The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
NIRRIM
THE TAVERN IS DARK ANDcool when I open the door, the iron handle hot from the lowering sun. I have no time for this. No time to see, with new eyes, the place I used to call home. No time to hunt my victim. A war is brewing, one of my own making, and my enemies will know the cost of what they did to me and every one of my kind. But one enemy must come first. My blood demands it.
I was so innocent, so easily ruled.
Where is she?
Slipping into the tavern’s interior is like sliding into a fresh pool. I close the door against the dusty heat of the street.
“Raven,” I call, making my voice sweet, timid. The name echoes over the empty tables. It sits in empty chairs. “Ama,” I try again, using the word small children call their mothers, “are you here? I am sorry we argued. I am here to make things right.”
I lift the Elysium bird from my shoulder and set it on a rough-hewn table. The bird trills at me, tipping its crimson head left and right—trying, I think, to win me over, or ask for something. It scratches the table with a green talon. I remember everything from my past perfectly, from the grain of the orphanage floorboards that I mopped by hand when I was four years old to the number of petals on the first flower I saw. But sometimes I don’t pay attention to memories I hold inside me, and it takes a moment as I stare, irritated at the bird for distracting me from my purpose, to connect its behavior to the act of begging. It nudges its head under my hand.
Feed it, says a quiet voice inside me.
I frown, unsettled. The instruction came not as a thought formed by me, but as an intrusion, as though someone had whispered in my ear. Surely I have imagined it. I fetch a hunk of stale bread from the larder in the corner. Of course I will feed the bird. It is useful to me. Anyway, it is loud and unpredictable. Let it be occupied by satisfying its hunger while I pursue my prey. I tear the bread into pieces and drop them onto the table in front of the Elysium bird, whose inky beak jabs into the dry morsels, wings fluttering excitedly.
The slight grit of my dirty sandals scuffs the stone floor as I leave the bird behind. My feet drift down the stairs to the kitchen, where I once worked hard to please my mistress. At the orphanage, when she personally selected me, Raven touched my cheek and said, I know a good girl when I see one.
The kitchen is empty. Her bedroom? The steps leading upstairs creak beneath my feet. Did Raven see me in the agora? Does she fear me now, and hide? Then I must tempt her forth. “I have a gift for you, Ama. You will love it!”
No answer. Her room, into which I was admitted only to brush her hair or rub her soft hands with cream before bed (I work so hard for my girls, she used to sigh, and I would believe her), has the familiar smell I associate with her: indi soap made from the perfume of tenacious purple flowers that grow wild in the Ward. The clothes in her wardrobe are nicer than anything I wore during my childhood, when I never thought it wrong that her dresses were made of cotton, not wincey, like mine. I never thought it wrong that her sandals were more comfortable and didn’t leave blisters. She was Middling, after all, so the law allowed her things it didn’t allow me. Even if the law didn’t, I would have wanted her to have the comforts that I did not. Wasn’t that what a daughter should want? Maybe I wasn’t Raven’s daughter, not really, but I loved her like one.
I go through her things, snorting when I see a tear in a dress, neatly mended by Annin. How Raven must have laughed inside as she played her charade of selflessness! Oh, I scrimp and save, she said to me once, so that I can put more money aside for you girls. And of course—she leaned in to whisper—for our cause.
Meanwhile, she extracted every coin she could from Half Kith desperate to flee the Ward, even this city. She gave them passports that faked their kith—passports forged by me, the idiot, who believed we helped people for nothing.
I am grateful to the god of thieves. Joy thrills down to my toes, to know that I am no longer who I was. What use was my soft heart? It convinced me to excuse the bad behavior of others, to let myself be used, to forgive Raven when she hurt me. The loss of my heart is no bad thing. It left room for something else.
Freedom.
Anger.
My heart was full of guilt and love and tender forgiveness. Let the god of thieves keep it forever. Now nothing will stop me from doing what I want—for myself and everyone loyal to me.
I riffle through the drawer of Raven’s wobbly bedside table. Next: the desk where she once sat me down and exclaimed over how perfectly I could imitate a signature. My little artist! she said, and I glowed from her praise, not understanding then that there was little art to what I did, only the power of a perfect memory.
She is not here. She left nothing of value behind. She must have squirreled it all away in that house she built for herself in the Middling quarter, lining it with the nicest things the law allowed her. She must be there. Well, I will find her, and we will see who is the fool now. I fling open a roughly carved wooden jewelry box and snarl at the trinkets inside. Tin earrings. A tarnished silver chain I gave her when I was fourteen, having bartered work in a neighbor’s scraggly little garden. How beautiful! she said, adding, I will put it with my treasures.
When I noticed she never wore it, she said, It is too good to wear, my lamb. People will get jealous.
I see it now for what it is: trash. I toss it to the floor.
Where is the crescent moon necklace that once belonged to my mother, which Raven stole? Still around Raven’s weathered neck, most likely. My hands twitch as though I could wring that neck like a rag. Yet I pause, surprised by the force of my longing for a sentimental object, my irrational hope. What did the god of thieves steal from me, if I can still hope, still seek comfort in a symbol that doesn’t even prove its original owner loved me?
A hand lightly slips into mine. Instinctively, I crush it between my fingers. Someone cries out. I turn and see Annin, her blue eyes wide as she begs me to let her go. “You’re hurting me!”
“Nirrim,” comes a new voice, low and calm. Morah stands at the threshold of Raven’s bedroom. “You are not yourself.”
Aren’t I? Aren’t I the most perfect version of myself, who can look at these two young women and care nothing for the opinion of Morah, who used to lord her supposed wisdom over me, and care nothing for Annin, sweet little Annin, so easily biddable? She is a pretty doll with a porcelain head filled with pins. She would rattle if you shook her. She reminds me of me: who I once was. I double my grip. She screams, face contorting. Good. She no longer looks so pretty.
Morah slowly crosses the room toward me. “You will break her fingers. She won’t be able to sew. She loves to sew.”
Morah expects these words to move me and make me loosen my grip, but Annin needs to learn not to be so trusting. She scrabbles at me, like a kitten might twist against a grip at the nape of its neck, and I am momentarily amused. Neither she nor Morah seem to consider I possess a power more formidable than a mere grip. I am so distracted by their ignorance that I don’t notice—until Morah sets the sharp blade against my throat—the kitchen knife she must have held at her thigh, hidden in the folds of her skirt, as she crossed the room to me.
“Let her go,” Morah says.
The threat is ridiculous. Morah does not understand my god-gift. I could force a false memory into her mind. You dropped the knife, I could say, and re-create the past so that it becomes her present and she sends the knife clattering to the floor. I could make her freshly feel her most painful memory. Years ago—how many? Ten?—Raven stole Morah’s baby. Morah never knew what happened to the newborn boy. Yes, that might be a good thing to make her remember.
Don’t, says that quiet, internal voice, the same one that told me to feed the Elysium.
Startled, I loosen my grip. It’s enough for Annin to tug her sweaty fingers free.
My scalp crawls. Earlier, my impulse to feed the Elysium was easily dismissed as a stray thought … and a practical one that suited my goals. Now, however, I pay attention to that eerily familiar voice that seems at once inside me and outside me. The voice is low and steady. Like a candle flame, Sid once told me.
That voice is mine.
Morah presses the knife harder to my throat, so close it bites the skin.
A knot hardens in my belly. Once, I loved Morah and Annin like sisters. They should be my allies and strive to achieve my goals. I dislike having my will checked by some whispery ghost in my head: a shadow of the girl I used to be.
Annin wipes tears from her cheeks, her skin lighter than mine—always ready to blush or pale, quick to show her emotions. Her face might as well be a painted sign announcing her thoughts to the world. She reddens in distress.
Very well, I tell that needling little voice, which I sense waiting for some response. I won’t hurt them. That would look bad to the Half Kith, whose loyalty I need to consolidate. I bat the knife from Morah’s hand. It clatters to the floor. She never would have used it anyway. She is too fond of me.
The old me.
Morah’s expression betrays no fear, even though her weapon lies out of easy reach. Once she was the toughest of us three, as resilient as the sturdy kitchen worktable downstairs. “Nirrim, you can’t simply walk into the agora and proclaim yourself queen of Herrath.”
“I already did. Have you come to try to reason with me? Fair fortune to fools.”
“I am not here for anything. This is my home. Annin’s, too. And yours.”
I glance around Raven’s shabby room, remembering how mysteriously grand it seemed when I was little and knew no better. “I don’t want this home. You may keep it. My people will know me as a generous queen.”
Annin, cradling her hand, casts Morah a skittish look. Annin says, “You claimed you are a god. But there are no gods.”
I wave away her stupid words. “You think I’m mad, I suppose. Well, you shall see.” They clearly have not a drop of god-blood in them, nor much ambition. Having decided not to punish them, and certain they can do little to advance my cause, I return to my task, tearing apart Raven’s room to find whatever secrets she might have hidden. You will never know anything more about your mother, she warned me. How you were born. Who you are! I ran from her, horrified at how she had used me—and wanted to continue using me. You will be nothing to me, she promised—she, who revealed herself as my mother’s sister, and might know from which god I came. The kind of power I possess is no certain clue. The god of thieves’s history book revealed that the gifts of the half-gods were not mere copies of those of their immortal parents. When the gods abandoned Ethin long ago, retreating to their realm, the powers they left in their half-god children diminished and changed through generations. Probably Aden is a descendent of the sun god. Everything about Aden has always been so obvious. His boring, handsome face. The foregone conclusion the entire Ward shared that of course I should love him. His jealousy. His insecurity. No doubt his glowing god-gift could be traced to the most obvious source.
The same is not true of my gift. There is no god of memory.
Perhaps my long-ago ancestor was the god of some aspect of the mind, such as dreams.
Or the god of stars, the one that rules fate.
Or vengeance. What is memory, if not an account of all the wrongs done?
Maybe I can trace my kin back to the god of wealth, who demands a balancing of the scales, for surely I was born to demand payment for each wound inflicted on me and my own.
I retrieve Morah’s knife from the floor and cut into the mattress, pulling out handfuls of straw-and-rag padding. I probably do look mad. There must still be streaks of color in my hair, put there by Madame Mere, a High-Kith dressmaker, who also painted cosmetics on my face—smeared now, I’m sure. I attack the bedding, cutting more deeply, looking for that necklace, or for anything that might give me a clue to my parentage. Nothing is hidden there, but I keep stabbing. It feels good.
Morah says, “We think something happened to you, damaged you. You are no longer the person you were.”
“Because I am angry? Because I am strong? Why aren’t you angry? You have been treated just as badly.”
Annin says, “We are worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I feel wonderful,” I say, and it is true.
I abandon the gutted mattress and lift Raven’s handheld mirror from her dressing table, though not to look into its glass. When I shake the mirror, the glass rattles in its frame. Believing there might be something hidden between the mirror and its frame, I crack it against the vanity. Silver shards clink to my feet. There is nothing but a lead handle and a simple wooden backing to the frame.
“Nirrim—”
“You bore me. You are stupid chickens, clucking away. I am tired of people who know nothing, who lie to themselves that one day things will be better if they only have patience. A tale for children and idiots. Brave people take matters into their own hands. Learn this now, or learn later and be left behind.” I snap my fingers rapidly, as though to wake them up or hurry them along. “Will you help me or not?”
Annin says, “Help you destroy Raven’s room?”
“Help me with the war.”
“War?”
“Yes, war. Do you believe the High Kith will simply give us what we want? We must take it.” They look at me as though I am a bee that has unwittingly flown into someone’s home, and thuds itself against a window to get out. Their expressions show me more than the mirror I broke: how erratic I appear. Erratic is how I feel: seeking one thing and then the next, desiring something and then changing my mind. It is true that a void lurks beneath the giddiness of my new freedom and power, as though the god of thieves stole not my heart but the center of my being. That void is a hollow chamber that echoes with only one command: those who made me suffer will pay.
Uncertainty marks Morah’s and Annin’s faces.
They never hurt you, says the voice inside me. They loved you.
They are useless, I tell Other Nirrim. Just like you were useless.
I reach for a metal hairbrush. In the past, I would gently draw it through Raven’s silver hair and untangle each knot with careful fingers. Like the mirror, the brush has a backing—hard and painful, as I know well, from every time Raven struck me with it. I pry at the backing and feel again like that bee I imagined, banging softly at windows. A buzzing rises within me, blocking my ears against Morah’s and Annin’s questions, their silly concerned tones. The backing comes off in my hands. Two whitely bright lights tumble out of the revealed space and onto the dressing table.
Earrings. Jewels unlike anything I have ever seen. Each earring is a tiny star, its light pure. Annin gasps. I don’t recognize the earrings, but instantly know they form a set with the crescent moon necklace my mother once wore. Like the necklace, they are otherworldly.
They are mine now.
I have no piercings for earrings, since Half Kith were never allowed even the most modest jewelry. No matter. I push my hair aside, set the sharp tip of an earring against my earlobe, and press until the stud pops through the flesh. Blood dribbles down my neck. Happily, I fasten the earring and do the same with the other. A broken shard of mirror lying on the dresser catches my reflection. Yes, I do look crazed: cosmetics streaked across my face, my mouth open in delight, lines of blood down my throat, twin stars glowing at my ears.
I didn’t find what I was looking for, neither my revenge upon Raven nor her secrets about my parents nor the necklace, but perhaps these jewels are an even better discovery. I grew up so starved of beauty, so used to the starvation that I couldn’t even recognize, then, what I was missing.
I deserve beauty, and I shall have it.
What Morah and Annin see in my face, or think of me, I neither know nor care. I push past them, out of the bedroom and down the stairs, whistling to my bird, which swoops from the rafters to my shoulder. The jewels make my ears throb. The bird’s talons grip my shoulders as I dive into the warm dusk of the street in search of Aden and the rest of my god-blooded soldiers.
The High Kith come at nightfall. Weapons bristling, they enter the Ward through the wall’s gate.
Aden sets their skin aflame, roasting them inside their armor. Rinah, whose garden I once tended, its abundance surprising, the sun melons always unusually large and honeyed, steps forward. She teases indi vines, those pretty weeds that lattice the entire city, into snaking ropes that bind the invaders.
The wall the High Kith built to contain us also protects us. The High Kith and their Middling militia pour through the gate as thickly as they can, but it is a narrow entrance. They cannot enter the Ward in great enough force to overwhelm the god-blooded Half Kith. Not Aden, lighting their bodies into torches, nor Rinah, nor that little boy whose father had brought him to me, Sithin, who is gifted with making holes. Black space appears in living flesh. He makes skin pop with empty buttons, riddling the skin like a disease.
When most of our enemies have been captured, killed, or subdued, I step through the wall’s gate into the Middling quarter to face the rest of the horde. “You were so tired.” The power of my gift curls into my lovely voice. “You wanted to fall asleep.” The trick to controlling people with my god-power is to present them with my version of the past. A memory might not kill a man, but I can push false memories into a weak brain. The High Kith are used to nothing standing between them and their pleasure. The Middlings, who serve the High Kith, are used to obedience. What resistance can they possibly raise against me? I make them remember a sleepiness they do not feel. One by one, they drop unconscious at my feet.
All my life, the people of Ethin lived as instructed, the Half Kith behind the wall built to contain them and the gifts they didn’t even know they had. The High Kith lived diamond lives, clear and glittering, as they threw wild parties in their lavish homes and consumed whatever they wanted: wriggling rainbow fish, clouds of pink cream on airy cake, and our god-blood, watered down and served as a tasteless elixir in teacups so fine you could see lamplight through their creamy porcelain. Our blood was their delight: a little burst of magic on the tongue so that the High Kith, at least for a few hours, reveled in borrowed glory. They floated inches off the ground. Their faces shifted into more beautiful lines. Rainwater trailed from their shoulders in a veil. Lightning traced crowns above their brows.
How many of the High Kith understood what they did? How many knew that they drank the blood of the people they most despised, and how many believed the elixir was an innocent delight offered to them by the Council, a drink made from fruit or a flower, perhaps? Maybe some suspected the pink elixir had an unpleasant origin, yet did not seek its source, because to know and drink would then be wrong, and they wanted the taste of magic without the bitterness of guilt.
Their life was sweetly blessed. They had everything they wanted. Days of endless luxury. I, who had a taste of sweetness with Sid, understand why the High Kith never sought to learn whether they deserved what they had. I once feared that if I considered too closely why Sid wanted me, I might discover that her attention would never truly be mine, that I didn’t deserve it, or that it would be wrong to keep it.
Do you not love me like I love you? she asked. My perfect memory, a gift and a curse, makes me hear again the fear in her voice, and feel again my devastation to hear her ask that question at the moment of abandoning me.
The god of thieves has done me a favor. I desire Sid still, but I cannot feel my love for her. I feel love for no one, not even my people.
This is a good thing. Love is a problem. It blurs your sight, and stands in the way of what needs to be done. If I listened now to the love I once had for Morah and Annin, their kindhearted worries might trouble me. Instead, I tell my Half Kith to bind our sleeping enemies and carry them to prison. Morah and Annin might stay my hand as I reach for Rinah’s shoulder. “Tear down the wall,” I order her. “Use the indi vines.”
Rinah hesitates. The wall is too familiar, the most important element of our lives from birth. It stood the whole of our parents’ lives, and their parents’ lives, encircling the Half Kith for centuries. When I lived with Sid in the High quarter I sometimes missed the wall for its reliable, calm strength. The wall corrals us, but it also creates our home.
“Do it, Rinah, for your children. Remember how you feared they would be snatched away in the night. Remember how as they grew old enough to play in the streets, you dreaded that they might break one of the High Kith’s many rules, and be taken to prison, and come home with a missing limb, or weak from blood loss. Think of the world you want for them instead.”
Rinah’s face contorts. Indi vines thicken to the width of a burly man’s arm. Their green darkens to near black. They knot together and wedge into tiny pockmarks in the wall’s granite. Vegetal fingers dig into rock, then disappear, driving into stone like worms into earth. Rinah watches vines split the granite. The wall begins to crumble, dust sifting down. Rubble spills loudly from the cracks, hissing and thumping to the ground. With a thunderous crack, the wall breaks, pieces heaving down in chunks.
From the scattered debris, dust rises like smoke.
“Good,” I tell Rinah, who looks stricken and angry and glad.
“I suppose our days of forging and selling passports are over,” Aden says, “now that the wall is gone.”
I do not like his poor attempt at jovial familiarity, and at leaning on our history together so that he might share—or perhaps eventually control—the authority I now possess over this city. I do not like his smug expression, as if this is his victory, when he simply obeyed my command. It was I who foresaw how this clash would go, I who knew how to use my god-soldiers to strike. Aden is convenient to me for his power and popularity, but he is sorely mistaken if he thinks I have forgotten how he wished to control me with his so-called love, how he blamed me when I wanted someone else. He shamed me for wanting Sid. What a tiny-minded man, to construe my choice as shameful, simply because I did not choose him.
Let him watch his step. He lives only because I allow it.
“I never sold passports,” I tell him. “I made them to give away. To help.” How naïve I was! How easy it was for Raven, whom I loved like a mother, to manipulate me, feeding me sugary stories about the good we were doing for others. With the passports I forged, people trapped behind the wall could pretend to be Middling and escape. And they did … at a cost I never suspected. Raven made them give her all they had. She enriched herself, padding a home in the Middling quarter with luxuries. I—meek, trusting—had never guessed. I needed her love so much that I made myself believe she was the good person she pretended to be.
I am finished with love.
Aden must see some of my thoughts in my face. “You have changed.”
“Good.”
“You used to be kind, Nirrim. Gentle. I liked you better before.”
“Of course. I was easier for you to use.”
Aden’s expression twitches with genuine hurt. “All I wanted was to make you happy. Tell me how, and I will do it.”
“Make plans for public trials of the High Kith,” I say, “and mass executions. We shall tithe them as they once tithed us. Ten percent of all High-Kith adults shall be culled from the prison to pay the price for their people’s sins. Sharpen an ax, Aden. That will me very happy indeed.”