The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

SID

I DROP THE GOLD EARRINGto the table in shock. “Emmah has been in your room,” I say to my mother. “She poisoned your food. She embroidered and delivered the red dress.” The memory of the goat cheese, eaten so peacefully with her in the kitchen as the quail roasted, floats over my tongue. Could I have been poisoned, too? But no—Emmah shared the savory treat with me, and I feel fine, if queasy from my sudden knowledge. Reassured, my mind moves to exonerate her, to blame myself for my unfounded suspicion, but the earring winks up at me and I remember how easily Emmah knew where I had been, how swiftly she had always been able to find me. Her reaction to the embroidered dress, now that I reconsider them, could have been the words of someone who sought, without betraying herself, to learn exactly how much I suspected. “But why?” The answer begins with you, my grandfather said. “Emmah loves me. How could she poison you, Amma? How could she do that to me?”

Behind me, I hear the small, metallic sound of someone cocking the firing mechanism of a gun.

Mygun.

My mother’s eyes, lifted to look over my shoulder, widen.

Emmah says, “Sid, I would do anything for you.”

I spring from my chair, drawing my dagger, placing my body between the gun and my mother. Emmah stands by the door near the table where I left the gun, her hand steady, the gun aimed right at my chest, her green eyes bright and cold in the lamplight. She must have followed me from the kitchens and waited in the recesses of my mother’s suite, listening to our conversation. “Sid, get out of the way.”

My hand tightens around the dagger’s hilt, but what could I do with it? I cannot hurt Emmah, my second mother, the one who always comforted me when I worried I wasn’t good enough for Queen Kestrel.

You are the best child, Emmah always said. If the queen doesn’t know that, then she is a fool. Now, is your mother a fool?

No, I whispered, and Emmah smiled.

Slowly, so I don’t startle her, I set my dagger on the dining table and silently beg my mother to do nothing, say nothing. I have no idea what skill Emmah might possess with a gun, but at such a close range, skill doesn’t matter. All she needs to do is fire. The bullet will blast its way so deep into flesh that the god of death must be here even now, hovering invisibly, waiting to see if he will be needed. “Emmah, please don’t do this. I can’t believe you would hurt me.”

“I am doing this for you.”

“That makes no sense.” Fear swirls in my belly. “If you hurt my mother, you will hurt me.” Something flickers in her expression, but she doesn’t change her stance.

Emmah says, “She has tricked you into believing she loves you, like she tricks everybody. I heard what she said to you. Pretty lies. They say the god of lies loves Kestrel, but I know the truth.”

I remember how my grandfather received a poisoned book with a coded message similar to the card that came with my mother’s dress. He told me that, long ago, when Herran was newly independent, there had been assassination attempts against my mother. They stopped with your birth, he said.

“Kestrel thinks she is so smart,” Emmah says, “but she doesn’t see everything. She has no idea what’s right beneath her nose.”

Behind me, my mother makes a small noise but instantly stifles it. Quickly, to control the conversation and make certain my mother remains out of it, I say, “Is it because she is Valorian?” Emmah’s free hand lifts briefly, as if to touch her burned face, but then shifts to join the hand that holds the gun, and steady its aim. “Herran suffered because of General Trajan,” I say, “but it wasn’t Kestrel’s doing. She’s not to blame.”

“She is. Your heart is too good to see the truth. Arin’s, too.”

“She saved Herran.”

“No one asked her to! Countless people died because of her! And why? So she could marry Arin. Don’t you see how selfish that is, to cause a war in order to be with someone?”

“That’s not why. That’s not the whole story.”

“Damn their story.” Emmah’s hands tremble.

I worry the gun might accidentally fire. “Set down the gun, then, and tell me what she did.”

“She took everything from me!” Emmah doesn’t relinquish the weapon. “If she had only left Arin alone, no one would have suffered. He would have fallen in love with someone else.”

“Who?” my mother says quietly.

“Shut up!” Emmah shouts. “You caused the Firstwinter Rebellion.”

No. My father did. He poisoned aristocratic Valorians on the same night that other Herrani rebels coordinated an attack on the armory. Rebels burned Valorian ships in the bay. My mother knew of none of it. She would have stopped him, at the time, had she known.

Emmah’s green eyes are wild, her wrinkled cheeks flushed with hectic anger. I know I cannot argue with her, that she will see nothing but her own version of history, but I don’t understand why she blames my mother. “Kestrel has never been anything but kind to you.”

“Oh, yes,” Emmah says mockingly. “Such a kind mistress. She bought your father, Sid. She owned Arin. And now she pretends to love him? Impossible. She loves no one but herself. After the Firstwinter Rebellion, she escaped from Herran. She warned the Empire. She brought the Valorian fleet right to our doorstep. They attacked us. Fires burned in our city.”

I suddenly understand not all of Emmah’s rage, but at least part of it. Carefully, gently, I say, “This was how your face was burned, wasn’t it? I’m so sorry, but—”

“I know you now.” My mother’s voice comes low. I hear her rise to her feet. “Your name is not Emmah.”

“I am glad I was burned!” Emmah says. “Glad it disguised me, glad I, finally, could have my chance for revenge. I never mattered. No one paid attention to me. Not Arin. Not Kestrel. Not the gods. She is queen, and I am nothing. Kestrel ruined my life, yet no one cares how I suffered.”

“I care,” I say, but she doesn’t listen.

“So many songs,” she says. “So many stories about Kestrel and Arin. But none for me.”

“Lirah?” my mother says, and for a moment I cannot place the name until I remember my father confessing that a Herrani girl named Lirah had fallen in love with him. She was pretty, he said, but I didn’t even notice her, didn’t realize I had let her believe I returned her feelings.

A small cry escapes Emmah—Lirah. In the instant I realize she will shoot I know I am already too late. I reach anyway, the horror within me as sheer as ice.

A blur hurtles past my vision. The gun cracks. Something shatters. Lirah screams, clutching one empty hand with the other. A cold wind blows into the room.

The gun lies smoking on the floor. My mother’s thrown dagger lies next to it.

Snow swirls into the room. How can it be snowing in my mother’s room?

“Sid!” my mother shouts.

Her voice slaps me out of my shock. I kick the weapons far out of Lirah’s reach and grab her hands. It feels like a violation to be rough with her. How can I hurt her? How can I capture her? She tended to every childhood wound. Sometimes, she felt like my only friend.

“She might hurt herself,” my mother warns, so I listen, and yank my dagger belt from my waist to bind Emmah’s—Lirah’s—hands fast.

Faraway doors within the suite bang open. The room is freezing with wind. Some of the wind comes, I understand now, from the window Lirah shattered with her wide shot. But a thick tunnel of cold drives into a room from another source. Someone has entered the suite from the garden door. Someone is battering through door after door.

“Kestrel!” my father shouts from another room. I hear fear in his voice but also something I have never heard before, something that makes me understand why people call him Death’s Child.

It is a brutal threat.

A promise.

Meet me, it says, and meet my god.

“Sid,” Lirah whispers. Her burned face is wet, her eyes emerald. “Before you were born, I planned to murder you. That would be my revenge. Then I saw you, on the festival to honor your nameday. Arin’s baby. So small. Innocent. The only pure thing in my world. How could I hurt you? Even in that moment, from where I stood in the crowd, I loved you.”

My eyes, too, are wet.

“What, though, was a baby, in the face of so many ruined lives? The god of vengeance had chosen me. The proof? Arin selected me, of all the possible nurses, to care for you. He did not recognize me. He placed you in my arms. You were golden. Valorian. Look at the infant, I told myself. See how she resembles your old masters. Kestrel’s child. Yet you curled your tiny hand around my finger. Such blind trust. I will wait, I thought. Let the baby grow. Kestrel’s suffering will be all the greater to lose a toddler. But then you were a toddler, and I could not bear the thought. When Sidarine is a child, a girl grown, I decided. Yes, then. That will destroy the impostor queen.”

My father shouts my mother’s name again.

“But I could not do it,” Emmah—Lirah—says. “No year was a good year. From the beginning, I loved you too much. And once I loved you, I hesitated to kill Kestrel. I thought maybe I could forgive her for your sake, because how could such a tender child survive the death of her mother? But of course Kestrel ruined everything, as always. She chased you away. She didn’t accept you, not like I did. She was given such a gift as you, and what did she do but disdain it?”

“It’s not like that. I returned. I’m here.”

Lirah doesn’t seem to hear. “You are better off without her.”

My father slams into the room, battle sword unsheathed, eyes as bright as murderous stars. His gaze sweeps the scene before him. I see him decide, instantly, that even if he doesn’t understand everything, he understands enough. He hurtles toward us through the snowy cold. His broadsword is ice.

“Arin, no!” my mother shouts. “Don’t!”

His expression shows that he hears her, but his sword can’t stop its swing toward Lirah.

Please, I think, and it is not a good prayer, but it must have been heard, because some force, as invisible as the cold wind, seems to wrench the blade from my father’s hand.

The sword drops with a thud to the floor.

“What will happen to Emmah?” I can’t speak her real name. Lirah feels like a disguise, an invention. I am in the library with my father, who asked to speak with me in private after he summoned guards to bring Emmah to her room and keep watch over her there.

My father sighs. “Nothing.”

I am stunned. I was ready to beg on her behalf, and had never expected my father to so easily overlook the attempted murder of his wife. The lines of his body, as he stands before his desk, leaning back against it, still look taut, murderous, and I can imagine what he must have felt when he heard a gunshot come from the east wing.

He sees my surprise, and his body sags into weary lines. “Kestrel told me what Lirah said to you. In some ways, Lirah is right. Kestrel and I did terrible things during the Firstwinter Rebellion and the war that followed. My hands are not clean. Neither are hers. We did what we did because, in each circumstance, we felt left with little choice, or only bad ones. I know you have said you want your own story, Sid, but let it not be like mine. Kestrel and I aren’t heroes. What good we did was bought with the blood of others.”

“You are too hard on yourself.”

He smiles a little, his face handsome, wistful. My mouth, they say, is like his. “You say so only because you are kind.”

A tender hope rises in my throat. “Me, kind?” I disguise the sudden shyness I feel with a light tone. “Not a reprobate? Not a breaker of hearts?”

“Yes, kind. Why do you think people love you so easily?”

“Not everyone does,” I say, thinking of Nirrim.

“I have to forgive Lirah,” my father says, “because I understand her, and her anger did not come from nothing. But most of all, I must forgive her for how tenderly she always took care of you. How she loves you. She could have smothered you in your crib. She could have pushed you as a toddler out the window, and claimed it was an accident. I am haunted by all the ways you could have died. Instead, Lirah protected you from harm … including from herself. And I must forgive her because I know the damage it would do to you if I did not.”

Outside, the snow comes down thickly. I see it form swirling halos around the tall lamps that light the gravel path to the house, set against the black night.

“Kestrel tells me you have chosen to break your engagement to Prince Ishar,” he says.

I hold my breath.

He says, “Will you tell me why?”

I think of the speckled yellow feather passed between my parents. I imagine my mother telling my father that I wanted it. Had it been easy to give up?

What if there was something I wanted that he could not give?

“I love someone else,” I confess.

The edge of his mouth curls in a surprised smile. “Well. That is a good reason.”

“I know the engagement is good for Herran. I know that breaking it will cause problems.”

“Kestrel and I have faced worse.”

“Maybe ending the engagement will be for nothing. Things probably wouldn’t work between Nirrim and me anyway.”

“Ah. The Herrath girl.” He pushes away from the desk and comes to sit beside me on the long sofa made for reading, with a tufted headrest at one end. “Why wouldn’t it work?”

“She doesn’t love me back.”

His expression is amused now, which is annoying, though comforting. He rubs the scar that cuts down through one brow and into his cheekbone. “Are you sure?”

Do you not love me as I love you? Won’t you come with me? After she answered no, and I turned away, she called to me.

An apology would make it worse, I said.

I don’t want to apologize, she replied.

Did she simply want to explain? Did Nirrim see that I had understood her no to be her answer to both questions? It is possible to love someone and not be willing to follow that person to a strange land.

“I am not sure,” I admit to my father. “But there are other reasons why it wouldn’t work.”

“Since you are so determined to argue against yourself, give me the reasons.”

“She knows nothing of the world outside her island. She comes from another culture than ours.”

He lifts his brows. “You mean like how the Valorian culture is different from the Herrani one?”

Point taken. But I add, “Nirrim and I barely know each other. I knew her for not even a month before I left Ethin.”

“It is possible to fall in love in even less time.”

I am surprised. My father is so serious that I thought he would immediately agree that love is impossible in such brief circumstances.

“You can fall in love the very first time you meet someone,” my father adds.

“Is that how it was between you and Amma?”

He laughs. “Not at all.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Because it happened to me,” he says, “the first time I saw you.” He touches my cheek lightly, then lets his hand fall. Even as my eyes sting, I am hungry for more—some recognition of who I am, some proof that he means what he says, that it is more than words. I place my hand on his cheek, half of the gesture Herrani men show each other when they are family. He startles, confused.

I don’t know why I want the gesture, but I do. Maybe because it is a strange thing to want, and I simply want him to give it to me even though it is strange, even if he doesn’t understand it.

He lifts his hand again to my face and places his palm, warm and sure, against my cheek. He says, “If you love her, fight for her.”

“Where are you going, little lion?”

The snow covers the ground evenly in a fine layer. Roshar stands idly on the path blocking my way to the stables—just managing not to shiver, though his face is screwed up in a scowl at the white flakes sifting down. “Going to saddle a horse, are you, and ride down to the harbor?”

“I am sailing to Herrath.”

“I am so surprised.”

“Why are you stalking me?”

“There has been a lot of commotion in the house. I hear talk of gunfire, poison, assassination attempts … I am feeling a little hurt. I am feeling like I have been left out of things. Are you sure that now is the best time to leave—especially without explaining everything in detail to your dear godfather?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a wicked night to set sail. The seas will be rough.”

“So?”

“Sooo,” he drawls, “how about you take my ship?”