Maret hates Nikolai and Gospodin both. Nikolai was the one who exiled her, but he wouldn’t have done it without Gospodin’s say-so. She’s always been clear that it’s Nikolai, not Gospodin, we’re focusing our attention on. After Nikolai, Maret is next in line for the throne. She figures she can take care of Gospodin once she’s in the palace. And, if I’m being perfectly honest, I just can’t muster the same hatred toward Gospodin that I feel for Nikolai. Nikolai was the one Cassia hated. The one she ranted to me about. To her, Gospodin was just—an inconvenience. A thorn. Only dangerous as long as he was working with Nikolai.
“It’s good news,” Maret says, “Nikolai calling off his engagement. Princess Colette wandering in and popping out an heir too quickly could’ve ruined our plan.”
I nod. Personally, I’m wondering how likely it is that Nikolai would ever marry a common-born Kostrovian girl. If he’s anything like his aunt Maret, I’ll put the odds at roughly never. If he’s like Cassia—Cassia, who didn’t see poor and Terrazzan and orphan, Cassia, who just saw me—
I shake the thought away, because Nikolai is nothing like Cassia.
“How was your first glimpse of him?” Maret asks.
I roll answers around in my head, but I can’t make myself say any of them, because I don’t know quite how to put to words the feeling that lives in my stomach. It’s so far beyond hatred that I can’t describe it in Kostrovian. The almost-right word for it exists in Terrazzan.
“I would like,” I say finally, “to see him dead.”
Maret smiles approvingly. “That’s the spirit, dear. Shall we go watch the Royal Flyers?”
I nod, but my head is already far from this place. It’s in a dark room with a knife in my hand, the whisper I’ve held in the back of my throat for months, finally voiced aloud. It’s my breath against his ear—This is what you get for killing your sister.
5
NATASHA
When Katla and I get to the stage, Adelaida is coaching Ness through a tricky bit of choreography, ignoring the growing crowd.
I grab Adelaida’s sleeve as Ness spins on the silk above us. “I need to talk to you.”
Adelaida’s whole face purses, lips and nose and eyebrows. “You have mud on your face. Ness, if you don’t lock your knees, you will fall and break your neck and have only yourself to blame.”
“I’m doing it!” Ness says.
Soft laughter burbles from the crowd behind us. I press my index fingers to my temples. “Adelaida, please.”
“Not now.”
“What Nikolai said about the spots on the royal fleet—”
Adelaida holds up her hand to silence me. “After the festival.”
“You promise we can talk?”
“After,” she says firmly. “Now warm up.”
The ground in front of the stage is clogged with bodies thin as cheatgrass. Faces—smiling. Hands—mud-fingernailed, holding loose sheathed umbrellas and bags of festival splurges, warm bread with soft edges.
Behind them, under an awning of blue fabric, are the faces I know. Guards, councilors, Gospodin, Nikolai. None of them smile; none hold umbrellas or bags.
Nikolai catches me looking at him. He tilts his head sideways in silent greeting. Gospodin glances over at the young king, and then to me, and when his eyes narrow, I feel like I’ve been strapped to a scholar’s dissection table. Does he think I threw that mud? Does he know I overheard his conversation with Adelaida?
“Flyers,” Adelaida says. “In position.”
The orchestra begins to play. I wrap my silks around my ankle. I stretch my hands up, then I’m climbing, rising into the rhythm of a performance I know forward and back. Before I was a flyer, the crane season performance, Bog Song, scared and enthralled me in equal measure. The music is full of creaky violins and jangling bells. As the principal flyer, I play the role of a little girl who gets lost in the bog on a cold crane season night. My role is the most difficult and the most important, and I can’t afford a single mistake. I keep glancing out at the audience, my eyes seeking Adelaida, Gospodin, Nikolai.
If the flyers are going on the royal fleet, this performance matters.
If the flyers are getting left on Kostrov to sink, it means nothing.
With a deep, slow breath, I twist into a hip key, pressing my nose to my knees and holding myself suspended in the air while the other girls climb at my sides.
Katla is climbing perfectly. Sofie is a half-beat behind, but I can’t scold her the way I would in practice. Gretta and Ness have managed to find something of a rhythm, thank the seas.
The stage feels uneven with only two bases instead of three. Pippa and Katla were my two wings as long as I’ve been principal. Now Sofie flies in Pippa’s place.
I wonder if Pippa is out there. I wonder if Sofie found her before the flight. I wonder—
The music swells, and I nearly miss the cue. I spin out of my hip key just in time. Focus, Natasha.
Twist, flip upside down, straddle, flip back up. Separate the silks and fan them apart. Hold the position. Not much longer before we’re through. One and two and three and—
The bird appears out of nowhere.
One minute, my gaze is flitting between the crowd and my hands. The next minute, my entire field of vision is consumed by a feathered body, eight feet long from wingtip to wingtip. The bird blinks its amber eyes, startled, and then its feathers brush my arm.
My hands shudder around the silk, and then they release. I release. The silk, suddenly free of all tension, bounces like a spring.
My world spins. The audience, then the rig, then the sky above me. My back hits the stage.
Above me, the crane—I see now that it’s a crane, long-beaked and black-winged—warbles as it flies for the horizon.
The music screeches.
The crowd is silent. I gasp and I sit up so fast, my head pounds. Above me, Gretta and Katla are still moving through their elements. Ness stares at me. Sofie slides down her silk recklessly fast.
Keep going, I want to say, but I can’t find the breath to do it.
Sofie hits the ground and kneels beside me.
Then the crowd stops being so silent.
It begins with a whisper. A concerned murmur here, there. Then a giggle, a laugh, a guffaw. Scattered applause; scattered jeers. Adelaida, from the edge of the stage, hisses, her voice so thin and angry that I can’t understand what she’s saying.
Sofie presses her hand to my shoulder. “Tasha, are you okay?”
I tell myself not to look at the crowd but I don’t listen. Some people stare openly. Most of those underneath the blue awning are averting their eyes, as though they can’t stand to be part of my humiliation.
Sofie shakes me. “Tasha. Natasha.”
This must be what it feels like to drown.
I don’t look at Sofie. “Get back on your silk.”
She hesitates.
I can still feel the way the silk sprang out of my hands like a living thing. I can still see the bird’s startled eyes.
“Get back on your silk,” I tell Sofie again. When I try to haul myself up, my left wrist sears with the burden of my weight.
But I have to fly. I have to.
Tears sting my eyes as I climb, clutching the silk with my feet to relieve the burden on my wrist.
Another bird flies overhead, narrowly missing the top of the rig. Then three more; five more; a flock so large, I can’t count all the sets of wings.
Cranes. Heart-faced barn owls. Jewel-feathered bee-eaters, and a dozen other species whose names I don’t know. As they pass overhead, they shadow the city like dusk has fallen.
All the eyes that clung to me find the birds instead. And then, as the birds head for the city’s edge, all those eyes find the sea. A pillow of cloud, as dark and smooth as a seal in water, balloons from the horizon.
&n
bsp; Storm Five, Captain’s Log says, begins with the Exodus of the Birds.
The word storm starts low, in mutters from the crowd, and begins to pulse around us.
Adelaida crosses the stage in swift steps. “Off the silks. All of you, now.”
I drop the five feet straight to the floor, my wrist burning as the impact shakes through me. Katla catches me before I can fall to my knees.
“Come on.” Katla loops her hand around my waist.
The crowd bubbles with unfurling umbrellas. The musicians rush to get their instruments in cases before the rain starts. I glance back to the blue awning, expecting to see Gospodin shouting consoling words at the masses, but the awning is already being packed away.
“Back to the palace.” Adelaida’s eyes sweep across us. “Leave the silks. Go.”
Sofie grabs our cloaks from the edge of the stage. I put mine on as we begin to run, holding the hood over my head with my right hand as we go. Gretta and Ness lead. Katla and Sofie stay close at my sides.
We keep to the seawall, crossing slanting cobbled bridges and watching the angry ocean, the seething sky, still blotted by the shadows of birds. It’s not the safest path, but it’s the least likely to be congested with fleeing crowds. The streets have transformed in a matter of minutes. Carts lie abandoned in the streets.
“Are you okay?” Katla asks.
“We’ll see,” I say. I press my wrist to my stomach.
A wave smashes over the seawall.
It thunders against the stone and shoves through the gaps in the railing. The water slaps me to the side so hard, I nearly fall. Ness tumbles into a puddle. Sofie scoops her up. We keep running.
Then the sky unhinges, like a canal lock opening above us. In the distance, a bird shrieks.
Within moments, I’m drenched. When the hem of my cloak snags on the rickety rail of a bridge, I let go of the fabric. The wind carries my cloak into the ocean.
We run until the Gray Palace cuts a silhouette through the rain. The pointy-topped windows gleam like a row of bared teeth. Water drips from the snouts and antlers of a bronze menagerie, broodily watching from tower turrets.
By the time I fling myself at the palace wall, my slippers are disintegrating off my feet.
A guard stands at the entrance to the flyer door. He throws the door open and shouts something, but the rain washes the words past me. My head pounds.
The sky erupts with a claw-slash of light. Thunder booms.
“Tasha.” Katla grabs my good wrist. “Come on.”
How many more months?
“Natasha.” Katla tugs at my arm. “Get inside.”
How many more days?
6
ELLA
My family died in Storm Ten. Storms Nine and Eight and Seven, I had Cassia. Storm Six was my first in Kostrov, and I spent the whole of it hidden in Maret’s apartment.
This is the first storm I’ve felt on city streets. It’s the first time I have felt the terror of being trampled, the smell of sewage rising out of the canals. If I didn’t have a job to do, I would leave New Sundstad tomorrow. No one ought to die in a city like this.
When Storm Ten struck, I was too busy grieving to realize what it meant. That the Flood was coming. After my family died, I got a job waiting tables at an inn near where my family’s farm had been. That was where I met Cassia and Maret. They were traveling through town—running away from Nikolai’s men, I later learned—and I was wiping their table down. Cassia looked up at me over the top of a pint of cider. She smiled, so sharp, so clever, like she already knew everything there was to know about me. I lingered by their table because they were speaking Kostrovian, which reminded me of my father, who taught himself—and, in turn, me—languages from places he’d never been and would never see, just because he thought it was the sort of thing people ought to do. So I listened to their Kostrovian. And Cassia saw me listening. She said, “You understand everything we’re saying, don’t you?” I nodded, and she said, “Well, we need a translator. So sit down and tell us your name.” By the time I sat, I was already hopeless. That’s how I loved her: quick as a snake bite and twice as painful.
I found out she was a Kostrovian princess the next morning. They’d spent the night at the inn, where I’d started spending all my nights—I had nowhere else to go. I caught them arguing, in hushed Kostrovian, and I put the pieces together. Maret thought it was ridiculous to let a stranger join them while they were running from Nikolai’s men. Cassia thought I had a funny smile. Funny? Good funny or bad funny? I was busy wondering if I’d mistranslated when they spotted me. I asked them point-blank if they were royals. Cassia, in answer, opened her wool coat and showed me a brooch pinned to the inside flap—an insect, studded with diamonds and pearls the size of hazelnuts.
“It’s the ladybug,” Cassia said. When I just blinked at her—the ladybug?—she said, as though it should’ve been obvious, “The symbol of Kostrovian royalty?”
So I went with them. Of course I went with them. They were royals! They were a family. And they wanted me around.
Storm Nine came a few days later. The rain was just as bad as Storm Ten, threatening to flood fields and burst dams. But afterward, the trees. Blooming and blooming and blooming. And that was how Cassia made me feel. Like I was growing again after the grief had shrunk me small.
Wandering through those blooming trees, tacking sideways from one Terrazzan town to the next, Cassia slipped a bright orange poppy behind my ear. Maret held a hat to her head as she craned her neck, looking skyward.
“It really was Storm Nine, wasn’t it?” Maret said.
“Obviously,” Cassia said.
I’d heard rumors, but there were always rumors. Whenever a bad bit of rain hit, everyone called it the start of another Harbinger Year. But my parents never believed in that sort of thing. Neveses didn’t panic.
“You know the first book of Captain’s Log, don’t you, Ella?” Cassia asked me in that lush copse of trees.
I hesitated. “Remind me which part you’re talking about?”
To Cassia, Maret said, “They’re not as devout in Terrazza. You know that.”
My face warmed. I still wasn’t sure what Cassia and Maret believed—whether my uneven devotion was a bad thing.
Cassia waved her away. “I’m talking about the part where Kos insists that a Flood only comes once every two thousand years. He never gives any reason why a Flood can only come that often. He just says ‘It is known.’ But the Sacred Breath doesn’t want anyone to poke holes in their book, so they’re trying to convince everyone that this can’t be the start of the Harbinger Year. You know, if I were queen, I’d send all those stodgy literalists to the bottom of the sea. Maybe Kos made a mistake. Is that so bad?”
“Stodgy literalists are the lifeblood of Kostrov,” Maret said. “Stodgy literalists and a petulant child king.”
“For now,” Cassia said. She said it emphatically, which was the way she said most things. I couldn’t have disagreed with her if I wanted to.
Over the next few months, I let her build a future for me. We’d go back to Kostrov. Reclaim her throne from her brother. Tell the country the truth—the Flood was coming, and we’d be ready. We’d do all the things countries around the world were slow to do: Stockpile food and water, ready ships. And then, when Storm One came, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Cassia and I would be on the same ship, rising above the waves. Surviving. Discovering the New World. Things I don’t care about anymore.
Nikolai didn’t just take Cassia away from me. He took my whole future.
When we get to the apartment, Maret fumbles with the key. She shakes her head and laughs. Water has sneaked a few of her curls out of their confines and plastered them to her face. Her cheeks are bright. Her lashes are long and rain-dazzled.
“You must think I’m acting the fool.”
I shrug.
<
br /> She finally manages to get the key in correctly. “It’s just—aren’t you excited?” She steps inside and takes off her hat. “We don’t have much longer to wait.”
While most everyone else counts the storms to the end of the world, Maret counts to the beginning. She wants to seize the crown as close as she can to Storm One. Too late, and the royal fleet will sail away without her. Too early, and someone else may come along to topple her reign. But if Nikolai dies at just the right moment, and Maret, as the only obvious heir left, arrives to take the crown and calm the country, it will all be hers. She will control the fleet. She will control who lives, who dies, who drowns, who breathes.
Most people are worried about ever seeing the New World. Maret wants to own it.
“Ella?” Maret says. “Come inside.”
The water is fiercely cold on my skin. It’s not unlike the way the silks hurt when I began practicing—painful enough to remind me I’m still alive.
If I closed my eyes and nose and ears and all I knew was the feeling of raindrops bursting on my skin, I could be in Terrazza again. I could be with my family. I could be with Cassia.
Maret snaps her fingers. “Out of the rain, now, before it eats you up.”
I would like that very much.
7
NATASHA
I huddle with the other flyers in the hallway that connects the studio and our bedrooms. No one says why we’ve chosen this place, but I think we all know. There are no windows in the hall. In here, we can’t see the storm.
Sofie, Ness, and Gretta play five-hundred sweep with a deck of tarot cards. Katla stretches, her legs out in front of her and her nose to the floor. My hamstrings burn just looking at her.
I’m a few feet away, having already wrapped and rewrapped my wrist in a length of bandage three times. I do it again anyway, holding the fabric tight in my teeth.
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 4
