather-skin pouch. Her heartbeat thrummed in and out of time to the flickering flame. Before she could reconsider, she pocketed a mouthful of oil, gathered her strength, and, copying Jodori, spewed thrice. A flower of flame bloomed each time, its dangerous orange blossoms crowning the empty air. When she had finished, the flame resettled on the head of the torch, still dancing, still agitated.
Jezebel turned to Jodori and smiled. A drop of lamp oil trembled on her lip, pining for the flame.