Fox and Phoenix Read online

Mā mī nodded. She gave the griffin an absentminded kiss on its beak and set it upon the closest shelf. It shook out its feathers (plus a quantity of dust) and clambered back up to the top, where it curled once around and went still.

  I expected my mother to shout. Or deliver one of those scary lectures about how her worthless street-rat son was bound for a misty hell. She did neither, and that made me nervous.

  “Yún should come back soon,” I said hesitantly. Mentioning Yún often made her smile.

  Mā mī just nodded again and set her basket into its usual cubbyhole behind the counter. (Chen had wisely disappeared, leaving behind just a faint piggy odor.) Still not talking, she headed through the curtained doorway, into the shop’s back rooms. A minute later, I heard the faint ting of metal from the kitchen, then water gurgling.

  The curtains drifted slowly in the invisible breeze of her passage. I stared at them for a long moment, not really taking in what was going on. Deep inside my skull, an itch told me Chen had not completely left, but even he was too scared, or too surprised, to do more.

  Not sure what to expect, I checked Mā mī’s shopping basket. Except for a bottle of fish sauce and three packets of chewing tobacco, it was empty.

  What do you think happened? I said.

  You better ask her, Chen replied.

  So much for my brave pig-companion.

  I pushed the curtains aside. They swirled around me, ruffling against the back of my head, and enveloping me in soft shadows. I was in the main storeroom for our shop, where we kept all our supplies for classroom exercises, my mother’s experiments, and the potions we sometimes brewed up for special customers. The air smelled strange and familiar, a mixture of strong herbs and black pepper, of soap from the morning mopping, of powdered metals and other rare ingredients. Hsin and several other cats napped here, keeping an erratic watch for mice. Ahead, another set of curtains marked the doorway into the kitchen, while a pair of winding stairs led to our upper floors.

  I drew a deep, unsatisfying breath and headed into the kitchen.

  Mā mī sat at the pockmarked old wooden table. She held a measuring spoon filled with tea leaves in one hand, in mid-movement from transferring the leaves from the canister into her favorite blue teapot. The kettle sat on its grating over the coal fire; puffs of steam added to the miserable heat, but Mā mī didn’t seem to notice. She had a distracted expression on her face, as though she studied something very far away.

  “Market closed?” I asked.

  Mā mī nodded. “Everything closed early today.”

  Everything?

  I waited for my mother to explain, but she didn’t.

  “A holiday?” I said, helpfully. Royal visitors from kingdoms all throughout the mountains had crowded into Lóng City this past month—something about trade negotiations—and the king had scheduled numerous banquets and festivals to entertain them. The shops often closed early for the big celebrations.

  But Mā mī was shaking her head. “The king . . .” She stopped and rubbed a hand over her eyes, a gesture I had not seen since my father died years ago.

  I was a child, almost a baby. How could I remember?

  You did, you do, Chen said softly, though no one could hear us. Children always remember.

  Even so, it had been ten years....

  My mother went on. “The king fell ill this morning. They believe he will not live beyond a week. They’ve sent for Princess Lian.”

  So many replies clattered through my brain. The king. Lian. My friend. She must be worried. Or scared. Those were not subjects I could discuss with my mother. Finally, I asked, “How?”

  Mā mī set the spoon down on the table and frowned in its direction. I had the feeling she wasn’t seeing the spoon or the table any more than she saw me right now. She said, “If you listen to the bazaar rumors, he fell by attack from angry spirits unleashed by this wretched heat. Most likely it was simply from age and overeating. He is an old man, you know. And he misses his daughter.”

  I knew that. I also knew it was my fault that Lian was far away in Phoenix City. And now her father is dying.

  “I am thinking I should suspend classes,” was my mother’s next unsettling announcement.

  “Close the shop?” My voice squeaked up.

  She gave me a sharp look, almost like usual. “Not entirely. You and Yún shall have your lessons. But the tutoring can wait. A week or two, not more. Things should be decided by then.”

  Things? Like the king dying?

  The teakettle rattled. Mā mī pushed herself to standing—stiffly—and fetched it from its hook. “You need not finish the worksheets,” she said quietly, as she poured the boiling water over the leaves. “Go. Find your friends. Just come back by nightfall.”

  I stared at her, not believing what I heard or saw. Mā mī telling me to goof off? Mā mī acting quiet and bothered by what went on in that “golden egg crate they call a palace”? I waited another minute, but she never glanced in my direction. She rifled through the cabinet and extracted a honey pot, which she set beside her cup. My mother never took honey, not that I remembered. She liked her tea strong and bitter. Like her.

  Unnerved by all the strangeness, I backed through the curtains into the dimly lit corridor, where Chen waited. He’d taken a smaller form, the size of a formidable cat. His bristles stood out in worry.

  I’m going out, I whispered.

  He tilted his head.

  She told me to, I added.

  Chen made a soft, pig-whistle noise. Do you want company?

  I . . . I don’t know yet.

  He nodded. I will listen for you, then.

  I turned the shop sign to CLOSED and headed down to the Golden Market. It was the oddest walk I’d ever taken through Lóng City. Sure, there were festivals where the shops closed early, but that usually meant people thronged the streets, laughing and dancing and buying grilled kebabs or bowls of rice and curry from street vendors. And in the main squares, the public radio speakers always played loud old-time music, while jugglers tossed batons and acrobats flipped around in heart-stopping handsprings.

  Today, the streets were quiet and empty. In the bazaar itself, the noodle shops had closed their shutters, and their brightly colored awnings were rolled away. One scrawny mutt lounged in the shade, panting. An old man swept the steps in front of his house. He stared at me as I passed by. Two or three kids wandered around, with confused expressions. Probably their parents had told them to go play, too.

  I took a roundabout path to the nearest wind-and-magic lift. Iron shutters blocked the counter. Chains hung across the entryway, and a hand-brushed sign informed me the lifts weren’t running. A big placard with an arrow pointed at the stone stairs nearby.

  Seven hundred years ago, Wei Lóng, our first king, had ordered staircases built all over the city as part of its defense. He wanted to make sure his soldiers could always reach every corner and terrace of Lóng City, even if the wind-and-magic lifts stopped working. Whenever a king or queen expanded the city, they added another flight, or reinforced the existing ones. It was a fine accomplishment—one I could appreciate better when I wasn’t trudging up those same stairs in the lingering heat of a late summer’s day.

  There were six flights between me and the top of the city. Guard posts marked every landing, and every intersection with a major boulevard. Some of those guards stared at me as I passed, their electronic eyes whirring as they recorded my image. I stared back, scowling.

  I reached the topmost terrace, then bent over, wheezing. Behind me stood the city’s outermost wall. More architecture. Above that the mountain shot up another li to a snow-rimmed peak.

  Once I regained my breath, I scrambled up the wall, using chinks and knobs as handholds, until I reached a narrow ledge. There, I settled onto my perch and braced my feet in two handy niches below. A nest of ants, disturbed by my arrival, swarmed away in all directions. The air smelled of dirt and pine and a rank scent that spoke of mice and beetles and magical creatures.

/>   Lóng City spread over the mountainside in steps and tumbles and folds. From here I could see the Golden Market, the Pots-and-Kettles Bazaar, the warehouse district where my old gang liked to meet, and off to one side, its fat towers shining bright and yellow in the late afternoon sun, the king’s palace.

  I slid out my phone and stared at it unhappily. How many weeks had it been since I talked with my friends? More than I wanted to admit. Gan worked in his uncle’s stables and attended a special academy for the king’s guards. Jing-mei spent her days flirting or buying expensive clothes and trendy gadgets. Fun, but she and Gan argued all the time, him saying she wasted her money, her saying he’d turned into a big, ugly stick. And Danzu had started up his own gang, but there were strange rumors about what that gang was up to.

  What about Lian?

  My fingers hovered over the keys. The talk-phone was the princess’s gift to me after our adventure, and she had coded it with her personal number. She didn’t give that number to many. Me, Yún, a handful of others. Ordinary talk-phones needed a land connection, which you could find in any tea or noodle shop; mine was different. Special connectors drew the magic flux into a knot at the talk-phone’s receptor port. More wires and resistors translated the flux into a braided current, strong enough to carry voices to the nearest transmitter tower.

  But if Gan was busy, Lian would be ten times busier, arranging for her long journey home. In spite of the baking sun, I shivered. Autumn rains would make travel difficult through the mountains. An early snowstorm would make it dangerous, if not impossible. The Guild Council had to be nervous to send for Lian now.

  As I tucked the talk-phone into its pouch, I noticed a dark smudge on my wrist. Ink. And just underneath my sleeve, where I might not notice it right away. A quick survey of my clothes showed presentable trousers above my knees, spatters of ink below. When I wiped at my forehead, my hand came away stained. No wonder those guards had stared.

  I muttered some bad words. Can you help me? I asked Chen.

  But either Chen couldn’t, or he had stopped listening, because I heard no answer.

  Or maybe he thinks he already has helped me.

  Inside everyone, the scholars said, there existed a quiet place, where everything was possible. The old wizards, the magic workers who first climbed the mountains to commune with gods, must have known about it. They were able to work miracles. All I wanted was to clean my face and hands. With a whispered apology to those old and holy priests, I closed my eyes and recited the spell from Chen’s scroll.

  “. . . from east to west and north to south, we the unworthy call upon the sunbird and dragon to bring purity to these quarters. . . .”

  I recited the spell, taking care over the stresses and the pronunciation. As I spoke the last word, the air went taut for one long, silent moment. Then . . .

  Magic snapped and crackled over my skin, which felt raw, as though a fire burned too close. The air rippled bright and tense, like the moment before lightning strikes. I drew a breath, tasted the strong scent of incense on the back of my tongue. Only when the smell faded away did I open my eyes. With a leaping pulse, I saw the ink had vanished. My skin and my clothes were clean and soft, shining with a residual brightness, which even now was trickling away.

  So. I have worked my first spell by myself.

  I felt strange. Like something had dissected me, plucked my feelings outside the shell of my body. For a time, I could think of nothing except this peculiar sensation. Then my thoughts wandered back to Lian and her father the king, and from there to my own father, dead these past ten years. When my thoughts returned to the now and here, I noticed the sun was dipping toward the horizon. Soon it would be twilight, and the watch-demons would swarm from their lairs to patrol the streets.

  I clambered down from my perch and loped homeward. Mā mī had locked herself in her private workroom. In the kitchen, I found soup, rice, and tea warming over the grate. Yún had left a note for Mā mī propped upon the counter. She had come and gone, apparently, while I was out.

  Kai?

  Chen’s gruff whisper sounded inside my skull.

  Not now, I answered.

  I dumped the soup and rice outside for Old Man Kang’s chickens, then stacked the dishes in our sink and went to bed.

  2

  THE KING DIDN’T DIE, BUT HE DIDN’T GET BETTER.

  After a while, the shops reopened their doors, and the craftspeople and street vendors and other common folk returned to their work. As the old saying goes, it’s the heart that grieves, not the stomach, and without business, we would all starve. But it wasn’t the same as before. Most of the tea shops closed early, the temples held prayers twice daily for the king’s health, and the city bells were wrapped in cloth by their keepers.

  Most important, at least to me, my mother had not reopened her tutoring shop.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t mean I was free of lessons.

  “Students, attend.”

  Mā mī stood behind a lectern in the shop’s drafty classroom, just like always, as though nothing had changed. As though she had not wiped tears from her eyes ten days before. Yún and I both dipped our brushes in our ink bottles and waited, ready to take down her words.

  “Man is within the chi, the chi is within the man. From heaven and earth down to the myriad creatures below the soil, there is not one thing that does not require chi in order to live.”

  Yún bent over her notepaper and wrote swiftly—down stroke, cross stroke, swooping stroke, and dot—small, perfect characters that marched down, then up the page. She had changed a lot since our street-rat days. She wore clothes bought new from Lóng City tailors, not begged from servants in rich houses, and she’d moved from that tiny set of rooms into a real house along with her mother and aunt. But it was more than that. She spent all her free hours reading dusty old books or memorizing lists of herbs and compounds and all the other useless things my mother gave us to learn.

  One lock of her hair had worked loose and curled around to tickle her cheek. With hardly a pause, Yún tucked the lock behind her ear and kept writing. One last dot, one last line and she glanced up. I quickly turned back to my blank paper.

  “Kai-my-son, have you done with the writing?”

  Mā mī’s tone was dry.

  “Almost.” I dashed off three columns that might or might not have had anything to do with her lecture.

  Yún gave a tiny smile, dimpling her cheeks.

  “And do not copy from your classmate,” Mā mī added. “Listen and transcribe the words upon your heart and mind, as well as the paper, as Wu Cheng the philosopher writes. To continue, my students . . .”

  Off she went, reciting page after page from some old text about the parallels between chi and blood and air, and how knowledge of the body aided the student with the chi, which everyone knew was another word for magic flux.

  Or at least, that’s how it sounded to me. Most likely Mā mī would announce a surprise test, and insist we recite the words exactly. That was the main reason I was flunking both advanced calculus and magical philosophy. Well, that and she subtracted points for illegible handwriting. If she couldn’t read it, she said it didn’t count.

  You could practice your penmanship, Chen offered, speaking quickly. (Our spirit companions were not supposed to talk with us during class.)

  I do practice, I replied.

  A faint squeal. A loud crack. Chen vanished.

  Attend, said a familiar voice inside my head, while out loud, my mother’s lecture continued “. . . but people use the chi every day and do not understand it . . .”

  Damn straight, I thought, struggling to keep up. At one point, I shot a glance at Yún. She pretended to ignore me, but her eyes were bright with amusement as her brush skimmed across the page. Maybe she’d let me read her notes, just this once. That wasn’t exactly copying . . . more like refreshing my memory.

  Just as my hand cramped up, the clock chimed the hour. Yún made one last dot and waited. I scribbled the last
few characters, trying not to drop my brush. Mā mī surveyed us, her lips pursed, as though considering another hour of misery for us.

  “Students dismissed,” she said at last. “Kai, you will take the second afternoon shift of watching the store. Three o’clock. Remember you must also review our accounts this evening. Please consider that when you arrange your studies for today.”

  I nodded, as though I always planned my studies.

  “And Yún. You will take first afternoon shift. Please review the inventory against this list. Mark the items we need and provide a written account of the cost.”

  She handed over a tightly wound scroll. Yún tucked it into her pocket and made a sitting-bow, her face wiped clean of anything but obedience. Hypocrite, I thought. I choked back a snort before my mother could suspect it, and made my own sitting-student bow. Mā mī’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. She said nothing, however, merely swept from the room with the dignity of a queen.

  Yún screwed the cap onto her ink bottle and began to stow her books and writing materials in her satchel.

  I stuffed my own books into my satchel. “Say, Yún?”

  Her eyebrows lifted, reminding me of swift elegant question marks. “Yes?”

  “I, um, was wondering . . .”

  “. . . if you could read my notes?”

  “Well, I thought I could . . .”

  “Kai.” She made my name sound like a sigh. “You know what your mother said.”

  “She said no copying. Not no reading—Oh, never mind.”

  I slung my satchel over my shoulder and stalked from the classroom. Mā mī stood behind the counter at the front of the shop, paper and basket in hand, frowning. Before she could say anything, I pounded up the stairs to my bedroom and flung my satchel into one corner. Just in time, I stopped myself from letting out a howl.

  Last year. Everything had changed since then. Last year Yún and I had been friends. Last year we’d run pranks in the marketplace. We’d plotted together how to win the king’s challenge. It was Yún who tricked Mā mī into giving us the magical spells we needed. And it was Yún who stood next to me when we faced down watch-demons and ghost dragons. Sure, Lian was with us, too, but it was Yún I remembered.