of the Phoenix to his coat. “Where have you been?” my father asks the front of the room.
I don’t like to lie to my father, but like any loving parent, he worries too much when I go near the edge of the continent. There hasn’t been an accident on Ashra since I was two years old, and yet he still fears that I’ll lose my footing and fall off the edge of the world. I don’t think I could survive without my realm of one, so I bite my lip and gently betray him.
“At the lake,” I say. “So many flowers are in bloom now.” Two more attendants rush toward me, and I’m forced to raise my arms to the side like my father. They mumble to each other about the gray soot on my dress and the ragged ends of my golden rope belt. I wait in guilty anticipation of them noticing my missing shoe.
My father chuckles under his breath, and though I can’t see his face, I know his eyelids are crinkling at the sides as he smiles. His blue eyes are always filled with warmth, even when he scolds me. “My Kallima,” he says. “Always fluttering away.”
The attendants tug at his sleeves and yank my hair back, brushing the brown matted waves into a more presentable tangle. Two of my father’s attendants move to the side of the room and reach for the heavy golden headdress to bring it toward me. I groan quietly. It’s beautiful, but it weighs a ton, pressing me into the ground. Whenever these ceremonies end and I get to take it off, I’m always surprised I don’t float away.
The headdress is like a crown, but made of thousands and thousands of golden beads and cones and iridescent shells from the creatures that lurk in the mud of the lake. The strings of beads end in tiny plumes of red, usually the feathers of sunbirds but sometimes dyed gull or chicken quills if they need replacing. The headdress tinkles and chimes as they carry it toward me and lower it slowly onto my head. The beads drape across my forehead and dip along the sides of my head, where they fasten together in the back and drape through my hair. Every movement I make, no matter how slight, sends them clinking and jingling together in a melody that is said to evoke the Phoenix herself. May she rise anew, and all that.
The government on Ashra pieces together like a Phoenix, as we learn when we’re little. The Elders are the feathers, surrounding the people—the Phoenix’s beating heart—with truth and light. Some are just tufts, like the Initiates, and others are long wing and tail feathers, guiding us in the right direction with the sun and wind on our backs. When a child is born, the Elders visit the home to bless the child with welcoming rituals and gifts. The Elders study the annals to help us serve the Phoenix and each other, to take care of this floating world she entrusted to us. They’re revered and welcomed as they journey the floating continents of our world—Ashra, Burumu, and Nartu and the Floating Isles. Nartu and the Floating Isles are so remote and small that they’re usually grouped together. Only scholars live out there, retired Elders included.
After the Elders come the Elite Guard, who’ve arrived from their home in Burumu on the airship that passed over Elisha and me. The Elite Guard are the sharp talons of the Phoenix; they keep us safe from danger, although now they are much more ceremonial than in the past when monsters threatened us. In the time of the Rending, they formed to protect what was left of mankind. Now they serve as a reminder, and as a force against future dangers, should they arise. We stand upon them for support.
The Sargon lives in Burumu and is a lord below my father’s ranking. He is the Eye of the Phoenix, ever watchful for unrest or trouble. And there has been some in the past, for Burumu is a small island of limited resources, and things have become tense from time to time. But none of us want to go back to dark days, and so it’s never amounted to much at all.
And my father, the Monarch. He is the beak of the Phoenix, speaking truth and leading us all toward the future. His word is law. He lives here in Ulan, in the citadel, which is a smaller town than Burumu but it allows him the peace and quiet to thoughtfully govern us.
And me, his heir? I’m the Eternal Flame that ignites the Phoenix, the hope for the future of our floating world.
All of this symbolism is etched into my headdress. It’s no wonder it weighs so much.
My father wears a circlet of feather-shaped hammered gold, the plumes of sunbirds hanging along it in a much more subtle pattern. His face crinkles up again as he smiles at me, and despite the hundred pounds pressing on my head, and the weight of who I am in my heart, I smile back.
“Ashes, child,” he says suddenly. “Your foot!”
They’ve noticed. I can’t look down easily with the headdress on, but I can feel the attendants lifting my foot up and wiping it with cloth, maybe the hem of their own tunics.
“I lost it on the way,” I say sheepishly.
The doors at the end of the hallway burst open, and two of the Elder Initiates stride in. “Your Majesty,” they say to my father, the Monarch. “If you please.”
“Yes, well,” he says, looking at me worriedly. After a minute he laughs. “I suppose you’ll have to lose the other shoe, as well,” he says.
The attendants exchange looks.
“Sir, but Elder Aban will...”
“Oh, he can take it up with me later, if he survives the rise in his blood pressure.”
I love my father, and he loves me.
I kick off the spare shoe and bite my lip to hold back the delighted grin at the expressions of the attendants and Initiates. My father quickly squeezes my fingers before they place a red and gilded annal in his hands and a short ceremonial staff in mine, a golden beam that ends in a rich crimson plume that tickles against my sleeve.
I follow my father through the hallway, and then we are upon the steps of the citadel. The sunlight is blinding after the darkness of the corridors. The minstrels are plucking at the goat-string harps and the trumpets are blaring as the crowds cheer for their Monarch. Father looks noble and kind as he descends the steps toward the crowd. I wait at the doorway and watch him. Banners of crimson stream in the wind, and the giant statue of the Phoenix towers over the courtyard. There are garlands of flowers strung around her neck and bouquets of red and orange laid at her feet.
It seems a little ridiculous to me at times, but the annals and my governesses have always been clear—without her, mankind would have perished, consumed by the monsters that overrun the earth below. She saved us all with her sacrifice, and so we celebrate the Rending every year since, commemorating our deliverance from certain death.
My father has reached Elder Aban in the courtyard below, and the trumpets blare loudly as the crowd looks up for me. I take a deep breath and grasp the plume staff tightly, walking slowly down the stone stairs in my bare feet, one clean, one scuffed and dirty. I long to glance at Aban’s reaction, but I know I must look straight ahead into the crowd, smiling gently and looking wiser than I feel. The steps are grainy and rough and scrape the soles of my feet. Despite the bright sunny weather, the stone stairs are cold from the thin air up here in Ashra.
The crowd and minstrels are quiet, staring at me as I descend. I think only of how ridiculous it would look if I tripped headfirst, or if I burst into dance or suddenly turned and ran. I could end this whole ceremony, I think. It’s not that I want to destroy it, but the potential, just knowing I could do so, swirls endlessly in my head.
At last I reach the bottom step, and the crowds bow their heads. It all seems too silly to me. I walk through the village all the time with Elisha and no one bows to me. But today there’s such a separation I can feel it. They bend around me like heat bends around the wavering flame of a candle.
The
