The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
SID
I TAKE THE POISONED DRESSback to my suite and lay it on the table of my writing room, where I get the best light. The windowpane exhales a chill. Outside, almost all the leaves have fallen. I see groundskeepers raking leaves into colorful piles and setting them on fire. Even without the window open, I smell the sweet, musty smoke.
Slicing open the dress, I examine how cleverly the tiny hooks are sewn into the fabric. Someone skilled with a needle and thread did this. While I cannot assume it was a woman who crafted this dress, my mind leans that way. A man could possess this skill—even my father can sew simply—or he could have commissioned the dress from someone else, someone who might not even have known which life it threatened. Someone who might not even have known the dress could be used as a murder weapon. A seamstress could have sewn in the tiny barbs while another brushed poison over them, later.
The finger I pricked remains numb, and the numbness has spread from my fingertip to the heel of my hand. If my mother had pulled the dress on, and been pricked multiple times, her death might very well have been certain, and swift.
I don’t need to visit my grandfather to know what he would say: the assassin has lost patience, and whereas once they would have been content with a slow death that looked natural, now little caution is being taken. The assassin no longer cares whether the queen’s death is known as murder.
“Sid, what are you doing?”
Startled, I flip the fabric over so that the barbs are hidden, and all that can be seen is the dress’s red, embroidered exterior.
Emmah, who has entered my suite without knocking, slips the key she holds into her dress pocket. I don’t usually mind that she comes and goes at will to my rooms. It has always been that way, ever since I was a baby. But I flush, torn between disliking the intrusion and welcoming it. My mother wanted me to tell no one, and I have already broken that trust by bringing my worries to my grandfather. I am tempted to break it again. Emmah could provide useful information—as a servant, she knows the world of the people who live and work here in a way I never can. She might have noticed something suspicious that could help me identify who wanted my mother’s death, or was hired to accomplish it.
“I know you hate dresses,” Emmah says, “but you don’t need to dismember them.”
I decide to risk a subtle question. “What do you think of this embroidery?”
“It is very fine.”
“Is whoever did this as good as you at embroidering?”
Emmah runs a light hand over the fabric. “Better, I think,” she finally says.
“Do you know who could have made it?” Maybe the workmanship has a signature pattern that could be traced to an individual.
“You don’t know yourself? You didn’t commission the dress?”
“No. Have I ever commissioned a dress?”
Emmah smiles and shakes her head. “I’m afraid I can’t help. Sometimes a dressmaker will sew her initials into the inside of a dress’s hem.”
But I have already examined the hem, and saw nothing like that. I think of the god of sewing, the youngest god, who was born human. She was made immortal by Death, who loved her. We Herrani mark time by the gods, each year belonging to one of them until a hundred years have passed, and the cycle begins again. My father was born in the final year of a century, Death’s year, but his mother chose to celebrate his nameday the following year, the first one in the new century: the Seamstress’s year. It is not odd to me that Death could love a mortal, or that he would be drawn to an artist whose skill is to create when he brings an end to every creation. But it surprises me that the Seamstress stitches thread that binds, and Death cuts the stitches of life, and yet they can still love each other.
Using my dagger, I slice away a portion of the outer fabric, careful not to take any barbs with it, and tuck the swatch inside my pocket. Then I bundle the dress carefully, place it back inside its box, and reach for my jacket.
“Going somewhere?” Emmah says.
“Into town.” I will visit the dressmakers.
“You’ll need a thicker jacket,” she warns. “It’s colder outside than you think.”
But I am already halfway out the door.
I don’t get very far. I’m striding down a hallway, letting my long legs go as swiftly as they can without running, when I see Ceciliah turn the corner. Her eyes—a gray so pale they look like silver snow—go wide.
Oh no.
I halt abruptly and gird myself for the insults and accusations about to come my way. I wish spurned lovers wouldn’t feel so … spurned. I never made any promises.
But then my heart clenches, to remember once more Nirrim’s rejection of me, and I feel ashamed, and ready for what I deserve.
Ceciliah smiles, her prettily perfect mouth curling with secrecy. “I was looking for you,” she says.
“You … were?”
“We need to talk.”
“Can it be not right now?”
“Do you have somewhere better to be?”
I don’t want to tell the truth, and I don’t want to be rude. “No, but—”
“Good.” She steps close, edging me toward the corridor’s wall.
“Cecy,” I say, determined to be as gentle—and moral!—as possible, “I am sorry that I hurt you.”
“I forgive you.”
“You do?” I say, surprised that apologizing is so easy. Then my back touches the wall and her hand is on me and I am surprised again in a totally different way. “Ceciliah, I don’t think—”
“You don’t have to explain. I have missed you so much. No one makes me feel the way you do.”
I catch her hands between mine to put some distance between us, then see from her expression that even this gesture has misled her. Quite possibly, I look like I treasure her hands, and am holding them the way I have seen my father hold my mother’s, cradling her small fingers within his larger ones. I drop them as though scalded. Trying again to be gentle—but not too gentle this time, I say, “It is over between us.”
Her face contorts. “But … don’t you want me? Aren’t you sorry you treated me the way you did?”
“Yes.” Then, horrified at her tender look, I scramble to add, “No! I mean, yes, I’m sorry. You deserved better. But no, I can’t be with you anymore.”
“Why?” she demands.
I am about to answer very, very carefully when my mouth clamps shut. I am assaulted afresh by the memory of my last conversation with Nirrim. Do you not love me like I love you? I asked. Won’t you come with me?
No, she said.
But I asked two questions, just as Ceciliah had done with me. What if it was the same between Nirrim and me? What if she only meant to say that no, she could not come with me, and I had taken the answer to one question to stand for both?
“You should at least have the decency to tell me why,” Ceciliah says, her eyes welling.
I take her hand again. How hot it feels, and slender, and rigid. She might very well punch me with it. When I speak, I try to be as true as I can. “I want you to be happy, and you can’t be happy with me, because I have given my heart to another.”
She wrenches away from me. “I always knew you were a liar,” she says, and crashes past me to race in the direction from which I came.
I can’t blame Ceciliah for disbelieving me. Once someone has a reputation for being a liar, it is difficult to trust when she tells the truth. I feel horribly guilty … but in the midst of my regret, I can’t help but think of Nirrim, and hope.
“Well, that’s a first,” says a dry voice.
I turn my gaze from one end of the corridor, where Ceciliah has vanished, to the other end, where I had intended to go. Sarsine stands, arms folded across her chest, her expression interested, as though I am some hitherto unknown scientific fact, suddenly revealed.
“This is a very popular hallway,” I say.
“I have never known you to turn a lady down.”
“Too popular. This can’t all be coincidence. Which god have I offended?”
“Sid, are you in love?”
I cover my eyes. Of course she heard everything. “I have an errand to run.”
“What is so pressing, may I ask?”
“I need to see a dressmaker.”
“You obviously do not. You hate dressmakers. Unless … the dressmaker is the young woman you mentioned?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions.”
Her face is amused. “Now, Sidarine—”
“Sid. My name is Sid. For the love of the gods, you know that.”
“Sid,” she says, her voice serious now. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“Wonderful.” I begin to maneuver around her when she says, “But I would like to meet her, this girl who has captured your heart.”
I stare. “You would?”
“She must be very special.”
My serious little moonbeam, I called Nirrim when I saw her in a silver dress, but it wasn’t just the dress that made me say it. It was her way of being: her gentleness, her touch as soft as moonlight. But also her intelligence, her unexpected strength. She lit up the night. “You won’t meet her.”
“Why not?” Sarsine says.
“She’s a foreigner. On that island I visited. I asked her to come here, to live with me, and she refused.”
“Well, did you try asking her again?”
“I … What good would that do?”
“People change their minds.” When I stammer—how could Sarsine pretend things are so simple?—she says, “I am a practical person. You, on the other hand, are just like Kestrel and Arin. So much drama. Perhaps whatever has gone wrong between you and this girl could be solved with more honesty, and less wounded torment.”
“Impossible.”
“Why? Kestrel’s health has greatly improved. What is to stop you from returning to that island?”
Any number of reasons, including the presence of an assassin I’m not supposed to tell Sarsine about. But also: “I am engaged.”
“May I suggest”—there is that droll tone again—“that you end your engagement, since you are in love with someone else?”
“It’s not so easy. Herran needs this alliance.”
“Does it?”
“I must marry him.”
“And be unhappy forever? Sid, maybe your marriage is not something you have to do, but something you only feel you have to do.”
“You would have me invite international chaos, ill will from Dacra, and the disappointment of my parents?”
“If it means your happiness, yes.” She must see the surprise on my face, because she adds, “Little one, I was there when you were born. I knew then, as I know now, that we are all held in the hands of the gods. Our lives are so short and fragile. We must waste none of it.”
Then she kisses me tenderly on the cheek, and leaves.
It is almost dinnertime when I return from the city. I hasten my horse, whose breath floats in the air like a white flag. Soon, it will be cold enough to snow. My stomach is empty and my mind is full, filled to bursting with the uselessness of my errand (none of the dressmakers recognized the embroidered fabric, though they could have been lying), the lack of any one good suspect in my mother’s attempted murder, the possibilities presented to me in that corridor (could Nirrim love me? Could I have misunderstood? What was the very worst that could happen, if I ended a political engagement?), and—most pressing of all—the fact that I am late to serve my mother.
The silver sun is low in the sky, the clouds as thin as tishin paper. I guide my horse across the brown, brittle lawn to the stables, passing the fighting salle, when I yank the reins in surprise. My horse whuffs and stops, stamping.
There, in the ground near the salle, is a hole. It is exactly where Roshar buried his poison ring.
I get down from my horse and come close to the hole. I reach inside, down to its very bottom.
The ring is gone.
I am hasty in the preparation of dinner, stuffing dried apricots into a quail, a fowl small enough to roast quickly, as I mull over the missing ring and its numbing eastern poison, which has the same properties as what tainted the barbed dress sent to my mother.
Emmah enters the kitchen, in her hand a chalky round of aged goat cheese, which she must have taken from the stores. “The other servants said you had returned from your errand into town. You are cooking for the queen?”
Distractedly, I tuck boiled lemons and twigs of rosemary that were grown in the atrium around the quail in its iron roasting pot, shove it into an oven, and add more wood to make the fire burn hotly.
“She is lucky to have such a child, but why do you cook all her meals?”
“No reason. I like cooking.”
“Yes, but this level of domesticity is unlike you. Usually, you are too busy training in the salle, or attending parties.”
Even if I were not preoccupied with the continuing threat on my mother’s life, I cannot believe that the usual social events would pique my interest now. Something changed when I saw Nirrim in splendid green, the color of high summer, the glossy fabric sliding down her skin. I didn’t care about the party we attended. I didn’t care about the dress. In fact, I wanted that dress gone. I wanted to be alone with Nirrim, to hear only her low voice. I cared only for her company.
“Eat with me,” Emmah says, “while your quail cooks.” She sets the goat cheese, which she knows is my favorite kind, on a cutting board. The fragrance of hot rosemary rises in the air. “You look starved,” she adds, and she is right, so I cut into the cheese with my dagger—never mind how outraged my Valorian ancestors would be—and offer her a piece. We both eat. The tangy cheese crumbles in my mouth. “Did you find what you were looking for in town?” Emmah asks.
I shake my head, mouth full.
“Why did you go?” she says. “Was it about that dress?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I might be able to help you find who embroidered it.”
“Emmah, would you know if someone in the house has been watching me? A servant? Or even a lady, like Ceciliah, or Lyannis, the Valorian ambassador.”
“A jilted lover, you mean.”
“Must everyone always cast aspersions on my reputation?”
“You earned it, you must admit. Why are you asking about someone watching you?”
When investigating, my mother always said, let the people you question know only what they need to know. I decide against explaining my suspicion—that either Roshar retrieved the ring and used it to poison my mother’s dress, which I cannot imagine him doing, or someone surveilled us and dug up the ring after we left. I must hesitate too long to reply, because Emmah waves away her own question and says, “Forget the reason. I know of no one who would follow you, save the lovelorn, but I will play your spy.” She helps herself to another wedge of cheese. The quail sizzles in its pot. “I will pester the other servants for some answers.”
“You are wonderful, Emmah.”
“I know. Mind that quail. Small as it is, it will be done for dinner sooner than you think. Wipe that worry from your face. If you are being watched, I will soon find out by whom.”
When I enter my mother’s suite, it is empty. In her quiet bedchamber, the bed is perfectly made. The dining room is silent in its simple intimacy, the curtains plush yet not overly elegant, the wood of the furniture a light, sanded ash. I set down her dinner. I listen to the suite’s silence, and worry returns as my boots tread the sapphire patterned carpet. By the time I enter the sunroom, my worry has turned into fear and self-blame. I should have told my father about the assassin. There should have been guards placed around my mother at all times. Why did I not do this, how could I be so arrogant as to think I could solve the problem all by myself?
Could my mother have been abducted?
Will I find her lifeless body?
Then I hear, though the windows, footsteps across gravel. It’s the sound of someone small, and I recognize the short, quick paces of my mother in a rush.
Of course. The garden.
My mother’s rooftop garden has a door that allows her to pass into my father’s rooftop garden, which lies just on the other side of the garden wall. The garden is a way for my parents to enter each other’s suites without the entire household talking about it.
I step out onto the garden. The sky has darkened to iron, the air bites, and the potted trees have lost their leaves, but the walls of the garden are afire with an ivy that changes to red in the cold, and the low, bushy damselthorn will keep its color throughout the winter, its broad leaves a glossy green traced by a red-pink pattern. My mother halts at the sight of me, her heels grinding into the gravel. She blushes. She is dressed impeccably, and I have an image of my father tenderly buttoning each button up the back of her dress, buckling her dagger belt into place, and sliding a wisp of dark gold hair back into its braid. “I’m late for our dinner,” she says ruefully.
Now I flush, because I feel stupid for believing that she needs me to serve her. How many times has she slipped away to my father’s room and snuck back just in time for me to bring her a meal? When did she get well enough to walk?
Then I feel terrible for being jealous of my father and wishing that my mother had stayed ill a little longer—not very ill, but just enough for me to remain important to her. “We have no appointment to keep,” I say. “You can go back to Etta.”
“And miss the meal you made? And your company?” She crosses the crunching gravel to me and reaches up to tuck a short lock of hair behind my ear. “You are so tall.”
“Too tall for a girl, you mean.”
“I mean that I can’t believe how you’ve grown, when you were once so small, and all mine.” Her fingers are icy. “I have been lucky, to have you three times a day. Even before you left Herran, you would avoid me.” My mother’s hands are cold when she is afraid. I realize that she is afraid of me.
It makes me sad. I don’t want her to be afraid that she has offended me just by visiting my father. I don’t want to feel possessive of her, or greedy for her attention. I want to feel normal. I want to be Kestrel’s normal daughter, the kind she raised me to be. “Come inside, Amma. I want to talk with you.”
“Yes?” she says eagerly. When I say, “About the assassin,” her face falls, and I wonder what she hoped for.
Inside, I undo the holster and place the gun with a clunk on a petite, decorative table near the door of the dining room and then join my mother at the dining table. I keep, of course, my dagger at my waist, as does my mother. A Valorian always wears her dagger. I light lamps. The room glows as if it has been made suddenly happy. As I carve the quail, which vents its steam, I tell my mother about fighting in the salle with Roshar, about his broken ring and how he buried it, and about discovering the ring was gone.
“Roshar would never hurt me,” she says.
“I agree.”
“If he were the assassin, why would he mention to you that he wore a poison ring? It makes no sense for him to make such a song and dance about a broken ring and then later return to dig it up.”
“Well, this is Roshar. He makes a song and dance about everything.” When she begins to protest, I interrupt. “I don’t suspect him. But it is interesting that the barbs on your dress had the same numbing effect as the poison from the eastern worm. I think before, when I was gone, someone was contaminating your food regularly, possibly with the same Valorian drug poured into the aqueducts decades ago. Your symptoms match those of that drug: you grew fatigued, and it seemed like you had a wasting illness.” I set the carving knife aside, and we sit. The tablecloth reaches all the way to the floor. It is made of a heavy gray fabric with embroidered blue kestrels, its hem fringed with thread-of-gold. A gift, probably, from a visiting dignitary. Some of them aren’t very imaginative, and often give her something with her namesake on it instead of something she would actually enjoy.
“The assassin grows bolder,” she says, “to take advantage of the opportunity to use a new poison—which, with the right dose, would kill instantly.”
“Yes, but that’s not what troubles me.” Neither of us can eat what is on our plates. “It’s that the person must have been spying on Roshar and me. It’s someone who must have easy access to you, the house, and the grounds. A servant? A guest?” Many Valorians resent my mother for bringing an end to the Empire. Is Ambassador Lyannis one of them?
“The assassin must have been very close,” my mother says, “in order to overhear Roshar describe the properties of his ring to you.” Her expression tightens with anxiety. “I don’t like the thought of this man following you.”
“I’m not so sure the assassin is a man,” I say, though I am not surprised my mother thinks so, when so much danger in her past came from men—like the emperor, or even her father. I think of Ceciliah, haunting the hallway, looking for me.
“True: the dress,” my mother says. “It was made by an expert hand. Likely a woman’s, though not necessarily.” She toys with her fork, amber eyes narrowed, and I wonder if part of her has liked, even if only a little, being threatened, for the challenge of trying to name the culprit. I confess that although I wanted to bring the name of the guilty person to her, to do the job she had assigned to me, with none of her help, I like better working on a puzzle with her, even if it is a grim one. It reminds me of when things were good between us. When I was small, and we would play round after round of Bite and Sting, sometimes I would beat her, and she would be thrilled. Do it again, she would say, and then we would play, and I would lose, and so we would have to play yet again, and so on until I fell asleep at the gaming table. Time for bed, she would murmur, and I would pretend to keep sleeping so she would carry me to her bed. In the morning, she would wake up next to me, soft and warm, and say, I kept you up too late.
No, you didn’t. I want to be good like you.
You are good like me.
Amma, I said, filled with sudden, childish guilt. I confessed, I was faking to be still asleep. So you would carry me.
She smiled. Do you not think I knew that? Do you not think I love to carry my one, my only tadpole?
A stone rests in my throat. I think of Sarsine, and how she said she wanted me to be happy. I think of my father, who said he wanted me to choose whether to be safe or happy. Most of all, I remember Nirrim. She was abandoned as a baby, left in a metal box outside the Ethin orphanage, and raised by a woman who used her and made her blind to her own worth. Nirrim was imprisoned. She could not even wear certain colors, or taste certain fruits. And yet, in spite of all this, she was brave. She was ready to risk her life to change her country. The way she kissed me was brave, the way she brought me to bed. She would have been punished for it, if caught. For her kith, it was forbidden for a woman to be with a woman. How could she be so brave, when every pleasure and freedom was denied her?
How could I be such a coward, that I cannot bear to tell my mother the truth?
Finally, I feel the full force of how much I miss Nirrim. I wish she were here. I wish I were like her. “Amma,” I say, “I don’t want to marry Prince Ishar. Please don’t make me do it.”
Her expression rumples. I must have horribly disappointed her. I grow rigid, hands stiff on the table, and await her anger. She will try to persuade me. Already, it hurts. Already, I feel outcast. She will banish me from her heart. Yet what can I do, save this? I cannot continue to lie to her. Even if Nirrim is lost to me, I can’t forget the lesson of how brave she was, and how much I wanted to live up to her example. The god of games does not love me … or loves me too much, and gave me the gift of playing a part too well. I pretended too convincingly to be the person my mother wanted me to be, until I became a coward hiding in the shadow of my phantom self.
My mother says, “I know you don’t want to. I would never make you do that.”
“But … you wept when you caught me with Ivaline.” I remember my mother’s stricken face. “Because you knew then, for certain, that I liked women, and could not want Ishar.”
“I did not know then that you didn’t want him. Some people do not want only women.” She traces a blue kestrel on the tablecloth. “I cried because you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about Ivaline. What we had when you were little was gone, when you would bring every beautiful thing you found to show to me: every pretty stone, every irrielle’s egg. A leaf. A horse nail. You were grown, and would one day fall in love, if you weren’t in love already, and you didn’t want to discuss any of it with me. Instead, you said you wanted to marry Ishar, yet grew angry whenever I raised the topic.”
“Because I knew you wanted the marriage!”
“For the good of Herran, maybe, but not for you.” She spreads her hands helplessly. “There have been times when I planned to write to Queen Inishanaway to end the betrothal, but then I thought it would make you only angrier at me for taking the choice out of your hands, for acting so imperious, as you have called me. So all-knowing.”
“Amma—”
“You are right. I do act that way.” Her eyes are golden with tears. “But I don’t know you. I haven’t known you for a long time. I only know what you let me know, and I have missed you so much.”
I drop my gaze to the golden fringe of the tablecloth, which blurs in my vision. “You called me an apple.” I can’t keep the accusation from my voice.
“What?”
“The night we fought. When I left. You said, You are an apple, Sidarine.”
She places a small, cold hand on mine, where it rests on the table. “Because I thought of that day on the pier. Of the apple and the stone.”
“I know you did. You called me that because you disapproved of how I was with women, how much I loved pleasure, how I wanted my life to be as sweet as a dessert—”
“No. It was because I knew you would leave me.”
As my eyes fill, I remember the apple, floating away from the pier, bobbing on the waves, floating out past the ships, until it was lost in the great bay.
“I am sorry I left,” I whisper.
My mother touches three fingers to the back of my hand: the Herrani gesture to seek forgiveness, or to give it. “I am glad you did, if it means you were able to return, and let me tell you how much I love you.”
Outside the window, tiny snowflakes drift down against the purple sky. Soon it will be too dark to see them. I hold my mother’s hand and feel warm inside. Soft, the way I was when she carried me to her bed. I think of Sarsine’s advice, and of Nirrim, and say, “What if I must leave again?”
“Tadpole, all children leave their mothers, in one way or another. But we always wait for our children, and are so happy when they come home.” She smiles, and my eyes clear. I understand that although I have tried for years to be like my mother, she is telling me she knows I need to be myself.
The snow falls more thickly. The quail has grown cold. I shift in my seat to reach for knife and fork, eager to be busy with my hands, and when I do, the sole of my boot comes down on something small and hard, just beneath the edge of the tablecloth.
I lean back and look down to see what the object is. Something golden twinkles up at me from the carpet. I might have noticed it earlier, perhaps, had it not blended in with the tablecloth’s fringe.
“What is it?” my mother says.
I bend down to retrieve the object.
It is a small gold earring.
“Amma.” My voice sounds very far away. I look again at the tablecloth, whose embroidery is so intricate. “Where did you get this tablecloth?”
“Your nurse made it for me.” Her face pales as she realizes why I am asking. In a hushed voice, she adds, “Emmah is so gifted with needle and thread.”
I remember Emmah coming to me late at night to light candles to the gods, her thimble glinting on her thumb. Some new project, I thought. She was always working on some piece of embroidery. I remember her stricken face when she realized she had lost an earring I had made for her, an earring exactly like the one gleaming on my palm. I remember asking for her opinion on the fabric of the poisoned red dress, and how she had hesitated, and asked me if I knew who had sewn it.
No, I said.
But I know now.