he reached down into the embers. When he turned back to her, his hands seemed to be ablaze. He cupped them and blew into them, a visible breath as if the air had chilled about him. Opening the palms side by side as if reading them, he blew sharply once more and strode up to her. Then, leaning down, he parted his hands across hers; six flames tumbled onto her palms. The flames were colored greenish blue and didn’t burn her hands at all. She moved her palms back and forth, and the fires slid upon them. She glanced up from the magical flames. “What do I do?” she asked.
“Now,” said the king, “you pick a story and hold the image of the characters in your mind. Try it. Pick any.”
She brought her face closer to her hand and concentrated. The most obvious character to imagine was Meersh, and immediately one of the flames swirled and grew, forming into a tall, gangly body in worn loose trousers and a vest, his nose hooked and crooked, his chin sharp, his eyes sharper, and his orange hair a tangle around his head. He looked at himself as if surprised to be there, then at his audience. He stepped to the edge of her hand and stuck his tongue out at them.
The members of the feast roared with laughter, even Diverus. Here was Meersh as only she could realize him.
With a delighted smile she gazed at the king again, and the figure unraveled and shrank to a green flame.
“There you have what will pass, I think, for puppets. Let us begin the storytelling.”
She traded a glance with Diverus and was about to ask them if they would equip him with musical instruments to accompany her, but some instinct prevented her from mentioning his gift. She gave him a smile of reassurance instead. Then she focused on the flames, and settled upon one of the stories she had been performing on Colemaigne. The flame that had been Meersh coiled and shaped into the form of a man wearing a tattered cap, a striped shirt, and loose trousers that fell just below his knees. She looked up at her strange audience and began.
THE DREAM OF A FORTUNE
There once was a poor man who had no hope. His name is recorded as Loctrean, and he lived in an old, dilapidated house in the span of Guhnavra, which lay on a spiral far from here. He lived with his father and mother and sister.
His father was a dreamer, a teller of tales who was very popular at the local tavern because he always had a story and enough coin to buy his audience a round, and if they disbelieved his adventures, the free drink bought their complaisance.
The father claimed to have been a sailor on board the ship of the mythical Captain Sindebad, to have walked in exotic lands, seen impossible monsters, and sailed to the very edge of Shadowbridge and back. “Believe me,” he would assure his audiences, “there is an edge of the world.”
At home he told the same tales to his children, filling their heads with dazzling images, breathtaking adventures, and promises that one day they would all be terribly rich; but when he was off fishing, their mother would say, “The truth is, your father hasn’t been anywhere at all. The only place he’s sailed is inside his head.” The children would have preferred not to know this, but they were children and at the mercy of the adults. Loctrean in particular wanted his father to be the adventurer of those wonderful stories.
His life might have gone on like that forever, except that one evening his father didn’t return from the day’s fishing, and no one knew at first what had befallen him. Eventually, other sailors found his father’s boat and dragged it into the cracked and broken courtyard of the house. The keel had been shattered, a hole punched in it as if upon a sharp point of rock, and the sailors left it overturned there. Of his father they had found no sign. Loctrean overheard the superstitious sailors whispering that the gods had struck down his father for all the lies he’d told, and Loctrean burst upon them, shouting, “He didn’t lie! He did travel far, he did have adventures!” But despite his defense, he was ashamed, though whether for himself or for his father, he didn’t know.
It wasn’t long after that before his mother succumbed to a wasting disease, a