The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
SID
I THUMB POMEGRANATE SEEDS INTOa bowl I know my mother likes, a matte white ceramic one that looks like water-polished stone. When I asked her why, she replied that the Valorian dishware she used when she was young was too elaborate, painted with heroes from long-ago wars. Unusually for her, given that she taught me every code she knew and challenged me to invent more, she said that sometimes it was nice for something not to mean anything, for a bowl to be no more than a bowl. A spoon, a spoon. It is as it is, she said, smiling, holding the bowl out for me to admire its simplicity.
I shiver to remember those words. I remember Nirrim reciting them, her tone dull with the habit of acquiescence. It frustrated me at first, because I did not reckon with how necessary it was for Nirrim and everyone of her kith to repeat them, as though they were internal law that the Half Kith imposed on themselves. If she did not pretend the rules of her society were simple, immutable, like this bowl, she would be punished.
My hands falter as they cut bread. Nirrim stopped pretending. I did not fully realize, then, how courageous it is to no longer go along with a lie. I remember her angry tears as she made me swear to help her make the High Kith pay for what they did to her people. I promised, and broke that promise, and left her to the danger of Ethin and her determination to plot against it.
At first, when I explained to Nirrim that my mother was sick, I thought I would return to Herrath as soon as she was well. But that island holds nothing for me now. Nirrim does not love me. I understand. How many times have I tried to explain to a girl that love cannot be forced, that I could not make myself feel what they wanted me to feel? Nirrim had started to say the same words, and I couldn’t bear it.
Do you not love me like I love you? I asked. Won’t you come with me?
No, she said. I can’t come with you.
I stopped her next words. An apology will make it worse, I told her.
I don’t want to apologize.
Good. There is no need. I lifted my hand to block the sight of her beauty, her pity, and left immediately, grief and shame rising in my throat like bile.
And yet I cannot leave Nirrim, not entirely, not when I wake up thinking she sleeps beside me, that after I have my fill of looking at her full, gentle mouth and the thick lashes of her closed eyes, I will stir her out of dreams with a light touch. Wake up, I will murmur against her throat.
Mmmph.
Lazybones, I will tease, and touch her in a way that will make her eyes fly open.
Sid!
Yes?
I was sleeping.
You were?
You owe me an apology.
You’re right, Nirrim, I do. How shall I make you forgive me?
You know, she will murmur.
I always stretch out on the bed, imagining what I will do, my limbs alight with desire. But then I come fully awake, and of course the bed is empty.
The serving tray is complete. The bread, the bowl of garnet fruit, the cup of warm milk. My hands rest on either side. They are no lady’s hands. Usually that makes me feel good. I like my nails cut to the quick, the strong knobs of knuckles, palms calloused from years of weapons training and the skid of a ship’s ropes. But today they look useless, helpless, as I think about how a month has passed since I left Ethin. I do not know Nirrim’s fate. I will never know. But I cannot imagine that she is safe, not when she was ready to risk everything to save her people, and had no one to protect her.
Yet she would not come with me. I asked. I begged.
Enough. Remembering doesn’t help me. It is painful. I grab the tray with such vehemence that a cook, who had been politely giving me a wide berth, shoots me a startled glance. I ignore it, and bear the tray to my mother.
She is awake. She smiles to see me, though I can tell she is too weak to shift herself up against pillows behind her, so I help until she catches my hand in hers and says, “You are a good child.”
I could say: Yes, when I do what you want. Or: I am not a child.
I feel hot, my face tight. How often have I wanted to hear her say what she has just said? It comes now, but too late, and not because of who I am but because I am taking care of her. Maybe someone would say that taking care of my mother is who I am, that it is what I always want to do for those I love, but I would insult that person, mock them as a fool, even when I know the words to be true.
I do not know what to do with my anger. I do not understand how it constantly feeds itself, how sweet it is, how I need it so badly.
My eyes prickle. I place the tray beside her. “What does that yellow feather mean?”
She glances around her bedchamber, her brow furrowed. “The yellow feather?”
Indeed, it is not here, not now. “The one that is sometimes in your suite, sometimes in Etta’s. Small, and speckled. I don’t know from which bird.”
“A southern bird,” she says, her voice tired, dreamy. She has fallen into some memory that has nothing to do with me.
“If I am such a good child, maybe you should give it to me.”
She blinks up at me, confused. I have rarely seen her confused. She pushes bright hair off her brow to look at me better. “Why would you want a feather?”
I shrug.
“I found it during the second war,” she says, “when I was on a campaign with your father. We were traveling, fresh from a battle, and discovered an ancient temple to the gods. It was overgrown. That temple meant so much to Arin. The Valorians had destroyed most temples during the colonization of Herran. We pulled away the vines and saw mosaics of gods I did not even recognize. He believes in more than just the gods. He believes they will return, though he is too shy to say so.” She glances at a window. It is full of pink dawn. The light touches her face softly, and she looks no older than I am. “I saw his wonder. His hope that not everything was lost. Do you understand? And I knew I loved him. I kept the feather as a memory of that day, and gave it to him when he went into battle without me. I told him to return it to me when he had won. I suppose …” Her voice trails off, and again I feel that I am not even here, that she is speaking into the past. “I believed it would keep him alive.”
I say nothing. Longing fills me. I want the feather even more, now that I understand how impossible it would be for her to give it to me.
“It is yours, Sid, if you would like it.”
“It is?”
“You will have to be content with my promise. Arin has it, for now.”
“Oh,” I say, realizing that the feather is as much his as hers, and maybe he would not like me to have it. I flush. All this over a feather.
She understands my worry in an instant, of course. I believed I had gotten better at not showing my every thought, but she is who she is, like that bowl is a bowl, and there is never any hiding from her. “He would want you to have it, knowing it means something to you.”
The cup of milk will grow cold. I lift the porcelain cap, designed to guard warmth, from the cup’s brim and offer the milk to her. “Only I will serve your meals.”
She drinks. “That is wise.”
“It is common sense. I am surprised you did not restrict your meals earlier to the hands of someone you trust.”
“I was too tired.” She bites her lip. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I feel better.”
“Not so sick?”
“Not so hopeless,” she says, “now that you have returned.”
I shift in the seat beside her, my dagger digging into my side. I don’t want to feel the softness that steals through me. What can I say? Her words are so tender that they hurt. They are what I want, yet she doesn’t even know what it cost me to leave Ethin, how I had to give up my heart to be by her side.
She lets the silence linger, then says, “I wish you had a friend. You never really did.”
“I have Roshar. Emmah. Things were always complicated with anyone else.”
“You did ignore young men. Instead you seduced women whom you befriended, and then abandoned them. Hardly a model for lasting relationships.”
The dagger’s pommel jabs my ribs. I stand, towering over her. “What would you know about my relationships?”
Quietly, she says, “Only what you tell me.”
“Don’t act like you were so heartbroken over my departure. You know why I left.”
“That night, we barely spoke. You shouted at me. You wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.”
“Because I knew what you would say!”
She sets the empty cup in its saucer. “Let me remind you, Sidarine, that it was you who chose to be engaged to Prince Ishar of Dacra. You said that you would. You said it was what you wanted.”
It is true, and I cannot bear it. I storm from the room.
“Oooh, I know that look,” Roshar says slyly from the low bench opposite the fountain in the atrium, stopping me as I speed through the house like a shot bullet. If I enjoy the atrium, he does so even more, especially this time of year, when heat drains from the air. So cold, your country, he always says, shivering. Once the leaves change color he returns to Dacra, complaining that the wind bites his bones. The atrium, with its peaked glass roof, traps the heat on a sunny day. White flowers, their petals thick as curls of shaved soap, look up at me from their green beds along the fountain. Roshar lounges on the bench like it is a bed, faceup, head pillowed on arms crossed behind him, one long leg dangling. I recognize the way he looks, because I have tried to appear this way many times—careless, seductive, lazy, clever. I have endeavored so much over the years to imitate Roshar that sometimes when I see him like this I do not know if he is simply being himself or imitating me imitating him. “Why are you even here?” I demand.
“To muse upon the sweet scent of the flowers, Princess.”
“Not here, the atrium. Here, Herran. You did your duty to my parents and dragged me home. Your ship waits in the harbor. The weather grows cold. Why don’t you return to Dacra, Prince?”
“I am needed where I am.”
I renew my suspicion of him. My mother trusts him wholly. He was visiting Herran before he sailed to Ethin to collect me. He could have poisoned her, then been compelled, in order to pretend his continued loyalty, to seek me out at my parents’ request. If he claims he is needed here, could it be to finish the assassination he began?
He sits up, the lines of his body loose and lithe, an open reminder of how deadly he is as a fighter. Fearless. Quick to attack. Yet his sleek, black eyes are tender when he says, “Sid, I have stayed for you.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
“Well … my parents.”
“Not this time.”
“But you sailed to Ethin for me, for their sake.”
“Yes. But I also did that for you.”
The fountain whispers. The humid, perfumed air of the atrium feels like a veil over my face. He says, “When I received word that you were in the city of Ethin’s prison with an evidently charming local girl, and that you both needed to be released on my royal authority, I did as you asked, and left you alone. Were your parents wrecked with worry, wondering where you were? Yes. Am I their dearest friend? Yes. Did I tell them where you were? No. You are my godchild, and I swore to take care of you as though you were my own. You ran away. You insisted upon your freedom. Who was I to take it? Was it not my role, as your godfather, to give you what you needed?”
I sit beside him on the bench, my anger and suspicion dampened by surprise.
“But when Kestrel fell ill,” he says, “I had to come find you.”
“To make me come home.”
“Sid, no one has made you do anything.”
My throat tightens. I stare at the tumbling water.
“I know a little,” Roshar says, “about making a mistake, and grieving it. I didn’t want that to happen to you. Your mother is dying. I knew that Kestrel held the hand of the goddess, and might walk with her forever. If she died, and you learned of it later, you would never forgive yourself for missing the chance to say good-bye. I came to Ethin to give you a choice.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. When he came to me in my house in Ethin with the news, my need to return home was so strong that it never felt like a choice. And although I asked Nirrim to come with me, I nevertheless chose my family first. It occurs to me how deeply I might have hurt Nirrim, even if she understood my choice, and that when I begged her to be by my side and live with me in my country it was so that I need not feel the pain of choice, and not surrender anything—neither the girl I loved, nor my mother.
“I think it would be easier for you,” Roshar says, “to blame me for forcing your return. But it is not the truth.”
I sigh. “Doesn’t someone miss you in Dacra? Your sister?”
“The queen hates me.”
“Your tiger?”
“Arin will climb all over me when I return, and lick off what remains of my face. He will consider eating me, but I will remind him that I do not taste good to tigers. He will lean against me, and purr down to his bones. I have that effect on men.”
“Surely you have a lover who wants your return.”
“Loads of lovers.”
I look at him sideways.
“Kestrel and Arin have a true love enshrined by the heavens,” he says, “but that is not for everybody.”
“I know.” I can’t quite keep the wistfulness out of my voice.
“I mean: not everyone wants that. The way I live makes me happy. Why must I be with one person until the day I die? How dull.”
“I suppose.”
He looks at me narrowly. “Do you not agree? Given your reputation—”
“Yes,” I lie. “I agree.” I feel too raw to say otherwise, though I now understand that what he has told me about himself I have long already known, and that the way I have—as people like to put it—run through women is because I have yearned to resemble Roshar in every way, including the freedom of his heart. I have been afraid of loving someone like my parents love each other. To love like that is to live with the knowledge that the end will come, one way or the other, because we are mortal, and the loss will be incalculable. Better, I always thought, without realizing that I thought it, to love lightly, and never lose too much.
It’s hard to want something and deny you want it, to long for the very thing you’re afraid of. Anger spouts up again inside me. I am angry at everyone. I am angry at myself.
“I note,” he says, “that you were stomping and stalking your way from the east wing.”
“My mother is impossible.”
“Terrible! Imperious and calculating.”
“Exactly.”
“And a sore loser!”
“That’s you, Roshar. You always lose when you play her at cards, Borderlands, Bite and Sting—”
“You are an ungrateful child.”
“Will you really not leave?” My voice is small. “Even when it grows cold?”
“Even then.”
“And when it snows?”
“Snow is nothing to me. I laugh at snow.”
My eyes sting. He roughs up my hair as though I were a boy. I lean into his hand, then rest my head on his shoulder, grateful … and guilty for ever suspecting him. “She is so sick,” I say.
“I know.”
“She makes me so angry.”
“Fight me, then, and feel better … at least until you lose.”
I look up at him. It has been a long time since we sparred.
“As your godfather,” he says primly, “I retain the right to exploit any vulnerability of yours and trounce you so that you acknowledge I am superior at hand and sword and am generally the best you shall ever know, or have the honor to encounter. This is all for your personal growth, of course. To make you a better warrior, even if you cannot possibly be as good as I am.”
“You do look out for me.”
He smiles. “In my own way.”
We walk out into the sunshine, Roshar tipping his face up to it as though he were his tiger, and cross the lawn to the fighting salle my father designed. It is a simple wooden structure about as large as the stables and not very different from them, with sandy rings open to the air, some unroofed, so that he could train me to fight in snow and rain. Other rooms, where I learned how to fight with short knives and defend myself without ever being able to extend my arms fully, are boxed in tight like a horse’s stall. Once, when my father and I left the salle, sweaty and tired, he claimed I could wield any weapon with grace, and we had exhausted all that the salle had to offer, had fought in its every corner. My gaze floated to the roof. He noticed, eyes widening. You are just like your mother, he said with a smile. When we returned to the salle with a ladder, he pinned my shoulder in one heavy hand just as I set my foot on the first rung. His expression pretended humorous anxiety, but his voice was serious enough when he said, Don’t tell Kestrel.
Then we fought on the roof, and I fell only once.
In the weapons room, Roshar chooses a Dacran blade, long and slim, with a blade that curves slightly to its point. I lift one brow.
“Youngling, do not give me that look,” he says. “Find another slipwater blade for yourself and let’s begin.”
“Are you that afraid to lose to me at fighting that you must choose a weapon you’ve wielded since the time you could toddle?”
“So rude to your elders. You should look upon me with naught but awe. Now, I prefer one of the rings open to the sky. I want to drink in the sunshine while it lasts.”
I choose a slipwater blade lighter than his, and longer, to give me greater reach, and unbuckle my dagger so that I may strap this weapon in its place.
“No one beats me,” he says, “let alone a little half-grown Herrani.”
“No one?”
“Your father is good, I allow, but he cheats.”
“Cheats how?”
“He is too big.”
“That is not cheating.”
“Uncannily gifted.”
“I do not think you are proving your point.”
“He is not natural! His god helps him. How can you best someone blessed by the god of death? That is how he cheats.”
“You don’t believe in our gods. I’m not even sure you believe in your goddess.”
We walk into an achingly bright ring. The sand beneath my boots is washed white by the sun, so that it looks like thinly spread cream.
“Faith can be a choice,” he says. “I choose to believe in my goddess, because I want to believe in mystery, in another world I cannot see until I die. It makes my life better to feel that something waits beyond it.”
“Philosophizing will let you stall only so long, Godfather, before I beat you.”
“So cocky! Wager me, then, if you are so sure of yourself.”
“What stakes?” My mother warned that I should never ask this question, that I should instead seize the opportunity to set the stakes myself, rather than let an opponent make the first move by setting terms that suit him, but I am tired of listening to my mother, tired of how her voice rings in my mind. Anyway, I disagree. Sometimes there is an advantage to hiding what you want, and making your opponent show his wants first.
“If I win,” he says, “I will ask a question, and you will answer.”
“Questions and answers are highly irregular stakes.”
He laughs. “Not in your family. Now put up your blade, and promise you will answer honestly when you lose. Swear by your gods.”
“Roshar, I am always honest.”
“You lie all the time. You have lied just now. Now swear by your gods. The full pantheon, please.”
“Very well, I swear by the hundred to be honest. But I want something different, when I win.”
“If.”
“Give me your ship.”
Roshar shifts in surprise, and the sun catches his blade and turns it to ice. “My ship cost a fortune. She is the swiftest in the Dacran fleet.”
“I know.”
“My prized possession. You do realize that it is worth, say, a minor country? Like one of those Caynish islands. Not even the smallest one. A midsized island.”
“I could have asked for Arin the tiger.”
“Arin is mine.” He tsks. “Are you planning to leave again so soon? To sail back to your Herrath sweetheart?”
“No,” I say, and mean it. I just want a ship that is mine, truly mine. One that I don’t have to steal. I am beginning to worry that to find my mother’s poisoner, I might need to travel somewhere swiftly. The answer begins with you, my grandfather said, and if it is true that my leaving Herran prompted an assassin to attack my mother, it could be for political reasons: because a foreign enemy saw an opportunity to further destabilize the Herrani monarchy, a process I had already begun by vanishing. For now, I must stay close to home. So long as I monitor what my mother eats and drinks, she might recover. Already, this morning, she seemed better. But the assassin might strike again. I wonder, however, whether I will need to sail to Valoria to gather information, or even the Cayn Saratu, where the band of Valorians unhappy with the dismantling of the Empire lurk, and plot against Verex … and possibly against his allies, like my mother.
I want the ship for another reason that cannot linger too far off in my future: my marriage. When I marry Prince Ishar of Dacra, my godfather’s nephew, I want to be able to go where I will. I cannot be confined to his castle.
“Fine,” says Roshar. “A question for me, or a ship for you. But—”
I strike first, my slipwater sword spinning free from its sheath. Roshar is forced to dance back. He edges to my left, clearly annoyed. His curved weapon darts around me like a dragonfly, never landing a blow, the thrusts too quick for me to parry though I duck easily out of their way. His strategy is bewildering, seemingly aimless until I feel a light nick in my side and realize what he is doing.
My tunic. A brand new one, tailored to my wishes. He is slicing it to shreds. “That is mean,” I say, and he grins. I catch the next thrust and shove it back at him, making an advance lunge to whack the flat of my blade against his sword hand. It strikes his thick gold ring with a sound like a tiny bell. I feel the force of the blow judder up my arm, but he does not drop his weapon, merely takes the blow and curves around me to push one boot into the back of my knee. I stumble, fall, and roll, but when I am up I see that he has steered me directly into the sun’s glare.
Now I understand why the Dacrans call this sword a slipwater: the sun flashes off the blade with such brightness that it leaves an afterimage across my vision even as the sword darts someplace else, so that I see the brightness of the blade moving and the bright ghost of where it used to be. Rippling light falls like water over my sight.
After that, it is over fairly quickly. My eyes stream in the sun. I can’t tell where his sword actually is, or where it goes. He knocks the blade out of my hands and onto the sand.
I wipe my eyes. I can barely see Roshar gloatingly sheathing his weapon. He shakes out his right hand. “That hurt.” He pouts, looking down at his long brown fingers and the glinting ring.
“You must really want that answer.” My voice is surly. I sit down in the sand. My tunic is in tatters. Roshar is still complaining about his hand, saying that I am lucky he doesn’t bruise easily, or he would kill me for my impudence. I lift my hand into a visor against the sun. Although the loss doesn’t make me doubt my skill, I feel ashamed. As I blink my vision back into clarity, I realize that the shame is not because I lost, but because I wanted his ship so much, for what it represented: freedom that was not a gift or an inheritance or a theft but truly mine, honestly earned.
Roshar sits beside me, luxuriating in the sun. I, of course, will burn.
“Well, ask me,” I say.
“Why are you angry?”
“I am not angry.”
“You swore to be honest.”
“You beat me fairly. I can’t complain.”
“I don’t mean the fight. I mean your mother. Your father. Even me. Sid, you are a rangy little lion of anger. Always looking for someone to bite. You were like this before you left Herran. Now you’re back, and it’s worse. Why?”
I drop my face into my hands. The gesture shows too much of what I feel, but letting him see my expression would be worse. I realize he made a decision, from the moment he saw me hurtling through the atrium, to bring me to this point, to force me to answer this very question. Roshar being Roshar, he had to make a pageant of it, from pretending a friendly spar to proposing that absurd bet to making sure I knew he had fully won, in every possible way. “You could have asked me like a normal person.”
“Where is the fun in that? Besides, you wouldn’t have answered. Now you must. You’re sworn to answer.”
I breathe out slowly, my hands still pressed against my eyes and cheeks. “I am not like you.”
“You must admit that you are, in a number of important ways.”
“I have been with many women.”
“You are a legend,” he agrees.
“I didn’t mean to be unkind to them. My father thinks I have been. I suppose he is right. There is … a hunger in me.”
“For what?”
Quietly, I say, “To be wanted.”
“Ah, Sid. In this, we are very much alike.”
I have not given him a full answer. My vow to the hundred swells in my chest. I should never have made such a promise. Sunshine beats down on my head. I have already shown too much. Maybe I am already the gods’ plaything, I cannot tell, but I have foolishly made a bet in their name. If I don’t hold true to it, I might as well surrender myself wholly to whatever cruelty they might devise for a vow breaker.
It is easy to believe only halfheartedly in gods until you imagine how they might punish you. Then your faith solidifies very quickly indeed.
“We are different,” I tell Roshar, “because I want one person. I want forever. I want what my parents have.”
“What Kestrel and Arin have is a rare thing.”
“I know.”
“I am glad you want it,” he says. “It is not for me. But only you can choose what is right for you.”
“I kept looking.”
“Sid, you are so young. You will find someone.”
I think of Nirrim, of plucking a white petal from her hair and rubbing it between my finger and thumb, releasing its scent, and how I was able to make her want me but not love me. I shake my head.
Roshar says, “That girl in Ethin? Nirrim?”
“Nirrim didn’t feel the same way.”
He winces. “Should I feed her to my tiger?”
“It’s not her fault. I didn’t earn her love.”
“That might not be true.”
“This is me, being honest, sworn to honesty by the gods.”
“I mean that you might not see the whole truth.”
“There is more.”
“Goddess help us.”
“I don’t want to be with a man. Ever. I never have. I never will.”
“I am hardly surprised, but this is … rather inconvenient, considering that you are engaged to my nephew.”
I shrug.
“I was given to understand that you wanted the engagement.” His black eyes are wide, the green paint rimming them bright. “Kestrel said so. Did she lie to me?”
Miserably, I shake my head. Roshar heaves a great breath and flops backward onto the sand. “Of all the self-defeating … you are just like Arin. I swear he almost walked himself into an early grave countless times over. You are walking me into an early grave. And Dacrans don’t even have graves!” More seriously, he says, “Sid, did you not know your own desires? I understand that maybe, when you agreed to the engagement, you weren’t sure then, and thought you enjoyed men, or you did and then you changed your mind—”
“No. I knew.”
“Did you want the political power? The royal marriage, to be queen of two countries, and to love whomever you wanted in secret? There’s no shame to that. This, too, I would understand.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
This sun. It will blind me. How can it be this hot so close to autumn? How can summer hold on so hard? I want to plunge into snow. For ice to imprison my face. I want the hands that rest so uselessly on my upturned knees to dissolve into white powder and blow away in the next wind. My vow. The hundred. I say, “I wanted to make my parents happy.”
His face fills with love. “Sid, youngling, you do make them happy.”
I shake my head. “I am angry at my mother because she is glad to marry me to someone for political convenience. I am angry at my father for not seeing any of this. I am angry at you because you should know better than anyone who I am and what I want.”
His expression twists.
“Can we be done?” I say. “Is that enough? I have answered you. You asked and I answered.”
“It is enough, but—”
“Good.” I scramble to my feet, not bothering to shake the sand out of my clothes, and hurry into the salle, plunging into the blessed, cool dark. I hear Roshar behind me. His hand on my shoulder drags me to a halt.
He says, “I think you should talk with Kestrel and Arin.”
“No. Herran needs this engagement. We are a small country. Dacra is vast and powerful.”
“We are your ally.”
“Your sister the queen will eat our country whole the moment it serves her.”
“Well, now, that is true.”
“I thought, when I sailed away, that I would find something that would help Herran. An asset. Like our guns. A weapon or skill that would help us keep our independence. I thought if I could find it, I wouldn’t have to marry.”
“Did you?”
Nirrim feels so far away, the magic I tasted at the tips of her fingers a dream. I am no longer sure if what I experienced in that country was magic, or simply the desperation of my hope for a solution. My memory is not perfect, not like Nirrim’s, and all I am sure of now is how I needed the feel of her fingertips against my mouth, and the way she knew me. “No.”
“I still think—”
“I don’t want my parents to know what I have told you. They wouldn’t understand. Promise me you won’t tell them.”
“Sid.” He sighs.
“None of this is yours to tell. Promise.”
“I promise.” He holds out his right hand and I take it. As he looks down at our clasped hands, he frowns. My eyes adjusted to the dark interior, I see that the heavy black stone set in his gold ring is not a gem at all, but glass. It has cracked. Swearing, he tugs the ring off his hand, reaches for the hem of my tattered tunic, and rips a strip from the bottom.
“Roshar!”
“The tunic was ruined anyway.” Quickly, he wraps the ring in the cloth. “I am lucky the ring didn’t leak.”
I am confused. “Why would your ring leak?”
“It is filled with poison.”
My heart falters. “Poison?”
“Well, not exactly. A liquid derived from an eastern worm. The ring has a mechanism that allows me to prick someone once, to send them to sleep. A stronger dose could kill someone.” He walks outside. I follow, and watch him kneel and begin to chop at the earth with his slipwater sword. “I shouldn’t have been wearing it in Herran anyway,” he mutters as he digs a hole.
“Why not?”
He drops the cloth bundle into the hole and buries it. “Because of your mother.”
He cannot be the poisoner. If he was, he would never speak so frankly about this to me. “What does my mother have to do with your ring?”
He tamps a clod of grass-rooted earth down with his boot. “It’s a replica of one I loaned Arin years ago, when Kestrel was imprisoned in the tundra. He said he lost it, but that wasn’t true. He threw it away.”
“Why?”
“Kestrel wanted it.”
“For revenge?” I know so little about my mother’s imprisonment in the work camp, only that my grandfather sent her there, and that when my father rescued her, she was near death.
“For herself. In the camp, they gave her a drug that made her work hard, and stole her memory. She came to love the drug. Even when Arin brought her home, she wanted it. I think part of her always will.”
“Why did she never tell me this?”
“Why do you never tell her certain things? Because you find them painful to share, or you consider them yours alone to know … or because you are ashamed.” He sees my worry and says softly, “This was long ago, before you were born. The worm poison is not the same as the drug used on Kestrel in the work camp, but it reminds her. I was careless to wear the ring, but I’m not afraid that she would try to take it, or use it, only that it might hurt her to remember that time. Kestrel’s body needed that drug, and then her mind did, and her heart, but she was stronger than her need. She has been for a very long time.”
I realize he is telling me a story of my mother’s strength, but also a weakness in her that I have never seen. She has always seemed so invulnerable. The night I fled Herran, she had simply grown quiet and pale as I yelled at her. She stood, posture perfect, braided hair golden over her shoulders, slender eyes as amber as those jewels that hold trapped insects from another time. She did not look human. She looked like an icon, like an image set in mosaics, each chip of ceramic slick and hard. You are an apple, Sidarine, was all she said, and then I was gone.
But I wonder if it has been easier for me to think of her as an icon, as a hard, untouchable image. She has always been more than my mother. Kestrel: the impervious queen. As much as that infuriated me, maybe I needed to see her that way, too, because it meant she could always protect me, and I would never lose her. What would it mean for me to see her as Roshar did long ago, when he first knew her: fragile?
The sun has advanced in the sky. I promised to bring my mother each meal. I cannot look like this: sweaty, worried, my tunic in tatters. In Dacra it is customary to thank your opponent for the pleasure of being beaten, so I do, formally—which Roshar adores—and hurry across the lawn.
Emmah awaits me in my breakfast room, though it is long past breakfast, and says nothing about my appearance, so used as she is to seeing me in worse shape, whether from fighting or slipping into my suite with my clothes in wanton disorder, trailing the perfume of lust. She smiles to see me, and despite the wrinkles from the burns on her face she looks young, her teeth even, her dark hair not so silvered as my father’s, or Sarsine’s, though they must be the same age. Surely Emmah was beautiful once. “I have something for you,” she says.
My mind is too disordered; I do not really hear her. “Emmah, you must know Herran’s medicinal herbs well.” I will not say the word poison.
“Of course. Any nurse to the princess needs to know the rudiments of medicine. But you were a healthy child, thank the gods.”
I stop myself from saying anything further. Every territory in the world has its own native drugs and poisons, and the secret to my mother’s condition might lie not in Herran, but in Dacra, Valoria, or the Cayn Saratu. After I change and visit my mother’s suite, I must ride in to pay a call to the redheaded Valorian ambassador whose eye I caught at the state dinner.
“Sid, I said I have something for you. From your father.”
I blink myself back into where I am, instead of where I plan to be, and see that Emmah holds out an envelope. What could my father write to me, that he would not say to my face? The envelope is light, as though it contains nothing, not even the paper of a letter. I open it.
Inside is a speckled yellow feather.
I lift it by its milky quill. The vane is the color of honeysuckle, its tip whisper soft when I touch it to my lips. The answer begins with you, my grandfather said. I remember what Roshar told me, how my mother had to conquer her need for a drug. I remember my grandfather’s prison, and how my mother designed it by thinking with my grandfather’s mind. How she would beat me at Bite and Sting, tricking me into believing that four scorpions were enough when she held tigers in her hand. I wanted this feather too much. Can the gift of it, requested of my father by my mother, be only what it appears to be—a gesture of love? Does my mother ever say or do anything without meaning something more? An apple! She called me an apple. I think of apples and feathers and poison worms, and wonder if my grandfather was right, if the timing of my mother’s poisoning has something to do with me. Was it meant to bring me back to Herran?
Queen Kestrel is capable of anything, they say.
Would she be capable of poisoning herself, if it brought her wayward child home?