I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twelve

I didn't realize I had dozed off until a soft knock outside eased me back to consciousness. I pulled the pillow over my head and hoped it was for my parents.

That didn't work, of course; the pillow wasn't my jacket, and the soft bed ate my movements when I stirred. This wasn't Grillo Negro, my parents weren't here, and the anxiety of being in a house of gods returned with a jolt.

"You guys awake?" came a whisper at the door.

Emma rolled over and rubbed her eyes. I jumped up and let Jem in. His clothing and mine—and Emma's—had changed to soft sleeping outfits of their own accord. Jem looked at his in annoyance, and it changed back. Mine shifted to match. I wanted my coywolf jacket back.

"Are they meeting?" I said.

He shook his head and sat on the edge of my mattress. "Something happened, and they all left in a rush. I don't think they'll be back for supper."

I hoped that "something" didn't have to do with Grillo Negro. I also hoped the gods would come back. I wanted answers, and we had a mission to complete here.

My stomach took the moment to offer its thoughts on the supper part of things. We hadn't eaten lunch, and the merienda we'd been served when we got here could only compensate for so long. Emma poked a spot just above the floor. A pottery bowl shimmered into existence beneath her fingertip. She brightened. "Look! I can do it, too!"

I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair. Magic was real. This was our life now. I had to stop being so surprised.

But gods, this was weird.

Emma put her finger on the edge of the empty dish, and her smile furrowed into a look of concentration, then a frown. "Wow, you actually have to cook it. That's a lot harder than it looks."

A bit of broth appeared in the bowl, and fumes of green onion filled the room. Grifo pinned his ears back and whined.

"Oh gods, Emma, get rid of it." I loved green onion, but even I had to yank my shirt up over my nose.

The broth ceased to exist. Emma stabbed the bowl with her finger, like it was personally to blame for her lack of cooking skills. "So why is this so easy? And... that."

A carrot appeared, its top falling in a green waterfall over the pottery's edge. It even still had dirt on it. Jem scooted closer.

"Weird," he said. "Can you do other vegetables?"

She made a tomato, a single black bean, and a small amount of hominy.

Jem took a fat hominy kernel and nibbled it warily. His eyebrows lifted. "Tastes real to me. You think they'd let us use their cooking area?"

"Emma, if we get food poisoning, I'm holding you personally responsible."

Her chin jutted. "I can make proper vegetables. Just not soup."

As if that made any more sense.

"Let's go find the cooking area," said Jem. He looked a little too excited about the prospect of snooping through the gods' house, even if it was currently empty. Could gods... I don't know, track where we'd been? Even so, though, I had to admit my curiosity about what the rest of the place looked like. My stomach offered another encouraging growl. It wasn't helping.

We found the cooking area connected to the dining room, through the doorway Xipe had gone towards earlier to get food. Along the left-hand wall were three open fires. Two had wooden pot-hanging frames over them, and the third was covered by a round, flat ceramic dish set on three stones. A comal. Why did the Mexica gods have a comal? On the close side of the three fires was a round, wooden lid set in the ground, covering what turned out to be a deep pit kiln.

Along the right-hand wall was a wall-length block of a counter cut from the stone. A neat row of knives graced one end, contrasting the bowls, cutting boards, mortars and pestles, assorted clay pitchers, well-loved books and scrolls, and assorted detritus piled in precariously tidy columns along the back.

Emma giggled. "I think this is Xipe's hideout..."

Everything—and I mean everything—in the room was leafed, inlaid, decorated, or simply made of gold. The gold-skinned god reflected his element, it seemed. I wracked my brain for myths that mentioned him. Was it gold, or goldsmiths? One of the two. He also had a penchant for feeding the Mexica people, a habit that clearly hadn't changed.

Jem helped himself to a gold-edged cutting board and a knife with gold curlicues in the blade and set them in front of me. Emma popped several onions and a large pile of hominy and chilies into a bowl, then set to work attempting to make rabbit meat. Jem couldn't find fire-making utensils, so he used his own. There were no vents in the ceiling to take away the smoke, but it disappeared the moment it left the fire. The sparks, likewise, never reached our clothing. Okay, magic was kind of handy. I had to give it that.

Jem had pushed up his sleeves to work, giving me a sustained view of the tattoos around his wrists. They'd been a shock when he'd first shown them to me in the Fuego-stricken town, but it hadn't taken long to get over that. Nothing magical should be allowed to look that good on someone. I snuck a glance at mine and hoped they did me the same favour. Could I ask the gods to leave them when they rid me of Fuego? Or would that be asking too much?

Emma wasn't about to give up on the meat, so Jem intervened and made her grow several herbs and another tomato before she went back to work. Suspicious pink and black lumps appeared and disappeared in front of her. At one point she tossed one to Grifo, who sat in the doorway and watched us work. He sniffed it and shifted his butt back.

On the other end of the cooking area was another doorway. I chopped enough vegetables to keep Jem busy, then snuck out to explore this next room. It was circular, with a rug-covered floor between walls ringed with furniture I had only ever seen the flayed bones of in Fuego-burned towns. There was a giant, fluffy armchair, couches in an eclectic array of colours and patterns, and an assortment of furs and unmatched pillows. Tucked between the couch arms were wee triangular tables, their backs curved to fit the wall. Cozy glyph-lights made concentric circles on the ceiling.

But what really caught my eye were the windows. There was a ring of them all the way around the room, even on the sides that should have faced stone. Each was broad-silled, nearly square, and large enough to rest your elbows on without bumping your head. Most opened onto grey sky over a grey landscape. Several showed different shades of grey, though, and the landscapes didn't continue across them the way they should. We weren't even level with all of the views. Some looked straight out onto dead gardens and forests, others down from great height onto desert, and still others across to mountains. There was no glass in them, but no breeze came in and I suspected nothing else could either.

Did these all show some level of the gods' layers of the world, or were some of them views of the world below? I checked each for signs of settlements. There were none.