The Night of the Swarm

sfvantskor is perfection. She set the pages down outside the door with the stone atop them and crept back to her room.

Her heart was pounding. She had been thinking about her stolen memories because another was trying to come back. The sight of those two beautiful selk, and now of Vispek, was bringing it nearer. She wanted to run again; she wanted to steal from the house unseen. There were voices in the outer chamber: her brother was asking if anyone had seen Neeps, and whether Neda was still hiding in her room.

Neda slipped out of the window and crossed the little garden and pulled herself easily over the wall. There was a shaded lane here. She looked left and right and saw that she was alone, then leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.

Thy soul will make a slave of the flesh, whereas in lesser men-

She slid down the wall, and the thing she’d been commanded to forget came back to her. It had happened two years ago, in one of the darkened chambers where the Father often left his children in a trance until sunrise. Neda had been in deep, dreamless trance, all volition gone. Someone had stepped into the room and touched her. It was not the Father himself: she knew the rattle of his ancient hands. Two fingers had caressed her hair, grazed her lips, touched her briefly on the throat. Then the man had drawn back, sighing, struggling with himself. At last, surrendering, he had kissed her hand over and over, weeping a little and murmuring Neda, Neda, my phoenix, my dream. The voice was faint even now. She’d been commanded very firmly to forget.

Who could have dared? One of the other aspirants? Malabron, whose sanity she had always doubted? Or poor Jalantri? Neda thought he had probably loved her, though he had never admitted the truth even to himself. How could he? The sfvantskors were commanded to love things eternal. To pursue carnal love was a grave sin; to pursue one’s faith-sister, unthinkable. No wonder Vispek had warned Jalantri to keep his distance from Neda at the first slight sign of his temptation.

Neda covered her eyes, digging for the memory, for clues. The man had said he loved her. He’d said it many times through his tears.

She thought again of Vispek. Neda had known him in Babqri: he was their weapons trainer; he had stood behind her and guided her arms through fluid sword-strokes. Impossible to think, sinful even to imagine, that it could have been him.

She hugged herself and felt debauched. She did not know who had come to her that night and feared that she would never know. But she knew this much: it had taken so long to remember not because of the strength of the Father’s command, but because she herself had wished so desperately to forget. And she had wished to forget not out of horror but shame.

For when the man had left the chamber she’d been sorry. She wished he had stayed there, bathing her hand with tears and kisses; until the dawn broke her trance and she could move again, touch him maybe, see the eyes of the one who had told her she was loved.

That night, for the first time in years, Neda dreamed of her mother.

They were in the kitchen of the Orch’dury, the family home on the hillside above Ormael City. Suthinia was chopping vegetables with a will. Leeks, carrots, turnips, chives. She scooped them up on the big knife’s edge and tossed them into a steaming vessel, never looking at her daughter who stood six feet away.

‘Mother,’ said Neda. ‘Who are you cooking for?’

‘Oh, oh,’ said Suthinia breezily, turning to the rack of spices.

Neda told her mother that she was not in the mood for visitors. Her mother hummed and went on cooking, like some kind of strange machine. Neda walked through her beloved house and saw the floor littered with children’s toys. The beautiful pen from the selk was among them, just lying there on the floor waiting to be trampled. Irritated, she retrieved it and slipped it into the folds of her cloak. She was startled to find that she was naked beneath the robe.

‘Out of matches,’ said Suthinia. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Neda ran a hand surreptitiously over her own body. All her battle scars were there. And glancing up at the mirror above the fireplace, she caught a glimpse of her red Mzithrini tattoos.

‘Finish up, do you hear me?’ her mother shouted. ‘Pazel has to bathe before we eat.’

Neda looked at her. ‘Are you talking to me?’

Her mother started, knocking over the bottle of cooking wine.

On the kitchen wall hung an old map of the city before the shattering of the wall. Ormael: Womb of Morning. That was what the name meant, in some ancient tongue; she’d not thought of it in years. She looked in the mirror again. She had been born here, born of that womb, and the womb of that impossible woman behind the stove. Before her rebirth as Neda Ygrael, Phoenix-Flame, servant of the Unseen.

She walked to the back door and opened it. At the table in the garden sat her brother, just nine or ten years old, and Dr Chadfallow. They were puzzling over a text in Mzithrini together.

‘That’s Father’s shirt,’ said Neda. ‘Your mucking lover is wearing his shirt.’

Suthinia poked at the fire in the stove.

Neda stepped outside. The sun was fierce; the colours bled to white. She stood right next to the boy and the man and wondered if anyone could sense her presence at all. Bees were buzzing in the orange tree she’d planted as a small girl. Dr Chadfallow was conjugating the verb kethak: to forgive.

‘There is no passive voice in the Mzithrin tongue,’ he told Pazel. ‘You cannot say, “The sin was forgiven.” You must declare who is doing the forgiving, see? You cannot play fast and loose.’

He went on talking, pointing at lines in the weighty tome. Through the garden gate Neda could see the edge of the plum orchard. It was harvest time; there were the harvesters with their hoop-baskets tied to their wastes. But instead of the old procedure where someone would climb a rickety ladder and try not to fall, the men also had smaller baskets on poles that they were hoisting high into the trees. Shielding her eyes, Neda saw that there were ixchel in the treetops, selecting the ripest fruit and dropping them into these baskets as they passed.

‘Deketha, I forgive. Troketha, you forgive-’

Suddenly Pazel looked straight up into her eyes.

‘This is your dream,’ he said. ‘You have to give Mother permission to enter it. She’s afraid to interfere.’

‘But she’s already here!’

‘That’s what you think,’ said her brother, and lowered his eyes again to the book.

Neda returned to the kitchen. Her mother was mincing onion, blinking back tears. Neda watched her work. Sometimes her hands closed on an object that had not been there a moment before.

‘Mother?’

‘Hmm-hmm. .’

‘Stop that and look at me. I want you to. I want you to come into this dream.’

Her mother cried out. Neda was sure she had cut herself. But no, she had dropped the knife and pressed both hands to her face. She was looking straight at Neda and weeping with joy.

Dream tears are like nothing else in human experience: a plunge into total feeling, a ripping away of words, lies, excuses, of the bandages we have been winding about ourselves since we first learned to speak. Holding Suthinia, Neda wept for the years wasted, for the pain she had both caused and received, for the distance that had suddenly been bridged and the vast distance that would not be.

We must stop, said her mother, pressing Neda’s head to her breast. The tears will wake us if we don’t.

But neither woke. When the tears ended Neda felt herself changed, and knew the change would persist when she emerged from the dream.

‘I don’t believe any more,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘It’s like dying. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

Suthinia just looked at her and held her hand.

‘Cayer Vispek is going to kill me.’

‘You mean this never happens to sfvantskors?’

‘If it does no one admits it. The elders probably kill them, quickly and quietly. And blame the death on Arquali spies, or the Shaggat, or devils. Who knows.’

‘We’re almost strangers, aren’t we?’ said Suthinia.

Neda said nothing. Her mother squeezed her hand tighter.

‘I will never ask you to forgive me,’ she said, ‘for failing to protect you, for harming you with that spell.’