ChapterOne
“There’s something wrong with him.”
Micah Fire-Keeper hunched over the desk in his small, ramshackle cabin, delicately painting the eyes of a wooden puppet. The puppet had a red coat knitted with wavelike patterns, her shoes were black and glossy, and she was smiling coyly up at Micah as he traced her lashes over the wood. When he was done, she would be able to tap across the worktable, and he would wrap her up and give her to one of the families who lived closer to the shore. Maybe they would love her. Maybe they wouldn’t. But for now, she was beautiful and new, already smiling.
“He’s just shy, Fia.”
“Shy doesn’t look like this.”
Micah’s parents were long dead, lost to a sickness when Micah was fifteen, but that didn’t stop them from commenting on his behavior. He always remembered them the most when he was finishing a project, their tense voices just a touch too loud.
They never understood why he preferred quiet, why he jumped at strange voices or froze up when he met someone new. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people. It was that when he was in the middle of a crowd, the sound and the smells and the feeling of being stared at were too much. It was like being tossed into a lake and told to swim when he hadn’t learned how to float yet. He was left to flounder, and all anyone did was ask, “Why is he so unhappy?”
Instead of thinking it over or even asking him, his parents had decided there was something wrong with him. Then everything else he did was just another sign that he didn’t fit in with their idea of a proper Lukoi.
Micah finished painting the smiling puppet and pushed his chair back.
His cabin was a riot of color. There were lengths of dyed cloth hanging over his bed, clay jars of paint and glaze lining the walls, and scraps of fabric and wood shavings everywhere, along with half-finished projects. In the middle of it all, squat and fat like an enormous bullfrog in an overturned bowl, was the kiln. The fire inside glowed, baking a tray of clay figurines that would go on strings of dragonflies and sparrows on a web made to simulate flight.
He hadn’t been allowed to tinker when he was a kid. His mother thought it made things worse—fed his need for quiet, exacerbated the choking anxiety that seized him every time he was pushed into the crowd during feast days. She thought if he focused onfixing himselfinstead of playing with toys, maybe a lever would flip in his brain and it would all settle properly. She was always grabbing things out of his hands, tearing the cloth braids he made, her eyes wet with fear. The only thing she didn’t take from him was the book.
The book was his father’s. Or, rather, it was his father’s grandmother’s: an old book full of recipes and diagrams and little inventions, some as simple as a new type of compass, some complex mixes of gears and strings and levers. Micah found it when he was ten, and every time he looked through it, he felt a deep tie to the woman who wrote it. His great-grandmother had loved these diagrams and had meant to pass them on to her descendants. To him.
“I met Iya Fire-Keeper once,” Dragan had said, shortly before Micah’s parents passed. The kuvar was surprisingly understanding, not trying to force Micah into anything that made him uncomfortable. Micah had gathered the courage to ask him about her, since Dragan seemed to know everything about the village, and Dragan had gazed at the distant mountains before answering.
“It’s rare to be that old and still hale enough to survive a winter here,” he said, still focused on the snow-capped peaks. “But she was always inventing something, even to the end. She had two houses. One near Red Mountain, with a kiln she used to bake clay, and another here. The one near the mountain should still be there.”
Micah turned to look at the mountains, holding his arms tightly. “Can I take her name?”
“Her sobriquet?” Dragan’s brows raised, and Micah shrank back, shame building in his chest. “It isn’t unheard of. If you earn it, yes. She would have wanted someone to carry on her skills, I think. Why else would she have written that book?”
Micah clung to the book after that, reading the old instructions long into the night and imagining his great-grandmother’s hands working on the wood carvings and the recipes, bringing them to life.
When his mother and father died only a week apart, Micah took them outside to burn on the pyre in spring, and then he went back in and spent all night carving a crow with wings that moved, straight from the pages of the book. No one took it from him. He gave it to a woman who was expecting a child that summer, and she smiled at him so warmly that Micah went home and finally let the grief come, the bitterness and loss washing over him like a winter storm.
For a while, every creation was a release. Even the ones that went wrong, when he moved beyond the instructions of the book and started making his own. But he found joy in the work, too, and he found himself smiling and humming while he spent too many hours on a doll with a secret compartment or a set of interlocking gears that made a picture instead of hunting and shoring up his house for the winter.
Micah earned his sobriquet, in the end. He’d gone alone to the mountain. He found his great-grandmother’s house, which had fallen to ruin around the ancient kiln, and rebuilt it. He shivered through winters alone in the draughty shack, surrounded by toys and carvings and clay figurines, and he held her book to his chest and carried her name with him, his own private legacy.
He assembled the strings and made the puppet bow in the cluttered mess of his desk. She was perfect.
Outside, the mountains loomed over his shack, and the trees beyond his window shimmered in brilliant golds and reds like the flames in his kiln. He could do something with that, maybe—a miniature forest on a plate that spun, the leaves’ colors changing. He’d have to think about it.
It would be another week or so before he could trade the doll for supplies. Zev, one of Micah’s few friends on Lukos, was supposed to bring the kuvar to help fix a crack in Micah’s wall. He was always doing that: trying to help out here and there, cleaning while Micah worked, talking to him in his quiet, gentle way. He didn’t seem to mind Micah’s aversion to crowds. More than that, he understood it. Even though the idea of heading toward the other houses in Lukos filled Micah with terror, like a claw dragging at his heart, he had to admit that he missed Zev when he was gone.
Lonely, he thought, setting the puppet aside.I’m lonely. But just as it had been with his parents, he didn’t know how to solve the problem without fucking things up. Zev had a mate. A life. Micah couldn’t ask him to stay the night just because he felt the emptiness of his house as keenly as he felt the oppression of a crowd. They were both fully grown—it wasn’t done.
Micah took the pottery out of the kiln to cool and pushed scraps of wood carvings off his bed. The doll smiled at him, her coat a slash of red against the wooden tools behind her as Micah curled up under his blankets and closed his eyes.
As Micah slept, the wind rose until it whistled through the boards and rushed through the small shack. It stirred the cloths above Micah’s head, ruffled the puppet’s yarn hair, and rattled open the door of the kiln, sending sparks flying from the embers to land amid the wood shavings on the floor. The wind quieted, and for a long moment, everything was still. Then the air moved again, like the lungs of an ancient dragon, breathing in.
* * *
He smelled the smoke first.
Sasha was a lot of things, ridiculous and loud and prone to breaking stuff if he wasn’t paying attention, but one thing he took no small amount of pride in was how good he was at hunting. He’d been doing it his whole life, and he was good at it. Viv always said it was one of the few times he could be quiet, could stop moving around so much and focus on the scents, the sounds, the air around him.
Everyone back at the Compound was used to him by now: the big, cheerful man with shaggy black hair and a loud laugh, a submissive who wanted nothing more than to have his tiny, feisty wife cut her name into his back and whip him with a flogger made of thorns after he spent a day hauling wood to the pile and whistling while he chopped it into logs for the fire. Viv was bossy as fuck, and half the Compound was terrified of her. Sasha had loved her from the moment he saw her—and fine, at first maybe it was puppy love, and then as they got older, more like “Climb on my cock and scratch me until I bleed and leave your teeth marks in my chest while I fuck you so good you come six times in a row” than “love,” but love had to start somewhere, didn’t it?
