Fireflies at Lughnasadh

I

The candle flame guttered and spat. Kestutis Naujokas sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and begged every sinew in his body to remember what it had learned long ago and do his bidding for him. The gestures accompanying wilful magic – sorcery – were very small, and mostly involved focus and concentration, as well as strain to get his unpractised ability to respond to his pleading mind.

He took a deep breath and teased the flame apart, trying to separate light from heat so he wouldn’t inadvertently send a gobbet of flame into his bedding or into the pile of books he had won so hard from the Dun Dubh authorities. It was a simple magical charm to cause a candle flame to spit out at someone to cause fright. What he wanted was “fireflies” – to conjure magical lights as any self-respecting travelling showman could. The clergy of Lapiukas used these illuminations in midsummer rituals, celebration of the divine spark among them.

It took hard work to extract the light and harmlessly dissipate the heat into the air around him. He pulled the flame into a long streak of both heat and light before he sensed that the heat had dissipated.

The “firefly” popped gently into the air, and he let go of the spell with a sigh of released concentration. The candle flame puffed out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. His cell fell back into semi-darkness, the only lantern at the end of the long corridor.

It was well after lights out. That day had been like any other – ten hours of grinding stone into gravel, mixing paint and concrete or cutting wood for endless building in the Carriger mountains. Tomorrow, however, was Lapinés, the holiday his Galtarai captors called Lughnasadh, the high holy day of the god both the Lenks and the Galtarai held in common. They had a day off from labour, as well as an evening ceremony to mark the passing of the summer season and the approach of the harvest.

He put the candle back on his table and rolled himself up in his bed, about the only comfort there was in this benighted fortress. The night was not warm; the heat faded rapidly after midsummer in the Carriger mountains, just as it had down far to the north in the city of Kubichas, from which Naujokas and his people had been expelled just over nine years before. The Empire had singled the Lenkish shamans and priests out for separation from the rest of their people, and they weren’t about to allow a sorcerer to practise his craft at any time, still less on the eve of Lughnasadh.

Footsteps came down the corridor. Naujokas turned to the wall, instinctively hiding. He shut his eyes, ignoring the noise at first, trying to sleep through the excitement of at least some power return to his itchy fingers after nine years of legal and physical suppression of his talents.

Until the person outside the door passed, however, he was unable to rest easy. His eyes were still open as they stopped outside his cell, the flicker of lamps reflected on the wall. It was about two hours since they had all been made to turn in. Naujokas had simply waited for everything to become still before trying his luck with the candle.

“Shaman!” The warder tapped on the door, indicating that Naujokas was the inmate of which he spoke. Aushriné in the next cell was also a shaman – they were all either priests or shamans – although she was a healer rather than a conjurer and already had a privileged position as a herbalist among the guards.

Lucky her. Each individual had their own talents; magic was not something learned, it was something innate. There was no rhyme or reason; shapechanging had been clearly established to run in families, but no other scientific explanation could be found for the emergence of a talent in a particular individual. Naujokas himself had dabbled in the conundrum, but had never been a patient scholar except where his own ability was concerned.

He didn’t answer the warder, hoping he looked to her to be fast asleep.

“Shaman, I know you’re awake. No point in trying to hide it – you snuffed the candle out a few minutes ago. I can smell it from here.”

The shaman turned over in bed. It wouldn’t have been a prison if the discipline wasn’t harsh. The woman outside his cell, Doirrean, a civilian warder rather than a military guard, held her baton down. In nearly a decade they hadn’t got round to segregating the wards by gender; there were roughly equal numbers of men and women incarcerated here, but no urgent need to split them up by building two cell blocks.

If the candle had still been lit, a deft magical trick would have sent it into her eyes, but that would be empty spite, and not becoming of a religious man. The devil took his own. The shaman simply waited for her to bark at him again, but she instead softened her voice. “We have a proposal, since you seem to have been working magic in your cell.”

Damn. Doirrean was relatively new to the fortress. One magician knew another. He might have known a warder at a prison for sorcerers would employ people with such finely-tuned senses as to pick up the residue magic left behind it. It worked only at close range – in the same room – so they might have been coming for another purpose, only to know what he’d been doing.

“Do you know how to make fireflies?” she asked.

“Yes,” Naujokas lied, hoping that his talent might come back to him if he was given official leave to practice. He sat up. “I suppose I’ve got no choice other than to come with you?” he asked her, looking her full in the eyes – an act of defiance even in this modern age.

“I could make your life very uncomfortable if you didn’t,” Doirrean answered, acknowledging the shaman’s insubordination with a frown.

The shaman decided not to push his luck any further, and got up, folding his bedding deliberately slowly. He went for the papers that he’d been allowed to write, notes on how to re-learn his talent, but Doirrean shook her head. “Just yourself.”

The prisoners wore pyjamas to bed and Naujokas also had been issued a dressing-gown on the orders of the fortress doctor due to a weak chest. It was no comfortable life, but conditions were similar to those of other fortresses where people were held awaiting trial, rather than as convicts. The Lenkish clergy had committed no official crime, and abusing them would have upset their church, so they were on perpetual remand. It was always promised that they could rejoin their former parishioners in their places of exile, but never delivered.

Doirrean brought him into the guards’ common room, where he could pick out familiar faces on the night shift. Cards and whisky bottles were strewn around the room, with most of the warders deep in their cups. It made him grit his teeth; as a sorcerer, he’d always been careful not to over-indulge lest he lose control of his magic. Sorcery sent you mad eventually anyway; there was no need to provoke any more ill-effects than necessary.

When they saw him, they broke into ugly Galtarai jibes. They evidently didn’t realise that after nine years in the fortress, Naujokas could follow what they were saying about his drained, unshaven face and thinning white hair. He caught a few obscenities, at which point Doirrean blushed and tried to shut them up.

She put a candle in the middle of the table. “Try it. Show me.”

Naujokas sat at the table, and the warders immediately fell silent, as if they’d never been witness to magic before, or hitherto thought of it as an abstract idea that they were not permitted to witness. As if on cue the cuckoo-clock in the room struck midnight, heralding the start of the festival.

He felt a surge of energy through his body, as if a great fire – both heat and light – had taken hold.