The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

SID

USUALLY, I LOVE THE SEA.

Yes, even during a storm, Nirrim would add, teasing yet serious, too. Especially during a storm.

But that’s not true. Storms can kill. They grind ships against unseen rocks, shred sails, tip the world upside down, wash sailors overboard. Frustration fills me, as if Nirrim has actually said this to me, and I must defend myself, to say I am no fool, that I don’t seek danger (not always). So I am good on the water. Is it wrong to take pleasure in my skills? I have but three. And this skill is one any true-born Herrani should have. The sea is in my blood, and if I like the roll of a ship’s deck beneath my feet and can taste a storm in the air long before it arrives, well, that is my birthright.

Nirrim, you say I love a storm only because you have never set foot on a ship. You have never seen the sea as more than a twinkling blue expanse meeting the horizon. You think me braver than I am.

A gull tilts low over the too-still water. I push the imagined conversation from my mind. Nirrim refused me. I gave her my heart and she gave it right back. There is no conversation one can have after that. Why am I imagining she thinks me brave? Why do this to myself? I don’t know what she thinks. I know only that she decided I was not enough.

“Itching for a storm, are you?” says a smooth voice over my shoulder.

“Oh, shut up, Roshar.”

He leans against the taffrail and gazes at the becalmed water. His mutilations are stark in the sunlight: the missing nose, the wrinkles of flesh where his ears once were. People flinch when they first meet him. I can’t see him as anything but familiar. He held me when I was a baby. He taught me how to stroke his tiger’s broad head so that it would not bite. He has a warrior’s body, not broad like my father’s, but lean like mine, his gestures firm yet with a lazy kind of elegance my father has said, amusedly, that I imitated for years until Roshar’s sly way of speaking and moving had become my own. Roshar’s black eyes, narrowed against the sun, are rimmed with the green paint that marks his royal status, a color echoed in the flag of his ship, a narrow Dacran sloop, which lies not far off from this one, barely dipping in the too-peaceful water. He insisted on staying aboard my ship. “Little runaway princess,” he said, smirking when he saw how much I resented that last word, “do you think I will let you out of my sight?” Then he ousted me from my captain’s quarters. “I outrank you,” he said, and when I spluttered, he added, “There was a beauty contest. The crew said I won.”

I keep my gaze on his sloop, which I have seen cut through choppy water like a blade. It is narrowly designed and beautifully made, the captain’s quarters a jewel box of tiny windowpanes.

“I don’t like the look in your eyes.” He stuffs tobacco into his pipe and lights it easily, not even having to shield the bowl from the wind, which is nonexistent. “That is my ship. Don’t look at it like she’s some girl you want to bed.”

“If you were a good godfather, you would give her to me.”

“Ha!”

“I stole my father’s ship. Who is to say yours isn’t next on my list?”

He smiles. “I, too, like to threaten people when I’m worried.” He smokes, a cloud curling around him. “A stiff wind would be nice, if it doesn’t blow us off course.”

Fine, maybe I do like a storm every now and then. Roshar knows me all too well. Nirrim doesn’t, not quite, but she saw me well. She understood me, which apparently was enough to make her stay behind in a city that treated her terribly, even when I offered her my heart and my home.

Tiny, scalloped waves lap the side of Roshar’s sloop. My hands feel heavy, although they are empty. They hold a memory. I do not have Nirrim’s preternatural gift for memory, her ability to see every moment in her past as clearly as though it were the present. What I have instead is a memory of a memory, the moment so old that what I remember is my frequent return to it. It haunts me.

My mother placed an apple in one hand and a small stone in the other. We stood on the royal pier, hoping to glimpse the ship of my father, who was due to return from a visit to Dacra, our eastern ally. Which object is heaviest? she asked.

They weigh the same, I said.

Drop them, she said. The water gulped down the stone. The apple bobbed, a friendly red and yellow.

If they weigh the same, my mother said, why does the apple float?

“What I wonder,” Roshar says, interrupting the memory, “is what you want more: for a wind to push us to Herran so that you may see your mother, or for it to carry us away as swiftly as possible from Herrath and that forlorn girl of yours.”

Despite myself, I cast a glance southwest toward Herrath, to where it lies hidden beyond the Empty Islands. Herrath can’t be seen, of course. We left its shores several days ago. I practically begged for Nirrim to come with me.

Roshar grins, which makes him look like the sign of my father’s god. A skull for King Arin, touched by the god of death. Since it is my father’s sign, it has become my family’s, too. Death loves you, people say. When, impatient, I have demanded what exactly that means, they say, Death grants you mercy.

But sometimes people mutter, Death follows at your parents’ heels.

There it is again, my old annoyance. My father’s god is not my god. I was born in the year of the god of games, and although I have my religious doubts and light a candle in the temple mostly to please my faithful father, I take comfort that my patron god is no serious member of the pantheon. She is a rascal. Of the three skills I possess, winning a gamble is one.

It is my mother’s, too.

“You’re lying,” I tell Roshar. “My mother is not sick. This is a trick to make me come home. Some game of hers.”

The humor leaves Roshar.

“She probably put you up to it,” I accuse him.

“No.”

“It would be just like her.” A lump of worry and anger hurts my throat. I, too, don’t know why I most want the wind: to carry me away from Nirrim, or to bring me to my mother. Part of me dreads a swift voyage. I am afraid that as soon as I reach Herran I won’t be able to pretend anymore that my mother is all right, that the news of her illness is a hoax to call me back as if I were the kestrel, wheeling toward the bait in her uplifted fist.

“Little godchild,” Roshar says, “I have never lied to you.” He rests a hand on mine where it grips the taffrail, his dark brown skin covering my pale fingers. All gold, Herrani say when they see me. They don’t say it nicely. I look very Valorian. I look like the people who conquered my country thirty-some years ago. Like my mother. I slip my hand out from beneath Roshar’s and the weight of his heavy ring, set with a dull black stone. He says, “I wish I didn’t worry that Kestrel might die, but I do.”

Think, tadpole, my mother said as I stared at the floating apple.

Because the apple is bigger? I said. Like a boat?

She smiled in encouragement—which is against her rules. She disdains giving hints, and if you go up against her you can be sure that nothing in her expression or gesture will reveal what she does not wish to show. But I was small, and she did want me to see a truth: her love. She gently tugged one of my braids. My hair was long then. When I cut it a few years ago, on my fifteenth nameday, her expression radiated hurt, because she believed I had done it so that I would look less like her.

She was right. She always is.

But the apple and the stone weighed the same, she said. You felt that when you held them. Why would one sink and the other float? Why would the apple’s bigness make it buoyant?

I had no answer. I studied apples and stones for days. I dropped pebbles into the atrium’s fountain. I cut open apples. I pried out seeds—brown teardrops, as though each apple, cheerful on the outside, wept at its core, or had several tiny, hard, bitter hearts.

Tell her, my father said to my mother.

No, she answered.

Finally, I announced, It is because an apple is filled with air. It doesn’t look that way, but it is. The air makes an apple go crunch between your teeth.

She looked so proud. I felt proud, for making her proud. My darling, I knew you could do it.

She promised a ride on her stallion as a reward. Javelin was strong, enormous. He was in his prime then. I always begged to ride him. She would say no, not because she worried that he’d throw me, but that I’d lose my seat and fall.

This time, I didn’t even have to ask. Javelin was a gift freely given. Up you go. She boosted me into his saddle. I was a sudden giant. I looked down at the crown of her head, her braided hair the color of lamplight. She fussed with a stirrup. She was going to walk beside me, I could tell, and I became instantly frustrated. I had done what she had asked. I had worked hard for my answer to her question. And now, to be babied? Rebellion lit my blood. My heels kicked into Javelin’s sides. We flew. I did not fall.

I think I was five years old.

Many years later, when I yelled at her, when I said I would never do what she wanted, that she could go to hell, when I shouted with all the fury she might have shown me that time I took off recklessly on her horse, she said, You are an apple, Sidarine.

What?I wanted to tear my hair out. I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t, then, remember that day by the pier, her test. I said, For once, say what you mean! I am sick of your riddles. I am sick of you. How dare you expect me to marry. I do not want him. I do not want any man. Do you hear me? I never will.

I think, she said coldly, you know exactly what I mean.

I remembered, then, the apple and the stone, and saw instantly her insult. This was how she saw me: filled with sweet air. I had given myself over to pleasure. All the girls I had taken to bed. She knew about them. Of course she did. She was the queen of spies. Clearly, she thought I liked a fresh dessert so much that I had become one. What did I know, her expression said, of duty?

Well, she was right. I knew nothing of duty. I refused to know it. I slammed the door to her suite behind me. I gathered my things and stole a few others. I cast off from the city that very night.

Roshar has left me alone at the ship’s rail. I wipe my wet face. My old hurt pushes against my new one. Was this why Nirrim said no? I love you, I said, but she didn’t feel the same way. Maybe she saw in me what my mother saw: someone unworthy.

My mother might die.

I say this to myself, over and over. Though I only half believe in gods, I pray for wind.

She cannot die. Impossible. She is strong. Hard. A weapon if need be. You’d have to break her open to see what’s inside. My mother: dropped down deep, secret and invisible below the waves.

My mother is stone.