The Hollow Heart

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  for Trisha de Guzman and Joy Peskin

  THE GOD

  YOU HAVE MY HEART. You know you do.

  I have heard this said, from one of you to another. Mortals say it as though they can feel the hand of the beloved inside their ribs, palm supporting the heart, fingers curled lightly around the trembling muscle. Pain could come so easily. All it would take is a good, hard squeeze.

  Once there was a girl who traded her heart to a god for knowledge. It seemed, at the time, a fair bargain. One should never bargain with a god, let alone this god, yet Nirrim had been raised to think more of others than of herself, and as such people often do—the orphans, the underlings, the lesser-thans—she soon tired of being trod upon. She sought power. Eventually, she would seize it with a vengeance. A heart seemed a small price to pay. Anyway, it was broken.

  Yet she hesitated. I can’t live without a heart, she told the god, who said, Not that lump of muscle beating in your chest. I mean what makes you you.

  If you take my heart, what will I become?

  Who can say? said the god.

  Nirrim made her bargain. She plotted to make a palace fit for the new person she was, and looked out at the sea, which glinted like beaten tin. She placed a palm against her breast, and her heart knocked back. I am here, it said. But was it truly? Something was gone. Nirrim, self-crowned ruler of Ethin, our lost city, Queen of the Hollow Heart, discovered that her bargain had not taken away her longing as she had hoped. No, she was not done with wanting. Now she wanted all the world.

  And me?

  I warn you now: do not think well of me. I have murdered your kind before. Nirrim’s black-eyed lover, Sid of the Herrani, will know this when she meets my gaze. Fear will shiver through her.

  How does a story end? For you mortals, it always ends with your life.

  NIRRIM

  MY PEOPLE COME TO SEE me in my triumph. The words I have just spoken ring in my mind: I am a god, and I am your queen. Half Kith fill the agora, curious, their souls surely sweetened with the knowledge that I have given them: that they, who for generations were scorned by the rest of Ethin, are the children of gods.

  At least, some of them are.

  “Bring all the Half Kith to me.” I pitch my voice so that it rings against the white walls of the agora. “Even the smallest child.”

  “Why? What will you do, Nirrim?”

  I can’t see who calls, but I would know that voice anywhere: Annin, whom I once considered my little sister, despite any lack of blood between us. A new tone of suspicion infects her voice.

  I lift a hand to my shoulder for the Elysium bird, as soft and red as a rose, to shift its perch onto my fist. It obeys, trilling, and rubs its head against my cheek. It loves me, just as I deserve. I remember feeling grateful, like a beggar, for any scrap of love tossed my way. I yearned so badly for a mother that when Raven, the woman who took me in, hurt me I invented reasons to explain her behavior. My only other choice was to face the truth that she cared nothing for me. I was weak. Desperate. Never again. I look into the crowd of Half Kith. They will love me, too, just like my bird, and I will reward them by returning to us the power that was stolen long ago. I will raise the Half Kith on high. We have been ignored for too long. Treated cruelly. My people surely believe this as I do.

  If they don’t, they must be made to believe it, for their own good. I will need their loyalty, and for that I need their trust. “I am here to protect you,” I say gently. “This is the gods’ bird, whose ancestor, hundreds of years ago, drank the blood of the god of discovery. My Elysium will know which of you has magic running in your veins. Don’t you wonder what you could do?” I smile at the crowd. For the first time in my life, I am aware of my beauty and relish it. The crowd’s mesmerized faces relax as they regard me. My black hair must be wild, wind-torn: a dark crown. My eyes: green as jade. Skin pure, sun-warmed. A sweet, quiet face. For now, let them think I am as sweet as I look. “The bird is harmless. All it will do is sing—if, that is, you are gifted. Aden, step forward. Show them.”

  Aden knows full well that he is god-touched. He glows. A golden smirk curls his lips. He looks as though he has lifted the goblet of the sky to his mouth and swallowed the sun. Once he was my lover, and believes he knows me well, yet when our eyes meet he hesitates, appraising me. He must wonder who I am now, and can’t help but see how I have changed. I am no longer the shy, easily controlled girl he knew. “Aden, surely you are not afraid. It is but a bird.”

  With a squint to his eyes that says he thinks my challenge to his courage is a cheap trick, yet that he will indulge me for his own reasons, Aden steps close. His light runs over my skin. It feels nice enough. I remember how he was with me when all the Ward knew I was his sweetheart, how his love, like this honeyed light, felt like a too-warm blanket, like something that wouldn’t let me breathe and made me long for cool water.

  For a moment, I remember Sid’s skin on mine. Her weight. Need pours into my belly, dizzying me, dazzling my flesh. A sharp breath escapes my lips. I thought I was past this desire, that whatever I gave to the god when he demanded my heart would make it impossible for me to feel anything for Sid. What did he take, exactly, from me?

  There is no time to wonder. Sid is gone. She will never return. I am here, and nowhere else. This is my city. My moment.

  Mine, the bird sings, staring into Aden’s face, stirring its crimson-and-pink wings.

  “Why don’t you show them,” I whisper to Aden, “what you can do?”

  “I am not your toy.”

  “No.” My voice is still low enough for this to be a conversation only between us. “You are a child of the gods, yet your entire life you have been trapped within this Ward, walled off from the rest of the world, told by the Council that you were not worthy. You didn’t even know what power you had until I returned the memory of Ethin’s past to everyone in this city. Don’t you want everyone to recognize your skill, your strength? Won’t that feel good?”

  His eyes still narrowed, he lifts one hand for the crowd to see. Flame erupts from his palm, and an excited murmur rises like the sound of cicadas. Surprise at what he has done leaps across Aden’s face, but he hides it quickly. I imagine that before today, he had probably noticed that he could see into the twilight a little longer than other people after the sunset, or that he stayed warmer than everyone else during the chilling spell of an ice wind. But he would not have thought this was anything different than being taller than most people, or having keener eyesight. And now, to create flame? How incredible that such a change could come simply from knowledge, from knowing something today that he did not know yesterday. Yet is that so strange? Once I saw, in the center of a High-Kith agora, an acrobat flip and spin her body as though it were a toy. I could not conceive of even trying to do what she did. Yet how it would be if I were filled with the knowledge that I could tumble through space, that the gods were my ancestors, that the skill lurked
in my limbs? If I knew this truth, knew it in my bones, how could I not try? How could I not succeed? When I think about all that the High Kith took from us, what angers me most is that they tricked us into not seeing our own skills. They dulled us. They stole our knowledge of our own selves. This, I will never forgive.

  My people push their way toward me. But others, like Annin and our friend Morah, slip away. Sirah, an old woman I once cared for, though it is now hard to conceive why, disappears into an alleyway. A few people trickle away from the crowd and vanish. Let them. I do not need these weaklings.

  “May I try?” It is a little boy of perhaps eight years, lifted by his father above the crowd. I invite the brave boy forward. I try to look benevolent, my lovely face as calm and gentle as a statue’s, because the crowd will appreciate that. I touch his cheek. The bird sings again.

  It sings for another Half Kith. And another, and another, its call jangling in the agora as the sky darkens.

  * * *

  Later, when the sun fades and the crowd has divided into the disappointed and the lucky, Aden turns to me. “What game are you playing?” he murmurs. “What do you want?” I look straight into his blue eyes and then over his shoulder, letting my gaze trail to the wall that for centuries imprisoned our people. He knows, as I know, how we once feared being tithed for committing small sins. We were made to give our blood to the High Kith. Our hair, our limbs. Our hopes. Even children were taken. We will not return to who we were: cowardly, pathetic animals penned in a cage. We will never be the same, any more than I will return to the person I once was—kind, considerate Nirrim, so ready to put others’ needs before her own. That girl is gone.

  What do I want?

  Revenge.

  SID

  USUALLY, I LOVE THE SEA.

  Yes, even during a storm, Nirrim would add, teasing yet serious, too. Especially during a storm.

  But that’s not true. Storms can kill. They grind ships against unseen rocks, shred sails, tip the world upside down, wash sailors overboard. Frustration fills me, as if Nirrim has actually said this to me, and I must defend myself, to say I am no fool, that I don’t seek danger (not always). So I am good on the water. Is it wrong to take pleasure in my skills? I have but three. And this skill is one any true-born Herrani should have. The sea is in my blood, and if I like the roll of a ship’s deck beneath my feet and can taste a storm in the air long before it arrives, well, that is my birthright.

  Nirrim, you say I love a storm only because you have never set foot on a ship. You have never seen the sea as more than a twinkling blue expanse meeting the horizon. You think me braver than I am.

  A gull tilts low over the too-still water. I push the imagined conversation from my mind. Nirrim refused me. I gave her my heart and she gave it right back. There is no conversation one can have after that. Why am I imagining she thinks me brave? Why do this to myself? I don’t know what she thinks. I know only that she decided I was not enough.

  “Itching for a storm, are you?” says a smooth voice over my shoulder.

  “Oh, shut up, Roshar.”

  He leans against the taffrail and gazes at the becalmed water. His mutilations are stark in the sunlight: the missing nose, the wrinkles of flesh where his ears once were. People flinch when they first meet him. I can’t see him as anything but familiar. He held me when I was a baby. He taught me how to stroke his tiger’s broad head so that it would not bite. He has a warrior’s body, not broad like my father’s, but lean like mine, his gestures firm yet with a lazy kind of elegance my father has said, amusedly, that I imitated for years until Roshar’s sly way of speaking and moving had become my own. Roshar’s black eyes, narrowed against the sun, are rimmed with the green paint that marks his royal status, a color echoed in the flag of his ship, a narrow Dacran sloop, which lies not far off from this one, barely dipping in the too-peaceful water. He insisted on staying aboard my ship. “Little runaway princess,” he said, smirking when he saw how much I resented that last word, “do you think I will let you out of my sight?” Then he ousted me from my captain’s quarters. “I outrank you,” he said, and when I spluttered, he added, “There was a beauty contest. The crew said I won.”

  I keep my gaze on his sloop, which I have seen cut through choppy water like a blade. It is narrowly designed and beautifully made, the captain’s quarters a jewel box of tiny windowpanes.

  “I don’t like the look in your eyes.” He stuffs tobacco into his pipe and lights it easily, not even having to shield the bowl from the wind, which is nonexistent. “That is my ship. Don’t look at it like she’s some girl you want to bed.”

  “If you were a good godfather, you would give her to me.”

  “Ha!”

  “I stole my father’s ship. Who is to say yours isn’t next on my list?”

  He smiles. “I, too, like to threaten people when I’m worried.” He smokes, a cloud curling around him. “A stiff wind would be nice, if it doesn’t blow us off course.”

  Fine, maybe I do like a storm every now and then. Roshar knows me all too well. Nirrim doesn’t, not quite, but she saw me well. She understood me, which apparently was enough to make her stay behind in a city that treated her terribly, even when I offered her my heart and my home.

  Tiny, scalloped waves lap the side of Roshar’s sloop. My hands feel heavy, although they are empty. They hold a memory. I do not have Nirrim’s preternatural gift for memory, her ability to see every moment in her past as clearly as though it were the present. What I have instead is a memory of a memory, the moment so old that what I remember is my frequent return to it. It haunts me.

  My mother placed an apple in one hand and a small stone in the other. We stood on the royal pier, hoping to glimpse the ship of my father, who was due to return from a visit to Dacra, our eastern ally. Which object is heaviest? she asked.

  They weigh the same, I said.

  Drop them, she said. The water gulped down the stone. The apple bobbed, a friendly red and yellow.

  If they weigh the same, my mother said, why does the apple float?

  “What I wonder,” Roshar says, interrupting the memory, “is what you want more: for a wind to push us to Herran so that you may see your mother, or for it to carry us away as swiftly as possible from Herrath and that forlorn girl of yours.”

  Despite myself, I cast a glance southwest toward Herrath, to where it lies hidden beyond the Empty Islands. Herrath can’t be seen, of course. We left its shores several days ago. I practically begged for Nirrim to come with me.

  Roshar grins, which makes him look like the sign of my father’s god. A skull for King Arin, touched by the god of death. Since it is my father’s sign, it has become my family’s, too. Death loves you, people say. When, impatient, I have demanded what exactly that means, they say, Death grants you mercy.

  But sometimes people mutter, Death follows at your parents’ heels.

  There it is again, my old annoyance. My father’s god is not my god. I was born in the year of the god of games, and although I have my religious doubts and light a candle in the temple mostly to please my faithful father, I take comfort that my patron god is no serious member of the pantheon. She is a rascal. Of the three skills I possess, winning a gamble is one.

  It is my mother’s, too.

  “You’re lying,” I tell Roshar. “My mother is not sick. This is a trick to make me come home. Some game of hers.”

  The humor leaves Roshar.

  “She probably put you up to it,” I accuse him.

  “No.”

  “It would be just like her.” A lump of worry and anger hurts my throat. I, too, don’t know why I most want the wind: to carry me away from Nirrim, or to bring me to my mother. Part of me dreads a swift voyage. I am afraid that as soon as I reach Herran I won’t be able to pretend anymore that my mother is all right, that the news of her illness is a hoax to call me back as if I were the kestrel, wheeling toward the bait in her uplifted fist.

  “Little godchild,” Roshar says, “I ha
ve never lied to you.” He rests a hand on mine where it grips the taffrail, his dark brown skin covering my pale fingers. All gold, Herrani say when they see me. They don’t say it nicely. I look very Valorian. I look like the people who conquered my country thirty-some years ago. Like my mother. I slip my hand out from beneath Roshar’s and the weight of his heavy ring, set with a dull black stone. He says, “I wish I didn’t worry that Kestrel might die, but I do.”

  Think, tadpole, my mother said as I stared at the floating apple.

  Because the apple is bigger? I said. Like a boat?

  She smiled in encouragement—which is against her rules. She disdains giving hints, and if you go up against her you can be sure that nothing in her expression or gesture will reveal what she does not wish to show. But I was small, and she did want me to see a truth: her love. She gently tugged one of my braids. My hair was long then. When I cut it a few years ago, on my fifteenth nameday, her expression radiated hurt, because she believed I had done it so that I would look less like her.

  She was right. She always is.

  But the apple and the stone weighed the same, she said. You felt that when you held them. Why would one sink and the other float? Why would the apple’s bigness make it buoyant?

  I had no answer. I studied apples and stones for days. I dropped pebbles into the atrium’s fountain. I cut open apples. I pried out seeds—brown teardrops, as though each apple, cheerful on the outside, wept at its core, or had several tiny, hard, bitter hearts.

  Tell her, my father said to my mother.

  No, she answered.

  Finally, I announced, It is because an apple is filled with air. It doesn’t look that way, but it is. The air makes an apple go crunch between your teeth.

  She looked so proud. I felt proud, for making her proud. My darling, I knew you could do it.