Ness talks to Ella nonstop. “Dark, isn’t it? I always thought it was too dreary in here, but no one listens. And compared to outside, it’s just—oh!”
Kaspar leaps from Adelaida’s shoulders, knocking the papers from her hands. His claws scrabble across the floor until he comes to rest at Ella’s feet, with a quick detour to bump headlong into Ness’s shin. He twines himself around Ella’s ankles, pawing at the baggy fabric of her uniform.
Adelaida looks up, her mouth folding sourly. “Kaspar isn’t friendly,” she says, almost like a threat.
“Well, he’s got no reason to like me.” Ella shakes her foot. “You’ll find no friendship here, cat.”
Kaspar gazes up at her with unbridled adoration.
Kaspar has never once nuzzled my ankles. More proof that he’s a stupid cat with stupid taste.
“I’ll lead your stretches,” Adelaida says. “Show Ella her basic climbs. Kaspar, come here.”
As the other girls sink into deep toe touches, Ella pads over to me. Kaspar looks torn between his old master and his new friend. I do hope the panic doesn’t set fire to his little brain.
Ella stops a foot in front of me. I inch backward. Kostrovians, by nature, require a bubble of personal space big enough to swing one’s hands without colliding. In a perfect world, we’d all just stand so far apart, we’d never see anyone else.
Ella inches forward. The corner of her lips fights a smile. In such close quarters, she’s as pretty as she is in the silks. She’s shorter than me, muscular, with prominent cheekbones that I only now, standing so near, recognize.
“I saw you at the festival,” I say. I remember catching a glimpse of her—the dark curls, the olive-toned skin, the curious look in her eye—but she disappeared too quickly.
“Did you?” she says. “Hmm. I don’t remember that.”
I feel a pang of annoyance at her dismissal. I search her expression —is she lying?—but I can’t read it. “Adelaida and I think you were relying on your arms too much in your audition. I want to see your climbs again.”
Ella follows me to the back of the studio. I stop at the lengths of fabric that used to be Pippa’s.
“I know this is just a fundamental,” I say, “but if you don’t get the fundamentals right, you won’t get anything right, and we’re going to move quickly. So listen. Unless you’re planning to fall and break all your bones today.”
“Oh,” she says. “I was actually scheduled to break all my bones on Thursday.”
I narrow my eyes. Ella looks back at me impassively, blinking her dark lashes. Her hair is tied up in a massive ponytail, but one of the curls keeps springing in front of her ear.
“Do you not understand—” I stop, take a breath, and start again. “This is important. Right now. It’s important that the Royal Flyers—and that includes you—are perfect.”
“Because if we’re perfect, we’ll convince the ocean not to kill us?”
“Do you think you’re being funny?” I say.
“Well, yes,” Ella says. “I’ve done a survey of the group, and it looks like Ness is already the wide-eyed idealist and Sofie’s already the lovable confidante, so all that’s left for me is the comic relief. Unless that’s you.”
“I’m not funny,” I say.
“Then what are you?” She has a quiet way of speaking. The kind of voice that forces you to lean forward for fear of missing something.
And I fall for it. I lean closer to her as I say, “What am I?”
“The spoiled heiress? The girl who doesn’t realize how pretty she is until a man tells her so?”
“I know I’m pretty,” I say.
This, finally, tugs her lips into something almost like a smile. It’s as slippery and slow as the rest of her movements, the corner of her mouth coming to a curl. “Then I suppose I’ll have to figure it out for myself.”
“Well,” I say, “I do like to cultivate an air of mystery.”
She pauses, tilting her head to the side. That curl swings forward, casting a corkscrew shadow across her jaw. “Well, aren’t we just two peas in a pod?”
I point to the silk. “Climb.”
Ella wraps the silk around one leg with the other and starts to climb. I take a step back to watch her.
“You look like you’re in pain,” I say.
“I’m not in pain.”
“Well, your face is all scrunched up.”
She releases her grip, dropping to the ground in a way that rattles my teeth.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “It’s bad for your knees.”
“Oh, bother,” she says. A heavy, drawn-out sigh. “I need my knees to stay intact until Thursday.”
“Thursday,” I say. “When you’re scheduled to break all your bones.”
She leans forward, smiling. Like a cat playing with prey. “Exactly.”
I snatch the silks out from in front of her. “You’re still relying on your arms too much. The silk should be cinched between your feet.” I thread the silk between my feet and lift myself up a step. My wrist gives a little burn—a friendly reminder, in case I’d forgotten about my fall—but I ignore it.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?” I slide hand over hand back to the floor. “No questions?”
“Not really, no.”
I hand her the silks. “Fine. Go.”
The correction is subtle, but it’s perfect. I should be pleased. I’m just annoyed. The only thing that’s off is her full-suit. It’s too big around the wrists and ankles, and the excess fabric keeps snagging.
“You can come back down now,” I say.
She does another heavy drop, landing on her feet. She looks up at me. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I forgot about the knee-breaking.”
I’m caught in her voice. It’s throaty and warm, honey-smooth words relaxing into each other. It’s not quite like the angular, Kostrovian way of speaking.
“Your grip was off,” I say. “I think it’s the full-suit getting in the way.” I reach for her hand, where the fabric of her sleeve is bunched up to her knuckles. She flinches. Not quickly enough.
I catch my mistake a moment after I’ve made it.
She didn’t realize I’d already seen the tattoo on her wrist. She thought she was hiding it.
I feel suddenly, accidentally, invasive. My fingers on the smooth plane of her wrist, pushing back fabric. I see black lines, an inked siren face. My hands are an attack.
I recoil. Ella pulls her arm back toward her chest like I burned her. Her eyes shift—panic, betrayal, and then a cool nothingness.
“It . . . It doesn’t matter here,” I say. The words are sticky in my throat. And after I’ve said it, I regret it, because it seems to minimize something that surely matters to her, here and everywhere.
She pulls her sleeve back down to the heel of her hand and clamps the fabric inside her fist. But even with her wrist covered, my eyes keep drifting back to it.
I’ve heard of siren tattoos before, but I’ve never seen one so close. Certainly never touched one.
I don’t pretend to have done a careful study of Captain’s Log, but I know there’s a passage on sirens. Strange fish-women Kos claims he saw on his voyage. Beautiful enough to be tempting, but not quite right. Not human. I don’t know whether Kos actually saw—or thought he saw—them or if they’re a metaphor.
Nowadays, when someone says siren, they don’t mean a fish-woman living in the sea. They mean a woman who’d rather lie with another woman than with a man. People don’t tend to use the word kindly.
“What’s next, then?” Ella says.
I shake my head, feeling heat rise in my cheeks. “Right. Let’s check your arabesque.” I hold out the silks for her to take.
She’s careful to position her hands around mine, never brushing my skin.
My body is ting
ly and uncertain. I can’t stop looking at her sleeves. She won’t look at me at all.
I have too many questions. They feel too rude, too personal, too thorny.
Who put that tattoo on Ella’s wrist? What man was so offended by her existence?
When she rises, she commands the silks, flowing through them as easily as though they’re water.
“Is that right?” she says.
So many questions. I swallow all of them. “That’s perfect.”
18
ELLA
There’s warm bread at dinner, and no one gets upset with me when I eat seven rolls. We’re in a kitchen with stone walls and a suffocating cloud of sulfuric peat smoke.
I haven’t been able to look straight at Natasha since she saw my siren. She and Katla spend the meal whispering. I keep inventing scenarios in my head: What if she and Cassia were once friends, or more? What if Natasha knew Cassia went to Terrazza when she fled Kostrov? What if Natasha figures out what Cassia was to me and why I’m here?
Fortunately, it’s hard to spend too much time worrying about this, because Ness talks so profusely that I can’t hear myself think.
“I promised Twain we’d meet him and some of the other guards at the hot pools tonight.” She tears off a dainty corner of bread. “We should all go.”
Gretta’s bottom lip pulls back. “I would literally rather swim in the Grand Canal than watch you and Twain eat each other’s faces.”
Sofie tilts her head toward me. “Twain is Gretta’s older brother. He and Ness are seeing each other. There’s no actual face-eating involved.”
“Sad. Palace life would be so much more interesting with a dash of cannibalism.”
“I bet Andrei enjoys some light cannibalism on the weekends,” Sofie says. To me, she adds, “He’s our least favorite guard.”
“I’d rather you not suggest my father hires cannibals,” Gretta says.
Katla gasps. “Your father is Captain of the Guard? I can’t believe you never mentioned that!”
“Hey!” Gretta says. “I don’t—”
“So,” Ness says loudly, “you’ll come to the hot pools, yes? The guards are lovely. And there’s always a chance Nikolai will join.”
My lungs constrict.
Natasha raises her head. “What? The hot pools tonight?”
I can’t help but feel like she lifted from a trance at the sound of Nikolai’s name. Why so interested, Natasha? My palms itch.
“We’ll all go,” Ness says.
“Except me,” Gretta says, “who will be avoiding the face-eating.”
Katla waves a hand. “I have an important date with my bed.”
So an hour later, I follow Ness, Natasha, and Sofie into the heart of the palace.
When Natasha pushes open a door to an interior courtyard, the wind breathes cold and wet on my face. I haven’t felt fresh air since my arrival at the palace this morning.
“The Stone Garden,” Sofie says, opening an arm to the cobbled path. “Just in case your idea of beauty starts and ends with rocks.”
We twist through a maze of fountains and sculptures, then a massive glass structure looms into view.
A redheaded guard pokes his head out of a clouded glass door, releasing a burst of warm steam. “Good evening, flyers.”
I bunch the fabric of my sleeves in my fists, just to be safe.
“Gregor,” Natasha says. “Don’t you have a pregnant loved one to care for?”
“I’m on duty,” he says.
“Yes, you look like you’re working terribly hard.”
He looks genuinely hurt. “You know I’d be with her if I could.”
I frown between the guard—Gregor—and Natasha as they disappear into the glass building.
“Are they related?” I say. They have the same slender, freckle-dappled noses; the same knobby knuckles and over-long limbs.
Sofie laughs. “No, but they should start telling everyone they’re cousins. They could pull it off. Come on. Let’s go inside.”
When I blink to clear the fog from my eyes, I see plants. More than I can count. They line every wall. Hang from every lattice. Although only a few steps ahead of us, Ness and Natasha and Gregor have disappeared in the tartan of overlapping branches.
The flowers stretch the limits of my vocabulary. A violet bloom too thickly petaled to be a violet; a scaly tangerine tower; blossoms beaked like birds.
“You’ll get used to this sort of thing.” Sofie nods to a potted tree beside us, its roots slithering in and out of its dirt like a sea serpent in waves. The tree is a skein of branches and a spray of leaves. A horde of ants marches up the trunk, unbound by gravity. “The royals have . . . expensive taste.”
Half a dozen young men in guard livery cluster around a sunken pool at the middle of the conservatory. A few have their pants rolled up to their knees, feet dangling in the water. Ness is already kissing one of them passionately.
“Well, that’s more than I wanted to see,” Sofie says.
“They, um, look very happy together.”
Sofie snorts, then gestures to the pool. “Shall we?”
I worry for a moment we’re meant to take off our full-suits, but Sofie only rolls up the legs and sits on the edge of the pool like the guards. A more elegant woman, like Maret, would probably take issue with exposed ankles, but as far as joints I’d like to hide go, my ankles rank relatively low.
I take off my slippers and pull up the fabric of the full-suit to my knees. The ground beside Sofie is damp, but when I slide my feet into the water, I sigh.
“Good, right?” she says.
The water burns. My feet prickle with cold, then hot. All the legs swinging around the edges of the pool invent a current, sending miniature waves lapping against the rocky lip. Natasha and Gregor sit across the water from us.
Sofie swirls her hands in the pool. “If the ocean felt this good, I might not mind the Flood.”
“How do they heat it?”
“They don’t. It comes from some underground hot spring, or something.”
I hear Nikolai’s name before I notice him. It’s—Nick—and then—King—and then—shit, stand up—whispered among the guards. Hasty bows. Then a figure in the steam.
On our voyage from Terrazza to Kostrov, our ship passed a pod of killer whales. One of the sailors pulled me aside and pointed at the ocean.
“See that shadow?” he said.
“No,” I said, but then I did, an elongated balloon of darkness just under the surface. It slid airward, a hooked fin, an oblong back, a sleek black head.
This is how Nikolai emerges from the fog. Blurred, then sharp all at once, muffling the greenhouse of its happy chatter at the emergence of his sleek black hair on his narrow white face.
His mouth curls into a smile without teeth. Gray eyes flit from one face to another, and when they land on me, they catch, unrecognizing.
I can’t breathe.
The eyes stay fixed a moment too long.
He looks at me, and I look back at him, and I wonder if he feels it the way I feel it. That there is something monumental about the other person.
He’ll be the first person I ever kill, and my eyes will be the last thing he ever sees.
Then the moment breaks. Gregor gets to his feet, offers a hand to help Nikolai. Natasha says something I can’t hear—because they’re too far away or because my ears are full of cotton? Nikolai joins them at the edge of the water.
He rests his hand on Natasha’s wrist, the bandage wrapped there. She waves him away—It’s fine, it’s fine. A lazy smirk tugs his mouth.
I hate him. I hate his lazy smirk. I hate the way he’s looking at Natasha.
“Are they friends?” I ask.
“Natasha and Nikolai?” Sofie says.
He looks so comfortable. Not like the leader of
a small nation. Just a seventeen-year-old boy with a girl too pretty for him at his side. The guards around him, taking Gregor’s cue, ease back into their own conversations. A few fiddle with their holsters, guns, but no one looks on edge. This is normal, I realize. Nikolai has no enemies in the palace; certainly none among this young cadre of guards.
Natasha smiles. It might be coy. It’s definitely nauseating.
“Yeah,” I say. “Do they know each other well?”
Sofie shrugs. “Two beautiful people living under the same roof? Yeah. They gravitate toward each other.”
I must look at her sharply, because she shakes her head.
“Not like that,” she says. “Nothing romantic or anything. I mean, up until now, he’s been engaged.” She pauses. “You were at the festival, right?”
I nod.
“So you heard about the marriage thing? That he’s going to marry another Kostrovian?”
“It’s a lie,” I say, almost definitely too loudly. I glance around. None of the guards are looking at us. “I understand why it’s not worth his time to marry the princess from Illaset, but why would he marry some random Kostrovian girl? He’d be better off waiting until the New World settles and marrying the daughter of whoever claims the most territory.”
“Maybe he needs an heir on the way sooner than that,” Sofie says.
I blink. She’s right. What better way to cement his rule than to have an heir?
“I could maybe see Nikolai marrying a girl without a title, though,” Sofie says. “He’s not as pretentious as you’d think.” She glances at the nearest pair of guards, then lowers her head to mine. “Okay, he is. But I feel bad for him. Even though my father is an ass, at least he’s family. Nikolai has no one.”
“Oh?”
“Parents dead of cholera,” she says, nodding at Nikolai, “sister exiled.”
“Sister,” I say.
“There’s a wild story for you,” Sofie says.
“Tell it, please.” Or I will burst into flames.
“Well,” Sofie says conspiratorially, “the Kostrovian throne always goes to the eldest son, so Cassia wouldn’t have ever ruled while Nikolai was alive. That’s his sister’s name, by the way. Cassia.”
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 9
