Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

  “So,” he says, “you spent the day with Gospodin.”

  I’m relieved at the distance between us: Nikolai on his end of the pool, me on mine. He doesn’t try to come closer. “I did.”

  “And did you talk about me?”

  “Maybe a little. I think he’s starting to trust me.”

  “Should that make me nervous?” Nikolai says. “Did you promise to be his spy?”

  “I’m on your side,” I say. “Not his.”

  He laughs, short, light. “You’re on your own side, Natasha.”

  I blink.

  “I’m not a fool,” he says. “You want to survive. I understand that. I want to survive too. That’s why I want a queen I can trust.”

  When I look at him, I see a version of him I’ve never seen before. Not brooding, not compensating, not nervous. What I see now is a young man, just a few months my senior, who has spent his life surrounded by those who would use him for his power. He’s self-absorbed, but so am I. He was never going to be as charming as Gospodin; never going to be as powerful as his father. Even when I was a child, when people spoke of the clever little royal, I knew they meant his sister, Cassia.

  He’s tragically normal. Had he been born something other than an heir, maybe he would have made a happy life for himself.

  “Do you know whom you’re going to pick?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “My birthday can’t come soon enough. I want this game to end.”

  “And then you’ll pick . . .?” I say.

  He shrugs.

  “How do I prove that you can trust me?” I ask.

  “Can I trust anyone?” he says. “All anyone ever tells me is what I want to hear.” He purses his lips. “Maybe you’d be better served figuring out how to earn Gospodin’s trust.”

  “I’m trying to convince him,” I say. “But I’ve lived in this palace half my life. My mother lived in this palace. I’ve always believed in the crown more than Captain’s Log.”

  Nikolai’s eyes search me. I can tell he’s thinking.

  I feel impossibly close.

  I stand. Water streams off my shoulders. It laps against my stomach as I walk one, two, three steps across the pool. I stop at Nikolai’s side.

  He’s not so bad. Not so scary, not so exciting. Just a boy with a crown.

  And he’s considering me.

  I reach, not for but around him. I lock my fingers around his golden crown resting on the lip of the pool. The jagged edges press into my skin.

  We watch each other.

  I move slowly, to see if he stops me. He doesn’t, so I put the crown on my head.

  The metal is damp. It sends beads of water down my scalp, down to where the wet ends of my hair cling to my arms and chest and back. And seas, I have never felt more powerful in my life.

  Nikolai’s tongue sweeps his lip.

  “We’re going to walk onto the royal fleet,” I say. “Both of us.”

  He swallows, and I watch him do it, watch the knot on his neck bob. I know he can see it: me, in a crown of my own. The queen. Surviving. Ruling.

  “I—” he starts.

  The conservatory door opens with a clang of glass.

  “Your Royal Highness,” Gregor says. “I’m so sorry—”

  Nikolai curses and snatches the crown from my head. His cheeks are flushed red, and I feel my own face heating. I sink under the lapping surface of the water until my shoulders are submerged.

  At the door, Sebastian stands beside Gregor. Their faces are red too.

  “It’s urgent,” Sebastian says. “The Righteous Mariner just sent word. He wanted to meet with you about—something about the festival.”

  Nikolai curses again and hauls himself from the pool. Water streams from his black trousers.

  “Bye, then.” I sound like a child, and I hate it. All that power I just felt surging through me, gone.

  Nikolai, either too embarrassed or too distracted to pay me any more attention, doesn’t respond. He slings a towel over his shoulder and turns to the guards. “How long ago? Did he say what was wrong?”

  And then he’s gone. The door slams shut behind them.

  The festival. What, Gospodin urgently had to talk to Nikolai about his receiving line?

  I want to scream. Then I do scream, because there’s no one left to hear me.

  For a moment, it feels good. Once the noise gets bored of echoing around the glass walls, the conservatory feels even quieter than it did before.

  I hear the door open again. I lift my head, wondering if Nikolai has decided to come back for something.

  “You’re not drowning in here, are you?”

  Ella leans against a snarl of vines. Her arms fold across her chest.

  If my face wasn’t already red, it is now.

  On all sides, semi-tamed plants surround her. The petals of a fury-red flower stretch to touch her.

  “What are you doing, Natasha?” she says. Her voice has no irony and no artifice. Any chance I had of playing confident goes to dust.

  I sink into the water until it touches my chin. “Taking a pleasant soak. Why are you here?” I ask.

  She tilts her head. The red flower folds against her temple. “I happen to enjoy the occasional pleasant soak.” She pushes off the wall of vines. Her steps are soft against the wet stone.

  My mouth is too dry for the humidity of this room. “Is that so?” I say.

  She peels up her sleeve and shows me her wrist. “Of course. Siren. Half fish, and all.” She tilts her head at me. “What about you?”

  My breathing—shallow. “I don’t trust you.”

  She takes one slipper off, then the other. She drops them on the stone. Her legs slip into the pool. “That wasn’t an answer.”

  “You’ve been lying to me about—about something.”

  Ella slides fully into the water. “We all lie.”

  The curling ends of her hair flatten against the pool’s surface.

  “I don’t trust you,” I say, forgetting I’ve said it before.

  When she moves, the warm water laps at my stomach, tugs at the fabric of my sleeves.

  “We have that in common,” Ella says. “Among other things.”

  I’m standing on an edge. Everything about this moment feels like a before, in the tips of my waterlogged fingers and the trembling of each breath. It stretches, elastic, Ella staring at me and I at her, this sweet, reluctant delay.

  Her smile curls at the edges. “You don’t love Nikolai.”

  We stand so close that if I reached my hand through the water and she reached hers, they would meet. I keep my hands pressed to my thighs. “I already told you,” I say, my voice softer than I mean it to be, “that I don’t.”

  She takes a step closer. Now only one of us need raise a hand to touch the other. “He’s not a good person,” she says. “Surviving isn’t worth marrying him. You have to see that.”

  “I didn’t know you’d ever spoken to him.”

  “I don’t need to,” Ella says. A half-step closer. I can see the humid gleam of sweat across her steep cheekbones. “You can’t possibly like him.”

  I imagine telling her that I don’t. I will take the last half-step. I will touch the underside of her chin with two fingers to raise her face to mine.

  But I’m standing in water, and the water doesn’t let me forget its own importance that easily.

  Seas rise. Everyone drowns.

  “I want to be queen,” I whisper.

  Ella’s face hardens. “You’re a fool,” she says. She hoists herself out of the water and tosses her wet hair over a shoulder.

  “And you’re a liar,” I say.

  “I’m not a liar just because I don’t tell you everything there is to know about me,” she says. “You’re the one who isn’t honest.”

>   “About what?” I say.

  She lets out a short sound, breathy and through her nostrils. When she throws open the door to leave, a burst of frozen wind stings my cheeks. The door slams shut again.

  I count the moments that pass, waiting for her to come back.

  She doesn’t.

  48

  ELLA

  After the incident at the hot pools, I start performing an experiment on myself. I’m trying to see how little sleep I can get without dying. Sleeping is bad. Sleeping means dreaming, and dreaming means imagining myself with Natasha, and I’m not allowed to do that. The dreams aren’t always lascivious. Yes, there are the dreams where she doesn’t push me away in the hot pools, but there are also dreams where we sit under a tree eating porridge together and she tells jokes in fluent Terrazzan. Both sorts of dreams are equally bad.

  Maret’s deadline approaches like a stampede of cattle. I know I only have until the first day of bear season to come up with a new plan—a plan that allows me to assassinate Nikolai without dying in the process—and instead of concocting something brilliant, I spend all my time in endless flyer rehearsals trying not to think about Natasha.

  So the day of the bear season festival arrives, and I haven’t come up with anything.

  Natasha walks into the kitchen while the rest of us are eating breakfast, her hair in a loose bun, her eyes finding anyone but me. “Adelaida wants everyone in the studio for festival makeup.”

  Everyone stands. I squint at Sofie.

  “Come on,” she says. “On your feet.”

  “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m just going to prepare myself for a few more minutes.”

  She grabs my arm and hauls me out of my chair.

  “Ow,” I say. “Bully.”

  “Seas, Ella, you look half-dead.”

  “That’s rude,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Stay here.”

  The other flyers follow Natasha out the door. Sofie walks to the stove, where the chef, René, is working. I stay at the table and sway. A moment later, Sofie pushes a mug of something hot and black into my hands. I take a sip.

  “Ew. This tastes like . . .” I take another sip. “Burnt toast.”

  “It’s coffee,” Sofie says. “René brews it for himself and only gives it to people he likes. It has to get shipped from across the world.”

  “Does he know it tastes like burnt toast?”

  “Drink,” she says. I think she’s trying not to laugh. “Or else you’ll fall off your silks.”

  The flavor never gets less awful, but I finish the cup anyway, and when I do, I feel a bit of life trickling back to my limbs. I manage to keep my eyes open as Ness does my makeup and Adelaida talks us through final performance notes.

  The bases—me, Ness, and Gretta—are all dressed as snowflakes, which feels not quite as silly as it sounds. Our full-suits are white with glimmering skirts. I expect the makeup to turn us ghostly, but Ness has a good eye for it, and in the end, our faces shine with silver frost.

  Inna and the Bear, the flight we'll be performing at the festival, is based on an old Maapinnen legend, which in turn became one of Tamm’s fables, and is as old as the Royal Flyers themselves.

  When Katla first walked me through the story of Inna, I was sure she was joking. “A Maapinnen legend? I thought the Sacred Breath was against Maapinnen things,” I said.

  “They are,” Katla said.

  Natasha shook her head. “I have a copy of Tamm. It’s not like they’re burning them.”

  “Gospodin doesn’t like it,” Katla amended. “But I suppose he’s okay with it as long as everyone knows that his story is fact and all the other stories are fiction.”

  And thus, I was introduced to Inna and the Bear. As the legend goes, Inna was a Maapinnen girl whose clan was attacked by invaders from another island. These invaders, we are made to note, were not the kind Grunholters who renamed the country Kostrov and converted everyone to the Sacred Breath. Those were good invaders, obviously. These intruders insisted Inna would marry their king. Inna, determined not to marry, fled into the boglands in the midst of a snowstorm. Everyone thought she was going to die in the snow, but instead, she stumbled across a bear whose hibernation was interrupted by the invaders’ arrival. Inna befriended the bear, and together, they marched back to her clan. The bear ripped open the intruding king’s throat and Inna drank his blood.

  I, for one, think it’s a fabulous story.

  Sofie is playing the conquering king, and when she emerges in her costume—a green full-suit and a costume crown braided into her hair—she lifts her chin and lowers her eyelids in a perfect imitation of Nikolai, haughty and bored. Katla and I are the only ones to laugh.

  Katla is playing the bear. Her hair is spun up into two dark buns to be her bear ears. Ness delights in smudging a big dollop of black on the tip of Katla’s nose.

  Natasha is Inna, because of course she’s Inna. When I first heard the story, I had hoped that some of Inna’s regicidal desires would rub off on Natasha.

  No luck as of yet.

  Too bad. Maret’s deadline is tonight. And I have nothing.

  49

  NATASHA

  “Does Ella seem off to you?” Sofie asks. She catches me by the elbow at the edge of the festival stage moments before we’re supposed to perform.

  I’m annoyed. I spent my entire warm-up driving Ella from my brain. “How do you expect me to know?”

  “Dunno,” Sofie says. “I just thought maybe you’d be concerned.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I say. I scan the crowd in front of the stage. I spot Nikolai and Gospodin under their awning, but their heads are bent low with a few other official-looking men.

  “Maybe I should be asking if something is off with you,” Sofie says.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “And Ella is fine too. She’s just . . .” Infuriating? “Enigmatic.”

  “Maybe she’s a ghost,” a voice says, directly in my ear.

  I whirl. My arms fly across my chest instinctively.

  Ella tilts her head at me, her expression unfazed as ever. “Adelaida sent me over. She said, and I quote, ‘Tell them to get their asses on the silks.’”

  She hasn’t stood so close to me since the hot pools. I think she must realize it at the same time I do, because she takes a quick step back.

  “Right,” I say. I inhale. Crisp air. Peat smoke. Distant ocean. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  ~~~

  I hold my hands under my armpits to keep them warm right up until the violinists begin to play.

  Then I start to climb.

  My muscles remember the motions even when my brain doesn’t. At every cue, my legs swing where they’re meant to go. Every wrap, twist, spin clears the clutter from my head until all that’s left is me, and the air, and my silks.

  I’m distantly aware that the crowd is a good one. Though they’ve probably all seen this flight more than once, they lean forward, riveted. They gasp as bear-Katla lowers herself upside down, snarling and showing off her teeth. When Sofie finally tumbles, hanging by an ankle, and I throw back my shoulders in triumph, the crowd roars like they truly just saw an enemy king vanquished.

  At the end, I bow. Nikolai claps. His eyes never leave mine.

  “Well,” Adelaida says after gathering us at the back of the stage, “don’t let it go to your head, but that wasn’t bad.” She turns to go.

  “Is that all?” I call after her.

  “Go enjoy the festival,” she says.

  The other girls start chattering, but I’m distracted by a fragment of something I hear from the crowd.

  “There’s to be a receiving line,” a voice says. “We haven’t seen one of those since King Nikolai was crowned.”

  Two women stand at the front of the stage. They’re probably as old as my mother would be by
now. One wears an orange scarf and the other wears red.

  “And your Ester is going, yes?” Orange Scarf says.

  “She’s already waiting,” Red Scarf says. “They danced at the ball. Did you know? She was one of the only Southtowners to get a dance, but you know what a pretty face she has.”

  “Mmm,” Orange Scarf says.

  I sense a stillness beside me. I look up, and there’s Ella, quiet, listening. I turn away.

  “Sofie,” Ness says, “you promised me a baked apple if I got my double-back dive perfect today.”

  “Oh,” Sofie says. “I don’t remember promising that.”

  Ness crosses her arms. “Liar. We’re going to get baked apples. Ella, come with us. They’re the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

  “I don’t like apples,” Ella says.

  “That’s silly,” Ness says. “Everyone likes apples.”

  Ness leads an enthusiastic charge through the festival. The first flutters of a new snowfall dust my skin. I shiver and bury my hands in my pockets.

  Carts and booths sell necessities—fish, bolts of cloth, peat briquettes—and bear season treats—honey-rye biscuits, blackened eel, steaming cranberry wine. Children dart and slide across an especially icy patch of street. The air is woven with smoke and a bonfire roars on every corner.

  Ness grabs Sofie’s arm and yanks her forcefully to the apple cart. The other girls keep drifting forward through the crowd. I spot a cluster of guards on the other side of the street. I rise on my toes. A flash of black hair. Nikolai?

  I squeeze through the crush of festivalgoers.

  A line of young women stretches from the front of Our Lady through the square and around the corner. It looks like half of New Sundstad showed up for his receiving line.

  I spot Adelaida on the fringes. She smiles broadly at an older man I think I recognize as one of Nikolai’s councilors. His own mouth is flat. When I walk toward them, he excuses himself quickly and her smile falls away.

  “Remind me not to play nice with the councilors,” she says. “They’re all ancient and stodgy.”