Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

“Ah,” I say. “Looks like it.”

  He reaches into his pocket. “Gospodin asked me to give you this.” He hands me a letter. A ship embosses the blue wax seal.

  I open it and scan Gospodin’s slanted, scribbling scrawl. It’s the handwriting of someone who doesn’t care how long it takes for anyone else to untangle it. “His penmanship is really something.”

  Nikolai laughs. “Squint and try your best.”

  Dear Miss Koskinen,

  I hope you find yourself well in the aftermath of Storm Four. The energy in the city is palpable as we await the arrival of the New World.

  Perhaps I was too short with you when I saw you at Our Lady of Tidal Sorrows. Over the past few days, the king has been emphatic about including you in our search for his new queen. If you will forgive my honesty, I admit that this is against my counsel. Nevertheless, the king’s powers are given by the sea, and I respect his authority.

  Perhaps the two of us should get to know each other better. I’m planning a tour of the city. I’d like you to join me. Should you agree, our first day will be next Sunday, eight o’clock in the morning. Meet me in front of Our Lady. Consider giving Captain’s Log another perusal. I recommend Book 3, Lines 121–144.

  My very best,

  Righteous Mariner Gabriel Gospodin

  I refold the letter along the seams. “A tour of the city?” I say. “Any idea what he means by that?”

  Nikolai coughs. “You know. Just spreading the teachings of the good brothers of the Sacred Breath. Telling people to stay calm. Smiling.”

  So, what? A propaganda tour?

  “There has to be a copy of Captain’s Log in here, right?” I ask.

  “A dozen editions in a dozen languages.”

  I scan the shelves until I find a copy in Kostrovian. Nikolai stands over my shoulder as I hunch with the book. I leaf through the pages until I find Book 3 and drag my fingers down the numbered lines.

  When it came time for our second harvest in the New World, we found our crops had spoiled. It was the work of a small insect, red-bodied and black-footed, that I named the crop louse. They bred prodigiously and flattened our fields. One farmer came to me and admitted he had seen such an insect moons ago, but did not squash it, so entranced was he by the vivid color of the creature’s shell. I told him that one toxic bug can spoil the whole crop. Soon, I realized my words had greater wisdom than even I first knew.

  One of our fellow survivors had begun speaking nonsense that it was only luck, rather than the sea’s fated intervention, that we should have survived the Flood. His dissent caused rumblings throughout the whole village. I had no choice but to act decisively.

  Much as one insect can spoil the whole crop, one dissenter can spoil the peace. We must root out dangerous individuals, whether they be insect or man, and see them to their deaths before they can contaminate others.

  “Gospodin told you to read that?” Nikolai asks.

  I scan the passage again. “Is he suggesting I’m a dissenter? Or a nonbeliever? Or a crop louse?”

  Nikolai frowns. “You’ve heard of what’s happening with the boglands, right?” he says. “There’ve been a lot of, well, stirrings. Uprisings. Among the Brightwallers. So maybe Gospodin is just making sure you know how important it is that we’re all on the same side heading into the Flood.” Nikolai smiles at me. “But that’s no problem, right?”

  I force myself to smile back.

  So Gospodin wants me to prove myself. To prove how thoroughly I’m committed to the Sacred Breath.

  To root out dangerous individuals—to see them to their deaths—before they can contaminate others.

  Dangerous individuals like Katla and her family?

  “Right,” I say. “No problem at all.”

  44

  ELLA

  In the week that follows Storm Four, I hurry out of the studio every evening the moment rehearsal ends. I feel Gretta’s suspicious eyes and Natasha’s angry ones. Once, when I’m leaving practice, Sofie takes my elbow and says, “Don’t you want to come to dinner with us? I feel like we’ve hardly talked lately.”

  “I haven’t been very hungry,” I say.

  And I slip away. I can tell she’s hurt by my rejection, and I tell myself that I don’t care.

  Maret wants me to come up with a plan, and so I will. I’ll figure out a way to kill Nikolai and get away with it. And then, once Maret is queen, I can tell her that Sofie deserves a place on the royal fleet, and all will be forgiven.

  I return to the library, careful this time about being followed. I study maps of the palace, then trace my fingers along walls that don’t seem to meet the way they should and staircases that go nowhere. Hidden passageways?

  I still have the knife from the barometer, but I don’t know how to catch Nikolai alone so I can use it.

  The best weapon I can think of so far is poison, but I’ve spent enough time in the kitchen to know that René personally handles all of Nikolai’s food. According to a demoralizing text I found on failed assassinations, every king in the history of Kostrov has had a food-taster.

  There’s no obvious solution. It’s infuriating.

  The shelf by the fireplace is stacked with those same books that look recently read. I wonder who sits here, leafing through these pages.

  I open the green botanical book that I noticed last time I was here, thinking of the carnivorous plant Katla’s brother showed me. I don’t see it, but there are plenty of other strange plants. On a dog-eared page, I inspect a mushroom with lavender gills. Smells of honey, the note says, then, inexplicably, Otto von Kleb?

  I put the book back where I found it. Someone other than Nikolai must be sitting here, reading these books and scrawling notes in the margins. I can’t imagine him marveling at plants. I certainly can’t imagine him leaving the palace to explore the boglands.

  The doorknob rattles.

  I freeze. Just as the door begins to open, I regain my senses and dart behind the nearest shelf. Footsteps echo down the long aisle at the library’s middle. I hold my breath. Another set of footsteps.

  “And the others?”

  “All in Skarat.”

  Lowered voices. I peek out from the edge of the shelf. Two men. The backs of their heads. One blond, one dark-haired.

  Nikolai and Andrei.

  My breath catches. I’m positive it’s audible. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

  “Fine,” Nikolai says. “Now, where is that stupid ring?”

  He’s still walking. Footsteps getting perilously close. I press myself into the shelf and try to disappear.

  He stops at the chairs by the fireplace. Shuffles around until he finds—something. I squint over the tops of book spines. He’s holding a ring up to the light.

  “How’d you lose that?” Andrei says.

  “I was here with Natasha Koskinen.”

  I immediately jump to the worst-case scenario. They were tucked away together like to-be-married lovebirds. So naked Nikolai had to take off all his silly-looking jewelry. Gross, gross, gross.

  Apparently, Andrei’s mind goes the same place as mine, because he starts to laugh.

  “Playing lynx and crane,” Nikolai adds, sounding annoyed. “Thank you very much.”

  “Sure,” Andrei says. “Hey, I told you Captain Waska wanted to meet with you about security for the bear season festival, right? For your receiving line.”

  “Great,” Nikolai says. “Do feel free to murder me before then.”

  They start walking again. Back toward the door. I crouch low, but just as I do—

  I only see it for a second. But it’s enough.

  Pinned to Nikolai’s chest, right over his heart, I see a flash of pearls. A strange little brooch shaped like a beetle.

  Cassia’s ladybug. The one she wore on the inside of her jacket every day.


  I’m sick.

  Once they’re gone, I stay in the library for a few long moments. I rest my pounding head in my hands.

  It’s only after they’re gone that I realize I should’ve had a weapon on me. Nikolai and Andrei were both here, right here, and—

  I didn’t feel like a killer. All I felt was terrified.

  The bear season festival—my deadline for Maret—is one week away. A week after that, Nikolai will announce who he’s going to marry.

  I need to kill him. Even if he’s going to pick Natasha. Even if by killing Nikolai, I end up killing her too.

  I don’t have a choice.

  45

  NATASHA

  When the day of my meeting with Gospodin arrives, my arms ache from all the extra flying practice we’ve been doing. With the festival just a week away, I’ve hardly spent a waking hour off the silks. Plus. I’ve needed something to distract me from Ella.

  I beat Gospodin to the square in front of Our Lady. All the rain that can drain away from Storm Four already has. More snow fell last night, coating the parts of the city that were not already water-filled in a freshness of white. A skin of ice tops the less trafficked canals. I bury my face in the coils of my scarf and stomp my feet against the frosty stones to keep warm. The big hand on the clocktower ticks five, ten, fifteen minutes past eight, and there’s still no sign of Gospodin.

  When he finally arrives, striding out of the apartment attached to Our Lady with his shoulders back and his hands in the pockets of a long coat, he’s a half an hour late and I’m grumpy.

  I plaster on a smile. “Many breaths.”

  “Almost believable,” he says. “Let’s walk.”

  Gospodin and I walk to Southtown in what I hope is companionable silence. We stop at a square at the farthest southern reach of the city.

  While the Grand Harbor is full of international bustle, as bright a place as any in New Sundstad, this wharf is industrial and gritty. The ships that dock here come from the rivers of the boglands or the fields on the other side of Kostrov.

  I follow Gospodin to a row of tables set up by the water. Two men in the white cloaks of the Sacred Breath and a few women in modest dresses stand behind it. One of the tables is stacked with pamphlets. The rest are covered in cloth-draped baskets. Savory smells emanate from them. My stomach gurgles.

  Everyone many breaths each other. I take one of the pamphlets. The paper is thick and pulpy, the texture of plentiful recyclings. Printed across the front: There is still time to find hope!

  “It helps if you don’t frown at our literature,” Gospodin says.

  I affix a smile to my face.

  The crowd flocks to us. In all, there are six tables with two volunteers manning each. Whenever a basket dips low, another one appears in its place.

  “How did you get so much food?” I ask Gospodin. We’re stationed at the same table, and every time someone points at me, whispers something excited about the Royal Flyers, he smiles.

  “Nikolai and I did it together,” he says. “We convinced the nobles to donate some of their usual rations for the greater good. He’d be here too, but we thought it might make everything too chaotic.”

  “Oh.” I find that I like imagining it: Nikolai, purposeful, directing people and resources. I feel a little guilty, even. I know I carry my mother’s resentment of the Sacred Breath. Maybe I shouldn’t.

  I pull a white cloth away from a new basket. This one is laden with loaves of rosemary rye bread and glistening little tarts. I hold one of the tarts up to the light. The pastry is a perfect gold. The filling, bright cranberries and bits of brown mushroom. I think the glisten comes from honey. A dab of it leaks onto my finger, dyed red from the berries.

  “Save the food for the less fortunate, Miss Koskinen,” Gospodin says.

  “I know, I know.” I hand the tart to the next person in line with a smile. He’s a light-skinned, well-whiskered man, and he wishes me many breaths before he goes.

  I’m about to lick the honey off my finger, but the next woman in line steps forward. She eyes me skeptically. I wipe my finger on the table. “Would you like the bread or a tart?”

  The first woman to look more intrigued by our literature than our food wears her gray hair long and loose. She takes a pamphlet, holding it a full arm’s length from her face in case it turns out to have teeth.

  Gospodin sets down a loaf of rosemary bread and goes to greet her. I hesitate, then follow.

  “Can you read, miss?” Gospodin says, showing off his bright teeth.

  The woman raises her chin. “My grandson can.” Then she notices me standing behind Gospodin and says, “You’re a flyer.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are the flyers part of the Sacred Breath now too? Instead of Inna and the Bear, will you be performing the story of Kos at the next festival?”

  Gospodin laughs. “That’s very funny.”

  The woman blinks as if Gospodin is speaking a dialect she doesn’t quite understand. “Wasn’t meant to be.” She looks at me again, still waiting for an answer.

  “The flyers all appreciate the Sacred Breath’s guidance.” I glance at Gospodin. “The royals and the Sacred Breath are closely entwined, and as Royal Flyers, we’re willing to support the Righteous Mariner however we can.”

  “Well,” the woman says, setting the pamphlet back on the table. “I should’ve expected as much.”

  She leaves in a hurry. I frown. One of the Sacred Breath brothers slips out from behind the table. He vanishes into the crowd, as if to follow the gray-haired woman.

  “Where’s he going?” I ask.

  Gospodin doesn’t answer. He’s already back by our table of bread and tarts.

  I watch the alley where the gray-haired woman and the Sacred Breath brother disappeared for a long moment, but there’s no sign of either of them. I go back to my table.

  Being in Southtown makes me feel eight years old again, at the mercy of my mother’s desperate sadnesses and sudden determinations to move us elsewhere: to a new apartment; to the converted closet of a seamstress’s shop; to the cabin of a ship captained by a man with a fishhook smile.

  I’m left with the disturbing sense that Gospodin can peek into my brain when he says, “You were born in Southtown, yes?”

  “Yes,” I say. I keep my eyes on the edge of the square, watching the people in their long coats go about their Sunday morning business.

  “So was I.”

  “Really?”

  A crooked smile.

  “How did you make it to the palace?” I say.

  “Same as you. Hard work. Being the best at what I did. As a boy, I worked in a lawyer’s office, cleaning his floor and sewing the buttons back on his coat. He took a shine to me and helped me learn to read. Really, I think he just wanted someone to file his papers for him, but I learned my letters anyway. By the time I was your age, I was studying law at the university. Nikolai’s father, Orest—this would’ve been right before he became king—sometimes deigned to show up to classes too. I made a point to become his friend, and he decided he liked me.”

  “You were a lawyer?” I wouldn’t like to battle Gospodin in a courthouse.

  “Not for long,” he says. “It was tedious and bureaucratic. What I liked was persuading people.” He nods at the pamphlets. “That’s mostly what I do nowadays. Persuade. But now I do it for a better cause.”

  “So you didn’t grow up following the Sacred Breath?”

  “I came to it later in life,” he says, “which is why I know the importance of being here today.”

  I think of the brother leaving our table and slipping down the street. I think of Book 3 of Captain’s Log: One dissenter can spoil the peace.

  “You don’t expect these pamphlets to convince many nonbelievers to leap headfirst into the Sacred Breath, do you?” I say.

  He tilts
his head, considering, smiling slightly as though he’s pleased I’ve gotten it. He doesn’t answer for a moment, not until no one is standing in line. Then, “No, Miss Koskinen. I do not.”

  “You don’t care who wants to talk to us,” I say. “You want to see who’s angry.”

  “Like I said. I grew up in Southtown among nonbelievers. I know what my father would’ve done, had he seen us standing here. He would’ve spat at our feet and gone straight home, to an altar to a bear spirit he thought lived in the boglands. If you camped out there for a night, you would’ve seen two dozen other men knock on his door, gather around his hearth, and tell blasphemous stories to undermine everything Kos wrote.”

  I’m almost too stunned to respond. “Does the Sacred Breath know that?”

  He lifts a shoulder. The curve of his smile steepens. He’s pleased at my shock. “How do you think I found my footing among them so quickly?”

  “You turned in your father?”

  “For the good of New Sundstad,” he says. “Always for the good of New Sundstad.”

  My mouth is dry. Is his father imprisoned? Dead?

  The cloaked brother who followed the gray-haired woman rejoins us. He gives Gospodin a short shake of his head.

  Thankfully, most people don’t stop when they see us. A few show genuine curiosity. Just when I have convinced myself that Gospodin was exaggerating when he said his father would have spat at our feet, a man does just that. He’s large in every dimension, with cheeks as round and ruddy as apples. “The Maapinnen survived just fine without Kos and his fanatics,” he says. Then he spits. It arcs through the air and lands with a resounding splatter on Gospodin’s chest.

  Gospodin laughs. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs away the man’s offering.

  The man, who looks unsettled by the laughter, hastens across the square, glancing over his shoulder as he goes. Gospodin, still smiling, nods to one of the cloaked brothers. Only now do I realize how disconcertingly well-muscled the two brothers are.

  The people in the square do an excellent job of pretending they don’t see the spit, or the spitter, or the brother following him. And yet, suddenly, the square is empty. Everyone seems to remember something urgent they must do in the opposite direction.