The Hollow Heart Read online

  The memory of her covers my body. My breath catches. She is here, I tell myself.

  Here.

  * * *

  I open my eyes to stronger moonlight. I must have fallen asleep. How much time has passed is unclear, but Sid’s perfume has faded on my skin. This will be the last time, I promise myself. I cannot come here again, to dwell in the past. To avoid a future. If you wish to rule alone, you must destroy her.

  I push myself up from the bed. How like a mortal I behave, seeking something in objects, wanting clothes and perfume even when I can conjure a memory of Sid so perfect it burns me.

  But I do want these things that remain of Sid, that touched her skin. I unstopper the vial of perfume. Its scent is not enough. From the pocket of my dress, where it lies abandoned on the parquet floor, I draw one sugar cube, soak it in perfume, and then, quickly, before it can dissolve, place it upon my tongue. The taste of Sid runs down my throat, sweet and bitter and burning.

  Under the black sky with its bone-colored moon, I stand on the balcony and listen to the wide, secret sea, remembering Sid.

  How sweetly I tumbled into sleep earlier, thinking of her.

  How empty I feel now, in the shell of her clothes, the acrid taste of her perfume on my tongue.

  THE GOD

  RAVEN SETTLED ME ON HER dressing table amid her treasures. Her true name was Raveneh, shortened affectionately by her younger sister, who said she was as clever as a raven, and as fond of collecting things. Oh, let me give you something in return for this flower! Raven said, and hunted among her treasures. A ribbon? Raven stared at it, aloft in her hand: a cyan strip of fabric whose color was beyond her kith. She set it back down. No, she said. You could get in trouble for owning this.

  My girl smiled. Sister, you just can’t bear to let it go.

  But I also don’t want you to get in trouble! Raven chewed her lower lip, picking up objects and setting them down: a violet shell whose inner curl was a shiny pink, a gold coin, an embroidered cloth doll, and more items, each time finding a reason not to give it to her younger sister. This shell is pretty, Raven said, but not worth very much, is it? And where would you spend a gold coin? Who would even have change for such a sum, in the Middling quarter? Now, you are obviously too old for a doll.

  Give me nothing, my girl said. I’m glad your collection makes you happy.

  Raven’s face softened. As handsome as she was, this was the only time she looked truly beautiful. She said, No one understands me like you do, Irenah.

  You see my dilemma. The kind sister was my best chance for compassion—and I was truly worthy of it, if only she knew! I had been cheated and entrapped. Irenah, perhaps, would pity me—if any human could pity a rose. But she was too good even to keep me, and certainly too good to take me back from her grasping, delighted sister.

  Irenah left the room, and Raven fussed over me for a while, positioning me just so in a new cut-glass vase, lifting my leaves and letting them fall as though they were a lace collar in need of straightening. She inhaled my perfume, and I do not care to tell how many times she subjected me to that, her face so close. That a mortal would take such privileges with a god, unbidden, was unheard of. Somewhere, the god of games laughed. She has a very particular laugh, that god: like the jingle of tiny bells mixed with the clash of knives.

  Then Raven forgot me. She showed me to no one, for fear that I would be stolen. My only view was of her bedroom, her bed made with what were surely the softest sheets in the house, the curtains sewn from the sheerest, prettiest fabric. The window showed me the street, and the wall beyond it. The god of thieves had commanded it be built, many hundreds of human years ago, to imprison the mortal children of the gods. They lived and died. (Nirrim liked to believe herself immortal, but even she could die like the others—like you.) They bore children of their own, god-blood watering down through the ages. From Raven’s bedroom, the wall rose in a white crest, like a foaming wave, above the houses.

  But I was a god, and could see beyond the wall. I saw the jungle, the sea.

  The bay of Herran.

  A baby’s wail split the night. Arin, Death’s Child, looked up from where he sat, hollow-eyed, face carved with worry. His infant howled in her crib. His large hands, which knew how to do many things—forge a blade, sew a button, murder an enemy, caress his wife—looked useless to him, clumsy. He had not been able to help Kestrel. He had not known how to stop the bleeding of birth, and the doctor, frantic, had banished him from the room.

  He should call the baby’s nurse. But the baby screamed, ruddy-faced, her fists the size of pebbles. He reached for her and settled her against his chest, against his loud, nervous heart. He had been a father for barely a few hours, and already he felt he was failing his child. Sidarine, shh.

  The baby quieted.

  Your mother is strong, he said. Wait for her. She will survive, you will see. But I am here. I am always here. I will care for you. No harm will ever befall you.

  I promise.

  SID

  “EMMAH?” I SAY, PULLING ON my softest leather boots, the ones that look ordinary but whose soles are made of padded fabric. All the doors within my suite have been left open, and the breeze blowing through smells like autumn. Outside, the leaves have caught fire. Roshar has stayed, even though my father has warned him that if he wants to escape the cold he had better do so before green storm season. Roshar has refused to give me any more of the Dacran black brew I like so much, the drink that sharpens my mind. Sorry, little lion, he said. I must ration my own supply. Too bad for you.

  I smell tea and hear the clink of spoons and porcelain in the breakfast room. Emmah must hear my call, but she ignores me. If you have something to say, say it to my face, she always scolded me when I was young. My parents could have employed any number of women as my nurse, and while I sometimes thought they chose Emmah because they saw their own past in her ruined face, I suspect my mother sensed that Emmah wouldn’t let me get away with anything … and that my father, in turn, sensed that Emmah would let me get away with just enough of the right things. I hurriedly pull on clothes—nothing with flair, for once—and follow the scent of tea to Emmah, who is arranging a small bouquet of trillin, a pink, autumnal flower with slender stems, and red-and-yellow leaves. She has poured a cup of tea for herself and sips it as she slips into the vase some sprigs of dried lunaria, which has flat, papery pods of sheer silver. It is the god of the moon’s plant. I have thought that the god of the moon might love me because of that god’s shifting nature, sometimes female and sometimes male.

  “Emmah?”

  “Yesss?” She draws out the word, making it clear that she doesn’t appreciate being shouted for.

  “Emmah, I’m sorry.”

  “Say it, then, whatever you are so eager to say.”

  I pour myself tea, which I like without milk: a clear, rich brown. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sid, I am paid to do you favors.”

  “Oh,” I say, uncomfortable at the reminder that although I think of her as a friend, a second mother, a confidante and keeper of my secrets, she is paid to be all those things. I look again at the lunaria, which has other names, too—fittingly enough for the plant of a shifting god—and is sometimes called the money plant, for how its disks look like silver coins.

  Gently, Emmah says, “And do you think I couldn’t have quit my job, any moment I liked, if you were an unbearable brat?”

  I touch one of the lunaria’s silver disks. The plant is also called honesty. The disk is slippery beneath my touch, smooth as Nirrim’s skin. “Am I?” I clear my throat. “Am I an unbearable brat?”

  Emmah sits beside me. “You are very bearable.” She smiles. “I missed you.”

  I smile back tentatively.

  “Now,” she says, “what is this gods-all important favor?”

  “It’s about Lyannis.”

  “The ambassador from Valoria? Sid, not her, too! She is almost twice your age!”

  “It’s not like t
hat.”

  “So you always say.”

  “I just need you to occupy her for a while. This afternoon would be ideal. Couldn’t you, oh, say that a merchant ship has just docked at the harbor, laden with Valorian goods? Once the green storms come, such things will be hard to come by. A trip into the city to see what the ship has unloaded would be a welcome suggestion to Lyannis, wouldn’t it?”

  “It might.”

  “And she wouldn’t think anything of such a suggestion, if it came from a servant, would she?” Ambassadors are really just spies by another name, sent openly to other countries to gather information for their monarchs. My father always said that Verex, Magister of Valoria, can ask us anything he wants to know, but my mother would keep quiet, since she doesn’t ask Verex everything she needs to know, nor would she do that with Queen Inishanaway of Dacra. Ambassadors are a necessary piece in the game, was all she would say. Indeed, in the game of Borderlands, with its many carved pieces that move intricately in their own patterns, the ambassador plays a key role, usually in the middle of a game in play, and is ideal for nudging the king into a vulnerable position.

  “Sid, what are you up to?” Emmah asks.

  The white lunaria disks make me think of paper. I will have to bring tishin paper when I search Lyannis’s suite. “Nothing. Don’t worry, Emmah.”

  “I only ever want what is best for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Sid,” she says seriously, “you are not unlovable.”

  “I said unbearable,” I say awkwardly, thinking back to earlier.

  “Do you think I can’t guess what you meant?”

  My face prickles. I busy myself with drinking my tea.

  “You are the only one I love,” she says, “in this whole world. I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”

  I set aside my cup and look away, trying to keep my expression even, to not show how sad it makes me that it is easy for her to tell me this. “I need to visit the queen.”

  Softly, she says, “I know.”

  I lean to kiss her burned cheek, then startle. “Emmah, you are missing an earring.”

  She claps a hand to her bare earlobe. “No,” she says, “not the earrings you made for me!” She looks stricken as she takes the other tiny hoop from her ear, her eyes welling.

  “Don’t worry. I will make you another.”

  “You were so proud. You lisped then. Do you remember? Such a sweet child. So good at loving.”

  I laugh a little. “You speak as though loving were a talent or skill.”

  She closes her hand over the small gold hoop. “It is. Never forget it.”

  “Maybe I inherited it, from my parents.”

  I can tell that irritates her. Defensive—of me—she sniffs. “People always say, ‘Sid is just like her father,’ or ‘Sid is just like her mother,’ but to me you have always been just you.”

  This is a kind thing to say, but it makes me sad that everything can be so easy between her and me. That she can lose my gift and I can say, Don’t worry, I will make you another, and the grief is gone and we are both better, when all my parents and I seem to do is wound one another. I am sad that Emmah can praise me not for something that I do, like spying or accepting a marriage proposal, but something that I am.

  You are an apple, Sidarine.

  “I love you, too,” I tell Emmah, then make sure I have everything I need for the day and hurry from the room, my boots soundless across the wooden floor.

  * * *

  My mother, when I bring her breakfast, is sleeping. She has been improving lately, and has sometimes gathered enough energy to move from room to room within her suite, which makes me sure that someone must have poisoned her food or drink while I was away. There are slow poisons which, administered in small doses, can accrue inside the body, and so gradually weaken a person that she will seem merely sick of some unnamable malady. I let myself hope that the worst is over, and that the assassin, now cut off by me from the easiest route of murdering my mother, can do nothing, and my mother will heal on her own, though she is still too frail. I dread a relapse—or the assassin making another attempt via some means other than food and drink.

  I set the tray beside my mother—not wholly quietly. I am not loud about it, but make just enough noise that I won’t seem rude if I rouse her. A floral arrangement adorns her bedside table—her servants must have made it for her, just as Emmah made mine for me—and a long, shallow box rests farther off on a larger table with a Borderlands set. The pieces are not in play. Orderly, each on its home square, they wait for a new game. But Bite and Sting tiles lie scattered across the surface, which makes me wonder whether my mother has played against my father. More likely, since the pieces have not been put away, she has been awake, stirring them into different patterns, playing a kind of solitaire. She is, after all, the only opponent worthy of herself.

  The box lying next to the games must contain a new dress. I suspect my mother plans to return to an active role as queen. She hates being sidelined.

  I can’t be seen as weak, she said. It was during that time I visited her after being horribly beaten by Roshar, fighting with slipwaters.

  You are, I told her, frustrated and worried. Amma, you are sick. You always want to be everything all at once, I know, but not now.

  She shook her head. Herran can’t be left defenseless, she said, then added, to the immediate and horrid leap of my pulse, Sid, I want to talk with you about the night you left.

  Well, I don’t, I told her. I couldn’t bear again the accusation of being an apple: a frivolous dessert, easily cut open, so full of air that it floats on the water. Worse, I am afraid I might tell her the things I confessed to Roshar, that I might spill my embarrassing wishes before my mother out of hope that she understand, when what I know is that she always plays to win, and winning means keeping Herran safe. I am keeping it safe for you, she would say. So that you are safe.

  My engagement to Prince Ishar ensures the safest future for our country. She knows it. I know it. I just didn’t—don’t—want to hear her say it. So that day, when my face was clean and clear, wiped fresh of sweat from my fight with Roshar, I told her, I don’t want to talk about the night I left. Ever. I will marry Prince Ishar. If you try to discuss this with me again, I will leave, and this time I won’t come back.

  She shut her mouth, eyes wounded, too bright.

  It is a rare thing to win against my mother. It didn’t matter that it felt like I lost. I felt as though I had erected a wooden shell of myself around me, a statue that looked exactly like me. While I didn’t want her to see my true self, my roiling insecurity, how desperate I was for her approval, I could not believe that she couldn’t see through that fake, wooden version of myself. How could she not, when she always sees everyone’s motives and moves so clearly? How could I be so self-sabotaging, to want to hide from her and be found, at the same time? I left her rooms before I could take back everything that I had said. She has not raised the topic of my marriage since.

  Now, as I gaze down upon her sleeping face, I wonder if her breath is a little too even, a little too deep. I wonder if she is pretending, in order to avoid me.

  * * *

  Officially, there are two sets of keys that unlock every door in this house. One belongs to my father, made from old iron and passed down through his family for generations. The other set is one he forged for my mother. I am told the gift was a romantic gesture. Not what I would choose to impress a girl! When I asked for a set of keys, too, my father examined me suspiciously (so what if he had reason? So what if I was known for sneaking around? My very mother trained me to sneak around!) and said, Of course, Sid. When I go home to my god, my keys will be yours.

  So when Roshar came to visit a few years back with a bottle of green Dacran liquor and teased my father into drinking some, I joined them in the study, encouraging them both. It was ridiculously easy. My father has no head for liquor, despite his size. When he wasn’t looking, I stole his keys.
I put them back, of course—after pressing each one into piles of wet tishin paper (that stuff was made by the gods for spies, I swear). Once the paper hardened, I had the molds I needed. My father never taught me blacksmithing, despite my begging. He was forced to learn as a child, sold after the first Herrani war to a smith. Although he still enjoyed making gifts like my gun and dagger, he couldn’t bear to remember learning the skill—and he would be forced to remember, if he taught me. He helped me make Emmah’s gold earrings, then refused to do more.

  I couldn’t forge the keys myself. But there are often many solutions to a problem, and it just so happened that I had been regularly bribing a smith in the city for a year, in anticipation of getting my hands on a set of keys.

  So now I have a set of my own. From one of the windows set in an arcade along the house’s upper story, I saw Lyannis ride into town. I set the right key into the outermost door of her suite and slip inside, my steps silenced by my soft shoes, just in case she returns or someone else enters.

  I search her room, admiring the several sheaths she has for the dagger she wears, as any Valorian does, at her hip. At her dressing table sits a small glass pot of glittering gold cosmetics. She must be engaged to be married—promised Valorian women wear a line of gold across their brows. It’s a good thing I am not really Valorian. I dislike cosmetics, though I have been warned I will need to wear eye paint once I marry into the Dacran family. I imagine it will be one of many things Prince Ishar and I fight about, once we see each other again.

  I sniff each of the cosmetics at her table, searching for anything that smells odd. There are botanical books in our library—my father was a sickly child, they say, and fond of studying plants while recovering from fevers—and I have done my research on poisons. But nothing among Lyannis’s cosmetics looks or smells like the murky brownish poison the Valorians once used to try to eradicate the Lahirrin population, just before the second war with Herran. The Valorians had secretly installed a device in Lahirrin’s aqueducts, the poison seeping slowly into the city’s water supply. I had thought that maybe the brown poison—called somnum, and used in lesser doses as medicine to calm the nerves and induce sleep—could produce the symptoms my mother had. But nothing in Lyannis’s rooms resembles that—nor simberry, a deadly, tiny fruit that grows near here, nor nightlock, a mountain weed my father used to murder a whole host of Valorian colonists on the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion, though nightlock likely would have killed my mother instantly, and the death would have been an obvious assassination.