The Heart of the World

2. The Sirin of Fire

Chapter 2

The Sirin of Fire

The morning fog, dripping wet on the spruces ringing the oval pool, was doing its best to stop the sun from rising. The sun fought half-heartedly, its light a sickly yellow. The grass, inundated with dew just on the verge of hoarfrost, shivered from the breeze as though it had lost its patience with the long winter. Voran shook with the grass and tried to remember what a beautiful sunrise felt like.

This same sort of fog had marred his last morning with Sabíana, what seemed like twenty lifetimes, not years, ago. Then, they had been young, their hearts bursting with fire. Voran had just been exiled for life by Sabíana’s father, but neither of them had expected that separation to last long. He would find the Weeping Tree. He would bring the healing power of the Living Water back to Vasyllia. He would bring the Covenant Tree back to life, restore the Covenant with Adonais, and Vasyllia would embark on a second golden age. And they would marry and live out their lives with ten children tussling by the hearth-fire.

Instead, he had hacked down the Weeping Tree, unwilling to take responsibility for its power. Vasyllia had fallen to an army of Gumiren nomads who had allied themselves with the demonic power of the Raven. And Voran had not so much as seen Vasyllia in twenty years. At first, he had tried repeatedly to return home. But the Raven had set strange traps for him. Everywhere along the way into Vasyllia, he had placed hidden doorways into other realms. It could be anything—a low tree branch leaning over a mountain path or a pool of rainwater under a tree. All Voran had to do was touch one of them by accident, and he would suddenly find himself lost in the Lows of Aer or in a different place entirely. How the Raven could manipulate the doorways so effectively, Voran had no idea. But no matter how many roads he tried, they were all impassable.

To add insult to injury, now a wall stood between Gumiren-occupied Vasyllia and the rest of the world. Voran had traveled the length and breadth of that wall, as far as humanly possible. It extended all around Vasyllia in a semicircle that ended only where the Vasyllia Mountains became virtually impassable, where the peaks were almost indistinguishable from the clouds. The peaks that the first-reachers often called “the Footstools of Adonais.” Beyond them, no Vasylli had ever ventured, and not merely because they were so tall. They were taboo. No self-respecting Three-lander would dare cross over into the unknown country on the other side, on pain of eternal damnation.

The sun exploded into life, so quickly that it took Voran by surprise. Then came the music—a soft whisper of wind whistling through reeds. So, it was not the sun after all.

A Sirin of fire materialized before Voran, her woman’s face brighter than the sun, every feather of her eagle body a golden-red flame that pulsated with light.

“You are Voran, soul-bond of Lyna, the eldest of my sisters.”

The Sirin were often prey to bouts of painful obviousness. There was a time when it had amused Voran, but in the absence of Lyna, it only irritated him.

“You are not Lyna, so-called soul-bond of Voran. I do not know you.”

She didn’t answer, though he felt the heat of her disapproval, even more intense that the light cascading from her feathers. Her feathers. They were like the flame-feather etched on his sword, given to him by Tarin the mad warrior-storyteller. The sword that he had abandoned years ago, swearing never to use it again.

“I can practically hear you saying it,” he grumbled. “Go ahead. Say it. No one has for so long. Clear the air.”

“It is your fault that Lyna avoids you.”

“And there it is!” Voran struck the trunk of a tree with an open palm. It did not make him feel better, and now his hand throbbed. “Always the same. Always the fault of the human. And what about Lyna? Where was she when I failed to heal the hundred children in Negoda? Where was she when I had no strength left to move, much less heal all those hacked down by the Internecine War? Where was she when I needed her? I became the Healer, the bearer of the only Living Water left in the Three Lands. The only person capable of stemming the blood of the wars. All those lives. All those deaths. All on my back. And do you know how heavy the water is? How it weighs on my very soul?”

Her glance was incorrigible.

“Where were you when she needed you?” she whispered.

“Do the Sirin even need us pitiful humans?”

Her fire flared, and now her eyes—they shone green in the midst of the red and orange tongues of flame—bored into him. He thought they might actually leave smoking scars on his face.

“You have seen so much, Healer. And yet you persist in your stupidity. To give love without expecting return is not the gift of the Sirin. It is the torture of the Sirin. We need your love even more than you need ours. But we are the stronger, so we can endure more neglect. You of all people should know that.”

Only then did he notice that it wasn’t disapproval emanating from her like steam from hot springs. It was pain.

“You also have a soul-bond?”

“I did. But I broke our bond as a final gift to my beloved.”

“Who?” As soon as he asked, his heart gave him the answer.

“You know who.”

Voran’s heart tried to flip over in his chest.

“Is Sabíana…” He had to stop to catch his breath, it came in such ragged bursts. “I can’t even ask it.”

“I do not know where she is. She flew away from Vasyllia, choosing the form of the eagle.”

“Choosing…I don’t understand.”

Ox-horns blared to their right, no more than a league away. Another battle. Who would it be this time? How many brothers would shed more fraternal blood?

“Voran, I do not have much time. Listen. Do you know of our dark sister, Gamayun?”

“The bird of prophecy. She who sings the futures.”

“She has disappeared. All the Heights are in an uproar searching for her. All she left was a final prophecy.”

Voran scoffed. “Words, words, words. What do they mean anymore?”

The Sirin of fire grew into a conflagration. Voran flew back into a tree. It knocked his breath clean out of his chest.

“Silence! Believe what you will. Only listen. The infection in Vasyllia is nearing the heart. Only the lame horse, the flightless eagle, the sword-less warrior can stop it in time. Look to the East!”

The ox-horns blared again from the West. The Sirin of fire was gone.

“They speak words that make no sense. And then they leave. It’s always the same.”

Voran scraped himself off the earth. His hip throbbed. The flask of Living Water was a stone on his hip and his heart. He picked it up. It looked like a dark flower bursting from vines. He had thought it so beautiful five years ago, when he found it at the walls of Vasyllia in the hands of a dead Vasylli girl that had come back to life. What had she called it? The final sacrifice of Llun the smith.

Will his sacrifice ever bear fruit, I wonder?

He bent his back toward the ox-horns. The Healer had work to do.