The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

SID

AFTER THE STATE DINNER, its many courses perfectly calibrated to show a delicious frugality—the dishes all Herrani, no imported delicacies slipping in to undermine such patriotic fare as pulped erasti dusted with savory spices, small hens stuffed with dried apricots, and tender beef flavored with paper-thin slices of my father’s oranges—Arin the Plain King gives me a somber look that reminds me I must play my mother’s part, and mingle with visiting dignitaries in the atrium as they sip a rosy dessert wine served in delicate glasses. I refuse a glass. It is too girlishly pretty, and I prefer to keep my hands free. My mother, were she here, would have arranged beforehand to be served a glass that looked like it held wine when it really held tinted water, so that people might think alcohol dulled her perception. One of her favorite tricks. But also pointless. I could have told her that she might as well not bother. Everyone knows how dangerous she is. An ambassador or discontented lord from a country manor would never forget that, no matter how many glasses of wine she pretended to drink.

Music floats over the room: a flute and three violins, the cool river of the flute flowing over the honeyed string trio. Music is always arranged for state functions to please my mother, and tonight is no exception even if she cannot attend. Piano performances, however, are rare. They make her impatient, even when she pretends they do not. At my last piano recital, when I was thirteen, I flubbed a tricky melody. I was so afraid of getting it wrong that I attacked it too quickly, and it spun out of my control, the notes tangled by my tripping fingers.

Sidarine, it does not matter, my mother said, kissing my hot eyes. Anyone can make a mistake.

Youwouldn’t. Those words, which I did not speak, burned in my chest. I refused to perform again.

I weave among the crowd, artfully sliding past a group of young Herrani women who would probably like a few words with me. One of them, Ceciliah, gives me a look so sharp it could draw blood. It takes me a moment to figure out why, since I thought we were on good terms before I left. Then I remember that although we were on very good terms indeed, after she asked me to teach her how to shoot a gun, and “target practice” became our private term for a different kind of activity, I might have ignored her in the weeks before I fled Herran.

I didn’t ignore her on purpose. I simply got busy doing my mother’s bidding. It was for the good of Herran! I cannot be blamed for that.

I see from her expression that oh, yes, I can.

Sorry, I mouth at Ceciliah, but she turns back to her friends, who notice everything, of course, and try to flay me with their eyes. One of them has just a tinge of disgust in her sneer, which she tries to disguise as loyal anger alone, but I have too much experience with that kind of disgust, and no patience for it.

No longer sorry at all, I shrug and saunter off.

Roshar catches my eye from across the room, where he is deep in conversation with delegates from his country. He smirks to see the circle of ladies tighten around Ceciliah as I leave them, as though cattle around a calf threatened by a wolf.

“You did well.” It is Sarsine, having snuck up behind me.

She cannot possibly approve of my dalliances, so she must not have seen that special little moment with Ceciliah. I have no idea what Sarsine means. “I did?”

“You spoke well during dinner.” My father’s cousin looks stiff in her blue poplin dress. Like Arin, she prefers simple clothes and says that eschewing luxury means people are less likely to try to bribe her, the monarchy’s most trusted counselor. “You were poised. Serious. Regal.”

“I had no idea I could fake it so well. I should run away again and join a theater troupe.”

She ignores this. “You reminded Herran that the country’s future is stable again.”

Because the heir has returned. I inhale to speak, but everything I would say I have already said: There are other ways to govern a country. It does not have to be a hereditary line of succession. Look at Valoria, where they now hold elections. True, the populace did elect the murdered emperor’s son, but at least they went through the effort of entertaining other choices.

Herran, however, loves my parents, and so they love me. The people want me.

Really, what they want is for the beloved story of my beloved parents to continue after they are gone. I am a convenient plot point.

Already exhausted by an argument I cannot bear to have again, I say, “We have had twenty years of peace. Herran is stable enough.”

“You don’t know how easily it can all be lost.”

She—indeed, everyone of my parents’ generation—cannot help that I have inherited their trauma. Even if I did not live through it, I live in its wake, knocked back by the passing of a heavy ghost ship that carries all their memories. “Yes,” I sigh, “you are right.”

Her stern features soften. “I missed you, little one.”

“You did not. I cause nothing but trouble. I am a disappointment to the crown.” Not that my parents wear one.

“I was angry because I worried.” She sees my expression and says, “Not about the line of succession. About you.”

I have my doubts but play nice. “If you say so.”

“Let’s not quarrel. I am the only family you have, save your parents.” There is an awkward silence as we both remember that this is not, technically, true.

I have a grandfather: General Trajan, who led the Valorian imperial forces in the first Herrani war, conquered this peninsula, enslaved the population, and colonized it. Who condemned Kestrel, his only child, to a labor camp in the northern tundra when he discovered she was working against the Empire on Herran’s behalf. Trajan, whom my father could not bear to kill, for love of my mother, when he bested the Valorian army in the second Herran war.

My grandfather lives still: imprisoned, an old man an entire country hates. Herran’s nightmare. Its monster.

Sarsine believes that he and I have never met.

I regard my father across the room. Roshar has made his way through the crowd to him, curtly dismisses anyone standing nearby, and says something to my father, his face unusually serious. My father glances up, sees me looking, half smiles distractedly, and returns his attention to Roshar, whose words seem to grow in vehemence.

“Sarsine?”

“Yes, Sidarine.”

I am, in a way, named after her, the ending of our names similar in an old-fashioned, soberly feminine way, like fusty, perfumed lace.

“Are people still angry at Amma and Etta for letting my grandfather live?”

“That decision was made long ago.”

“It is made again every day that he lives.”

She gives me a dry smile. “And people say you don’t have a mind for politics.”

“He eats. He sleeps in comfort. Taxes pay for it.”

“It was and remains an unpopular choice,” she says stiffly. “I do not like it myself. Why are you asking about this?”

I am thinking of my mother, weakened by poison. The only way to find the person who did this to her is imagining who could bear her so deep a grudge as to attempt murder. “Oh, I am studying the philosophy of statecraft.”

She snorts.

“For when I am queen,” I say in exaggerated earnestness, “and make careful, considered decisions with great moral impact. What, I wonder, will the legacy of my reign be?”

She starts to say something, then stops herself, smiles, and pats my cheek with a dry hand. “You will do just fine,” she says, and leaves me.

I survey the crowd. The atrium is usually one of my favorite rooms in the house, for its cool tiles mazed with streaks of gray over cloudy white, and the fountain that spills into itself. I like the room’s quiet. Its clarity. It holds none of that now. It is simply a space filled with people who either do not know me, or do not know me as well as they believe. A room of noise and gossip and heat. A crowd that it is my duty to entertain.

As Sarsine engages the Valorian ambassador, an older woman named Lyannis, whose fox-colored hair—“warrior red,” the Valorians call it—is braided into a heavy crown, I consider whether the Valorians plotting against Magister Verex could have learned of my mother’s investigations through me and her other spies. Perhaps a band of Valorians who seek a return to imperial glory have slipped an agent into our midst, and seek to remove the obstacle my mother represents. It would not even need to be the malcontents holed up in the Cayn Saratu, stashing blackpowder in the grottos of the tinier islands, the ones inhabited by only a few dozen people and some goats. Watching the red-haired ambassador sip from her glass, I make a mental note to speak with her when there is no risk of being overheard. It makes me impatient, to do nothing but wonder, and prowl around the edges of an idea, considering motives and suspects, yet this is my training.

Do not draw attention to yourself, Sidarine, my mother would always warn in the days when I was newly her spy and eager to please her, flashy in my efforts to ferret out information. Conceal how much you want a piece of information. Be the spider, sitting on the web, feeling the tremors of what touches it. Do not let your prey see you until it is too late.

Sarsine brushes a wrinkle from her blue dress. The violins cease, and the lone flute plays a slippery melody.

Her, too.

Consider your father’s cousin.

Sarsine’s friendship with my mother is well-known, as is how Sarsine nursed her through an illness after Arin rescued Kestrel from the northern tundra’s work camp. Sarsine loves my mother. Yet she loves my father more, and although there has never been even the faintest hint of attraction between them, I must consider that cousins sometimes marry, and that Sarsine and my father hold a history more complete than they do with anyone else, steeped with their shared childhood. My father trusts Sarsine. Aside from my parents—and me, I suppose—she holds the most power in Herran. Could Sarsine harbor an invisible feeling for my father, and view my mother as her rival? Could she have grown ambitious, and seek to remove my mother from power, and rule at my father’s side? She hates Valorians as much as most Herrani. Look at her now, how she hides her dislike of the Valorian ambassador, glancing down to brush again at the fabric of her blue dress. She gives a strained, polite smile.

Perhaps my mother ceased being an exception—the one good Valorian—and Sarsine, who can never forget what was done to her people, felt her affection for my mother slowly erode.

Fear swells inside me. Too many people could resent my mother.

I leave the party abruptly, not caring how my absence will be perceived, and descend to the kitchen, which rattles and bangs with chores and the sound of plates from the dinner slung into steaming copper sinks.

I give an order that my hands alone will prepare my mother’s meals, and pour what she drinks. I alone will serve her.

“Was it horrible?” Emmah says. She heard the tread of my boots down the hall, she said (“How you stomp!”), and came from her room to help me ready for bed. I said that was not necessary. I do not enjoy fussy clothes that need extra hands for removal, and my weapons are my responsibility. A Valorian hones her own blade. Emmah asked, then, that we light a candle together.

“The dinner was no worse than usual,” I say, selecting two long, pale tapers and setting them into holders clotted with old wax. I strike a match and Emmah does the same, the dusky smell of sulfur rising into the air. Emmah still wears a thimble—she loves to embroider, and must have been working on one of her many projects as I thudded past her room—and the silver catches the candle’s flame. The windows of my dressing room hold the black night.

We set our candles in a window. In its glass, the reflections of the twin flames glow like a god’s eyes. I ask, “What will you pray for?”

“You,” she says simply. She never married. She has no children. She cared for me from the moment I was born, and my mother was too weak from the birth to nurse me. “May the gods love you.”

“And you.”

“That is not all you pray for.”

My mother, that she may live.

Nirrim.

Prayers are private. I make them less because I believe the gods listen than because praying helps me feel more like a true Herrani. And it is no bad thing, to concentrate a wish in your heart.

I wish I could see Nirrim again. I wish for her skin against mine. I wish for her bravery, her compassion.

I wish she had chosen me, as I chose her.

“May the gods love us all.” I wonder which god I have offended. Which one watched me to set sail to Herrath, and placed Nirrim in my path?

“May they love us all,” Emmah echoes. She kisses my forehead and bids me to sleep well.

I cannot. After she leaves, the wax drips, the flames sputter and lower. The oil in my table lamp burns out, leaving a heavy, slick scent in the air. There is no light but the candle flames and their reflections. One hisses, and then the other, and I am left alone in the dark.

Of all the people in Herran, one might resent my mother most.

I push open a window. The night is dense. Warm and sticky. Sweet, too, with the scent of white, night-blooming flowers that have opened their faces to the moon. The night holds summer’s end: the honey left at the bottom of an almost-empty jar.

I pass into my dressing room, where I leave my gun and dagger on the table and shuck my tunic and trousers. Because I believe he will be more likely to speak with me in a dress, I select the first my gaze falls upon. If I must wear a dress, I don’t want to agonize over which one will feel less terrible.

The moment I am in it, I no longer feel like myself. I feel like a ribbon marking a page in a book about someone else. The dress—a lilac, lutestring silk affair that makes me sweat—swishes as I hunt for slippers. Practically a living thing, crawling all over me, the dress keeps getting in my way. It gathers awkwardly between my legs and slips under my bare feet so that I stumble. Its hem is too long without heeled shoes.

Yet all such shoes in my wardrobe are stiff, new, never worn. I swear that even more have been added in my absence. That will have been the doing of either Sarsine, who likes me to look “proper,” or Emmah, who sometimes commissions new garments and accessories fit for a lady, so that Sarsine will not pester me. Then Emmah stuffs them away to be forgotten. As soon as I see these slippers, I know they will cut my feet, even with stockings.

Stockings!

No. I have my limits.

I reach again for my favorite boots. After all, the dress is long. Maybe he will not notice the boots.

I lace them. I belt my dagger around my narrow hips. In the mirror, I could be a colonial Valorian girl: my eyes large and dark, my short hair the perfect golden color, even if it should be twined in braids as long as snakes. It is the right look—or close enough—to encourage him to want to speak with me. He does not always.

I take gold, to bribe the guards, and slip out of my quiet home to visit the prison that holds Herran’s most reviled criminal.

The god of the moon is not mine, but sometimes I think that mercurial god loves me. The moon’s fullness casts a pure light, and it is no trouble to make my way across the lawn to the stables and saddle a horse.

Javelin whickers at me hopefully, but I would never risk riding him. The warhorse has bony withers and is prone to saddle sores. His face, gone gray, looms over the stall gate. He likes winter apples, and every season my mother stores some for him, her expression more anxious with each year. Javelin has already lived longer than any horse should. I stroke his nose and the hollows above his eyes. He whuffs, disappointed in my lack of apples, disappointed in me. Whenever he sees me, he looks for my mother.

I saddle a roan mare. Doesn’t matter what her name is. She will answer to whatever I call her.

I never put my heart into a horse like my mother did. Javelin was the best, and he was hers. When I was little, all I wanted was for him to be mine, too. By the time I grew old enough to understand that that was impossible, I was also too demanding to settle for second best, and too afraid of my mother’s vulnerable expression when she looked at him. So I chose whichever horse struck my fancy on a given day. My father said that made me a better rider. In a way, Javelin was too good, he said. Too careful of his rider. Better, my father said, for me to learn to a range of different equine tempers, or one day I would find myself on a horse I did not know how to control.

I think he was trying to make me feel better. He must have at least guessed that I was jealous of my mother, that she had such a special horse, and jealous of Javelin, that my mother adored him.

Reluctantly, yet gently, my father said, Javelin was a gift from your mother’s father. It is the last thing she has of him.

I ride out into the whitened night to see him.

My gold slips into the guards’ pockets as they step away from the locked iron gate. They will give me privacy, but they are not about to leave me fully alone to my devices. Although they do not think Kestrel and Arin’s child would free the country’s most notorious prisoner, they will not take any risks.

Lamps glow within the prison, which bears no likeness to the dank cell that imprisoned me in Ethin, where I first encountered Nirrim, locked into the cell opposite mine. Trajan’s prison is a small house with no upper or lower floors, and a series of rooms that might allow him the illusion of privacy if it were not for the fact that every room has a large, barred window outside of which a guard typically stands. There is a dining room where, I know, no cutlery is used, for fear of them becoming weapons, and no porcelain plates are served. My mother warned they could be smashed into deadly shards. The corners of all furniture have been sanded down into smooth bumps. Oil lamps designed of wrought iron hang high out of reach.

The small library holds many Valorian volumes. Each book is examined before it enters the cell. Years prior, when I was still small, a book bound with toxic glue was somehow slipped into Trajan’s prison. When the guards noticed my grandfather slumped on the carpeted floor, surrounded by torn pages, his mouth full of glue, they found that a page ripped from the book had a message in Herrani script, written in a woman’s hand: A true Valorian is bound by honor. Once lost, it can never be regained. May you devour this book and know its worth.

Doctors poured a tonic down Trajan’s throat that made him vomit the poison. No one knew who had delivered the book. If Trajan knew, he refused to say.

In winter, his bed is covered with furs. In summer, his sheets are made of thick tishin paper. He is not allowed sheets, which could be torn into strips for hanging. That would be difficult, given that he is missing one arm below the elbow, but his guards have learned not to underestimate him.

The prison designed to contain him also protects him—from himself as well as others. Well-lit at all times, it reminds me of an eerie dollhouse, for how easily one can look inside. He never knows a moment’s privacy, save when he sleeps.

I see him writing or drawing at a desk, the shoulder of his amputated right arm hidden beneath a light cloak too warm for this weather but just right for his pride. He is not trusted with a pen, not even a quill, ever since the time he drove a goose quill into the eye of a guard in a bid to escape. He paints. His paintbrushes are specially designed, the horsehairs bound to fresh, thin willow wands too supple to do harm. When they begin to age and harden, they are taken away.

I step toward the bars, and he must hear the scuff of my boot against stone, for he looks up. Though as gray-haired and hollow-eyed as Javelin, Trajan is still a large man, his reflexes alert. “Kestrel?” he says.

His rooms must be too bright to see me well in the shadows. “No.”

“Sidarine,” he says softly. “It has been a long time.”

A few years.

He comes closer. His expression is such a mixture of timidity and tenderness that I could almost forget he is responsible for the most horrific crimes ever visited upon my country and my parents. I remind myself that he is cunning. His expression, which seems to be that of a lonely old man, has likely been crafted to make me believe, even if only for a moment, that he is harmless.

“Your hair was longer then,” he says. “You still look so much like her.”

I am encouraged. The first time I came to his prison, a weeping child, he would not speak with me, not even when I begged him to explain how he could betray his own daughter. I was ten years old, and had just learned that he was alive, and what he had done. Emmah told me. Your parents wish to protect you, she said, but no one can protect you from your history.

Tell me, Trajan, I demanded, my fists at my sides as I stood outside his prison. How you could do that to her?

He simply looked at me. It was not until I heard his silence that I understood the reason I needed to know was because I was afraid. If a father could do what he did to his daughter, what might my parents do to me? How would I know the limit of their love, until I had violated it?

The next time I visited him, a year later, I had a more considered plan. I asked no questions. I demanded nothing. I greeted him in respectful Valorian, not the howling Herrani I had hurled at him the previous time, and introduced myself as though we were at a formal gathering. Almost like a normal grandfather, he asked what I was studying. He inquired after my weapons training, and seemed satisfied that I was doing well. After that, I visited him once a year or so, never being anything other than calm and polite, biding my time until I might make him—either through trickery, the passing of time, or ensnaring his affection—answer the question that haunts me still. Sometimes, such as now, I think he likes me.

“You resemble her greatly,” he says. Amusement has crept into his tone. “Though she would never wear boots with that dress.”

He cannot see them. He must have heard them, and guessed from the depth of the sound of their scuffing stone, a slower drag than slippers would have.

“Kestrel is very ill,” I say.

His expression does something my mother’s does occasionally when she plays me at Bite and Sting. It is her only tell. Her face empties of emotion and looks simply … concentrated. His does that now. As soon as I figured out, a few years ago, that my mother’s expression did that only when she cared very much about what she held in her hand, I won with greater frequency.

“She might die,” I tell my grandfather.

With his one hand, Trajan brings a soft chair, made entirely from stiff cushions, to the prison door. He settles into it and looks up at me, waiting, his light brown eyes—the same color as my mother’s—bland. Politely, he says, “I am sorry to hear that.”

“Are you?”

“She is my only regular visitor. I wondered at her absence lately.”

Annoyed at his calm, I do exactly what he intends—even as I know he intends it—and recklessly say, “What if I told you that her sickness is not natural? Someone has tried—is trying—to kill her.”

His silver brows snap together into a stern line. “Do you know who?”

“No.”

“And yet you tell me—me—this?”

“Perhaps you orchestrated it from prison.”

“Yes, perhaps I did. And so you come to confront a potential assassin with your suspicion, and no proof?” He shakes his head. “Kestrel has not taught you well.”

“I don’t believe you did it,” I say, certain, though I had not been certain until this moment.

“Then you are a fool. You know as well as anyone that I once consigned her to her death. What would keep me from doing it again? I have no time for fools.” Yet he does not stir from his soft chair. He does not dismiss me, as he has done before, and retreat into his prison.

“You love her too much.” I know it from his desperate attempts to punish himself. I know it from the way his face contracted into an unreadable expression the moment he learned she was sick. I know it from how desperate he is to see her in me.

“I hate her,” he whispers, his eyes too bright in the lamplight.

“If she taught me poorly, then you teach me better. Who could do this to her? Was it Valoria? Do you know of her enemies, hidden in this country? She was in good health when I left Herran. By the time I returned, after a mere few months, she was almost gone. She looks like the quiet god will kiss her and make her his. Who could want to eliminate her from power? Who could despise her so much?”

“You ask the wrong question.”

“Tell me the right one.”

For a moment I think he will demand a fair exchange, and insist on his release, or that I slip him a weapon he could finally use. He shakes his head. “You cannot answer who until you answer why, and you cannot answer why until you consider when.”

“When what?”

“Consider your own words, Sidarine.”

“What words?” My fists are clenched so hard my knuckles ache.

“The words you just said, a moment ago.”

“Help me, damn the gods.” My anger feels murderous, and I want to weep for how tired I am of always wrangling it under control. When my elders accuse me of being too merry, of shrugging away anything serious, I think: you would not like me better if I showed what I truly feel. You do not know how hard it is to pretend to be unbothered.

To be, at every turn, confronted with an order—spoken or silent—to be different, more.

Be better, Sidarine.

Smarter.

Grow up.

Not this way. That way.

Do your duty.

Figure it out on your own.

I turn to leave, but he says, “Kestrel has always had enemies.” The strain in his voice makes me realize that his efforts at self-destruction over the years might have stemmed not only from pride and grief and self-blame, but also from an awareness that his very existence posed a risk to his daughter’s life and well-being. For who in this country could tolerate well his comfortable prison, his continued safety? “There have been attempts before to assassinate her.”

“That is not true.”

He makes an impatient noise. The flickering lamplight falls in orange ripples over his weathered face. “You do not know of it because she does not want you to know. The attempts were made long ago, when Herran was newly independent. They stopped soon after your birth.” He sees my growing understanding. “The question you must answer first does not concern motives but rather timing. You said the words yourself: you left Herran. The poisoner chose to strike while you were away. Why? What spurred this person to attempt Kestrel’s murder then?”

Oil sputters in a lamp. Above me, bats sing in high, thin voices.

“The reason,” my grandfather says, “begins with you.”