Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

For three days I prayed, too—prayed to Vkandis for Cara’s life. The God was silent as always, but I told myself that didn’t mean He couldn’t hear. I prayed that He would hear. Vkandis was a God who answered prayers, after all. I’d learned that in every one of my classes, and from Conor back in my village, too.

Yet after three days I was led with the other students into a barren gray courtyard. A single stone pillar rose out of the ground at its center, and dry wood was piled high around it. Looking at that wood, I felt suddenly ill.

A red-robed priest led us in prayer. My lips moved to the ritual words, but I scarcely heard them. I heard only my own silent pleas. God of Light, please, spare her. She’s done so much in your name.

Too soon, a hush fell over the courtyard, and a black-robed priest led Cara out. Dressed in undyed white, she looked like a spirit indeed, though I knew white was meant to be the color of Hell’s worst demons. Her feet were bare, her hair bound above her head, her hands tied behind her back. Her lips moved in silent prayer.

Vkandis was a God of miracles. I’d learned that in my classes, too. Sunlord, please.

Cara uttered no sound as the priests tied her to the pillar, not even when another black robe crossed the courtyard, holding a burning torch. He brought the torch to the wood.

Vkandis, no!

The wood didn’t catch. I caught my breath. Yes, Sunlord. Thank you, Sunlord.

The priest’s hands moved, a subtle gesture. Wood roared into flame. The flames licked at Cara’s feet, and she screamed.

She kept screaming as she spasmed against her bonds. Her robe caught fire; gray smoke billowed around her. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

Heat rose in me, the heat I’d spent years learning to hide. Anger rode close behind. I could send that heat into the black robe’s torch, commanding the flames to consume him. What use was being careful now?

But killing the priest wouldn’t save Cara. Nothing would save her, not even Vkandis’ own power.

So I sent my power into the pyre instead, turning orange flames to a brilliant white fire.

That fire consumed Cara in an instant, putting an end to pain and leaving behind nothing but ashes and silence.

I am no God. It was all I could do for her.

I stopped praying to Vkandis. I spoke the required phrases at public services, but those were words, nothing more. My heart was cold as a dead hearth at midwinter, before it is relit from the sacred fires. I had nothing in me left with which to pray.

Cara’s cries haunted my dreams, the same dreams where flames had once danced. No God worth worshiping would allow this. Whatever the Sunlord cared for, it wasn’t us.

When a black-robed priest came for me a week later, I was only surprised it took him so long. Surely the priests had ways of knowing that it was me who made Cara’s pyre burn so bright. Couldn’t they see into our very souls?

Yet the priest didn’t lead me to a locked cell to prepare for the fires. He led me to his own rooms and made me take a seat there. His name was Andaran, I remembered—he was the priest who’d lit Cara’s pyre.

“Your performance at the burning was—impressive,” Andaran said. “There were no hand motions to give you away.”

I suddenly remembered that Andaran’s hand had moved, right before the wood had burst into flame. He’d made that wood catch, I realized with a sick feeling.

His next words made me feel sicker still. “You are ready for the next stage of your training as a priest. At the next burning you will stand beside me as my assistant. After that, I will teach you all the subtleties of calling Vkandis’ fire.”

It wasn’t Vkandis’s fire. It was ours. Only ours. Or maybe it was a witchpower after all, if it was granted to priests who used it to kill.

Maybe Cara and I had both been wrong all along.

We think we can control fire. We see it chained in our hearths, and we think we’ve bound it to our will.

But when a brushfire roars through the fields, we flee. Or else we dig firebreaks, but fire can jump any obstacle. A burst of wind, a flash of lightning, a season without rain—any one of these can wrest a fire out from our control.

No one ever knows for certain what fire will do.

The next burning was only a week later, and the accused was the same girl who’d reported Cara to the priests. She’d been tainted by Cara’s unholy words, they told us.