And I told her about my brothers. I let myself feel—I don’t know what. Softer. Like the person I used to be. But Natasha isn’t my friend. She isn’t my anything. She’s part of the palace. Part of the court I’m going to destroy.
I feel sick.
When she rejoins us by the silks, her cheeks are dancing-pink.
Katla crosses her arms. “We just had an illuminating conversation with Sylvia Kanerva.”
Natasha blinks. “What?”
“Sylvia said there was no way you’d be able to bring us on the fleet, whether or not you were queen. Know anything about that?”
I wait for her to refute it.
She doesn’t.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Katla says.
Ness rocks back and forth on her toes, scanning the hall, face flushing. A few partygoers turned to watch us at the sound of Katla’s voice. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”
“Look,” Natasha says, “yes, okay, Adelaida mentioned that she wasn’t entirely certain how flexible the roster for the royal fleet was, but I know I could make it work if I was queen. I didn’t think it was worth worrying you all for no reason.”
“No reason!” Katla says. “What about planning for our death? That’s a good reason.”
“Hey,” Natasha says, “I don’t see you doing anything to save all of us.”
“We’re not saying you’re not trying hard enough,” Sofie says. “We’re just saying that you have to be honest with us.”
“You promised me,” Katla says, voice low and cold. “You promised.”
As Natasha struggles to come up with some excuse, I wish more than anything that I could leave this room, with the smell of spilled alcohol and overripe perfume, with Andrei and Nikolai and Natasha.
Then I realize that I can.
I turn my back and I walk away.
A pair of older guards push open the doors for me without question.
In the sudden stillness of the hallway, my ears ring. Soon, footsteps echo behind me. I turn to see Sofie and Katla.
“You know what really gets me?” Katla says. “It’s not the first time she lied about this. She hid the truth from us so we would perform better during the crane season festival, and she swore she wouldn’t do it again.”
In the distance, the music of another song begins. I wonder if the other girls are dancing to it. I wonder if Nikolai’s hand is on Natasha’s hip. I glance over my shoulder without meaning to. Katla watches me do it.
“If you’re waiting for the others to follow us,” she says, “they won’t.”
“I wasn’t,” I say.
Unconvinced, Katla continues. “Gretta doesn’t care, of course. Her father is the Captain of the Guard—in case you forgot since she last mentioned it—so she’ll be on the fleet no matter what happens with the flyers. And Ness, you know she’ll be blindly optimistic about things turning out well. Her family has money, and she’s devout besides. No one who loves the Sacred Breath as much as she does could really believe the Flood will kill her. And then there’s Natasha, off flirting with Nikolai, off trying to be the queen, which just leaves the three of us.” She frowns at me. “Unless you’re secretly engaged to a noble.”
I force a laugh. “No engagements.”
Katla nods with grim satisfaction.
“Look,” Sofie says, “I’m mad at her too. But she is trying.”
“I’m tired of being lied to,” Katla says.
“She’s your friend,” Sofie says. “Let her explain.”
Katla ignores this. Instead of responding to Sofie, she turns to me. “We never,” she says, bitter-vicious, “betray another flyer.”
I’m about to agree, to let the fury of her voice leak into my own. But then I remember that I’m not a real flyer. I’m an assassin, and my betrayal will rock the Gray Palace more than Natasha ever could. So instead, I say, “People do strange things to survive.”
It’s not as though I have just lost a place on the royal fleet. I was always going to be dead by then anyway.
When we get back to the flyer wing of the palace, Katla and Sofie go to our bedroom. I make an excuse about not being tired, even though I’m tired to my bones. I go to the studio and stare at the silks. I can’t find the energy to climb.
I lie down beneath them, the way I did in Maret’s apartment at the end of a day of practice that beat me to dust. When I breathe, the silks swirl; if they’re the surface of the sea, I’m the undercurrent.
I imagine Cassia beside me. I imagine her thumb running down the length of my jaw. Her hands never trembled against my skin; like everything else she did, she touched me with confidence.
“You wouldn’t have done it,” I ask in Terrazzan, “would you? Lied about who was going on the fleet?” The sound of my own voice in my own language is supple, a blanket wrapped around me by a mother’s hands.
Her thumb stops at my chin. “I would have ruled this country as Nikolai never could,” she says, her Terrazzan halting and accented. “I would have ripped out the corruption by the roots.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to seal the tears at the corners.
Even in my imagination, I can’t quite believe her. She never would’ve answered me in Terrazzan. She would never choose to stumble over her words when, in another tongue, she could speak like a royal.
The rain falls lightly on the roof. The music from the hall is distant but audible, even from here. Outside, I can make out the voices of fashionably late partygoers. And then, footsteps, quick and scratchy, too soft to be human feet.
A paw bats my cheek.
I open one eye.
Kaspar, Adelaida’s monstrously fluffy cat, leans over me. He gives my face another pat, as if to make sure I’m not dead. I’m not fooled into assigning empathy to the creature. He probably just wants to know whether or not he can eat me.
“Go away, cat,” I say, again in Terrazzan, because it’s all the same to him.
He blinks his big golden eyes.
“Why have you decided I would make a good friend? I’m very mean. Really.”
I don’t mind Kaspar’s favoritism quite so much when the other flyers are around. I think it makes me seem more trustworthy. But there’s no one here, no one to watch Kaspar pestering me.
I sit up.
There’s no one to watch me. There’s no place I’m meant to be right now.
Ten minutes later, I’m wrapped in a long cloak, hurrying through the night-washed streets to Eel Shore. When I reach Maret’s, I’m shivering. My full-suit never dried after our performance and my cloak is soaked through with drizzle.
Maret opens the door. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun. Her eyes are small with sleep for only a moment. When she sees it’s me, she inhales sharply.
“Well, it took you long enough!” she says, and she tugs me into the apartment.
Tears sting my eyes for the second time in too few hours.
I think I started to believe the flyers were something like family, and I was a fool. I let myself get caught up in the rehearsals and the dinners at the long kitchen table and the talking of the future, as if it existed.
“Come here, darling girl.” Maret holds my hands and sits me on the sofa beside her. “I had begun to think you were dead in a dungeon.”
“I’m sorry.” My throat is scraped raw. “They’ve kept me busy.”
“Tell me everything.”
Her smile is so bright. So terribly Cassia.
I tell Maret everything about the last month. About the meeting with Nikolai and the guards in the hot pools. About the way Nikolai stared from his balcony, haughty, and about spotting Andrei. The revelation about the flyers and the fleet. If my voice catches on the name Natasha, Maret doesn’t seem to notice.
“Interesting,” Maret says. “Do you think the flyers will
be disbanded and dismissed from the palace?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
Maret smooths my hair. A flyaway strand clings to my sticky eyelashes. “You’re upset, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Ella.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just, seeing the palace like that. Wasting food and time. All these old men scheming and faking politeness.” I look at my lap. “I imagined killing him tonight. When he was dancing with the principal flyer. I had a clear view of his back. And I imagined where I would put the knife.”
But that’s not the end of what I imagined. I also imagined what would happen after. I’ve never thought much about the after. I kill Nikolai; nameless guards kill me. But they’re not nameless anymore. Now it’s more like: I kill Nikolai. Ness screams. Gregor rushes forward. Katla shouts. Twain raises a gun. Natasha looks at me, horrified, lips parted—
You wanted to know me, I’d say. Well, now you do.
Maret laughs. “Now, that sounds like the Ella I know.” A pause. “So the principal flyer wants to be queen . . . Interesting. On the one hand, it could draw undue attention to you. On the other hand, it could give you a better chance to get close to Nikolai yourself.” Maret drums her fingers on the arm of the sofa. “What do you think of her? This Natasha girl?”
I try to swallow the knot in my throat. “I hardly know her at all.”
31
NATASHA
A kind director would let us rest the day after the ball. But we have Adelaida instead, so this morning, we gather in the studio at sunrise.
I look around at the flyers. They all look as bleary as I feel. Katla still won’t meet my gaze. Any triumph from my conversation with Nikolai last night is snuffed by her anger.
“You can all stop looking so sour,” Adelaida says. “Your flight went well. No need to let little squabbles ruin that.”
“I don’t see why we should keep rehearsing,” Katla says. “It sounds like there’s no hope we end up on the fleet. Zero. As far as I’m concerned, the palace doesn’t care what happens to us.”
I’m surprised when Ella speaks. “We should keep rehearsing,” she says, her voice soft and level, “because there’s always a chance. Right? Who knows what the final roster for the fleet will look like? Maybe, by the time the Flood comes, it won’t just be up to Nikolai.”
I’m not sure what she could mean by this—if she truly believes that the queen would have such power—but it has Sofie nodding, at least.
“It’s a fair point,” Sofie says. “We’re not guaranteed spots on the fleet if we stay, but we’re definitely not going on the fleet if we leave.”
Ness presses her fingers to her lips. “Why does it seem like you’ve all resigned yourself to die?”
“Because we are going to die,” Katla says. “How do you know you’re not? There are plenty of Heather Hill girls out there with rich fathers and only so many spots. Only so much food.”
I feel a flash of hot anger. Usually, I’m on the same side of Katla’s moods. But at the look on Ness’s face—like a dog just kicked—I feel the last of my patience dissolve.
“Stop it.” I step between the two of them. Katla’s eyes are fierce. “Your fight is with me and Adelaida. Would you leave Ness out of it, just this once?”
After a long moment, Katla leans around me. “I’m sorry, Ness. We’ll all be very happy for you when you sail off into the sunset.” To me, voice low, she says, “But you should’ve known better.”
My throat is tight. Katla’s never looked at me so scathingly before.
“I should go back to my family today,” Katla says. “And I should stay there.”
“You could,” says Ella, her eyes trained on Katla. “But that would only spite us. And it wouldn’t help your family at all.”
Katla’s jaw is fixed, proud.
“Go be with your family today, then,” Adelaida says. “Come back tomorrow when you’re ready to fly.”
Katla gathers her cloak and disappears out the door.
* * *
~~~
After the ball, I don’t see Nikolai again for a week.
The days following the ball are my loneliest since I came to the palace. When I walk into the kitchen for dinner and find the other girls already there, they don’t shift their seats to make room for me. When I arrive mid-conversation, no one bothers to catch me up on what’s been said. When someone is struggling with a tricky element, they always seem to ask someone else for help before they ask me.
This is what I asked for, isn’t it? I thought I could cloak myself in selfishness and—what? Everyone would understand?
So after dinner each night, instead of lingering in the kitchen or the studio, I head for the library. If the guards find me here, I could get in trouble, but I’m willing to risk it. In my bedroom, I get distracted by every set of footsteps passing my door. In the quiet of the library, I can’t fool myself into thinking someone is coming to forgive me.
I light a fire in the hearth. It bathes the austere room in a warm, trembling glow.
I curl in the armchair in front of the fire and find where I left off in Captain’s Log. The more of it I read, the more I regret not reading it sooner; it feels like being taught a language I’ve heard all my life but never understood.
The door opens behind me. I look up.
“Oh,” Nikolai says. “No, no, don’t stand up. It’s fine.”
He’s dressed all in black save the gold of his crown. When he crosses the library toward me, a pair of guards stay by the doors.
“Sorry for interrupting you,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“No,” I say. “No, please. Sit. If you want.”
He stops by my chair. “What are you reading?”
I hold up Captain’s Log, feeling sheepish. “I’ve never actually read it before.”
He frowns at my page. “Oh, the fertile vessels. Good.”
Kos calls women vessels. That’s what women are in the New World. He always adorns the word: lustrous vessel or fertile vessel or precious vessel, but there’s no adjective complimentary enough to make me wish a man would compare me to a boat.
“Do you think he called women fertile vessels to their faces?”
Nikolai laughs lightly. “So you’re at the part where Kos finds Grunholt?”
I nod. The first third of Captain’s Log is about the storms during the Harbinger Year. The next third is about the year of the Flood, sailing with his men and drawing ships into his fleet as they run across other survivors on the open ocean. The last section follows Kos as he makes landfall on the island that became Grunholt.
“They’re building Sundstad now,” I say.
“I like that part,” Nikolai says. He sinks into the chair across from mine. “It seems fulfilling. Building a city from the ground up. He talks about being so exhausted all the time, but—falling into bed, tired from a hard day’s work? That sounds nice.”
Nikolai does look tired. His eyes are underlined in purple.
“The women don’t seem to do much city-building,” I say. “Mostly child-building.”
Nikolai’s lips turn up at the corners. “Ah. Right. The fertile vessels have to stay home to protect their child-bearing abilities.”
“‘She who protects her body protects humanity,’” I say, running my finger across the sentence. I curl into a tighter ball in the chair, my stomach pressed to my thighs. I’m too conscious of my hips watching me, my abdomen staring back at me, this body I inhabit. If I make it to the New World, is that what they’ll expect of me? My heart flutters. I shift under the weight of Nikolai’s gaze.
“You know what I wonder?” Nikolai says.
“What?”
“How does Kos know how many Floods there were before his?”
I frown. In Captain’s Log, Kos says his Flood is the fif
th one the world has ever faced. But Kos never explains how he knows this. Like so much else in Captain’s Log, it’s so ingrained in our culture that we accept it.
I wish I could see the history of the world written out on a long scroll. I wish I could hear tales of every great ruler and every long-dead beast. But that’s one of the great cruelties of the Floods. We don’t only lose land and lives. We lose records, wisdom, stories, the history of our kind.
And how we cling to Captain’s Log. It’s our lifeboat in the fog of unknown past.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe you should ask Gospodin.”
Nikolai purses his lips. “Maybe you should ask him.”
“I—what?”
“Right,” Nikolai says. “Well, I better leave you to your reading.”
“No, wait!”
He pauses halfway out of his chair and raises his eyebrows at me.
I clear my throat. “I, um . . . Do you come to the library often?”
Nikolai stands up all the way. “Not really. This was always Cassia’s domain.” His eyes flit across the shelves.
“Do you hear from her?” I’m not sure what the protocol is on writing letters from exile.
Nikolai doesn’t meet my gaze. “No.”
He turns swiftly to the door.
I flail for something useful to say. All I come up with is: “So, I’ll see you around the palace?”
He glances back over his shoulder. My cheeks are hot. “I’ll send for you. Maybe we can chat when it’s not so late.”
Then he’s gone.
My heart keeps hammering for a long time. It’s not a pleasant sort of heartbeat. It’s panic. Desperation.
I smooth the pages of Captain’s Log again. Maybe, if I stay a few more minutes, Nikolai will come back and I can make slightly less a fool of myself.
He doesn’t come back. I finish the book. I tuck it under my arm and head back through the palace. My feet, despite better judgment, stop in front of the flyers’ door. I give it a long stare.
Then I keep walking.
I lie in bed for a long time, straining for the sounds on the other side of my wall. Sofie snoring. Ness singing. Ella laughing, sharp, like she’s surprised to have made the noise. I hear nothing. The only thing to keep me company is the sound of my own breathing.
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 16
