On the cold night they came for her, Anaya lay barely conscious atop a gray comforter. Her fever had spiked again in the evening, and the little girl breathed raggedly, bedridden near a rustic wall across from the hearth. The other three family members languished in total silence within the confines of the tiny house. The last brutal episode had drained them mentally, and now their resilience threatened to slip away.

Then Anaya stirred on her bed and moaned softly, her whimper echoing inside the house like a wounded whisper.

Anaya’s mother froze at the sound, standing before the burning stove in the section that functioned as the kitchen. She fought back the tears and brought a trembling hand to her chest, for Yael knew that dreaded sound all too well. It was about to start again. “Oh, sweet Dianasis, please have mercy,” she muttered.

Yael turned in time to see her six-year-old daughter convulse violently and the bed beneath her start to shake in tandem with her thrashing, the steel frame rattling and sliding, scratching the hardwood floor. Anaya’s mother dropped the pot of boiling water she’d been about to use, splashing its contents onto the floor as she rushed to her little girl. She kneeled next to the bed and grabbed Anaya’s hand, sure it would help. “Mommy is right here, sweetie. I’m right here.”

The convulsions and thrashing reached their tumultuous peak, and Yael held her breath, silently begging Dianasis to save her daughter. Then Anaya coughed, and her body expelled nine white feathers. Four of them shot up and hovered above the bed. Anaya’s contortions subsided, but the four feathers kept floating above the girl like snowflakes, refusing to come down.

Yael’s frown deepened, overtaking the pain in her face; she looked at the hovering feathers and tilted her head. It’d been two days of unrelenting high fevers and hacking coughs—Anaya’s lips were chapped from dehydration, and her caramel skin had taken on a sickly pale hue. But the bizarre feathers that had burst from the girl with each episode had never floated. The darn things fell onto the bed or thudded to the floor like flat pebbles, vanishing as bafflingly as they had appeared.

Yael reached out, trying to grab one of the feathers drifting above her daughter. But as soon as she touched it, the plume crumbled into dust and dissolved into the air. Not a trace of it remained. The other eight feathers disintegrated and dispersed two seconds later, like steam in the cold wind.

Yael’s eyebrows remained knitted together. Her heart ached. How in the name of Dianasis had Anaya’s body not yet broken under such relentless thrashing? How much longer could a six-year-old child withstand such a cursed and hideous disease? But Yael’s faith in her goddess was as unyielding as her daughter’s fevers. Anaya was still alive—there was warmth in her chest, sweat on her brow, and breath in her lungs. The other twenty-four children in the village who had contracted the disease were already dead, having succumbed to the sinister malady in fewer than thirty-six hours. According to Father Lorenzo, none of the thirty-eight children under seven years of age had survived the pestilence in the neighboring Old Berkton Village either. But her Anaya clung to life; her daughter had not given up.

“Yes,” Father Lorenzo had said when Yael answered his question about the feathers with a simple nod, “the other children coughed three or four feathers once, an hour or two before they died. And those feathers disappeared too. No doubt the devil is trying to hide his hand.”

Yael had thought it was best not to mention to Father Lorenzo—who was both the mayor and the priest—that Anaya had been coughing up feathers for two days now. And not just three or four at a time.

Yael bent and kissed her baby girl’s sweaty forehead. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered, still holding Anaya’s hand. “I’m not giving up either. You hear me? I’m not letting go.”

She slid an arm underneath Anaya’s neck and hoisted her head. Then she grabbed the bowl from the nightstand and fed Anaya some rice water. Her daughter sipped, and Yael’s forehead finally relaxed. According to the pattern established over the last two days, Anaya would rest easy for a few hours. Her fever would break for a while before starting to spike again, leading to convulsions and culminating in violent coughing and feathers.

Yael leaned back and inched her chin up higher. We’ll survive this, she told herself. She had not been uprooted from her homeland and suffered years of continuous discrimination in this country just to see her daughter die. That fire in her belly had seen Yael through awful situations before, and this one would be no exception.

“There is no justice in this world,” a deep male voice mumbled inside the house for the hundredth time. Yael’s eyes darted toward her husband.

Jamal sat in front of the fire, twelve feet away from his daughter’s bed, his eyes glued to the floor. Yael waited. It always felt as if Jamal would go on talking, but he never did. She knew her husband of ten years well. He probably wanted to encourage her and Anaya and their son Casar, but no other sentences had come out of Jamal’s throat for the last two days. Not when the village’s priest had come the day before and told them how bad things were all across their community and beyond. Not even when his eight-year-old son had asked if his little sister was going to die or if he would be next. “There is no justice in this world.”

Jamal hadn’t worked or eaten since Anaya had fallen ill with this infernal curse; the thought that her next cough could be her last had drained all the strength out of the man.

Yael didn’t fault her husband for crumbling under pressure. Kas, Jamal’s god, was a cruel deity, and it was hard to draw resiliency from that. But no matter how many flaws her husband had, Yael would always love her gentle giant. At nearly seven feet tall, Jamal was the tallest person in a town of tall people—a small rural community deep in the northern mountains where everybody knew everyone else. He was the only blacksmith in Ivory Village or any other village for miles. But Jamal’s ties with the community had not helped ease the torrent of racial discrimination aimed at his foreign wife, the petite and dynamic Yael, a woman with slanted gray eyes and full lips from the former territories of Naldora.

Her tiny house was the closest home to the forest, away from stores, the church, and the school. But that relative remoteness didn’t stop the entire village from noticing the bright light coalescing above Anaya’s home. It drew embers from all around the village throughout the evening like the house was a magnet for fire. For two hours, a throng had been gathering outside their door. They kept a safe distance amid complete silence, solemnly witnessing the bright light growing in size above the house. It was as strange as the illness that had taken almost all of the village’s young children.

Inside the house, Yael remained next to Anaya even as her gaze landed on the eight-year-old boy perched next to Jamal. The child poured more logs into the fire, trying to warm the chilly room, trying to be helpful. A sliver of pride pierced through her chest—Casar was such a good boy.

“That’s one log too many,” Yael said, and Casar stopped, drawing the last log back out of the fire. She gave him a tired smile. Her son had taken over the task of chopping wood two days ago. No one had told him he had to wield the axe, but he did it anyway. Those were the moments when she could glimpse into someone’s heart.

A frown returned to Yael’s forehead. Was she a bad mother to Casar? She hadn’t been thinking about how Anaya’s situation was affecting him. Instead, she’d worried that the curse assaulting the village might realize it had missed one of Yael’s children. What if it decided to claim Casar next?

She’d worried about him long before this plague. The boy had the muscular constitution and soft features of his father, but Casar had also inherited Yael’s fair skin. The school bullies called him “half-Abbie.” It had taken her son a week to realize that they meant it as an insult.

“Abbie is a racial slur against people from Naldora,” Jamal had told him without clarifying what “racial” or “slur” meant. Yael had explained the word “Abbie” to Casar. It referenced a traditional garment worn by Naldora’s farmers and miners during worship hour on Sundays—the abramalie.

“Why don’t they call me ‘half-Canyo,’ then?” Casar had asked his dad.

“’Cause ignorant folks say ignorant things.”

Jamal was a full-blooded Canyo, a tall, strong, dark-skinned native of the proud nation of Kasmana, a powerful race that had originally come from the island continent of Quinquella. Yael loved her husband, but she didn’t feel that way about any other Canyo. Kasmana was a nation of bullies—they were just like their god, Kas.

Casar’s face had turned red. “They won’t dare call me names once I own a gatalan!”

Yael shook her head. It was more likely that a gatalan would own him. Those five-foot-tall felines were nasty creatures, and every nation in the world except for Kasmana was terrified of them. Elite Canyo soldiers rode gatalans in battle; the beasts were the reason why Kasmana had emerged victorious over the allied forces of Naldora, Maraccia, and Normania during the Great War. Yael hated to admit it, but the kingdom of Kasmana had become the undisputed military superpower in the world.

“Jamal!” Yael called out next to Anaya, unaware of the gathering crowd outside. “Oh, mighty Dianasis. Thank you, moon goddess. Husband, come! Hurry!”

Her sudden call jolted Casar, and the remaining logs in his hand fell into the fire. Yael’s eyes glinted as Jamal bolted out of his chair for the first time in two days.

“Wife, what is it?”

“Look!” Yael exclaimed, pointing at Anaya. Jamal’s eyes widened at the sight of Anaya’s now-peaceful face. His daughter looked like she was sound asleep, her mind wrapped in a joyful dream.

“Not her face, husband. Look at her arms!”

“Hey, Dad,” Casar said in a trembling voice. His parents turned to look at him, and Casar pointed at the window. “What’s going on outside?”

Yael and Jamal looked where he was pointing and frowned. A dim glare came through the upper corner as if someone held a candle outside, trying to peer into their house.

Casar walked closer, opened the interior window, and wiped the condensation off the glass, trying to peer through the window himself.

“Fetch the coats,” Jamal said to his son when the glare from outside flooded their small home with light. A crowd of people circling the house came into view.

Casar hurried to a corner and returned holding a coat for his father, another for his mother, and one for himself.

“Stay inside with Anaya,” Jamal said to Casar, wearing his coat. “You can watch from the window.”

Yael had finished putting on her coat. Jamal opened the front door, and they walked outside. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the light. The sun had set hours ago, but something in the sky illuminated the entire area without warming it up. Fifty feet away, a dense circle of people stood around the house, some as far back as the forest’s edge. Their eyes darted from the couple who came out of the house to the bright light hovering above it.

Snow wasn’t falling anymore, but the white powder on the ground had piled itself up twelve inches high, making it hard to walk. Jamal held his wife’s hand and helped Yael trudge forward.

They reached the midway point between their house and the crowd. An old woman, aided by a walking staff, stepped forward and aimed a trembling finger upward, pointing behind Jamal and Yael. “That’s the work of the devil. And it’s pointing at your house!”

The couple stopped and turned to look at the sky. A large flame hovered above their home, blazing brightly, tendrils of fire dancing around it in midair. It burned in total silence, emitting a cold, gentle, bluish light.

Yael gasped, her eyes wide. What in Dianasis’s name was that ominous thing? A fearful awe grew in her chest. The flame could’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t so terrifying, if it wasn’t so close. It could be lethal; it could fall at any moment and kill them all, including her children. Or it could float higher and shine like a star. But what was it? And why was it above her house?

Yael fell to her knees. “Oh, mighty Dianasis, please protect us,” she whispered. Then she filled her lungs and shouted the rest of her plea. “Goddess of the harvest and the moon, please protect my daughter!”

Hearing the foreigner invoke a heretic goddess aroused the crowd. “The Abbie brought this curse upon us!” the old woman cried, her voice laden with stifled tears.

“The witch killed our children!” another mournful voice shouted.

“She did this to us!” a man yelled in an angry tone. “She has to pay!”

Jamal turned to the crowd with his fists clenched. “Shut up! Shut up, you ignorant mob. My daughter is very sick inside, barely alive.”

The old woman glowered at him. “But she isn’t dead yet. All the other children died many hours ago, but yours still lives.”

“Yeah! The devil protects his own!” someone yelled at the back of the crowd.

A murmur swept through the throng of villagers; a palpable, vicious intent grew in the air. Shouts demanding a reckoning multiplied, and some men stepped forward menacingly. Yael tried to stand without flinching, fear and disbelief in her eyes as the mob closed in.

Right then, the flame above the house roared and swelled, flooding the forest with a blinding light that turned the night into day. All eyes shied away from the bright fire. Villagers screamed, dropped to their knees, or ran away. Some tripped and tumbled, imploring Kas for his protection as they fell.

Yael grabbed her husband’s arm to steady herself, looking above her home wide-eyed. The ball of fire had saved her family from the angry mob. Had Dianasis answered her plea?

The last of the villagers fled, and the flame compressed into a column of fire before it shot up into the sky, hissing and crackling as it rode higher and higher. Then it came back down, sizzling like a diving arrow, speeding faster as it reached the house. It went through the roof and plunged into Anaya’s body, disappearing as it entered the girl, consuming all of the light from the surrounding area and submerging everything in pitch blackness for miles around.

The villagers kept running away, fumbling and blind but still moving, while Yael and Jamal did their best to retrace their path through the snow, their arms held out in front of them as they shuffled and flailed in the darkness.

Jamal’s hands were the first to brush against the door. He wrenched it open. Jamal and Yael stumbled into the house and closed the door behind them. They still couldn’t see anything, but they heard Casar trying to revive the hearth’s flame, striking the flint again and again against the iron rod. Fleeting sparks lit up Casar’s face intermittently with each strike until the logs caught and flames roared back to life, illuminating the house.

Yael, Jamar, and Casar looked at Anaya and gasped. The little girl sat on her bed rubbing her eyes, looking rested and lively.

“Mom, I’m hungry,” she said.