Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Laura Brooke Robson

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  Dial & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938609

  Ebook ISBN 9780525554059

  Design by Cerise Steel

  Photo of girls © Marta Syrko / Trevillion Images

  All other images courtesy of Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Samira Iravani

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  To Mom and Dad,

  Who taught me snark and courage in equal measure.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Harbinger Year

  1: Natasha

  2: Ella

  3: Natasha

  4: Ella

  5: Natasha

  6: Ella

  7: Natasha

  8: Ella

  9: Natasha

  10: Ella

  11: Natasha

  12: Ella

  13: Natasha

  14: Ella

  15: Natasha

  16: Ella

  17: Natasha

  18: Ella

  19: Natasha

  20: Ella

  21: Natasha

  22: Ella

  23: Natasha

  24: Ella

  25: Natasha

  26: Ella

  27: Natasha

  28: Ella

  29: Natasha

  30: Ella

  31: Natasha

  32: Ella

  33: Natasha

  34: Ella

  35: Natasha

  36: Ella

  37: Natasha

  38: Ella

  39: Natasha

  40: Ella

  41: Natasha

  42: Ella

  43: Natasha

  44: Ella

  45: Natasha

  46: Ella

  47: Natasha

  48: Ella

  49: Natasha

  50: Ella

  51: Natasha

  52: Ella

  53: Natasha

  54: Ella

  55: Natasha

  56: Ella

  57: Natasha

  58: Ella

  59: Natasha

  60: Ella

  61: Natasha

  62: Ella

  63: Natasha

  64: Ella

  65: Natasha

  66: Ella

  67: Natasha

  68: Ella

  69: Natasha

  70: Ella

  71: Natasha

  72: Ella

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BEFORE we start, we must come to an agreement on something: All stories are about the ocean.

  Oh, yes. I insist.

  I could tell you of characters—a beguiling maiden with the pull of the moon, a volatile king with the ire of a tempest. And of plots, I could tell you about the boy searching for his love, or the girl searching for lost treasure, or the man searching for fame and glory, and what does the ocean do but search? In the crevices of canals and the sheer edges of cliff sides and the ground floors of city apartments where a better-behaved ocean would not intrude?

  But the best argument, I believe, lies in the fables that follow.

  Now. Let us begin.

  —“Introduction,” Tamm’s Collected Fables

  WHEN the land settles solid beneath my bow, I leap over the ship’s rail and lay my back flat against pebbled shore. It is gloriously still; I have forgotten how not to sway with the sea.

  I rouse myself to stare at my New World—cliffs clothed in wind-bobbed grasses, trees pining skyward, blood-red wildflowers I will name, in time.

  This earth is reborn pure for my taking, crafted as my kingdom, and so it will stay until another reckoning floods us anew.

  —Captain’s Log, Antinous Kos (1189 PKF Edition)

  THE HARBINGER YEAR

  Storm Ten: Ice

  Storm Nine: Blooming of the Trees

  Storm Eight: Wind

  Storm Seven: Swarm of the Insects

  Storm Six: Heat

  Storm Five: Exodus of the Birds

  Storm Four: Panic of the Livestock

  Storm Three: Exodus of the Frogs

  Storm Two: Blood

  Storm One: The Flood

  1

  NATASHA

  Twelve hundred years ago, a man who should’ve drowned didn’t. He was a fisherman, some say. Others claim he was a king. Others keep shaking their heads. He was a god.

  As the story goes, there was a year of storms, called the Harbinger Year. Ten storms, each with a new horror to accompany it. The last storm brought the Flood. Water, the whole world over, killing every plant and animal and person that didn’t make it to a ship in time, and plenty that did. The Flood lasted a year, and when the waters receded, the world was made anew.

  There are others who survived, but they didn’t write down their stories. And this was an important story. This was a story that could teach us how to survive a Flood. Survive anything.

  So we forget the others’ names and stories, and we remember Antinous Kos.

  * * *

  ~~~

  Nine years ago, a woman who shouldn’t have drowned did.

  She was clever and beautiful and in a constant, losing argument with the inside of her head. Before she went, she told me stories. Never Kos’s story. The rest of the world told that one plenty.

  Instead, she told me fables. Of kind kings and brave princesses. Of ice palaces. Of girls she once called her friends, girls who knew how to fly.

  When I was four or five, I realized the last kind of story wasn’t a fable. She’d been part of them: The Royal Flyers, the girls who performed high in the air on the silks. When she was a flyer, she met kings and queens, lived in a palace, spun herself up in fabric where the water couldn’t reach her.

  The other flyers told her to leave when they realized she was pregnant. She never flew again. When I was nine, she drowned in a canal.

  My mother’s story isn’t one anybody wants to remember, because it’s not a story of how you survive. It’s a story of how you don’t.

  * * *

  ~~~

  I grip my silks, suspended in an arabesque
fifteen feet above the floor. The other five flyers are at dinner. Their silks sway gently in the drafty studio—far below me, the fabric is tied in fat knots to keep it from trailing against the padded mats and wooden floor. Across from the wall of mirrors, a rectangular window nearly as high as the ceiling beams, at eye level from the tops of the silks, shows a plum-dark sky and the diluted glow of a tired gas lamp on the street below.

  The door flies open.

  “Have you seen Pippa?”

  I spin to see Sofie cross the floor in three frantic bounds.

  “Not since rehearsal ended.” I pause to frown. “But she should be in here with me. Her elements were a mess.”

  “She’s not in our room.” Sofie cranes her neck up at me. Her eyes, heavily lidded, are wide with worry. The flimsy lighting makes her skin look gray, near translucent. She never took off her practice full-suit, a uniform that covers her in tight black fabric from ankles to collar to wrists. “Her things are gone.”

  “What?” I slide a few inches down the silk.

  “Her books, her trunk, her shoes—”

  My feet hit the floor. “I don’t understand.”

  Sofie shakes her head. “She didn’t come to dinner, so I went looking for her. But then I saw all her things missing. If she’s gone someplace, why didn’t she tell me?”

  I hurry to the bedroom shared by all the other flyers. It was my bedroom from the time I was nine until I became principal flyer. The five beds are in varying degrees of the usual disarray. Wardrobes with the drawers spilling open. Books and hair ribbons and at least one poorly hidden wine bottle.

  Pippa’s bed is neatly made. Her side table is bare.

  I turn to Sofie. “Is she with Gregor?”

  Sofie plucks at Pippa’s quilt. “Why would she bring all her things to go see her”—Sofie’s face pinches—“sweetheart?”

  When I leave the bedroom, Sofie keeps close at my heels. “I already tried to find Madam Adelaida,” she says.

  I knock on Adelaida’s door anyway. After a moment, a petite housemaid cracks the door. Bulky gowns spill out of her arms.

  “Miss Koskinen.” She gives an awkward curtsy and drops a chemise.

  “I’m looking for Adelaida,” I say.

  “She mentioned the Stone Garden, miss, to have a talk with Mariner Gospodin.”

  My heart beats faster. Gospodin—the Righteous Mariner who oversees Kostrov’s branch of the Sacred Breath—is one of the busiest men in the country. In addition to leading Sacred Breath services every morning—which reminds me that I haven’t gone in nearly two months; never mind that the flyers are supposed to go every Saturday—he’s King Nikolai’s most trusted advisor. I don’t think Gospodin is the type to drop in just for tea. If he’s meeting with Adelaida, they’re discussing something important.

  I turn on my heel. Sofie hangs back a moment, then jogs to catch me.

  “Wait, wait.” She hooks her elbow through mine. “What are you doing?”

  “I thought you wanted to find out where Pippa went.”

  “I did. I do. I mean . . .”

  Sofie and I turn a corner, leaving behind the part of the palace meant for flyers and flying. The rest of the palace is more imposing. Marble tiles the floor. Tapestries, lurid battle scenes stitched in turquoise thread, line the walls.

  “I’m just afraid of interrupting them, is all,” Sofie says.

  “I know,” I say, “but do you see an alternative?”

  Sofie is quiet.

  Six months ago, just before my seventeenth birthday, Storm Ten hit. People have a funny way of insisting everything’s going to be all right. No, Natasha, it’s not Storm Ten, they said. There won’t be another Flood for hundreds of years. Adelaida told me I sounded like my mother. Paranoid.

  But it was Storm Ten. It rained from sunrise to sunset, leaving the canals bloated with jellyfish and the streets puddled with sewage. Then everything froze. We started hearing reports of snow all over the world, even in places that never dip below freezing. Some people kept saying the Harbinger Year wasn’t supposed to start for another eight hundred years. They didn’t believe it had already begun. Why would they? It takes a special kind of cynic to accept that the world is trying to kill you.

  I’m that kind of cynic.

  By Storm Seven, after locusts and mosquitoes descended over Kostrov like a plague, no one could deny it. The Sacred Breath suddenly reported that they’d discovered a new interpretation of Captain’s Log, one that proved this Flood would come eight hundred years early. But we didn’t have to worry. The Sacred Breath and the king and the ocean’s love would protect us.

  Madam Adelaida told me otherwise. There was only one thing that would protect me. The same thing that had protected me all these years since my mother died. Being a Royal Flyer.

  Kings came and went, but where there was Kostrov, there had always been the Kostrovian Royal Flyers. When Roen laid siege to New Sundstad three hundred years ago, the Royal Flyers kept practicing. When a cholera epidemic swept across the country, the Royal Flyers stayed put. And now, when Kostrov sinks and the country takes to the sea, we will stay right where we belong: among the royals, in the court, as we always have.

  The girls who remain in our ranks when Storm One hits will join the royal fleet. The ones who don’t will fend for themselves against the Flood.

  I can practice fourteen hours a day. I can practice until my blisters burst and my hands bleed.

  I can’t practice enough to keep Adelaida from letting someone else go. From letting Pippa go.

  “Pippa’s so good, though.” Sofie chews her bottom lip. “Maybe she looked a little sloppy in rehearsal today, but it was just one day.”

  We reach the Stone Garden in the palace’s center courtyard and weave through the labyrinth of imposing sculptures and miniature canals. The wheezy light of the gas lamps cuts the fog and reflects along the wet path.

  “I don’t see why it’s your business to have an opinion on my girls.”

  I recognize Adelaida’s husky growl.

  Then, in response, a confident, deep voice. “Everything’s my business,” it says. “No need to get ruffled.”

  “I’m not—”

  Adelaida and Gospodin materialize through the fog. When Adelaida sees me, she purses her lips. Gospodin blinks away his shock and dissolves into an easy smile. While Adelaida’s appearance is a meticulous construction—eyes tightly rimmed in black pencil, feet bound in narrow heels—Gospodin’s handsomeness is lazy, windswept, and warm.

  “Go back to the studio,” Adelaida says.

  Sofie clamps her hand around my wrist. I’ve never seen her challenge Adelaida before, but if anything might give her the courage, it’s losing Pippa.

  “Where’s Pippa?” I say.

  Adelaida’s jaw twitches.

  “Her things are gone,” Sofie says.

  Adelaida scowls, and Sofie bites her lip.

  “Did you make her leave?” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Should I let you handle this?” Gospodin asks, his chin tilted toward Adelaida.

  “No.” Adelaida points. “Studio. Now.”

  Sofie flinches. I stand stubborn for another moment.

  “Come on.” Sofie tugs my arm. “She’ll tell us later.”

  Reluctantly, I follow her out. “Did you hear what they were talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” Sofie pauses. “Homilies?”

  “They were talking about us,” I say. “Why would Gospodin have an opinion on us?” I scan the hallway, nervous someone might overhear. It’s empty. “I want to figure out what they’re talking about.”

  “How do you reckon you’ll manage that?”

  “I reckon I’ll manage fine.”

  “Oh,” Sofie says. “Are we going back into the garden a super-secret Natasha way?”

/>   I shush her.

  A tapestry of a bear hangs adjacent to the library. When I was eleven and keen on the idea of spying on the royal children while they played board games, I discovered that the tapestry hides a crawl space.

  I pull the fabric aside and drop to my knees.

  “No way,” Sofie says. “Wait, do you honestly expect me to fit through there?”

  I press my stomach to the ground and begin the long scoot across the dusty floor. “You’re not required to follow me.”

  Sofie, of course, drops to her knees and follows me. “I thought we were friends, but all this time, you let me believe there were only three hidden passages in the palace.”

  Actually, I know of eight, but I’d just as soon keep some for myself.

  After a couple of feet, we pass an air vent that looks out onto the library. It’s empty and dim. I keep crawling.

  A couple stuffy moments later, the passage ends at the top of a tall stone wall in a dark chamber. I hear water splashing below.

  “Sofie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a four-foot drop ahead, so be careful.”

  “What? How am I supposed to manage a four-foot drop?”

  “Um.” I wriggle my torso into open air. “Inelegantly.”

  Once Sofie and I are both firmly on the ground, our feet submerged in about six inches of water, I squint around the room.

  “This way.”

  “Where are we?” Sofie asks.

  “Underneath the garden. Now, shh.”

  Water trickles through a metal grate overhead, leaking from one of the fountains into this tunnel, to be recycled again and again through the dozens of miniature canals and bubbling sculptures across the gardens.

  I hear a scrap of conversation and lift my hand. Sofie’s sloshing walk slows.

  I rise on my toes and peer through a grate along the upper wall of the passage. Water dribbles over the lip, but above that, I can see Adelaida’s and Gospodin’s legs. They’re facing each other. Gospodin’s posture is relaxed.

  Sofie rises on her toes beside me.

  “Have you talked to King Nikolai?” Adelaida asks.

  “Of course. He’ll be sad to see them go, but he’s rational. He understands we’re in a time of difficult choices.”