Burning Roses Read online

  At first Rosa didn’t know what she meant. The man? In Hou Yi’s language she needed give the statement no subject. Got away, she had said. Something or someone had gotten away—

  “The bird,” Rosa said. “You mean the other sunbird.” She’d spoken in her own tongue by accident. She repeated it, the words coming with difficulty. Her brain was addled with smoke.

  “Yes. It got away,” Hou Yi repeated.

  And Hou Yi was tracking it.

  Rosa wanted to ask why, wanted to demand whether they were in any shape for such a quest, but her scratching throat revolted at the thought of trying to form the questions.

  Hou Yi, for once, elaborated without being pressed. “I have to find it. It will return and wreak more damage. It’s been called, and…” She paused. “It is my responsibility.”

  “It’s not,” Rosa said. “You don’t have to.” She said it more out of form than anything. Hou Yi was running from something the same way Rosa was, only Hou Yi ran by hunting the sunbirds and water monsters and other creatures that threatened the people, extending herself beyond call, beyond reason. Rosa, on the other hand …

  Rosa had run halfway around the world and joined a mad quest that wasn’t even her own. She had no space to tell Hou Yi to stop.

  Death will catch us sometime anyway. Would this be such a bad way to go?

  “This is my responsibility,” Hou Yi repeated. She sounded strangely remote. “But not yours. You’re injured. You should return home.”

  Rosa pushed herself up so she was leaning on an elbow. She’d meant to get all the way to sitting, but after the effort it took to get this far, it seemed good enough. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You need me.”

  Hou Yi barked a laugh. “In my youth … but never mind. This isn’t your journey. Leave. Go home. Live in my house or return to your own country; it’s your decision. But this is not your path to take.”

  “Bull.” Rosa said the word in her own language, but she was quite sure the meaning was clear. “If you’re going to get yourself killed, you can at least let me do it alongside you.”

  Hou Yi turned her face away and touched something beneath her shirt. “You would quail away before the journey’s end anyway. Go, Flower. Go find your wife.”

  The words, the image they brought up of Mei’s face—they stabbed. As they were meant to. Not to mention that Hou Yi had never in their time together known Rosa to quail.

  Hou Yi was not usually cruel.

  No. Hou Yi was never cruel.

  Rosa’s mind spiraled back and rebuilt what she had heard and not understood. You called them, Hou Yi had said to the man, and he had confirmed it.

  I killed you. Rosa had thought she had misheard.

  Hou Yi was not usually cruel …

  “That man is someone you knew,” Rosa said. “He called the sunbirds. As … an act against you. Yes?”

  And now Hou Yi didn’t want Rosa along, was pushing her away, not because she didn’t need or want aid, but because this journey would bare Hou Yi’s soul. And Rosa would see.

  Rosa wouldn’t want herself, her past, so forcefully displayed either. A deep kinship thrummed through her for the violation Hou Yi must be feeling. The shame. They were meant to be able to hide from each other, together.

  Hou Yi had not moved, nor responded to Rosa’s query. Rosa swallowed against her swollen throat. She did not mean to do this, to know Hou Yi’s secrets without having them granted to her.

  But neither could she let a friend go off alone to die. Of all Rosa’s faults—and she had many, so many—she had never been that person, and would never be.

  “I had a friend,” Rosa said. Her voice cracked, and she wasn’t sure whether it was from the smoke or not. “I had a friend, and … she broke me. Then I betrayed the one who saved me from her.”

  Her eyes and nose burned. But if Hou Yi would be forced to reveal herself, the only thing Rosa could do was … the same.

  If she could maintain the courage.

  Hou Yi moved, finally, turning her head slightly to Rosa. “What was your friend’s name?”

  “Goldie. ‘Little Gold,’” Rosa translated. “For her hair. Golden curls—have you seen it before?”

  “I have,” Hou Yi said.

  “The first thing I saw was her yellow hair,” Rosa said. “Through the window of a cottage. I was so cold, and so hungry. And so very lonely. My grandmother had just died, and I … I had been on my own.” Her icy fingers had clenched the rifle, there in the tree, outside the house where she had heard Goldie scream …

  “You’ve spoken of your grandmother before,” Hou Yi said. “She taught you to hunt.”

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “She taught me…”

  * * *

  “Still now,” Abuelita’s voice said at her shoulder. “Relaxed. Breathe in, breathe out, as even as you can. Like the wind caressing the petal of a flower.”

  Abuelita smelled of gunpowder and warm bread. Rosa wriggled her belly against the ground and tried to relax. Inhale, exhale. Inhale …

  “Let the rifle move with you,” Abuelita said. “Up, and down. Up, and down. The same distance each time, yes? With each breath. At the bottom, your front sight kisses the target. Up, and down—kiss. Inhale, and exhale—kiss.”

  Rosa breathed. It was even, just as her grandmother said—she breathed, and the sight grazed the shingle that was her target. Breathe, and it happened again.

  “Now, at the very bottom of your breath, squeeze your finger back. Just the tip, and so gently. Just so.”

  Rosa breathed, and squeezed.

  The bang was so loud, even through the earmuffs Abuelita had made her wear! But the clay shingle jumped and shattered.

  “I got it, Abuela! I got it, didn’t I?” Without thinking, Rosa rolled out of her careful belly-down position to grin up at her grandmother’s gentle face. But she kept the muzzle down out of habit, for that she had been taught long before she had ever been allowed to pull a trigger.

  A proud smile wreathed Abuelita’s face. “Excellent, my child! Did it frighten you?”

  “No,” Rosa boasted. “I want to go again!”

  Her grandmother cast a quick, worried glance at the sun. “Next time. Your mother will be expecting you home.”

  “Can’t I stay here tonight?”

  “I wish, child.” Her grandmother’s hand touched Rosa’s cheek, a feather light brush. Rosa jerked back out of reflex, before she could remember that the bruise was almost healed, and besides which, Abuela was not Mama, never never never.

  “Oh. My dear,” whispered her grandmother. “How I wish…”

  But wishes never came true.

  * * *

  “You never speak of your mother,” Hou Yi said, when Rosa ran short of words.

  “No,” Rosa agreed.

  “I see.”

  Rosa had tried to turn her back on her mother when she ran, to restart her life for only herself. How ironic that the poison she’d ended up wrapping her life around had been, in the end, her mother’s legacy.

  No. Her prejudices were her own. She would not blame some long-ago influence that she had fled from in every other way.

  “My mother was not a … kind woman,” Rosa said instead. “I sometimes feel like she must have loved me … but I think I made myself forget those parts. And the grundwirgen—she was spiteful. Small comments, all the time, about how unnatural and dangerous they were. I told myself I didn’t believe her, that I would be better.”

  “Grundwirgen.” Hou Yi rolled the sounds around in her mouth, badly mispronouncing them. “What a complicated word. It’s your Western term for magic users, is it not?”

  “Not quite,” Rosa said. “It is what we call any intelligent animal. Humans who are cursed to animal form, or witches who transform themselves, or nonhuman creatures born with speech and intellect.”

  “What about gods who take the form of both beasts and humans?”

  Rosa suspected, but was not certain, that the gods in this part of the
world were a pantheon of extremely powerful sorcerers. But she had seen much here that she had never encountered before, so she reserved judgment. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “What of demons?” Hou Yi said.

  “If they become animals, yes.”

  “What of the—” She said a word Rosa didn’t know.

  “I don’t know. You have many more grundwirgen than we do. There is much more magic in use here.”

  “A very strange term,” Hou Yi said. “Not very specific. The sunbirds are the children of a god, but they are a plague.”

  Rosa frowned. She’d insisted, when she first joined Hou Yi—“You told me they are not grundwirgen.”

  Hou Yi waved a careless hand. “These are dumb, yes. But others … I faced some in my youth who were perfectly capable of reason, but reveled in burning the countryside and countenanced nothing but their own amusement. Intelligent or not, beasts or not, such menaces must be removed.”

  Rosa had no good answer. “Perhaps,” she said finally. She was too tired, and this was prodding old wounds from a direction she had not expected tonight. “But perhaps I am not the one to remove them.”

  She settled back, staring up at the stars. The fire had burned down to a pocket of glowing ash beside them. The night was so clear, the stars so bright, and Rosa had no idea where they were. It might as well have been another world.

  “You need rest,” Hou Yi said.

  It was true. Rosa’s voice was scraping into uselessness anyway. But she’d begun, and perhaps Hou Yi would take the opening of her story as the promise it was. “What’s your plan? Where are we going?”

  Hou Yi shifted, and sighed—a grant of permission. “We will move in the light. He is flaunting his trail at us.” She paused. “His name is Feng Meng. He was my apprentice, many years ago.”

  Rosa didn’t speak, didn’t press.

  “He surprised me in the woods. With a club, after he could not best me with a bow. He still would not have succeeded if the townsfolk hadn’t been on his side … they left me when they assumed their work was done.” She lowered her head slightly. “His motive was jealousy, but I am not sure he did wrong. Not then.”

  Rosa could understand that feeling. Whatever Hou Yi had done to swallow her in such guilt, however … it was not for Rosa to say the scales had been rebalanced, but Feng Meng’s chosen revenge was burning a swath across the countryside. Rosa saw again the girl who had come running, gasping; saw the fleeing villagers, the burning farms; remembered the dead man’s face staring into her own.

  “He does wrong now,” she said.

  “Yes,” Hou Yi answered. “And I must—we must stop him.”

  PART TWO

  Rosa was not sure whether she felt better or worse when she woke the next day under the wan light of a white morning sun. Every muscle had stiffened and cramped from sleeping on the ground, and every bruise from the fight the night before moaned at her when she tried to move. At least she could breathe a little more easily, though her throat and lungs felt scoured out by a pumice stone.

  Hou Yi must not have come away unscathed either, but she gave no sign. She’d restarted the fire by the time Rosa woke, and had a hare spitted over it.

  “Where is Feng Meng leading us?” Rosa asked. “Do you know?”

  “The sunbirds come from an island,” Hou Yi said. “Just off the coast, in the sea to the south and east. They mostly keep to that place. I was wondering why they had begun venturing so far into towns and villages—usually they do not, unless they are malicious.”

  Maliciousness would mean grundwirgen. Rosa could only be glad she was not faced with that moral dilemma.

  “The bird from last night seems to have returned in that direction. The trail of Feng Meng likewise points us on that path.”

  Rosa nodded. She had assumed Hou Yi had been tracking. “You think he has the sunbirds under his control?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He may be studying sorcery, but it’s also possible he only baited them out. The island is wild, steeped in magic, and home to many dangerous creatures. I’ve journeyed there once before, when I was seeking—well, it was many years ago. I think it is Feng Meng’s chosen arena for some final contest with me.”

  “You’re better than he is,” Rosa said, again remembering a snippet of conversation from their standoff that she had not grasped at the time. “He never matched your skill with a bow.”

  “No. But I am not under the illusion this contest will be even.”

  Of course not. And who was to say Feng Meng would even choose archery to duel with, when he knew his former mentor could best him?

  Hou Yi rose to siphon water—she paced back and forth in the heavy dew and then wrung out the sopping hem of her cloak into a waterskin she’d had hooked to her belt. While she worked, Rosa finished eating and broke camp, kicking dirt over the fire and shouldering her rifle. Hou Yi took up her bow and quiver, and they set out at a steady pace, one that would put ground behind them without scraping them dry of energy.

  They didn’t speak much. The sun climbed overhead, and the rolling hills began to be dotted with groves and thickets. Rosa let Hou Yi lead, but she noted the same signs the other woman followed: a trampled line in the grass, a boot print in the dirt, a broken twig by a stream. Either Feng Meng was not very good at hiding his tracks, or he wanted them to follow.

  Rosa was betting on the latter.

  But as the day drew on, Hou Yi seemed to curve into herself. At every new sign her mouth would flatten more, her eyes narrow, her brow tighten. By the time they paused for a late meal, her jaw might well have been carved from stone.

  “She wasn’t my wife,” Rosa said suddenly, over the fire. A much larger hare this time, felled by one of Hou Yi’s arrows, an arrow she had then carefully retrieved and cleaned.

  Hou Yi looked up from tending the flames.

  “We never called each other that,” Rosa continued. “But we were, to each other—I don’t know if that would be thought ill of here.”

  “For some,” Hou Yi said, and Rosa noticed her jaw had been distracted into relaxing slightly. “For some, anything different from them is scandal. If you love her, that is all that matters.”

  “I love her,” Rosa said.

  “She left?”

  “I did.” Rosa fixed her eyes on the crackling meat. “I left her and—our daughter. More than two years ago.”

  Hou Yi waited.

  “I had to.” The words sounded like a lie, even though they were probably the truest ones Rosa had ever said. “What I had done—it came back to destroy them. When they found out … they told me to go, but I’m not sure if they would have rather I…” She saw the coldness in Xiao Hong’s face again, heard the angry demands that she turn herself in, before the girl had thrust a rifle into her hands and said run.

  “It might have brought them more closure if I had stayed to face the consequences of my crimes,” she murmured. “Maybe that would have been best.”

  Maybe that would have made her at least a shadow of the woman they had thought her, instead of a monster who was also a coward.

  “I became a tyrant,” Hou Yi said. She wasn’t looking at Rosa either, focused instead on where her hand turned the spit. “I turned from hero to villain, when my wife left. I doubt you could have done worse.”

  “I’m not sure these things can be compared,” Rosa said. “I was a murderer. Where does that rank?”

  Hou Yi digested that for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I thought it might be something like that. Your ‘grundwirgen.’”

  “I told myself I was doing good. I don’t know when I lost my way.”

  Or maybe she did. The bears. And Goldie.

  Or maybe it had been still earlier than that, the very first time, with the wolf. It was the one time she could not truly blame herself, not that time—but maybe there had been no coming back from such a thing, no matter how it happened.

  * * *

  Her grandmother had made the red cloak for her. Well, her gra
ndmother had made her a red cloak, back when she was three or four … or perhaps it had been before that; perhaps Abuelita had been experimenting with the crimson dye even when Rosa was in swaddling clothes. But Rosa remembered the first hooded cloak her grandmother had enveloped her in, the bright, bright scarlet shouting her presence across the kingdom, and Rosa had taken to it so much like a second skin that she’d thrown temper tantrums when her mother tried to make her take it off.

  Now Abuelita gave her a new cloak every birthday—for growing girls, she had said—and Rosa never stopped wearing them. She felt protected when she did—safe in the embrace of her grandmother. Without one of her red cloaks she was exposed, vulnerable, an eight-year-old girl like everyone else.

  With one, she was invincible.

  Even from her mother.

  Her mother came up behind where she sat at the breakfast table and began stroking her hair. Rosa tensed. Her ear still rang from the night before, deep in her head where she almost couldn’t hear it.

  “Sweetheart. I’m going to give you some bread and meats to take with you when you go to your grandmother’s today. She’s old—she shouldn’t live alone like she does. I keep telling her to move in with us.”

  Rosa didn’t know if she liked that idea or not. On the one side, her grandmother would live with them, embracing and protecting her all day like a living version of her red cloak. On the other, she wouldn’t have her grandmother’s house to escape to.

  She hunched into herself.

  “Don’t frown, Rosa. It’s not becoming.”

  “I don’t care what’s becoming.”

  Her mother sighed. “You will. Someday you’ll need to start seeking a husband, and men don’t like young ladies who frown.”

  “Well, I don’t like men.”

  “Now you’re just being contrary,” said her mother. “Someday you will grow up. Here. I’m packing up some cheese, too. I don’t know how to talk to your grandmother, honestly. She’s over there, old and sick and worrying us all to death—”

  “She’s not sick,” said Rosa.