Spark of Change, by Marissa Lingen

My sister sent a messenger urchin to wait for me in the journeyman dormitories where I lived. The kid was almost asleep on the doorstep when I finally finished. Autumn was our busy season. But Milla wouldn’t have sent for me for no reason, so I gave the kid a copper and postponed my dinner to see what she wanted.

I had to make my way through yet another march on my way there. I’d been in a few myself, back when it was my neighborhood, but you get perspective once you buy your apprenticeship and work your way up into journeyman. Or maybe you just get tired.

Milla hadn’t saved up to buy into an apprenticeship. It was what we talked about when we came to the city, what we dreamed about when we got our first work as stevedores on the docks—but that’s where Milla had stayed. There was always someone who needed help, and Milla was the person who gave it. Always. So here we were five years later, me on the way to mastery in the dyers shop and her still living in the same rooms we’d shared with two other farm girls. They’d found another farm girl to take my place when I left. It’s not like we’ve ever been rare.

She was waiting for me in the yard when I got there. I could still hear the marchers yelling their slogans. Apparently so could Milla. She asked me inside, to the little kitchen they share with all the other rooms in the rooming house. It was as warm as I remembered it, and it still smelled strongly of yeast.

“When are you going to get out of here?” I asked. “I can put a word in for you, maybe even contribute to your apprentice fees if you’ll just tell me where you want to go. There’s a place in my own dyeworks coming soon, I think, but it wouldn’t have to be there. It could be anywhere really.”

Milla blew her hair out of her face and scowled at me. “I don’t have time for that right now, Ludi.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You never do.”

“Ludi. I wanted to tell you something myself. In person. Just us.”

“All right, I’m here. Go ahead.”

She looked into my face like she was checking for something important—something she might have forgotten, or I might. Whatever it was, I guess she found it. She rolled up her sleeve.

“Oh hells no,” I blurted.

Her right arm was glowing—not the whole thing, just an oval spot on her forearm, a bright gold glow. And I only knew of one thing that would cause that.

Phoenix egg infestation.

I grabbed her hand and pulled her arm closer to give it a better look. The glowing spot was warm and slightly raised. The skin around it, usually a golden brown, had gone an angry pink.

“It’s not very big right now,” I said. “There’s still time—the money I mentioned, for your apprentice fee, I can give that to a healer. If we hurry they might be able to save all the function in your arm. I’m sure your roommates will let you stay here while you’re not working, if you give them your share of rent, and maybe they’ll even help you convalesce. You’ve known Jiti for a long time, surely she’ll help, and then—“

“Ludi. I didn’t ask you here to fix this for me.”

“Oh.” I sat back and let go of her hand. “Oh. All right. What’s your plan, then? Which healer did you choose?”

Silence.

“No,” I said, too loudly. “Milla, no.”

“You can’t tell me we don’t need change around here.” Her voice was too quiet, maybe to compensate for mine, maybe to bring me back down. But I wasn’t having any of it.

True, a phoenix born was a herald of change. But the person who carried the egg in their body rarely survived to see it.

“Erfwig says I’m lucky it’s in my arm; that’s one of the highest potentials for survival. Not like if it was in my belly, or hells forfend my chest.”

“Erfwig! You can’t trust that sawbones. All he does is sober up drunks, lop off limbs, and catch babies after the mothers have done all the work.”

“Erfwig serves those who need him most,” said Milla stiffly. “We all need this now.”

“He doesn’t even have a healer’s license!”

“Because a healer’s license would cost him more than his customers—people like us—could pay him in a year! We don’t all have Guild backing, Ludi. The Guilds themselves make sure of that.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. I contained myself to a sigh, but that was apparently too much.

“Look, I know you’re in love with the Guilds. I didn’t ask you here to argue about that. You asked what you could do,” said Milla. “You can support me in this. You can help for once. I know you got out, but you can stop turning your back on the rest of us who didn’t.”

“I haven’t turned my back on you! I keep trying to get you out too!”

Milla slammed her hand down on the table, wincing at the reverberation through the phoenix egg lump, which, if anything, glowed brighter. “I don’t want to leave! I want to make things better here!”

I tried to make my voice soft, calm. “Milla. I know. But you’re working for that. You are, you and your friends, you’re working for it all the time. Phoenixes bring change. They don’t necessarily bring good change. Forest fires don’t just burn the dead wood, Milla.”

Her face went hard and stubborn, and I knew there was no reaching her. “Did you ever think, maybe those stories about the phoenixes that leave burning and destruction in their wake…maybe they tell us those on purpose, to keep us from trying for something better? Maybe it’s their propaganda. Demons know they have enough of it in other places.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I guess. Maybe. But…just think about it, okay? Someone else can give their life for this. It doesn’t have to be you.”

“Okay. One, it’s my arm, so it does in fact have to be me. The only successful transplants they’ve ever done are close blood relatives, and I couldn’t get back to the farm to Yocker in time. So that leaves you and me.”

“Yocker would never put up with this foolishness,” I muttered, and she glared at me. But again, I was not wrong; the brother we’d left behind to run the farm was so practical I’m not sure he’d ever had a conversation that was not about sheep or dirt.

“And two, I want this. I want this. Me. And I’m willing to try to do the work so that the phoenix can give us…you know, a boost. A little spark for the fire that’s ready to burn. That’s what I’ve been doing. I just wanted you, my sister, to know. And to support me.”

“All right, fine,” I said. “I’ll support you.”

Milla pressed her lips together in a pained grimace. “Yes, thank you, that was utterly sincere.”

I threw my hands in the air. “I can only do what I can do, Milla. Think about having that thing removed. Before it’s too late. I’d rather keep my sister.”

“I’d rather keep mine,” said Milla, but I was already on my way out the door. None of our arguments ever got anywhere anyway. Better to leave while we were still speaking to each other, however angrily.

I walked through the streets without really seeing anything around me. I had to focus very hard to make myself buy dumplings from a street vendor and eat them, since I knew I would get back to the dormitory long after the other journeymen had finished supper. They tasted like nothing in my mouth, like cottonwool and anxiety, which I knew was not the dumpling-maker’s fault.

Phoenixes always seemed so unfair to me. Sweeping in with magic change, destroying and creating and who could guess which. Chaotic. Dangerous. Dragons, at least, stay in their mountains unless the wild goats are scarce that year. Sirens can be avoided with judicious use of wax and ropes, or even a complete course correction.

But a phoenix. There’s no controlling it. And now it was threatening my sister.

Surely there would be something I could do about that. Even if Milla didn’t agree.

I slept fitfully and awoke thinking of poisons.

Not human poisons, of course; keeping Milla was the entire point. But there were powders to get rid of lice without killing the infested person. Surely there could be such a thing for a phoenix egg. I hurried through the day’s work. The Dyer’s Guild had a library full of information about plants, including herbal applications that were not strictly part of our guild remit.

No one had apparently attempted this. Or—no one who lived to tell the tale, no one who felt safe recording their attempts.

Undaunted, I went back to first principles. Phoenixes were hot and dry—they had to be, in order to burn. My sister was not a phoenix. Therefore, if I could get her to eat cold wet foods—maybe even a spice blend she wouldn’t notice right away—it might harm the phoenix egg without doing anything to my sister.

Cardamom, the books told me. Cardamom and turmeric were the cold, wet spices. Those were easy enough to blend into a tisane with a few other, more neutral spices, a nice little packet that I could send to her with a note that said, “I’m sorry.”

I only felt a little bit guilty that she would interpret it as “I’m sorry for what I said“ and not “I’m sorry for what I’m doing right now.”

I was not focused on my work after that. Some dyeing work is entirely amenable to an absent-minded dyer—cheap, pale pink linen for the school at the end of the valley to sew smocks, where a bit of variation wouldn’t get the lot sent back on us, and it gave me plenty of time to think how to do it. A messenger was better. A messenger would be less likely to look guilty, and anyway, Milla and I didn’t see much of each other these days. I made up the tisane, taking just long enough that the dye set a little too bright. The school was too poor to complain. It would fade in the washing eventually and give the poor mites something cheerful to look at in the meantime.

I spent the next day fidgeting over how soon she’d drink it, how soon after that it would work. Whether it would be soon enough. Whether it ever could be. Whether she’d do something rash in the meantime, which of course she would; she always did. She’d do something rash regardless, and then it was me who had to bail her out.

I fussed so much that even with another simple job in the vats, I managed to scald my arm with a spatter of boiling fixative. The blisters were filled with yellow fluid, each one higher than my thumb and ready to burst and weep all over everything. I was hard-pressed not to weep myself, though half of that was frustration at my own clumsiness. It was bad enough that Master Urblen, usually an advocate of biting one’s lip and carrying on, sent me to a healer on the Guild’s account.

“You’re lucky you’re in here now,” the healer grumbled, slapping an unguent on my arm and then a bandage over it.

“I’m lucky the Guild is paying for it at all,” I said.

He snorted, tying off the last of the bandage and giving me a hearty pat that made me wince. “Well, that too. But the word I’m hearing is that the troublemakers in the city are planning another demonstration during the holiday, and we always have to be ready for action after that.”

I hoped that he attributed any dismay on my face to my burn, or to the prospect of my city in disarray again—and both of those things were very upsetting, to be sure, even without my sister as one of the lead troublemakers. “Well, I hope it stays peaceful,” I said.

He rolled his eyes at me. “Seems likely, don’t it? Keep that clean, stay out of trouble.”

“And you,” I said awkwardly.

I couldn’t sleep that night, and it wasn’t just the pain of the burn—though that didn’t help. In the dark of the night I had to finally admit it was my conscience. What if a dead phoenix egg hurt its host as it died? What if Milla did something rash, counting on the coming of the phoenix and the change it would bring? What if Milla found out the tisane was what caused the phoenix’s death and wouldn’t ask for my help when she needed it?

The dark possibilities chased themselves around my head all night. Milla jailed. Milla dead. Milla martyred. I must have looked like the gods’ own wrath when I reported to work the next morning, haggard and weary, but no one said anything as I went about my lightened duties.

I realized no one said anything to me on a usual day.

The healer didn’t comment on my careworn appearance either—apparently he only asked after the complaints the Guild asked him to treat; no more and no less. Or maybe it wasn’t as obvious as I thought. “Burn looks to be healing,” he said, rewrapping it. “Shouldn’t be too bad.”

“Thank you. And none of that trouble you feared in the city as yet,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be quiet and you won’t have too many firebrands’ broken bones to splint.”

“Them?” He laughed without mirth. “Mostly I don’t treat them. Bosses don’t let me. One or two slip through, but mostly the rioters have to lick their own wounds and hope for the best.”

I thought of Milla coughing, poisoned by a dying phoenix egg. Or trampled underfoot by rioters, her potential and the phoenix’s gone at once. I had to talk to her again, give her the choice at least. I had to try to see what on earth she thought she was going to do before she did it. I stumbled out of the healer’s dispensary with barely a word of thanks to him. I had to get to my sister.

But I wasn’t more than halfway to her house when I knew I was too late. It had already started. The streets were full of shabby, yelling people. Their faces looked familiar but distorted, like I was trying to slip through a funhouse mirror. I couldn’t tell if they were people I’d seen in my days hauling cargo, if I’d passed them on my visits to my sister, or if they were just the sort of people I’d known, the sort of people I’d been.

A swell of them washed past me, and all I could do was press myself against a door and hope not to be swept away before I could spot Milla.

I tried not to fume that she was probably at the front of it all. If she was, there was no chance I’d find her until nightfall. Maybe if I found wherever there were people making speeches, she’d be clambered up on a statue or the rim of a fountain making herself conspicuous. Making herself a target for the bosses, curse her.

Throwing herself into everything before I could even try again.

I plunged into the crowd, staying as close to the buildings as I could for safety’s sake, determined to find Milla and have it out with her good and proper. At least try to get her to tell me what change they were going to fight for that the phoenix might—might—help them win. If it didn’t burn the entire thing down on the way.

Finally, one of the faces I pushed past looked familiar: Jiti, the hard-faced city girl my sister and I had lived with when we first moved to town. Milla still did live with her. “Where’s Milla?” I shouted over the din of the crowd.

“What?” she bellowed.

“Milla, my sister, where is she?”

“Amazing!”

“Where?” I shrieked.

Jiti pointed up a cross street. It seemed like people were coming from that direction, not going, but maybe they had seen her speak and were directed to some action or another. If she’d sent them to burn the Guild halls—or to loot the warehouses—or any of a million of her schemes—

A little voice in my head said she wouldn’t be entirely wrong. And I didn’t have a phoenix egg embedded in my arm to blame it on. It said that if the ragged skinny children streaming past me got trampled, got wounded in all of this, they deserved as much healing as anyone else. It said that my sister did.

Whatever that voice knew about trampling, it felt prescient the next minute, because the shouts on the next street turned shrill and panicked, and the bodies around me had a sudden pressure, a sour shift of fear in the air that I didn’t want anywhere near me. I managed to reverse my course, to take two steps back and then into the alley I’d just passed, and wait for them to go by.

A boy stumbled into the alley with me, a head shorter than me, panting, his shabby grey vest half-torn down the back. “Steady,” I said. “Get your breath here. Wherever you’re going, you can wait to get there another minute until the crowd subsides. What happened?”

He looked up at me wild-faced, only half seeing me, too much whites of his eyes showing like a spooked horse. He was older than I thought, ferret-faced, wouldn’t ever get much taller, but I still comforted him like the child I’d thought he was.

“Breathe,” I said. “You’re all right. Just winded. Now tell me. What made everyone run?”

“Bosses sent in,” and he had to draw in another ragged breath. “Bosses sent in the guard. Some on horseback. That woman from the docks was up on the edge of the Truth and Light Fountain speaking, and then—and then they were on us, they were riding people down, everybody had to scatter—“

“The woman from the docks. Sitrin?”

He shook his head. “No, the other one, the younger one.”

I closed my eyes.

“She was talking about kids getting a chance to eat so they could learn to be more than street rats, and then—I guess they didn’t want street rats like me hearing it.” He attempted a smile, but his heart was not in it.

“But you heard,” I said. He looked up, startled. “You did hear, no matter what they wanted. And you get to keep that in you.”

“Yes,” he said.

I looked out at the street. The crowd was still hurrying past at a clip I didn’t like to try to counter, but it was getting better. But the boy—the man—wasn’t going back for my sister. “Thank you, I’m—I can handle this now,” he said, and plunged back into the crowd, putting his head down. He blended in and was gone before I could say anything else.

And then I had nothing to do but wait for my moment and try to make my way to the fountain. With every step I took, I chanted under my breath, “Milla, be there, be there, Milla, be there.” But when I saw her, I wanted to take it all back. She was leaning back against the base of the fountain, her face an ashy color, holding her arm at an unnatural angle. Dislocated? Broken? Probably both. I could hope—I did hope—that some of the blood that covered her was not hers. But some of it clearly was.

And the weird light pulsing from her arm was almost as sickening as the break in her arm. It was that, I supposed, that kept her would-be supporters at arm’s length, a stalwart few unwilling to either leave her or touch her.

I was her sister. I had no such qualms.

“All right, I’ll take care of her, you clear off, go to ground,” I said. I hoped that the last bit sounded official enough that they’d leave without questions, but one of them paused and squinted at my journeyman clothes, my sturdy boots, too expensive for most of the marchers.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m her sister. I’ll take care of her. You get somewhere safe, she’ll contact you for next steps when she’s well enough.”

Milla startled us all by croaking an affirmation: “Listen to her. Go.”

They did—and then I was left wondering if I should have kept one of them to help me carry her. But I hadn’t lost all my old strength yet, and one of her shoulders, at least, was still in its socket. I looked around the square. The fountain had been built to be fancy, generations ago, but the neighborhood had not kept up with those aspirations. The houses around the square were shuttered, and if anyone was peeping out from behind the shutters, I couldn’t count on their help. There was something that looked like a tool shed next to one of the houses, its door hanging open a crack. Shelter. Supplies. Good enough; probably the best we were going to do for the moment.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

I think the noise she made was meant to be a laugh.

“We’re going to try, all right?” I said. When I bent to her, the smell of blood was overwhelming, but her breath sounded strong and good. I hoped that she’d be able to help a little—not walk, but not be entirely dead weight. Instead, she made a horrible pain noise and passed out when I hoisted her onto my shoulder. I staggered but didn’t drop her. I had no choice.

I wondered if this was how she still felt all the time: carrying burdens too much for her, no other choice but forward. She was still sturdy, corded with muscle. The tool shed was not far away. It felt like eternity. At least I was not gripping her with my burned arm. At least the guard had gone. At least, at least…I had the door open, and we were into the tool shed.

At least the flicker of the phoenix egg through her shirt combined with the late afternoon sunlight to give me some light to see her.

I assessed her wounds, no healer I. It looked like mostly the shoulder and arm, but that was bad enough. The blood wasn’t spurting. That was good. But as I was checking her pulse, I realized: the flickering of the phoenix egg was in time with her pulse. It was getting weaker. And she didn’t come to when I shook her.

Of course it was using her energy to incubate. Of course it was. I had to cut it out. She couldn’t afford to give it anything; not one more thing. She could kill me later, when she was alive. I looked around the dim light of the tool shed. Wheelbarrow, trowel…there, the shears. None too clean, and I’d have to pay for the healer with what I’d been saving toward my own shop, what I’d been willing to use for her apprentice funds, to make sure it didn’t rot after. But it would be worth it. Save her, dump her in the wheelbarrow and get her out. Tell them some other name. Maybe cut her hair with the garden shears while I was at it. Not Milla the stevedore, someone else. Someone safe. Someone alive.

I pressed the point of the shears against the egg awkwardly, and it sang. It sang out to me the song it must have been singing to my sister in her blood, humming up through the blade and making my teeth ache. And suddenly all the change I couldn’t imagine was there in me, with me.

Jiti, the roommate I’d abandoned, confident and safe, working in a shop where people spoke her name with respect.

The boy I’d met in the alley, able to leave his job and choose another with no reprisal. Able to eat enough that winter was no threat.

A city that wasn’t pinched. A city that wasn’t scared of itself. A city without bosses and underclass, just—neighbors. Just us neighbors. A city where I didn’t have to step over my neighbors to walk forward.

Was that the change the phoenix would burn for us? Or was it just singing the songs I wanted to hear to save its own skin? I had no way to tell, but, choking back tears, I didn’t care any more. My sister and I didn’t know how to talk to each other any more. But finally I understood why she was so set on trying.

Before I could change my mind, I slashed my burned arm against the open shears. It hurt worse than I expected. I gagged and retched from the pain, only turning away from Milla at the last second.

And then—I smashed my arm against my sister’s. She was already so covered in her own blood that I couldn’t see where mine ran into hers. Had I cut deep enough? My arm felt like it was on fire, but that didn’t mean I had actually succeeded.

The phoenix egg slid into the wound with a pop and I learned how wrong I had been to think my arm felt like it was on fire before. Scalding it in the vats was nothing, was a day in the sun compared to this. It burned. It smoldered. But it clearly wasn’t consuming my flesh—yet—

But it would. I had taken my sister’s phoenix egg into me, and the only way it had out was to burn. This was only the beginning. I didn’t know how Milla had borne it so far, and there was only more to come.

Milla gave a little sigh. I said, “Oh no, no no no, no you don’t, you stay with me, I did not take this thing just for you to die on me.” The phoenix egg had sealed the edges of my own wound. That was good; that seemed fair. It had not done the same for Milla on its way out. Of course it had not. Selfish plague of a creature only cared about its host for as long as it needed to stay alive; that was the whole problem.

The noise outside continued unabated. They were no more likely to hear me than before. I ripped off bits of my shirt, the shears too long to be able to cut them, and stuffed the rags around the ruins of her arm. We might be a matched set, two one-armed sisters running dye vats or—or no, not that, the Guild would never let me have my Mastery now.

My pain-filled wheeze of a chuckle sounded too much like my sister’s. Perhaps by the time it mattered, the Guild would no longer have a say in the matter. With my good arm, I braced the wheelbarrow into the corner so I could hoist my sister into it. “All right, burn, damn you,” I said to the glow in my arm. “Burn, and earn your keep.”

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Marissa Lingen writes fiction, poetry, and essays. She lives with her family near the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. She knows where to get the good ice cream.