by Natasha Ngan
I curl into a ball, expecting more. When it doesn’t come, I look up through swollen eyes, spit flecking my chin.
“I—I’m sorry,” I stammer thickly.
“Don’t you dare speak to me!” Chest heaving, Madam Himura draws down on me, a talon prodding my ribs. Her yellow eyes bore into me with their cold, unblinking stare. “Let me explain what’s going to happen. The only reason the King didn’t have you killed was because he still desires you, heavens know why. He has ordered you to be kept in isolation for one week with no food or comforts. Do not even think about escaping. Those enchanted bands will make running impossible, and a guard will be stationed outside this room at all times. You will return to your schedule once the week is over. The King will call you to his bedchamber from then on once he’s ready, and that time, you won’t deny him.” Her voice is harsh. “I comforted you yesterday. Do not ever expect kindness from me again.” With one last scathing look, she sweeps from the room.
Mistress Eira hangs back. In silence, she comes over and helps me lie down, pulling a blanket gently over me. She rests a hand on my brow, careful not to touch anywhere I was hit.
“Oh, Lei,” she sighs. “What have you done?”
“I—I couldn’t bear it.” My voice is a rasp.
Mistress Eira brushes a thumb over my hairline. “You have to, dear girl. You don’t have a choice.”
“Please, Mistress.” I rake in an inhale, fixing her with my watery gaze. “Tell me honestly. Does it get better?”
She gives me a half smile. “It does. That I promise you.”
But I look away, unable to believe her.
“Eira! Come!”
At Madam Himura’s call, Mistress Eira starts to her feet. “I’m so sorry, Lei,” she whispers. “There’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to find a way to bear it—and I know you will. You are stronger than most of the girls who come here.”
As she turns to go, I strain against the bands to lift my head. “My father,” I say. “Tien. This won’t affect them, will it? They won’t be harmed?”
She hesitates. “I don’t think so. At least, the King hasn’t shared any such plans with us.”
Relief wings through me. Then I add, “Do you know if your messenger managed to deliver my messages home? I still haven’t had any replies, and it’s been over a month now…”
“I’ll be sure to check,” Mistress Eira replies, already turning. “Now, I really must go.”
After the door closes behind her, there’s the thud of boots outside—a guard taking watch.
I slump back. Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to slow my breathing. Light in, darkness out, I remind myself. My father and Tien are safe. The King gave me a lead about Mama. Things aren’t so bad. Light in, darkness out.
But no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t work. As the minutes tick by, I draw in breath after breath, and all my lungs find is darkness.
I dream of home that night.
Not the nightmare—this dream is quiet and calm, a stitched patchwork of glimpses from my past life, the small world in which I lived before coming to the palace. Wind stirring leaves in the garden. The smell of herbs. Tien’s pattering footsteps in the shop. A cough from a room above. Baba? Mama, even, before she was taken? Throughout, I stand like an echo in the middle of it all, unable to move and feeling only the edges of tears in my eyes.
Odd, how time works. On long days in the shop, I’ve known it to stretch out forever, as thick and heavy as molasses. Other days—days filled with fun errands or festivals—time would take on a brittle, icelike quality. I’d race through it and it’d snap into pieces around me, crystalline moments of happiness and laughter, and before I knew it, the day would be gone.
The time I spend locked in the room passes so slowly I begin to forget what life was like before my imprisonment. Hunger gnaws my belly. I’m given a bowl of water each day, and sipping it gives me some relief, but I still feel hollowed out, as though someone had scooped my insides with a giant ladle, fed my core to the earth.
And I miss the girls. Not Blue, of course, or Mariko. But the others. Since coming to the palace, I’ve been surrounded by so many women that I’m only alone at night, and even then I can hear the soft sleeping sounds of the girls in their rooms nearby, sense their closeness, the dreams flitting behind their eyelids. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss that before it was taken away.
Over time that realization leads to another: that I have made a home here. Somehow, these walls, these rooms, have become as familiar and comfortable to me as my little shop-house back in Xienzo. And the girls within them, too. Because though I haven’t managed to find my mother yet, I’ve found something else during my time here.
Friends. A new kind of family, even, albeit a weird, dysfunctional, at times infuriating one.
Still. Family. A home.
The guilt is so strong I double over, gritting my teeth to stop the tears.
On my fourth night of confinement I’m struggling to sleep. It’s been hot all day, and without windows, the air in the room is trapped and close. To cool down, I’ve loosened my robe and am lying spread out on the floor, skin begging for just the slightest brush of a cool breeze. I watch the ceiling through half closed eyes. There’s cricket song from the grasses beyond the house, but other than that the night is quiet. So I notice it immediately when the tread of the guard’s boots outside my room disappears down the corridor.
I sit up with a struggle, weighed down by the bands at my ankles and wrists. For a few moments, nothing happens. Then I sense movement in the hallway.
The hair stands up on my arms. It could be the Demon King. He told me he has ways to get into Women’s Court. Perhaps he’s decided he doesn’t want to wait anymore and has come to take what I refused him.
I stagger to my feet. It’s not graceful, and I’m hunched over from the weight of the bangles, puffing heavily, my vision swimming. Yet I blow out an exhale and force myself to stand steady. I’ll face him on my feet even if it kills me. But when the door glides open a few moments later, the figure that steals inside is smaller than the King, and infinitely more lovely.
“Lei?” a low, husky voice whispers.
“Wren?”
I move forward, realizing just as I do so that four days of no food is really not conducive to a person’s ability to keep herself upright.
Wren catches me just as my knees buckle. Looping an arm round my shoulders, she helps me to the floor. She doesn’t let go straightaway, and a tremor runs through me at how close she is, her warm hands on me. The fresh, oceanlike scent of her unwinds in the air, stirring something deep in my chest.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, keeping my voice down. “The guard could be back any minute.”
She shakes her head. “Not for a while.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve watched him,” she says simply, as though it were nothing. As though spying on royal guards were completely normal. “He always leaves around now for half an hour or so. There’s a girl here he goes to.”
“One of us?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she digs into the folds of her robes, pulling out a small package wrapped in a banana leaf. “Here. I thought you might be hungry.”
Her fingers graze mine as she hands the package to me. I peel the leaf back to see a bundle of rice peppered with roasted peanuts and tiny fried fish. The fragrance of the coconut-steamed rice rises out, hot and sweet, already liquid on my tongue. I’ve never smelled anything more delicious.
I battle the urge to immediately inhale the whole thing. “I don’t know what to say,” I murmur, and Wren smiles, eyes shimmering in the darkness.
“Good,” she replies. “You’re not supposed to say anything. You’re supposed to eat.”
The room is windowless, the only light coming through the rice-paper panels in the door, and even that is weak, an amber tint from the sole lantern in the hall. In the shadows, it’s hard to make out the details of Wren’s face. Still, something about her s
eems different. It takes me a few moments to realize that it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. Properly, I mean. Openly, widely.
Unguarded.
It completely transforms her. Gone is the hard, closed mask she usually wears, replaced instead with a lightness so beautiful it’s dazzling. Her eyes are upturned, crinkled. She even has dimples.
“What?” Wren asks with a lift of a brow.
“It’s just… I’ve never seen you look happy before.” In an instant her smile vanishes. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“I guess I haven’t had many reasons to feel happy since coming to the palace,” she replies after a pause. Then she nods at the food. “You should eat, or there won’t be time for sweets.”
It’s my turn to raise my eyebrows. “You brought sweets?”
She digs out another leaf-wrapped package from her robes. “I thought you’d like them. I know your province is renowned for having the best in the kingdom.”
I unpeel the leaf to find four small diamonds of green-and-white coconut kuih. The last time I’d eaten these was at breakfast with Baba and Tien the morning I was taken.
For a while, I’m too choked to speak.
“Thank you,” I say eventually.
“It’s nothing.”
“Wren. You’ve snuck here in the middle of the night against Madam Himura’s orders—let alone the King’s—to bring me food you’ve stolen, and you think it’s nothing?”
She smiles again, that brilliant sunburst of a smile that illuminates her whole face and seems to warm the darkness, even just for a moment. “Well, when you put it like that…”
She laughs, but I don’t join her. “Why do you do it?” I ask.
Her forehead pinches. “Do what?”
“Put on a mask in front of the other girls.” As Wren goes to interject, I carry on, “Don’t you want to get to know us?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why do you distance yourself so much?”
She falters. Glancing away, her long lashes hide her dark eyes. “Before I came here, I promised myself that I wouldn’t make friends. I thought it’d be easier to shut myself off from everyone. To go through this alone.”
“So why are you helping me?”
“Because you tried. Because you were brave.” Wren leans in, voice fierce even in a whisper. “Our lives here are defined by others, every decision made for us, every turn of fate pushed by the hands of others. But you stood up and said no. Even though you knew what it could cost you. You have integrity, Lei. You have fight. I respect that.”
I drop my gaze to my lap. “It’s not like anything came of it. The King… he’ll call for me again one day. And this time I won’t be able to refuse.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t devalue what you did.” Then, stiffly, she reaches for my hand.
There’s a moment of awkwardness. I almost pull away—more from surprise than anything. But then we relax and our fingers twine together. The race of Wren’s pulse against mine sends a jolt of something electric down my bloodstream.
“You fought against the Demon King, Lei. There aren’t many people in the kingdom who can say that, let alone a Paper Girl.”
When she lets go, my skin sears where she touched me.
We talk in whispers while I eat. For the first time, there are no walls up between us. No masks. Honesty comes easily after her hand in mine, our closeness in the dark, hushed room. I tell Wren about my past, and in turn she tells me about hers. Life as an only child in the Hannos’ palace in Ang-Khen. Years of structure, routine, expectations. When she reveals how she was promised to the King by her father before she was even born, it makes me think of Blue.
“Did you want it?” I ask. “To become a Paper Girl?”
She hesitates, lips clamped. “Want doesn’t come into it. My life has always been about duty. Always, and only.”
“And your future?”
She answers matter-of-factly. “The King.”
I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up knowing that. To have never tasted freedom, never felt its golden, sun-bright wind beneath her wings.
“What would you have done?” I press. “If you hadn’t been chosen as a Paper Girl.”
At once, her expression turns rigid.
“I—I haven’t really thought about it.”
“You must have some ideas. Things you like to do, hobbies—”
“I don’t have any hobbies.”
She says it so seriously that I almost laugh, catching myself just in time. “What do you mean? Everyone has hobbies, Wren. All right, so I spent most of my time in the shop. But there were still things I liked to do when I got a chance. Playing with Bao, cooking with Tien…”
“Well,” she says after a beat, “I didn’t have any chances.”
Her face is shadowed in the darkness, and I scan for answers among its strong lines and feline angles, the charcoal pools in the hollows of her cheeks. Not for the first time, I wonder what word was hidden in Wren’s Birth-blessing pendant. At nineteen, she’s already opened it. I try to picture her reaction when the gold shell parted. Whether she discovered something new inside, or whether the character just confirmed what she’d already known all along, some fate or truth she’d always felt, like an ache in her bones. The way she told me her life has always been about duty, and her future about the King, worries me that it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. But asking about someone’s Birth-blessing word is taboo, so I bite back my curiosity.
Before she leaves, Wren tucks the now-empty leaves back inside her robe so Madam Himura won’t be suspicious.
“We can be honest with each other now, right?” I say as she helps me to my feet. At her nod, I wet my lips and go on, “I saw you leaving Paper House. A few nights ago. You went into the woods.”
“You followed me?”
The hardness in her voice makes me flinch.
“No! I—I saw from the veranda. I don’t know where you went—”
“Good!” she snaps.
My arms stiffen at my sides. “I’m only asking because it’s dangerous, Wren. If you were caught—”
“I know what’ll happen.”
“Well, you should be more careful.”
“I always am.”
I blink, freezing in place. “So it’s happened more than once?”
She looks away, a muscle pulsing in her neck.
“And you’re going to do it again,” I say dully.
Her silence is my answer.
My next question comes out quiet, barely more than a whisper. “Are you meeting with someone?”
“Of course not,” she replies, eyes flicking back to meet mine.
“Then what, Wren? What could possibly be worth you risking Madam Himura finding out?”
Wren’s face is touched gently on one side by the light from the corridor. Her features are set hard, but she closes her eyes for a brief second, taking a long breath, and the lantern glow across her right eyelid trembles, so soft looking I long to brush my thumb across it.
Finally she sighs, her shoulders curling forward. “I can’t tell you, Lei. I’m sorry. Please just pretend you never saw me. Can you do that?” When I don’t answer, she steps closer and adds, her voice gentler now, husky and low, “Have you never had a secret you needed to keep?”
Yes, I want to say. These feelings for you.
Instead, I look away.
Wren reaches out, her fingers grazing mine. “You’re making this so hard for me,” she says. “Do you know that?” And without waiting for an answer, she glides the door open and disappears into the corridor.
SEVENTEEN
THREE DAYS LATER, MISTRESS EIRA COMES to release me. She brings a shaman with her, and he removes the gold bands from my ankles and wrists, my skin warm and shivery from his magic. It only takes a few minutes. When he’s gone, I lift my arms, rolling my hands, marveling at how light my limbs have suddenly become, as though they might float away from me. But when Mistress Eira helps me to my feet, I p
itch forward. My body is just as heavy as if I were still wearing the bonds. I have to cling to her to stop from collapsing.
“You’re weak,” she says. “You need to eat. I got the kitchen to prepare you a special meal. It’s waiting in your room.”
“Just the one?”
She gives me a smile. “Today, Lei, you can have as many meals as you want.”
With Mistress Eira’s help, I shuffle to the door. She’s only just started to slide it open when a teary-eyed Lill runs inside and barrels straight into me, knocking me half to my knees. “Mistress!” she cries, looping her arms around my waist. Her doe ears flutter against my cheek. “I’m so glad you’re all right!”
I squeeze her back. There’s the pinch of tears in my eyes and I blink quickly to stop them from coming. “Of course I am,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. “I’ve handled Blue first thing in the mornings. Everything else is easy.”
Lill doesn’t laugh. From the doorway, Mistress Eira gives me a nod before leaving us alone.
I unravel myself from Lill. “It’s so good to see you.”
She doesn’t return my smile. Though her young face is still lovely, there’s something anxious in the pinch of her small mouth, and I notice dark patches beneath her eyes, like a pair of bruised figs. My heart gives a little kick.
“Has Madam Himura been cruel to you?” I ask, curving my hand round her shoulder.
“Not any more than usual.” She bites her lip. “But I wouldn’t have even noticed. Oh, I’ve been so worried, Mistress.” Her gaze moves over me. “You look…”
“Radiant? Ravishing?” I mean it as a joke, but in an instant tears well over her lashes.
I swipe them from her cheeks with my fingers. “Oh, Lill,” I say. “I’m sorry. And I’m so sorry for worrying you. I haven’t had the best week, either.” My stomach tangles with how much of an understatement that is. I force a smile. “But I’m fine now. I got through it, and so did you. That’s what counts.” She sniffs, and I pull her back against me, cupping my hand round the curve of her head. When I can tell she’s stopped crying, I draw back. “Mistress Eira said there’s food waiting in my room. Want to eat it with me?”
