Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

  “Come in,” she says.

  She’s at her desk flipping through letters. A lantern burns beside her, casting her in an uneven glow. I shut the door behind me.

  “I know you said there wasn’t room for the other flyers and provisions on the fleet,” I say.

  She looks up.

  “But if I’m queen,” I say, “there must be a chance I can change the councilors’ minds. Even if it’s just a tiny chance. There must at least be a tiny chance, right?”

  Adelaida surveys me. “You don’t really want to know the answer to that.”

  I let out a breath, slowly. No. I don’t. I want to keep believing I can fix this for them. For all of us.

  And a terrible part of me wonders—even if only one of us will survive, isn’t that better than no one?

  “But if Nikolai really cared for me,” I say, “and I told him how important it was to me—”

  “You’re right,” she says, placating. “I can’t be sure Nikolai will pick you. I can’t be sure you’ll be able to call me your personal advisor and get me a spot on the fleet. I can’t be sure about the girls. But Natasha—you’re my best shot.”

  My throat is dry.

  “The ball is in two weeks,” Adelaida says. “All the girls who think they have a chance will show up. You’ll perform, and Nikolai will want to talk to you, and you’ll flirt, and you’ll make sure he knows that you are a better match for him than the shiniest heiress in all of Heather Hill. I asked Gospodin about you, by the way. If he could imagine that Nikolai marrying a flyer would create the kind of compelling narrative they’re after.”

  “And?” I say.

  “He hoped I was talking about Ness,” she says.

  “Ness loves Twain.”

  “I know. But Ness also loves the Sacred Breath. And Gospodin. So take a hint.” She pulls open the top drawer of her desk and produces a leather-bound book.

  “What’s that?”

  “You really are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you? Take it.”

  It’s heavier than it looks. The pages are thin and many. When I flip open the cover, I see: On the day the Flood pulled the last land asunder, I took to my ship with a crew of fifteen men.

  “You’re giving me Captain’s Log?” I say.

  “Skim it,” Adelaida says. “At least pretend that you’re a good daughter of the Sacred Breath. If you want to be queen, you’ll need to have an intelligent conversation about these things with Gospodin.”

  I tuck the book under my arm. “Okay.”

  “Oh,” she says, “and give me my cloak back. Entitled little thief.”

  In my room, I lay Captain’s Log open on my quilt. Up to this point, I’ve carefully kept my attitude about the Sacred Breath noncommittal. When we’re made to go to holiday services at Our Lady of Tidal Sorrows, I pretend to listen while mapping out choreography in my head.

  I smooth the pages and begin to read. I’m surprised to find that questions of belief soon go from my head. Kos’s voice is brash and bold. He never once seems to consider that he’s anything less than divinely chosen to survive the Floods, and I begin to understand the magnetism of his certainty. He writes of whales with flippers longer than a man is tall. There are wonders: the night sea shimmering white and palest blue, like someone spilled milk in the waves. There are horrors: the shape of a ship on the horizon, clarifying through the fog to reveal the only crew: a man swinging from a noose on the mast.

  The tales are marvelous and grotesque in equal measure, and they make me feel a curious sense of the fantastical that I’ve only before ever felt when reading Tamm’s Fables. Is it a crime to compare the two? Does the comparing make Captain’s Log more fictional or Tamm’s Fables more real?

  I read until my room gets cold and I have to bury myself under blankets, only my hands and eyes peeking out, to stay warm. I’m about to tuck the book away for the night when I catch a word halfway down the next page.

  Sirens.

  I hold a breath in my cheeks and read on.

  After I tended my sails and my journal, I took a gaze through my telescope. Lo! A kelp raft, and on it, a naked woman. A stranded soul? As I neared, I saw this was no ordinary woman. She was a face of extraordinary beauty, but with a tail made for a fish. My men rushed to join me. All exclaimed of her comeliness. Swept up in a current of curiosity and infatuation, I trimmed my sails to reach her.

  She spotted me when I was but a hundred yards away. From her mouth came a song as sensual as I have ever heard. It rang like freshwater on a salt-parched sea. On her call arose two other women. Their heads broke the surface of the water. They looked at me inquisitively, then joined their sister’s magnetic song.

  I found myself leaning so far over the rails of my ship that I thought I might fall into the sea. When my men joined in, we threatened to capsize the ship. The fish-women laughed coyly, and I thought them as infatuated with me as I with them.

  But as I neared, I noticed a blackness in their eyes. Where there should have been white was an abyss of dark. Their irises were not round, but long and slitted like seeds. I heard a voice, masculine in tone and as if from outside of me, thunder: Antinous! Do not allow sirens to tempt you. Your wife awaits in the first dry year.

  This voice broke the spell of their song. I recoiled violently from these siren women. At my disgust, they bared ugly, needled teeth.

  I adjusted my sails at once. My men protested, but I called directions over the sirens’ angry songs. By the time I left the women on their raft, I no longer saw the beauty with which they had tricked me. They were no more beautiful than a storm-tossed sea.

  Not for the first time on my voyage, the voice—which I had come to think of as a voice of all humanity, a collective of human experience with more wisdom than any one man could amass during his life—had saved me. I now saw the sirens for what they were: temptresses. What would they have done had I not come to my senses? Stripped my skin with their sharp teeth and worn my bones for crowns? The sea maidens delighted in beguiling. I swore to never trust such a woman.

  We sailed on.

  Slowly, I close the book and set it upon my nightstand. I knew that the passage on sirens had something of this shape. But I didn’t expect it to settle into my stomach the way it has, with a chill my blankets can’t fend off.

  Nowadays, when the Sacred Breath accuses someone of being a siren, they don’t mean to call her a fish-woman with seedy eyes and needle teeth, but they mean to call her a monster just the same. Temptresses, Kos wrote, for singing and looking beautiful and having no interest in men. They are given the burden for tempting; Kos takes no blame for being tempted.

  I think of Ella, with her quick mind and sharp tongue and reluctant smile. With her eyes as dark and prettily lashed as a deer’s. With the line of her shoulders, her arms, strong and steady as she pulls herself into the silks.

  If Kos’s sirens were real, and not just some sea-induced hallucination, I should like to think they didn’t even notice him sailing by. Perhaps they were just singing to each other. Perhaps they were just living their lives.

  Twelve hundred years have passed since Kos wrote these lines, and yet, so little has changed. Perhaps powerful men will always want to own women. Perhaps powerful men will always want women to be beauty, meant for their own consumption.

  As I lie in bed, waiting for sleep, I raise a hand to my lips. With the tip of my finger, I skim the surface of my teeth, imagining they are needles.

  26

  ELLA

  As the royal ball barrels toward us, I begin to panic. Madam Adelaida, the dear, reminds me each day that my flying is very bad indeed, and however nervous I am, it’s probably not nervous enough. A week passes after Gretta corners me in the library. I’m hoping Natasha will feel generous again and give me a day off, but I’m out of luck. Maret’s going to be furious. It’s coming up on a month since Storm Five str
uck; some of the servants are whispering predictions about the onset of Storm Four. Storm Four’s meant to be the “Panic of the Livestock,” and though I don’t know exactly what it’s going to entail, I have a feeling my parents, if they were still tending our farm, wouldn’t be looking forward to it.

  Three nights before the ball, Natasha stands up from her place at the long kitchen table and says, “Ella? We’ve more work to do.”

  “But René hasn’t brought out dessert yet,” I say. The kitchen already smells of sweet cardamom bread soup.

  “And yet, the world continues to spin,” Natasha says. “Come on.”

  As we leave, Sofie calls after us, “I’ll save you some, if there’s any left.”

  The studio is hushed. The kitchen is too far away to hear even muffled voices. The loudest thing is Natasha’s gentle breathing.

  I stop at the silks that have become my own. She takes the ones beside me.

  When we climb, I watch her, copying her movements, imagining our limbs are connected by a puppeteer’s long strings. She moves; I move. She hooks her leg in the silks, and I do the same. When she hangs her head back, her ponytail dangles, a flame erupted from the tip of a match. The way she moves is stunning. To acknowledge this, I have to call it envy. If I call it anything else, it makes me feel like I’m betraying Cassia.

  There’s one move that I hate with a special passion, and not because it’s more difficult than the others. Natasha keeps her legs pressed tightly together as she spins herself in the fabric. Soon, the silks are wound around her ankles, knees, hips, like a glossy tail.

  The siren lift, they call it.

  Natasha watches me as I fuse my legs into a tail of my own.

  There’s a siren lift in our upcoming performance, so I don’t think Natasha is doing this just to torment me. But still, when we hold the position, her eyes meet mine, and a flush creeps up her neck and into her cheeks.

  “Good,” she says. “That’s enough for tonight.”

  Natasha unravels quickly back to the floor. I stay in the air. The long strings between us snap one by one.

  “I’ll practice a little longer,” I say.

  She crosses her arms. She looks like that determined herding dog again. “You should sleep.”

  “I’m fine.” I don’t want the other girls to be awake when I go back to the bedroom.

  I wait for her to leave, but she doesn’t. She stands at the base of my silk, neck craned, watching me tangle and untangle myself.

  “You’re doing really well,” she says. “I know Adelaida can be harsh.”

  “She’s not so bad,” I say.

  “You’re unyielding,” she says. “It’s impressive.”

  If I’m unyielding, it’s only because I have no other options. If I lose my stubbornness, I might not be able to kill Nikolai, and without revenge, what’s left of me?

  “I’m not, really,” I say.

  “Then what are you?” she asks.

  I look down at her. “Sorry?”

  Natasha’s hands press against her thighs. Her eyes are streaked orange by the flickering lamplight. “You don’t talk to any of us. When we try to get to know you better, you just—quip. Evade. I don’t know anything about you.”

  “Does it matter?” I say.

  “It matters to me,” she says. There’s a pause. “Just tell me something. Anything.”

  I think of the flush on her freckled cheeks in that siren lift. Does she want to know the story of my tattoo? Or the part that came before? How it felt to weave my hands in Cassia’s hair under a beech as old as the land itself? Her lips, soft, hummingbird-light, grazing mine for the first, second, third time? The shiver of the wind, of the beech, of me?

  I’m silent for so long, I’m surprised Natasha doesn’t leave.

  I keep my voice soft so it’s less likely to break. “The last time I saw my brothers, they’d forgotten my birthday.” I don’t know why that’s what comes out. I don’t know why I’m telling her anything.

  Natasha lifts her chin. Ten feet apart, our eyes meet.

  “They were twins,” I say, tightening my grip on the silks, “so their birthday was a double celebration and easier to remember. But they were four years younger and we were playing a game and . . . and they forgot.”

  I’ve relived the game so many times now that I can’t remember if we invented it that day or played it all our lives. The game went like this: I was a big, scary badger who ate identical little boys for breakfast. Filip would say, No, you’re supposed to be a friendly badger, and Milo would whack my arm with a stick and say, Take that, badger, and then my mother would come laughing outside and say, Ella! I’ve run out of apples, and how am I to make your birthday pie? Off into town, quick as you can. Boys, go with her. But they couldn’t go with me because they were aghast at having forgotten. Filip said, But I meant to come up with a song for you, and Milo said, And I meant to kill a mouse for you, like the cats do, and so while I set off for town, and apples, they set off to make my birthday trove.

  “Were?” Natasha says. “They were twins?”

  Storm Ten came while I was gone.

  “They’re dead,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” Natasha says.

  “Don’t be,” I say. “Everyone has the same story these days. Waters rise; everyone drowns.”

  Again, even softer: “I’m sorry.”

  The only other person I’ve ever told about my brothers, about that birthday, was Cassia. Why did I start telling Natasha? She’s not my friend. And she’s certainly not Cassia.

  “I’d like to practice,” I say. “If you don’t mind. Alone.”

  “Of course,” she says. She lets herself out.

  By the time the door is closing, quietly, gently, in Natasha’s long-fingered hands, a tear has made its way to the tip of my nose. I lift a hand from the silks to dash it, furious, but I’m too late.

  It falls fifteen feet. I don’t see where it lands.

  27

  NATASHA

  I close the studio door and press my back to it. Why is it that I’m so desperate to ask her more? Your brothers—what were their names? How did they die? Did they have your eyes, gold in the middle and brown around the edges?

  Ella doesn’t want me to check on her. She doesn’t want me to know who she is.

  I stand by the door for a long time anyway, hoping she comes out. She doesn’t.

  * * *

  ~~~

  The next day, I wait for Ella to say something about that moment—that whatever—in the studio. Nothing. When another day passes without so much as a lingering glance, I get mad at myself for hoping. I should be focusing on the upcoming flight. Not Ella.

  I finally manage to make it to a Sacred Breath service. I flip through Captain’s Log every night before bed. I join the guards every time they gather for a mind-numbing card game. None of it makes a difference; I can’t seem to run into Nikolai again.

  The day of the ball arrives with the first frost. My window is bordered by the faintest white fur. Real snow won’t be far behind.

  I try to dress without ever leaving the safety of my quilt. On top of my rehearsal full-suit, I add my lumpy maroon sweater, two pairs of woolen socks, and mittens for good measure. I know I’ll have to take them off before I get on the silks, but they’re staying put until the last possible moment.

  When I tromp into the studio, Adelaida and Gretta are already there. Gretta stops working on her saltos to giggle at me.

  “I was cold,” I say.

  Adelaida’s eyes sweep me up and down. “You look like you’re on an expedition to Skarat.”

  “Or a little Sacred Breath orphan wearing donated clothes,” Gretta says.

  Adelaida smiles. “Or a farm girl gone to collect the turnips before they freeze.”

  I press my mittens to my cold, cold face. “G
retta, do fifteen pull-ups.”

  Gretta’s mouth falls into an angry O. “Adelaida started it.”

  “But I can’t punish Adelaida for being a bully,” I say.

  “Correct,” Adelaida says. “Gretta, do your pull-ups.”

  Gretta grumbles loudly as she descends to the ground and starts in on her punishment. I slide across the wooden floor on my thoroughly socked feet to join Adelaida by the mirrors.

  “Are you ready for tonight?” Adelaida asks.

  “I’m offended you would ask.”

  Adelaida considers me. “Fine. Are all your girls ready for tonight?”

  “You know,” I say, “it doesn’t seem fair that whenever they’ve done something bad, they’re mine, and whenever they’ve done well, they’re yours.”

  “Oh,” she says, “you’re feeling cheeky today. I’m sure that will go over swimmingly with the esteemed members of the court.”

  I ignore her and take the choreography notes out of her hands. One of the court sculptors was commissioned to build a long pool across the first floor of the Iron Hall for tonight. We’ll perform over the water. Partygoers can watch from below or on the balconies that run the hall’s second-story perimeter. It was Gospodin’s idea. According to Adelaida, he said he wanted to remind everyone about the beauty of water, that the ocean isn’t here to destroy but to purify and re-create. I imagine it’s easier to appreciate the beauty of water when you’re not counting down the days until it kills you.

  Nikolai’s birthday is racing toward us. Everyone at that ball will be thinking about how soon he’ll have to choose the next queen.

  We spend the morning reviewing final choreography. We’ve never performed over water before, but there’s no arguing it’ll be striking if it goes to plan. Adelaida created this routine just for the ball. When I first looked over the moves, I asked her, “So your plan to help me win over Nikolai is to give me a thousand solos?”

  “If my director gave me this many solos when I was principal,” Adelaida said, “I’d be queen right now.”