Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

  As we climb the narrow stairs, Sofie whispers, “Don’t goad Iskra.”

  “It’s the kid’s fault,” I say, probably louder than I need to. “At least I didn’t shatter any bones when I fell.”

  Sofie grabs my arm and drags me the final few steps to Pippa’s door.

  “Oh!” Pippa says when Katla knocks. Her smile is the brightest thing in this house.

  During those sticky tavern table conversations about which of us is prettiest, people—mostly men—seem to run in circles until they decide the answer is probably Pippa. I’m too tall; Katla too small; Sofie too plain; Ness too made-up; Gretta too sour. And then there’s Pippa, of short but not too short stature, thin but not too thin build, skilled at making cosmetics look natural, and naturally beautiful underneath it, with bronze-colored skin and perfect teeth. Pippa is palatable to everyone.

  I know this because people—mostly men—feel compelled to tell me the conclusions of these conversations when they see me on the streets. And how do they expect me to respond? Thank you—I’ll strive to hunch so that I cut a less intimidating figure.

  Pippa ushers us inside a room too small for five. The room is dominated by a cot. An atlas rests against the pillows.

  “Did you steal that from the palace?” I ask.

  “No,” Pippa says.

  Sofie tugs at one of Pippa’s long braids. “But?”

  Pippa smiles. “But Gregor might have.”

  Sofie is bursting with questions and Pippa answers them all cheerily, but my eyes keep going back to that atlas. What was Pippa doing before we showed up? Flipping the pages, wondering if she’d survive on Illaset, or Cordova, or Skarat? It reminds me of my mother with Tamm’s Fables. Dreaming of a world behind seven mountains and beyond seven seas.

  I press my palms to my thighs to dry the sweat.

  This isn’t your bedroom. This isn’t your life.

  “Have you managed to find a job yet?” Sofie asks.

  Pippa smiles too brightly. “I have some leads.”

  “Won’t one of the youth flyer studios hire you?” Ness says.

  “They’ve been struggling to get enough girls to pay for lessons what with everything going on,” Pippa says, “so they’re not really hiring new instructors.” A pause. “But I’d be nervous to take a fall with the baby, anyway, so it’s just as well.” Her hand lights on the gentle curve of her stomach. It’s just barely visible underneath her gray tunic.

  How long has she been pregnant? How long did she hide it from us?

  My stomach clenches, shunning the notion that life could grow inside me. Ever since my body decided I was an adult—a cold morning at age fourteen when I woke up with blood on my sheets—I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which I look down to discover my stomach is inflated like a balloon. Everyone around me is full of congratulations. They coo and touch my belly. And for the life of me, I can’t remember how my body got this way.

  While the other flyers share birth control herbs, tell each other of the pillowed words whispered by lovers, and grow into women in ways still foreign to me, I remain. When my stomach cramps and I feel blood in my underthings, relief washes over me. But I have no reason to be so afraid. I’ve never slept with a man. I’ve never even kissed one.

  Ness has Twain; Pippa has Gregor. Even Katla had a brief romance, with a noble boy from Roen who swept into Kostrov, took her heart, and swept out again. Gretta, I think, is too young and too famous as the Captain of the Guard’s daughter to have any romantic conquests. I’m not sure about Sofie, but I’ve never seen her stare at a man as lovingly as she stares at Pippa.

  Ness sets a hand on Pippa’s stomach. I flinch, but Pippa doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Oh, you’re going to be such a good mother,” Ness says. With fervor, she adds, “I can’t wait.”

  “I can!” Katla says. “No offense, Pip.”

  Pippa smiles. “None taken. “

  “I just think there’s something really lovely about it,” Ness says. “The idea of bringing a child into the New World. It’s like Kos says—‘a mother is a vessel for the tender cargo of humanity.’ I think that’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks, Ness,” Pippa says.

  “I think I’d like to have kids,” Sofie says. “Especially in the New World. They’d be part of a blank slate, you know? It’s a chance to make the world better than you found it.”

  “Exactly,” Ness says. “And Pippa, you’ll come with us, won’t you? On the fleet?” Ness looks at me. “You can bring Pippa, right?”

  I feel nauseated. “I hope so.”

  “Why is Natasha bringing me on the fleet?” Pippa says.

  “She’s going to be queen,” Ness says, so matter-of-fact. “And she’ll protect all of us.”

  “That’s lovely,” Pippa says, her voice light and level. When she looks at me, I know she doesn’t buy it. Pippa knows well enough—maybe better than any of us still sheltered by the palace—that anything that sounds too good to be true probably is.

  Sofie gathers Pippa’s hands up in her own. “How is Gregor?” she asks. “He’s been to see you?”

  “Nearly every day,” Pippa says.

  “And has he proposed?” Ness says.

  Pippa laughs. “Nearly every day.”

  Ness squeals. Katla winces.

  “You should say yes,” Sofie says. She’s looking at Pippa seriously, her brows drawn, her jaw tight like she’s trying to keep herself steady. “He wants to put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Say yes.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Pippa says. “Gregor is one of Nikolai’s favorite guards.”

  There’s a long silence. I’m the first to realize what she means.

  “Ah,” I say. “The fleet.”

  Pippa nods.

  Ness frowns. “What about the fleet?”

  “With hundreds of guards to choose from for the royal fleet,” Pippa says, “why would Nikolai choose a guard who needed to bring a wife and child with him?” A pause. “Just in case Natasha can’t add me to the roster,” she adds.

  Outside, water drip, drip, drips off the corner of the roof.

  “You know,” Sofie says, “it’s pretty shitty of you to be that self-sacrificing.”

  Pippa smiles tightly. “I love him too much.”

  Drip, drip, drip.

  There’s a buzzing in my head. Filling my ears. I press my back against Pippa’s creaky wall.

  A child to care for. A suitor to worry about.

  Pippa doesn’t stand a chance.

  I press a hand to my stomach. Empty, empty, empty. Black spots dance in my vision; I don’t know when I started holding my breath.

  Why would you choose to love someone when this is what it does to you?

  24

  ELLA

  I wait in the flyer bedroom until all the other girls have gone to visit Pippa. I’ve never been alone in this room before, and now that I am, every nightstand brims with possibility.

  I glance at the door and swallow the bubble of guilt. I rifle carefully and quickly. I’m not sure what I’m looking to find, so I don’t spend longer than a few moments in each girl’s belongings. Sofie: a few books; a hidden stash of hazelnuts. Gretta: a silky baby blanket, folded into a small square and tucked out of sight. Ness: a well-annotated copy of Captain’s Log. Katla: a bundle of incense and a leather-bound book, singed around the edges, like someone considered burning it. When I open its brittle spine, I frown at the jumbled letters inside. I can read Kostrovian nearly as well as I can read Terrazzan, but this looks like Kostrovian untidily mixed with something else. There are letters whose sounds I don’t know and words I can’t translate.

  “Kostrov was one of the longest holdouts against the Sacred Breath,” Cassia once told me. “Before they came, our land was called Maapinn. Then the crusaders from Grunholt showed up and ba
stardized our language, our culture, our beliefs. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.”

  “Oh, hush,” Maret had told her. “Without the Sacred Breath, you wouldn’t be a royal.”

  “Except that our however-many-greats-grandfather was the leader of a powerful clan,” Cassia answered. “So we would’ve been basically royals.”

  “You expect me to believe,” Maret said, “that you would have settled for basically royal?”

  My fingers skim the words of Katla’s book. Is this Maapinnen? A prayer book, maybe?

  I flip the page. A clump of folded letters falls out and lands at my feet. I peek at them just long enough to see that they’re from someone named Henri and all dated from two years ago.

  I shove them back into the book. Maret won’t care about any of this.

  Adelaida’s room might have something useful, but when I put my ear to her door, I hear her humming softly to herself.

  I hurry into the heart of the palace.

  The first person I see is a maid with a pile of tablecloths so tall, she balances them under her chin. I step to the side to make myself unobtrusive, but she does the same. She attempts a curtsy, and when she doesn’t drop a single cloth, I consider applauding.

  “After you, Miss Neves. Many breaths.”

  I don’t know what part of this interaction to be most confounded by. For starters, I have never in my life been curtsied at. More horrifying, this is a maid I’ve never even noticed who knows my name. And while I don’t particularly care if the maids gossip about me, what if the guards do the same? I haven’t seen any sign of the men Nikolai sent to assassinate Cassia, but that doesn’t mean they’re not somewhere in the palace.

  I walk a little faster. Soon, I find myself passing an elegantly carved wooden door, and I press my ear to it. No sound filters out.

  I open it. The room is some sort of salon, with a wall filled with several life-size portraits. My eyes flit past one, two, three, and the fourth buckles my knees.

  Princess Cassia Aleksandra, the nameplate reads. Seas, why didn’t Nikolai take down her portrait?

  She smirks at me from her frame. Did I really doubt she was as beautiful as I remembered? She was more.

  “Ella, right?” I feel the roughness of hands on my shoulder, turning me. I blink at a face full of freckles, crooked nose, thinnest stubble. It’s jarring after so much Cassia, like the sudden dark after blowing out a candle. Gregor. I recognize him from the hot pools.

  “Look, you shouldn’t be in here.” He glances around. “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t hear his footsteps. Cassia’s portrait plugged my ears with wax.

  Another voice, male, sounds around the corridor’s corner.

  “Yeah, one second,” Gregor calls back. He pulls me into the hall and shuts the door behind me. Softly, he says, “Are you lost or something? The flyer hall is in the east wing.”

  I force myself to swallow. “I . . . Yes. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Just—”

  Another guard appears around the corner. I think I saw him at the hot pools too. He gives us a funny look, and I step away from Gregor.

  “Thanks for the directions,” I say. “Many breaths.”

  I hurry away before they can ask me anything else.

  I’m still halfway in a daze when I pass a set of windowed double doors. I loop back and open them.

  Shelves of books and books and books line the room in long rows. Through the windows, the Stone Garden stands stoic under a gray sky.

  When Cassia told me about the library, I imagined thirty, forty books. That was as many as I could hold in my head at once. But there are thousands. One shelf is just copy after copy of Captain’s Log, each one a different edition, a new translation, a glossier binding.

  After a sweep of all the aisles, I conclude there’s next to no fiction among all these books. It’s a scandal.

  I wish I could talk to Maret. What does she hope I’ll find? Nikolai’s personal diary?

  At the far edge of the library, a haphazard assortment of texts sits on the shelves facing the fireplace. These shelves aren’t as dusty as the others.

  I glance at the hearth. The chairs. Perhaps these are the relevant books. The recently read.

  My hands fly over their spines, fueled by the fear of Maret’s disappointment. Two weeks in the palace, and you haven’t discovered anything? No new information about the state of things? Nothing to help you kill Nikolai?

  But what I find is, distressingly, exactly what one might imagine finding on a royal library’s shelves. Books proclaiming the nation’s naval might. A botanical encyclopedia with a green cover of native Kostrovian plants. In a history of the Royal Flyers, I read:

  Maapinn was ruled by warring clans before the Sacred Breath’s intervention. Scouts—usually agile young women—would climb to the highest branches of the bog oak trees to see over the thick mist that shrouded the island. Visitors often exclaimed, upon seeing the girls in their swaying branches, that it looked like they were flying. When members of the Sacred Breath from Grunholt converted Maapinn and established a clan leader as king of Kostrov, they generously agreed that girls of such beauty and grace deserved a place in the new regime. In the early years of the Royal Flyers, the group performed dances in a ring of oaks in the gardens of the palace. As the group evolved, the trees were replaced by wooden beams and fabric silks. The emblematic oak trees have since died, but the tradition of flyers lives on.

  “What are you doing?”

  I slam the book shut.

  Gretta stands in the doorway. She tilts her head to the side. Her eyes are narrowed.

  I shove the book back on the shelf. “Reading about the flyers.”

  “We’re not supposed to be in here without special permission,” she says.

  “But you’re in here.”

  She points at her feet. “I’m in the doorway. It doesn’t count. Besides, my father is Captain of the Guard.” She waves her hand like she’s scooping air toward her in the universal gesture of get over here.

  “I thought all the other flyers were off seeing Pippa,” I say.

  “Why should it matter whether or not all of us left the palace?”

  When I stop opposite Gretta, I realize for the first time that she’s well taller than me. She’s terribly lean, save a youthful roundness to her face that the other flyers have already lost.

  “I didn’t realize we weren’t meant to be in here,” I say. “That’s all.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you deflect questions about yourself,” she says. “You’re obviously hiding things.”

  My wrist burns. “Hiding things? What would I be hiding?”

  “For starters, you’re not Kostrovian,” Gretta says. “You have an accent.”

  “My parents were Terrazzan,” I say. “I moved here as a little kid. I don’t see what difference it makes.”

  Gretta crosses her arms. Her eyes hold mine, searching. If there’s youth in the rounds of her face, the sharpness of her gaze more than makes up for it. “I was raised among palace guards,” she says. “I have very good instincts for when I’m being lied to.”

  My heart beats higher and higher in my chest until I can feel it thudding against my throat. “Well, my congratulations to you and your keen investigatory eye. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve just been informed I’m trespassing.” I turn myself sideways to slide past her.

  I feel her eyes following me as I hurry down the hall.

  Well. I finally have news for Maret:

  I’m being watched.

  25

  NATASHA

  We’re a more subdued party than we were on the way out. Somehow, I end up in the front of the group, and I take us the long way, past the rye fields and the distant boglands. Grass of amber and emerald, carved out by pools that reflect the low sky. The tr
ees are spindly, fewer and farther between with each passing year.

  Where else on this world can you stand on the edge of a stone street, city-loud with voices and industry, while staring across a canal and onto a land that looks so viciously wild? New Sundstad must be one of the most beautiful places person and ocean ever co-conspired to create. I wish the sea wouldn’t take it back again.

  When I stop, the flyers stop with me.

  “Have you ever seen a peat harvester wander off the path like that?” I say. Someone lopes across the boglands, forgoing the elevated wooden paths. The shape resolves itself into a man, hooded, with friends behind him. I count six in all.

  Everyone looks at Katla for the definitive verdict.

  “Never,” she says.

  “Look at the two in the back,” Sofie says. “They’re carrying something.”

  I squint and realize she’s right. The two hooded figures trailing the small pack have a long rectangle of shadow—a crate, I think—hoisted between them.

  Katla frowns. “Smugglers, maybe? Packing out food and supplies before the royal fleet can take them?”

  Ness looks aghast. “That’s illegal.”

  “Illegal?” Katla says. “In that case, it must be something else. Maybe they’re going to a birthday party.”

  “It looks like they’re headed north too,” I say. “We’ll see them when we get to the Wharf District.”

  But by the time we’ve reached the end of the Division Canal and ocean opens in front of us, the men are gone. It’s starting to mist and the sun is fading to a memory, so we hurry the rest of the way to the Gray Palace, the men and their crate forgotten.

  When the palace rises into view, it seems only fitting that the surrounding sky has gone to black. The windows burn gold, rejecting the night. The palace is a beacon in the darkness.

  Since I was nine, this is always what it has been. Kostrov: dark, wild, dangerous. The Gray Palace: life.

  Inside, the other girls drift back to their room. I knock on Adelaida’s door.