4.
The flames climbed my skirt, and I caught the smell of burning wood.
The fire raced upward, ankle to waist in the space of a blink, and yet not one part of me hurt.
Smoke rose, mixed with the crackle of the kindling and the townsfolk praying below, while my mother-in-law stood beside the woodpile, eyes fixed hard on the flames leaping over me.
I looked down at my hands.
My fingertips were coming apart, drifting off flake by flake, like paper ash scattering in the wind.
When the old immortal shaped this body for me all those years ago, he plucked a willow leaf by the river, crushed it in his palm, breathed on it, and that became me.
Weightless, thin as anything, and it took more than ten years of tending before it wore even the shadow of a living person.
Now one fire, and it was going back.
My mother-in-law leaned a step closer. "Better to burn clean. Burn it clean, and the rain will come."
As she said it, she turned and waved toward the crowd below, like she was claiming credit.
Below, some dropped to their knees, some began to kowtow, and others shouted that heaven had finally opened its eyes.
Elias still stood at the very front, and never once raised his head.
The fire reached my shoulders. But I felt no heat at all, my body growing lighter and lighter, the woodpile under my feet blurred as if seen through a film of water.
I lifted my face. The sun sat high, and not a breath of wind moved.
So many people begging for rain, and the sky held not a wisp of moisture, dry through and through.
The last willow leaf peeled away from my cheek, and golden light shone out from within, wrapping around me without a sound.
It was as though a hand tugged gently at my back, and my body floated upward.
I looked down at the crowd, the Henson family, the people kneeling for rain, the women weeping with children in their arms, my mother-in-law still holding up her torch, all shrinking to black dots, smaller and smaller.
Wind rose at my ears, blowing the smoke apart, cooling the ash.
The fire below still burned. The kindling spent itself, the flames drawing in to one small tuft, and then going out.
The gray smoke thinned, and the altar stood empty.
My mother-in-law was still standing there, the smile not yet gone from her mouth. She took two steps forward and craned her head to look into the pile of ash.
There was nothing.
No hair, no scrap of clothing, no charred bone.
Not even the smallest sliver of bone.
She froze for a moment, nudged the ash on the ground with her foot, and even that was only a thin layer, gone with a breath of wind.
Below, the crowd went quiet, and then someone began to murmur, the sound slowly rising. "Where is she?"
"You can't burn a person and leave nothing at all, can you?"
"Where are the bones? Burn someone and there have to be bones, don't there?"
