Red Lightning

There was no up, and no down, and no her.

That was the thing no one had told her. She had imagined pain as a place, a room she could walk into and out of, with walls and a door. But this had no walls. It was a color. It was red, a deep roaring red that filled her eyes and her mouth and the hollow of her skull, and she was inside it the way a coin is inside a flame. The bolts came and came. Each one struck at the crown of her head and ran down the whole length of her, bone by bone, nerve by nerve, and each time it reached her feet it turned and came back up.

She screamed. She heard herself do it, from a long way off, as one hears a stranger in the next room. The sound went on and on. It was a thin high animal thing. It cracked, and went on.

Stop.

The word formed somewhere. She did not know where.

Stop. Stop. Please stop.

Nothing stopped.

…

The fire went first.

She felt it go, as one feels a tooth being drawn: a deep and delicate wrench at the very root. All her life, or all the part of it she remembered, there had been a warmth in her. It sat under the breastbone like a hearth in a house. She had never thought of it as a thing apart. It was only herself, the shape of her, the way her hand was hers.

Now it was being pulled out like a thread from a cloth.

She felt it unspool. She felt it rise through her chest and her throat and her mouth in a long white ribbon, shimmering, and the cables at the top of the pillar drank it down. It left her cold. It left her emptier with every beat, a house with the lamps put out one by one, and with every lamp that went dark she grew more afraid, because she knew what lay behind them.

Nothing, she thought. There's nothing behind them.

That's all I am.

It was a stupid, small, childish terror. It came up out of the red like a face in a window, and it said: You were a beggar under a wagon. You have no name. They gave you one. They gave you a past and a palace and a man, and none of it was yours, and now they are taking the only thing that was.

And what will be left?

She tried to answer. She had always been good at answers. She had talked her way out of a cage and a council and a hall of silver masks. But there was no one to talk to. There was only the red, and the roaring, and her own voice growing thinner.

She thought: Kieran.

She thought it as hard as she could. It was a rope thrown across a gulf. She saw his face, the lamplit face of the tower, ash-eyed and cold and absolutely, helplessly curious about her. She saw the laughing face in the morning. She saw the one in the snow, with a stranger's tears running down it, when he had said I have never in my life called anyone that.

Kieran, it hurts.

She was not sure that she said it aloud.

…

"Solaia!"

Someone was calling her. The voice was far away, ragged, hoarse with weeping. She knew it. It was the one thing in the roaring that she knew. It came to her through the red like a hand through water, and she turned toward it, and found that she could not move.

She looked down.

She was standing in the air.

Not quite. Her feet were on the glass. But the glass was a great distance below, and she was looking down at it as from a height, at a white figure fixed on a black column, with arms flung wide. A slender figure, small as a doll. The red bolts struck it, one after another. It jerked and trembled. Its head was thrown back, and its hair streamed up toward the sky like smoke.

That's me, she thought.

It was strangely peaceful. She floated there, above the platform, above the Ridge, and the pain was only a distant thing, a drumming in another room. She saw the pillars, glowing like the teeth of a vast white jaw. She saw the crowd, a sea of faces. She saw a man on his knees at the foot of the stair, clutching his side, with blood on his mouth and his lips shaping her name over and over.

She saw the throne.

A hundred feet up, at the apex of the column, the Pontiff sat in his bone seat with the cables running into his back. He had thrown off his mitre. His veil lay in the air behind him like a flag. And his hands, those long white knotted hands, were clenched on the arms of the throne, and between his fingers the white fire poured.

It's mine, she thought. It's going into him.

It poured from the column, along the cables, up the ribs of the chair. It lit him from within. She saw the silver mask crack. A hairline split ran down it from brow to chin, and through the crack came a light so bright she could not look at it, and she heard the old man begin, very softly, to laugh.

It was the laugh of a man who had been waiting five thousand years for a drink of water.

No, she thought. No. No, you can't. That's not yours. That's not—

She tried to go to him.

She did not know how. She reached with the part of her that floated, the part that was only attention, and the red closed over her like a hand. The pain came back. It came back all at once, with the roar of a river bursting through a dam, and she was in her body again, in the chains, in the bolts, in the screaming.

…

It was then that the ash began to burn.

She did not understand it at first. It came to her as a small warmth at her knees, a tickle, as of a candle held near the skin. Then it grew. It spread. It was a point of heat in the hem of her gown, in a tiny pocket stitched with Berylla's neat small stitches. It beat. It beat like a second heart.

Warm, said a voice.

It was not a voice. It was a feeling. She knew it. It was the same one that had spoken to her in the nursery rhyme, in the mountain's heartbeat, in the first moment of her life under the wagon: the voice of her own fire, speaking from a long way off, in a language older than words.

Warm. Remember.

"I can't," she gasped. "I can't. It's too much. It's taking it."

Not all.

"It's taking all—"

Not what's hidden.

She did not understand. But she felt the ash flare, a bright hard spark against her leg, and a thread of white gold ran up her side, hot and fine as a needle. It slid under the bolts. It threaded through the pain, bending around the red like water around a rock, and wound itself into the cold place behind her breastbone.

It found something there.

A small thing. A very small, very bright, very stubborn thing, curled in the hollow of her. It had been hidden all along, tucked beneath the fire, shielded by the Veil. The cables had not found it. The bolts had not touched it. It lay in the dark like a seed in the ground, and when the thread of white-gold reached it, it stirred.

And it beat.

Thum.

She went rigid.

It was nothing like her own pulse. It was quicker, lighter, and it fluttered like the wing of a very small bird. It had a rhythm of its own. She had felt it once, in a hut in the snow, and she had told herself it was an echo, a trick of the mountain. It was not. It was here. It was in her. It was a second heart, tiny and fierce and unafraid, and it was beating in time with the ash.

Thum. Thum. Thum.

Oh, she thought.

She had known. She had known since the moment Osric had gripped her wrist. She had pushed it down, as one pushes down a dreadful thought, because she had needed to stand up and walk to the column. She had made herself deaf. But there was no deafness now, in the roaring red, with the fire gone from her body and the ash burning at her hem, and the thing in her breast beating like a drum.

I'm going to have a baby.

It came to her very clearly. Very calmly. It was an astonishing thought. It was the strangest thing she had ever thought, and it did not frighten her at all.

His baby. Ours.

And I've chained us both to a mountain.

…

The bolts stopped.

It was so sudden that she nearly fell. One moment the red roared through her, and the next there was silence: an enormous, ringing, ugly silence. The cables dimmed. The light in the pillars faded to a dull glow. She hung in the chains like a puppet with cut strings, gasping, her mouth full of blood, and the platform spun around her.

"A pause," said the Pontiff's voice, from far above. It was thin and dreamy, drunk with light. "A pause, child. To let the body rest. We are two-thirds done."

She tried to answer. Her throat would not work.

"You are very strong," the voice went on. "I had not expected it. Twenty-two strokes, and you are still conscious. The Marshal's wife did not last past ten." A faint chuckle. "She was a good deal more careful with her prayers."

"Solaia."

Kieran.

She turned her head, slowly. It took an enormous effort. He had dragged himself across the glass on his elbows, a long bright smear of blood marking his path, and now he knelt at her feet with one hand reaching toward her. His face was ruin. His mouth was torn. Black veins webbed his throat. His eyes were fixed on her, and in them was a horror so naked, so total, that she almost looked away.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I am so sorry. I did not know. I swear I did not know—"

"Yes, you did," she whispered.

He flinched.

"You knew some of it." Her voice was a husk. "You didn't want to. You wanted it to be true. That's different." She swallowed. It hurt. "Kieran. Listen."

"I am listening."

"There's something I have to tell you."

"Do not. Save your strength. I will find a way to—"

"Kieran."

He fell silent.

She looked down at him. At his black-streaked, bleeding, broken face. At the man who had chained her, and loved her, and lied. The red haze was beginning to creep back at the edges of her sight. She could hear the cables begin to hum.

She smiled.

"I think," said Solaia, "that I'm pregnant."

The hum stopped.

For a moment the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Overhead, the Pontiff stirred in his seat of bone. Kieran's face did not change. It simply emptied, slowly, of every expression, until there was only a white blank stillness, as of a man who has been struck on the head and does not yet know that he is bleeding.

"What?" he said.

"I felt it." She laughed, and it came out a sob. "In the snow, I think. When we lay in the hut. I thought it was the mountain. It's not the mountain. It's ours."

"Solaia—"

"It's in me. It's been in me this whole time. It was hiding." Her eyes filled. "It's been so brave."

He made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the sound a man makes when his legs go from under him. He crumpled forward onto his hands, with his forehead against the glass, and his shoulders began to shake. A long, dreadful, soundless shuddering. And above them, in the silence, the old man's voice came down the column, very clear, very soft, and no longer dreamy at all.

"Ah," said the Pontiff. "So that is what he meant."

The cables lit.