The Hollow Heart Page 8

  “Nirrim, how dare you!”

  Then Terrin’s hand strikes out and snatches the grosgrain belt from Raven’s waist.

  “Thief! Give that back!”

  I curl the moon necklace into my fist. “Everyone,” I call, “should receive fair pay.”

  Someone in the crowd reaches out and rips a fistful of hair from Raven’s head. She screams. “Nirrim, stop them!”

  A man holding a garden wall stone throws, and strikes Raven’s shoulder.

  “Please! They listen to you. Help me, you ungrateful girl!”

  Hands dive in. They tear at her. More rocks thunk into the center of the circle the crowd has formed around her. I step away. My people swarm her. I cannot see her anymore, but I hear screams as I walk away.

  She curses me. She begs.

  She claims she loves me, but I now know better than that.

  * * *

  Later, in the calm, when the crowd has dispersed to sleep, I wander back to the High quarter. The night is cool, its blue translucent. Debris litters the street, but the chaos of last night has dissolved into peace.

  Other Nirrim is quiet within me—horrified, maybe, at Raven’s death. Spineless girl. Or maybe Other Nirrim doesn’t want to challenge me, since I gave orders that all the High-Kith children will be spared from execution.

  I am too noble to punish the innocent, I tell her. Even if she is silent, Other Nirrim is still there, waiting and judging. Let the guilty fear me, I add.

  Other Nirrim says nothing.

  I laugh, the sound ringing against the colored glass pavements, the wrought-iron balconies that look like piping on a cake. I tease Other Nirrim, my disdain mixed with patience: Be glad, I tell her. I could do so much worse.

  There is a park in the High quarter Sid brought me to once. I follow the path to it, remembering how I slept in a tree that told my fortune. You will lose her, the fortune read. It had come true. Sid was gone, and would never return.

  Yet I had always known I would lose her. Even as I loved her, as she kissed me, as she made me hers, I knew it was only for a time, a moment she would give me. She would leave. She told me she would, and she did. My liar had told at least one truth. I had not needed a tree to make me know it.

  Lush grass tickles my ankles. The earth exhales the heat of the day into the night. A breeze carries the scent of green things.

  I wonder what Sid is doing now. I wonder if she thinks of me sometimes.

  My feet carry me to the tree. It has no magic of its own, I understand now: only what it borrowed from an elixir made by councilmen of some Half Kith’s blood.

  I must find the Council’s supply, I decide. I must go through the library in the Keepers Hall and search for records of arrests and tithes. Who knows how old the elixir that watered the tree was. Perhaps the blood came from an imprisoned Half Kith long dead. Our power was stolen from us for generations.

  Still, it is not the tree’s fault. Pink glass lanterns light the park well enough for me to see how its branches spread wide above me, its leaves a dark, hissing blur. The trunk shows patches of gold, from where people tore strips of bark to read their fortunes, and gardeners painted the scars prettily to ward off infection. I lay a palm flat against the cool, rough trunk. The tree is like me, like any Half Kith. Yet I do not feel sorry for it. Why should I feel sorry for anything with power?

  I remember what it was to feel pity. I try to feel it, to see if it is possible. I try, even, to feel pity for myself, for how I was used and left behind.

  I feel nothing but the bark of the tree.

  I wonder how long the tree will tell fortunes, now that no one will water it with my people’s blood. I dig my nails into the papery bark. As I tear it away, I think of Sid. Tell me, I ask the tree, about her.

  Even though the sky has deepened in color, and the light from the lanterns flickers, I still can read the spidery writing that appears on the bark’s pale underside.

  If you wish to rule alone, you must destroy her.

  THE GOD

  FINALLY, SOMEONE CAME DOWN THE path. I leaned toward the sound of footsteps the way a normal flower would toward the sun. How many human years had I been trapped inside this form? Time means little to the gods, but loneliness affects each member of the pantheon, and the god of games had deprived me of companionship, of speech, of being seen for what I truly was. Anyone would pity me, surely, if they knew my lot, but of course a rose cannot speak.

  The young woman’s black hair shone in the sun. She wore what the people of Ethin had come to call Middling clothes: a simple sleeveless dress, dyed green as many Middling dresses were, with light decorative touches—in this case, embroidered pockets and several hot-pressed pleats. I heard her sandals scuff the dirt path. She hummed, the sound mingling with the birdlike chirrup of frogs hidden in the jungle. Over her shoulder, the sea sparkled. She consulted a badly drawn map made by the hand of her High-Kith mistress. She was to meet with the Middling farmer who oversaw the mistress’s cane fields and bring a report of the harvest to come. Thick greenery framed the path, and flowering vines threaded through the trees. Were this woman to step off the path and wander into the thick vegetation, she would find a strangely vacant plain, a blank space made as if cut from the trees and vines. No mortal hand had created this emptiness, this square where blue sky could be seen above instead of leafy canopies, climbing pink frogs, and the dart of slender birds with frilly crests upon their heads.

  Fortunately for me, she did not stray from the path. I nodded in the light breeze, exhaling a lovely perfume. Roses do not normally grow in Ethin. I enticed her, and it was enough.

  She stopped, tracing a finger over my petals. I shivered. Take me, I willed … though, of course, possession is not compassion. To be plucked by her was not to attain the pity I needed to be free.

  She reached for me. Roses, however, were unknown to her, and as her fingers gripped my stem to break me, one of my thorns pricked her.

  She cried out in surprise and pain, a drop of blood beading on her thumb.

  SID

  AFTER THE STATE DINNER, its many courses perfectly calibrated to show a delicious frugality—the dishes all Herrani, no imported delicacies slipping in to undermine such patriotic fare as pulped erasti dusted with savory spices, small hens stuffed with dried apricots, and tender beef flavored with paper-thin slices of my father’s oranges—Arin the Plain King gives me a somber look that reminds me I must play my mother’s part, and mingle with visiting dignitaries in the atrium as they sip a rosy dessert wine served in delicate glasses. I refuse a glass. It is too girlishly pretty, and I prefer to keep my hands free. My mother, were she here, would have arranged beforehand to be served a glass that looked like it held wine when it really held tinted water, so that people might think alcohol dulled her perception. One of her favorite tricks. But also pointless. I could have told her that she might as well not bother. Everyone knows how dangerous she is. An ambassador or discontented lord from a country manor would never forget that, no matter how many glasses of wine she pretended to drink.

  Music floats over the room: a flute and three violins, the cool river of the flute flowing over the honeyed string trio. Music is always arranged for state functions to please my mother, and tonight is no exception even if she cannot attend. Piano performances, however, are rare. They make her impatient, even when she pretends they do not. At my last piano recital, when I was thirteen, I flubbed a tricky melody. I was so afraid of getting it wrong that I attacked it too quickly, and it spun out of my control, the notes tangled by my tripping fingers.

  Sidarine, it does not matter, my mother said, kissing my hot eyes. Anyone can make a mistake.

  You wouldn’t. Those words, which I did not speak, burned in my chest. I refused to perform again.

  I weave among the crowd, artfully sliding past a group of young Herrani women who would probably like a few words with me. One of them, Ceciliah, gives me a look so sharp it could draw blood. It takes me a moment to figure out why, since I
thought we were on good terms before I left. Then I remember that although we were on very good terms indeed, after she asked me to teach her how to shoot a gun, and “target practice” became our private term for a different kind of activity, I might have ignored her in the weeks before I fled Herran.

  I didn’t ignore her on purpose. I simply got busy doing my mother’s bidding. It was for the good of Herran! I cannot be blamed for that.

  I see from her expression that oh, yes, I can.

  Sorry, I mouth at Ceciliah, but she turns back to her friends, who notice everything, of course, and try to flay me with their eyes. One of them has just a tinge of disgust in her sneer, which she tries to disguise as loyal anger alone, but I have too much experience with that kind of disgust, and no patience for it.

  No longer sorry at all, I shrug and saunter off.

  Roshar catches my eye from across the room, where he is deep in conversation with delegates from his country. He smirks to see the circle of ladies tighten around Ceciliah as I leave them, as though cattle around a calf threatened by a wolf.

  “You did well.” It is Sarsine, having snuck up behind me.

  She cannot possibly approve of my dalliances, so she must not have seen that special little moment with Ceciliah. I have no idea what Sarsine means. “I did?”

  “You spoke well during dinner.” My father’s cousin looks stiff in her blue poplin dress. Like Arin, she prefers simple clothes and says that eschewing luxury means people are less likely to try to bribe her, the monarchy’s most trusted counselor. “You were poised. Serious. Regal.”

  “I had no idea I could fake it so well. I should run away again and join a theater troupe.”

  She ignores this. “You reminded Herran that the country’s future is stable again.”

  Because the heir has returned. I inhale to speak, but everything I would say I have already said: There are other ways to govern a country. It does not have to be a hereditary line of succession. Look at Valoria, where they now hold elections. True, the populace did elect the murdered emperor’s son, but at least they went through the effort of entertaining other choices.

  Herran, however, loves my parents, and so they love me. The people want me.

  Really, what they want is for the beloved story of my beloved parents to continue after they are gone. I am a convenient plot point.

  Already exhausted by an argument I cannot bear to have again, I say, “We have had twenty years of peace. Herran is stable enough.”

  “You don’t know how easily it can all be lost.”

  She—indeed, everyone of my parents’ generation—cannot help that I have inherited their trauma. Even if I did not live through it, I live in its wake, knocked back by the passing of a heavy ghost ship that carries all their memories. “Yes,” I sigh, “you are right.”

  Her stern features soften. “I missed you, little one.”

  “You did not. I cause nothing but trouble. I am a disappointment to the crown.” Not that my parents wear one.

  “I was angry because I worried.” She sees my expression and says, “Not about the line of succession. About you.”

  I have my doubts but play nice. “If you say so.”

  “Let’s not quarrel. I am the only family you have, save your parents.” There is an awkward silence as we both remember that this is not, technically, true.

  I have a grandfather: General Trajan, who led the Valorian imperial forces in the first Herrani war, conquered this peninsula, enslaved the population, and colonized it. Who condemned Kestrel, his only child, to a labor camp in the northern tundra when he discovered she was working against the Empire on Herran’s behalf. Trajan, whom my father could not bear to kill, for love of my mother, when he bested the Valorian army in the second Herran war.

  My grandfather lives still: imprisoned, an old man an entire country hates. Herran’s nightmare. Its monster.

  Sarsine believes that he and I have never met.

  I regard my father across the room. Roshar has made his way through the crowd to him, curtly dismisses anyone standing nearby, and says something to my father, his face unusually serious. My father glances up, sees me looking, half smiles distractedly, and returns his attention to Roshar, whose words seem to grow in vehemence.

  “Sarsine?”

  “Yes, Sidarine.”

  I am, in a way, named after her, the ending of our names similar in an old-fashioned, soberly feminine way, like fusty, perfumed lace.

  “Are people still angry at Amma and Etta for letting my grandfather live?”

  “That decision was made long ago.”

  “It is made again every day that he lives.”

  She gives me a dry smile. “And people say you don’t have a mind for politics.”

  “He eats. He sleeps in comfort. Taxes pay for it.”

  “It was and remains an unpopular choice,” she says stiffly. “I do not like it myself. Why are you asking about this?”

  I am thinking of my mother, weakened by poison. The only way to find the person who did this to her is imagining who could bear her so deep a grudge as to attempt murder. “Oh, I am studying the philosophy of statecraft.”

  She snorts.

  “For when I am queen,” I say in exaggerated earnestness, “and make careful, considered decisions with great moral impact. What, I wonder, will the legacy of my reign be?”

  She starts to say something, then stops herself, smiles, and pats my cheek with a dry hand. “You will do just fine,” she says, and leaves me.

  I survey the crowd. The atrium is usually one of my favorite rooms in the house, for its cool tiles mazed with streaks of gray over cloudy white, and the fountain that spills into itself. I like the room’s quiet. Its clarity. It holds none of that now. It is simply a space filled with people who either do not know me, or do not know me as well as they believe. A room of noise and gossip and heat. A crowd that it is my duty to entertain.

  As Sarsine engages the Valorian ambassador, an older woman named Lyannis, whose fox-colored hair—“warrior red,” the Valorians call it—is braided into a heavy crown, I consider whether the Valorians plotting against Magister Verex could have learned of my mother’s investigations through me and her other spies. Perhaps a band of Valorians who seek a return to imperial glory have slipped an agent into our midst, and seek to remove the obstacle my mother represents. It would not even need to be the malcontents holed up in the Cayn Saratu, stashing blackpowder in the grottos of the tinier islands, the ones inhabited by only a few dozen people and some goats. Watching the red-haired ambassador sip from her glass, I make a mental note to speak with her when there is no risk of being overheard. It makes me impatient, to do nothing but wonder, and prowl around the edges of an idea, considering motives and suspects, yet this is my training.

  Do not draw attention to yourself, Sidarine, my mother would always warn in the days when I was newly her spy and eager to please her, flashy in my efforts to ferret out information. Conceal how much you want a piece of information. Be the spider, sitting on the web, feeling the tremors of what touches it. Do not let your prey see you until it is too late.

  Sarsine brushes a wrinkle from her blue dress. The violins cease, and the lone flute plays a slippery melody.

  Her, too.

  Consider your father’s cousin.

  Sarsine’s friendship with my mother is well-known, as is how Sarsine nursed her through an illness after Arin rescued Kestrel from the northern tundra’s work camp. Sarsine loves my mother. Yet she loves my father more, and although there has never been even the faintest hint of attraction between them, I must consider that cousins sometimes marry, and that Sarsine and my father hold a history more complete than they do with anyone else, steeped with their shared childhood. My father trusts Sarsine. Aside from my parents—and me, I suppose—she holds the most power in Herran. Could Sarsine harbor an invisible feeling for my father, and view my mother as her rival? Could she have grown ambitious, and seek to remove my mother from power, and rule a
t my father’s side? She hates Valorians as much as most Herrani. Look at her now, how she hides her dislike of the Valorian ambassador, glancing down to brush again at the fabric of her blue dress. She gives a strained, polite smile.

  Perhaps my mother ceased being an exception—the one good Valorian—and Sarsine, who can never forget what was done to her people, felt her affection for my mother slowly erode.

  Fear swells inside me. Too many people could resent my mother.

  I leave the party abruptly, not caring how my absence will be perceived, and descend to the kitchen, which rattles and bangs with chores and the sound of plates from the dinner slung into steaming copper sinks.

  I give an order that my hands alone will prepare my mother’s meals, and pour what she drinks. I alone will serve her.

  * * *

  “Was it horrible?” Emmah says. She heard the tread of my boots down the hall, she said (“How you stomp!”), and came from her room to help me ready for bed. I said that was not necessary. I do not enjoy fussy clothes that need extra hands for removal, and my weapons are my responsibility. A Valorian hones her own blade. Emmah asked, then, that we light a candle together.

  “The dinner was no worse than usual,” I say, selecting two long, pale tapers and setting them into holders clotted with old wax. I strike a match and Emmah does the same, the dusky smell of sulfur rising into the air. Emmah still wears a thimble—she loves to embroider, and must have been working on one of her many projects as I thudded past her room—and the silver catches the candle’s flame. The windows of my dressing room hold the black night.

  We set our candles in a window. In its glass, the reflections of the twin flames glow like a god’s eyes. I ask, “What will you pray for?”

  “You,” she says simply. She never married. She has no children. She cared for me from the moment I was born, and my mother was too weak from the birth to nurse me. “May the gods love you.”