The Hollow Heart Page 12

  I want the ship for another reason that cannot linger too far off in my future: my marriage. When I marry Prince Ishar of Dacra, my godfather’s nephew, I want to be able to go where I will. I cannot be confined to his castle.

  “Fine,” says Roshar. “A question for me, or a ship for you. But—”

  I strike first, my slipwater sword spinning free from its sheath. Roshar is forced to dance back. He edges to my left, clearly annoyed. His curved weapon darts around me like a dragonfly, never landing a blow, the thrusts too quick for me to parry though I duck easily out of their way. His strategy is bewildering, seemingly aimless until I feel a light nick in my side and realize what he is doing.

  My tunic. A brand new one, tailored to my wishes. He is slicing it to shreds. “That is mean,” I say, and he grins. I catch the next thrust and shove it back at him, making an advance lunge to whack the flat of my blade against his sword hand. It strikes his thick gold ring with a sound like a tiny bell. I feel the force of the blow judder up my arm, but he does not drop his weapon, merely takes the blow and curves around me to push one boot into the back of my knee. I stumble, fall, and roll, but when I am up I see that he has steered me directly into the sun’s glare.

  Now I understand why the Dacrans call this sword a slipwater: the sun flashes off the blade with such brightness that it leaves an afterimage across my vision even as the sword darts someplace else, so that I see the brightness of the blade moving and the bright ghost of where it used to be. Rippling light falls like water over my sight.

  After that, it is over fairly quickly. My eyes stream in the sun. I can’t tell where his sword actually is, or where it goes. He knocks the blade out of my hands and onto the sand.

  I wipe my eyes. I can barely see Roshar gloatingly sheathing his weapon. He shakes out his right hand. “That hurt.” He pouts, looking down at his long brown fingers and the glinting ring.

  “You must really want that answer.” My voice is surly. I sit down in the sand. My tunic is in tatters. Roshar is still complaining about his hand, saying that I am lucky he doesn’t bruise easily, or he would kill me for my impudence. I lift my hand into a visor against the sun. Although the loss doesn’t make me doubt my skill, I feel ashamed. As I blink my vision back into clarity, I realize that the shame is not because I lost, but because I wanted his ship so much, for what it represented: freedom that was not a gift or an inheritance or a theft but truly mine, honestly earned.

  Roshar sits beside me, luxuriating in the sun. I, of course, will burn.

  “Well, ask me,” I say.

  “Why are you angry?”

  “I am not angry.”

  “You swore to be honest.”

  “You beat me fairly. I can’t complain.”

  “I don’t mean the fight. I mean your mother. Your father. Even me. Sid, you are a rangy little lion of anger. Always looking for someone to bite. You were like this before you left Herran. Now you’re back, and it’s worse. Why?”

  I drop my face into my hands. The gesture shows too much of what I feel, but letting him see my expression would be worse. I realize he made a decision, from the moment he saw me hurtling through the atrium, to bring me to this point, to force me to answer this very question. Roshar being Roshar, he had to make a pageant of it, from pretending a friendly spar to proposing that absurd bet to making sure I knew he had fully won, in every possible way. “You could have asked me like a normal person.”

  “Where is the fun in that? Besides, you wouldn’t have answered. Now you must. You’re sworn to answer.”

  I breathe out slowly, my hands still pressed against my eyes and cheeks. “I am not like you.”

  “You must admit that you are, in a number of important ways.”

  “I have been with many women.”

  “You are a legend,” he agrees.

  “I didn’t mean to be unkind to them. My father thinks I have been. I suppose he is right. There is … a hunger in me.”

  “For what?”

  Quietly, I say, “To be wanted.”

  “Ah, Sid. In this, we are very much alike.”

  I have not given him a full answer. My vow to the hundred swells in my chest. I should never have made such a promise. Sunshine beats down on my head. I have already shown too much. Maybe I am already the gods’ plaything, I cannot tell, but I have foolishly made a bet in their name. If I don’t hold true to it, I might as well surrender myself wholly to whatever cruelty they might devise for a vow breaker.

  It is easy to believe only halfheartedly in gods until you imagine how they might punish you. Then your faith solidifies very quickly indeed.

  “We are different,” I tell Roshar, “because I want one person. I want forever. I want what my parents have.”

  “What Kestrel and Arin have is a rare thing.”

  “I know.”

  “I am glad you want it,” he says. “It is not for me. But only you can choose what is right for you.”

  “I kept looking.”

  “Sid, you are so young. You will find someone.”

  I think of Nirrim, of plucking a white petal from her hair and rubbing it between my finger and thumb, releasing its scent, and how I was able to make her want me but not love me. I shake my head.

  Roshar says, “That girl in Ethin? Nirrim?”

  “Nirrim didn’t feel the same way.”

  He winces. “Should I feed her to my tiger?”

  “It’s not her fault. I didn’t earn her love.”

  “That might not be true.”

  “This is me, being honest, sworn to honesty by the gods.”

  “I mean that you might not see the whole truth.”

  “There is more.”

  “Goddess help us.”

  “I don’t want to be with a man. Ever. I never have. I never will.”

  “I am hardly surprised, but this is … rather inconvenient, considering that you are engaged to my nephew.”

  I shrug.

  “I was given to understand that you wanted the engagement.” His black eyes are wide, the green paint rimming them bright. “Kestrel said so. Did she lie to me?”

  Miserably, I shake my head. Roshar heaves a great breath and flops backward onto the sand. “Of all the self-defeating … you are just like Arin. I swear he almost walked himself into an early grave countless times over. You are walking me into an early grave. And Dacrans don’t even have graves!” More seriously, he says, “Sid, did you not know your own desires? I understand that maybe, when you agreed to the engagement, you weren’t sure then, and thought you enjoyed men, or you did and then you changed your mind—”

  “No. I knew.”

  “Did you want the political power? The royal marriage, to be queen of two countries, and to love whomever you wanted in secret? There’s no shame to that. This, too, I would understand.”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  This sun. It will blind me. How can it be this hot so close to autumn? How can summer hold on so hard? I want to plunge into snow. For ice to imprison my face. I want the hands that rest so uselessly on my upturned knees to dissolve into white powder and blow away in the next wind. My vow. The hundred. I say, “I wanted to make my parents happy.”

  His face fills with love. “Sid, youngling, you do make them happy.”

  I shake my head. “I am angry at my mother because she is glad to marry me to someone for political convenience. I am angry at my father for not seeing any of this. I am angry at you because you should know better than anyone who I am and what I want.”

  His expression twists.

  “Can we be done?” I say. “Is that enough? I have answered you. You asked and I answered.”

  “It is enough, but—”

  “Good.” I scramble to my feet, not bothering to shake the sand out of my clothes, and hurry into the salle, plunging into the blessed, cool dark. I hear Roshar behind me. His hand on my shoulder drags me to a halt.

  He says, “I think you should talk with Kestrel an
d Arin.”

  “No. Herran needs this engagement. We are a small country. Dacra is vast and powerful.”

  “We are your ally.”

  “Your sister the queen will eat our country whole the moment it serves her.”

  “Well, now, that is true.”

  “I thought, when I sailed away, that I would find something that would help Herran. An asset. Like our guns. A weapon or skill that would help us keep our independence. I thought if I could find it, I wouldn’t have to marry.”

  “Did you?”

  Nirrim feels so far away, the magic I tasted at the tips of her fingers a dream. I am no longer sure if what I experienced in that country was magic, or simply the desperation of my hope for a solution. My memory is not perfect, not like Nirrim’s, and all I am sure of now is how I needed the feel of her fingertips against my mouth, and the way she knew me. “No.”

  “I still think—”

  “I don’t want my parents to know what I have told you. They wouldn’t understand. Promise me you won’t tell them.”

  “Sid.” He sighs.

  “None of this is yours to tell. Promise.”

  “I promise.” He holds out his right hand and I take it. As he looks down at our clasped hands, he frowns. My eyes adjusted to the dark interior, I see that the heavy black stone set in his gold ring is not a gem at all, but glass. It has cracked. Swearing, he tugs the ring off his hand, reaches for the hem of my tattered tunic, and rips a strip from the bottom.

  “Roshar!”

  “The tunic was ruined anyway.” Quickly, he wraps the ring in the cloth. “I am lucky the ring didn’t leak.”

  I am confused. “Why would your ring leak?”

  “It is filled with poison.”

  My heart falters. “Poison?”

  “Well, not exactly. A liquid derived from an eastern worm. The ring has a mechanism that allows me to prick someone once, to send them to sleep. A stronger dose could kill someone.” He walks outside. I follow, and watch him kneel and begin to chop at the earth with his slipwater sword. “I shouldn’t have been wearing it in Herran anyway,” he mutters as he digs a hole.

  “Why not?”

  He drops the cloth bundle into the hole and buries it. “Because of your mother.”

  He cannot be the poisoner. If he was, he would never speak so frankly about this to me. “What does my mother have to do with your ring?”

  He tamps a clod of grass-rooted earth down with his boot. “It’s a replica of one I loaned Arin years ago, when Kestrel was imprisoned in the tundra. He said he lost it, but that wasn’t true. He threw it away.”

  “Why?”

  “Kestrel wanted it.”

  “For revenge?” I know so little about my mother’s imprisonment in the work camp, only that my grandfather sent her there, and that when my father rescued her, she was near death.

  “For herself. In the camp, they gave her a drug that made her work hard, and stole her memory. She came to love the drug. Even when Arin brought her home, she wanted it. I think part of her always will.”

  “Why did she never tell me this?”

  “Why do you never tell her certain things? Because you find them painful to share, or you consider them yours alone to know … or because you are ashamed.” He sees my worry and says softly, “This was long ago, before you were born. The worm poison is not the same as the drug used on Kestrel in the work camp, but it reminds her. I was careless to wear the ring, but I’m not afraid that she would try to take it, or use it, only that it might hurt her to remember that time. Kestrel’s body needed that drug, and then her mind did, and her heart, but she was stronger than her need. She has been for a very long time.”

  I realize he is telling me a story of my mother’s strength, but also a weakness in her that I have never seen. She has always seemed so invulnerable. The night I fled Herran, she had simply grown quiet and pale as I yelled at her. She stood, posture perfect, braided hair golden over her shoulders, slender eyes as amber as those jewels that hold trapped insects from another time. She did not look human. She looked like an icon, like an image set in mosaics, each chip of ceramic slick and hard. You are an apple, Sidarine, was all she said, and then I was gone.

  But I wonder if it has been easier for me to think of her as an icon, as a hard, untouchable image. She has always been more than my mother. Kestrel: the impervious queen. As much as that infuriated me, maybe I needed to see her that way, too, because it meant she could always protect me, and I would never lose her. What would it mean for me to see her as Roshar did long ago, when he first knew her: fragile?

  The sun has advanced in the sky. I promised to bring my mother each meal. I cannot look like this: sweaty, worried, my tunic in tatters. In Dacra it is customary to thank your opponent for the pleasure of being beaten, so I do, formally—which Roshar adores—and hurry across the lawn.

  * * *

  Emmah awaits me in my breakfast room, though it is long past breakfast, and says nothing about my appearance, so used as she is to seeing me in worse shape, whether from fighting or slipping into my suite with my clothes in wanton disorder, trailing the perfume of lust. She smiles to see me, and despite the wrinkles from the burns on her face she looks young, her teeth even, her dark hair not so silvered as my father’s, or Sarsine’s, though they must be the same age. Surely Emmah was beautiful once. “I have something for you,” she says.

  My mind is too disordered; I do not really hear her. “Emmah, you must know Herran’s medicinal herbs well.” I will not say the word poison.

  “Of course. Any nurse to the princess needs to know the rudiments of medicine. But you were a healthy child, thank the gods.”

  I stop myself from saying anything further. Every territory in the world has its own native drugs and poisons, and the secret to my mother’s condition might lie not in Herran, but in Dacra, Valoria, or the Cayn Saratu. After I change and visit my mother’s suite, I must ride in to pay a call to the redheaded Valorian ambassador whose eye I caught at the state dinner.

  “Sid, I said I have something for you. From your father.”

  I blink myself back into where I am, instead of where I plan to be, and see that Emmah holds out an envelope. What could my father write to me, that he would not say to my face? The envelope is light, as though it contains nothing, not even the paper of a letter. I open it.

  Inside is a speckled yellow feather.

  I lift it by its milky quill. The vane is the color of honeysuckle, its tip whisper soft when I touch it to my lips. The answer begins with you, my grandfather said. I remember what Roshar told me, how my mother had to conquer her need for a drug. I remember my grandfather’s prison, and how my mother designed it by thinking with my grandfather’s mind. How she would beat me at Bite and Sting, tricking me into believing that four scorpions were enough when she held tigers in her hand. I wanted this feather too much. Can the gift of it, requested of my father by my mother, be only what it appears to be—a gesture of love? Does my mother ever say or do anything without meaning something more? An apple! She called me an apple. I think of apples and feathers and poison worms, and wonder if my grandfather was right, if the timing of my mother’s poisoning has something to do with me. Was it meant to bring me back to Herran?

  Queen Kestrel is capable of anything, they say.

  Would she be capable of poisoning herself, if it brought her wayward child home?

  THE GOD

  THE YOUNG WOMAN CARRIED ME gingerly, as though I might bite her again with my thorns, and although she paused occasionally to marvel at my slightly shirred petals, the deep red of them, so dark that my center shadowed black, she conducted her task at the sugarcane estate, her face serious, concentrated, then returned to the city gate just before nightfall, when the sky was striped in blue and pink, and the cooling wind carried the sea’s salt. She presented her documents to the militiamen standing guard, the red of their uniforms an insipid, thin color compared to mine. She offered her Middling passport and her High-K
ith mistress’s written command.

  The soldier passed the documents back and was about to wave her forward, into the city, when he paused. What is that? he asked, pointing at me.

  I found this flower, she said, on the jungle path.

  Had she lived during the time of the gods, she would have been warned away from that path—indeed, the path would never have been built, for it cut through land sacred to us. But the god of thieves ruled Herrath, disguised as a mortal, and he despised us for casting him out. He made certain humans showed the pantheon no honor. Although he did not destroy the clearing in the jungle, or raze the temple one could find there, it was only because he had his own schemes, and believed the temple would one day serve him, for it was the only way he could ever return home to us.

  I’ll buy it from you, the soldier said, and I immediately worried, because men who wield weapons are not known for their ready compassion.

  It is not for sale, she said.

  She carried me through the gate and into the High quarter. Just before she entered the servants’ door at the back of an ice-white mansion with gilded balconies, she slipped me inside her pocket. I was glad to be hidden away. The rich rarely pity anyone, because to do so is to question their own right to a position of power, or to envision themselves ejected from it. Neither is a comfortable feeling for those whose every waking hour is designed around comfort. I did not want to belong to the mistress. Should she see me, I would be taken, or become a forced gift. I liked where I was, snug in the girl’s pocket, soft against her thigh.

  She brought me home: a low, modest house made from sand-pressed brick. A cup was fetched from the cupboard and filled with water. My broken stem slid into the water’s coolness and I sighed open, petals perfect, uncrushed. I had high hopes for the girl, whose face was the stuff of stories: plain, even for a human, and easily overlooked, save for her murky green eyes. Yes, I was held in a humble earthenware cup, hardly a fit vessel for a god, and I remained trapped by my bad bet, but the girl looked at me as though I were the whole world, and I thought surely it would not be impossible to do something—though what can a rose do?—to snag her tender heart.