The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
SID
WHEN WE REACH HERRAN’S BAY, a feeling as resonant as song fills my chest. I have not once felt homesick since I ran away, but now that I am back, homesickness floods me, belated. It is strange to feel longing for something just when I am about to get it, and when I had decided I didn’t want it. Longing thickens inside me, as though deriving its sudden strength from coming so late, so far after the fact.
Herran’s mountainous coast is lush with trees. Once the jewel in the Valorian Empire’s crown, the city grows out of the rocky cliffs that hug the bay. The newest homes, built after the war my parents won, are painted in soft pastels with bright blue shutters that must be shut when autumn comes and green storms riot up the coast. Nirrim’s island was summery, with odd bursts of icy wind that would last for a few days only, but my country has its seasons, and although the laran trees now hold their leaves like thick, green shawls, and all I smell is the sea’s brine, I know autumn is not far off. Soon, it will be Ninarrith, when my people light a hundred candles in honor of the last day the gods walked among us. I always thought the holiday a pleasant fantasy, an excuse for giving gifts, but after what I saw on Nirrim’s island, I wonder. I went searching for magic, and magic I found, but what was its source? Whatever her people could conjure was fleeting, thin, like rivulets from a nearly dry creek bed that cannot quench anyone’s thirst.
Nirrim, though, had something more. Deeper.
I try not to think about her. I think about the weather, as a true sailor would, for her life depends on it. I think about how the coming of autumn smells like honey and a lit match.
It smells like Nirrim’s hair, when I buried my face in it. My throat closes. For a moment I cannot see, my vision blurred. Then it clears.
A tall, broad figure waits at the pier. The shape of my father is instantly familiar.
I shouldn’t have hoped that the arrival of our two ships—Roshar’s an obvious Dacran vessel, skinny and long and flying his green flag, and mine one of the finest in my father’s fleet, which I commandeered the night I left Herran—would go unnoticed. A fool’s hope.
Perhaps I should be glad that my father hasn’t appeared with his entire guard. A small mercy. At least my prodigal return home isn’t public gossip. Yet.
Roshar rests a hand on my shoulder. “Best to face him sooner rather than later, princess.”
“Best you kiss my ass, prince.”
His hand tightens. “Don’t apologize to him for running away.” Surprised, I turn to him. He adds, “Never apologize for who you are or what you needed to do to be yourself.”
I almost believe my godfather. My eyes almost prickle with relieved gratitude. Even when I was small, I longed to have his self-possession, his easy-seeming way of flouting expectation. Of demanding people meet him on his terms, not theirs. I wanted this even though—or because—I knew nothing was easy for him. He shares his true feelings with few people. His mutilations keep them at bay. He has done things for which he will never forgive himself. So yes, the words sound like something he would mean. But as we disembark, I decide Roshar’s advice is a pretty-sounding lie. Be myself? Don’t apologize? I am supposed to marry Roshar’s sister’s son and inherit the realms of Herran and Dacra. He knows this. He helped arrange it. He might say understanding things—and he, who likes men just as I like women, understands me better than most—but he would never break my betrothal.
When we meet my father, the king, on the pier, he places his palm on Roshar’s cheek, and Roshar does the same: the traditional Herrani greeting between men who are friends or family. I cannot look away from this gesture, this closeness between them. I am filled with envy.
My father’s hair turned silver, they say, at my birth, so frightened was he to lose my mother, who had bled too much and was close to death. He lowers his gray eyes to meet mine. I have some of his height, but not nearly enough. He towers above people, his arms stony with muscle. His skin, a few shades darker than mine, the same light brown as Nirrim’s, is weathered by sun and wind and age, save for the shine of a long scar that cuts down from his brow and into the hollow of his left cheek. He does not wait to let me speak. He pulls me to him.
“God of life,” he says. “I thought I would lose you, too.” He holds me as if I were a child. Despite what Roshar advised, I instantly apologize, my face pressed against my father’s chest. Water seeps from my eyes into his linen tunic. “Etta,” I say, “forgive me.”
He tells me there is nothing to forgive, that I am here now. “My girl. I was so worried. Why did you leave us?”
I cannot answer. I don’t want to blame my mother, whom he loves so fiercely. I don’t want to blame him for not protecting me from her schemes, and ignoring them. I want, for once, to be a good daughter. So I give him my silence. It is the best I can offer. He accepts it, as I knew he would. He, who was enslaved from the time he was a child until he was a young man, never likes to force an answer.
What could I say? You expected too much from me. I chose to put my pleasure first. You are an apple, Sidarine.
What I’m truly sorry for, what makes the tears still come, is that choosing myself meant hurting him, and I did it anyway. I cannot promise I won’t do it again. I am sorry for my guilt—and my anger. When I saw my father greet Roshar, anger rushed into me like a wind-fed flame, because my father will never place his hand on my cheek like that. He will never greet me the way Herrani men do. I am his only child, his beloved daughter—a girl, not his equal. I am not a man.
My father doesn’t like the trappings of his stature. Arin the Plain King, people call him with pride. They love him and his simple clothes, his quiet manner. My mother, with her hive of spies, is fully aware that the way he presents himself to Herran only encourages the other name people call him: Death’s Child. Death, after all, needs no velvet or silk to remind you of his strength. He announces his presence with a mere tap on the shoulder.
My mother told me, People believe that your father survived the war because he was born in the year of the god of death. He is god-touched, they say. The god of death loves him.
What do you believe? I asked. My father worships the gods. He lights candles in their temple. My mother, whose features are practically a song for the fallen Valorian Empire and its many crimes, her skin honey-colored, her hair woven gold, has no religion. The Valorians believed in no god but their own strength. Infidels, the Herrani call them. Murderers. The Valorians deserved their destruction, they say.
I, for one, agree.
My mother said carefully, I believe it is important for the people to believe Arin is Death’s Child.
Because it makes it easier for you to rule them, I said, my tone rude.
My mother’s light brown eyes narrowed. No, she said. Because it makes them hopeful, and fear the future less.
As I follow my father and Roshar on horseback through the city, which still bears the scars of the last war before my birth, when Herran overthrew the Valorians and my mother murdered her emperor, I remember how I had wanted to point out that the Herrani’s love for my father exempted my mother from their long-held hate against anything Valorian. How could they even stand to look at her, when her people had enslaved this country, when three decades before my birth, Kestrel’s own father had brutally crushed the Herrani? How convenient for you, I wanted to say, that they adore Etta.
How convenient for you, she might have replied, leveling me with one of her perfectly aimed comments that I have seen strike home in other people.
There is no hiding that I look like her. I used to hope my blond hair would darken with age. I searched my face for traces of my father, but nothing will change my Valorian features. Still, I don’t like to be reminded, and I definitely did not need to be reminded by my mother. She is too keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of others, and on that day we discussed my father, chosen by Death, I feared saying something that would make her be cruel to me. While not a cruel person, she has a gift for knowing what hurts most. She used to show her love by never turning that gift against me.
My home is no palace, despite our royal titles, but rather an elegant villa, smaller than many of the enormous, marble-columned Valorian mansions from the decade-long colonial era. Sunlight splashes through trees that canopy horse paths leading out of the city’s center. The three of us, my father and Roshar side by side, and I behind, ride into the green tunnels created by trees and bushes, cicadas whirring in the branches, to the house that was his as a child, before it was stolen by the Empire. He reclaimed it during the Firstwinter Rebellion, when Herrani slaves rose up against their masters. He once even kept my Valorian mother prisoner within the villa’s east wing.
I ran to my mother on small, bare feet when I learned this, the marble tiles slick and cool against my soles. Even then, I hated pinching lady slippers. In a shocked voice, I announced, Etta captured you.
She frowned. Where did you hear that? she asked.
He locked you up.
Who told you?
Worried I’d get my nurse in trouble, but more worried I’d get myself in trouble, I confessed: Emmah.
Emmah cannot know the whole story, my mother said.
What is the whole story?
Emmah has no right to chatter gossip to my child. It is not her tale to tell.
Tell me.
When you are older. It is not a tale for little ones.
I am old enough for Needles, I said, referring to the set of deadly knives she was training me to wield. Though she had no natural gift for weapons, she had worked for years to be skilled at Needles.
She smoothed flyaway hair off my brow. Yes, he imprisoned me, but I imprisoned him first. Do not worry, tadpole. He is mine, and I am his. Always.
The grounds surrounding my home are still green with summer’s end, pomegranates heavy and dark fists on their low trees. My father’s orange grove has been harvested.
“Did you eat them all?” Roshar asks my father, nodding at the grove. My father’s love for the fruit is legendary. Really, everything about my parents is.
My father allows Roshar a small smile. “Almost.”
“And left none for your dearest, most charming friend, I bet. Well, Arin. You know what this means. Not a drop of my finest Dacran liquor for you later when we listen to young Sid regale us with all the fun she has had breaking foreign hearts.”
My father shifts uncomfortably in his saddle.
“She did run through all the ladies here,” Roshar says.
And there we have it: my third skill.
Roshar smiles at me over his shoulder. “A rake after my own heart.”
I tip my head to him, every bit the arrogant wastrel my father has cautioned me not to be. It is bad behavior in one so recently and easily forgiven, but I simultaneously do not like my father’s silence, and want to prove that it does not bother me.
The villa glows under the rising sun, the windows winking. Its set of peaked roofs rise and fall, sloping down to the west. The glass atrium is a pointed jewel. As my boots crunch gravel covering the walk, the front door opens, and a tall, gray-and-black-haired woman stands on the threshold. Sarsine, my father’s cousin and chief counselor, looks much like him. Same steely hair, same gray eyes. Bold brow and large hands. Her craggy face hardens with disapproval as she appraises me.
I brush imaginary dust from the shoulders of my jacket, a man’s garment I had made for me in Ethin. I tug at the cuffs. My boots are less than shiny. Still, I can play my part. Ne’er-do-well, Sarsine silently calls me. Bad apple.
Fine. I am.
I grin at her behind my father’s back as he and Roshar enter the villa. “Better late than never,” I whisper sideways.
“Better never, or so some have said in your absence.” Sarsine holds my gaze as I hear the men’s footfalls diminish into the villa’s interior. “You wasted countless resources in our search for you. Your parents grieved each day you were gone. Yet here you stand, smiling cheerfully, without a care in the world. Arin let you off easy, I see.”
“No one can hold anything against me for long. I am too adorable. It is my handsome face. My winning charm. All the ladies say so.”
Sarsine looks as though she would like to slap me. “May the heart you break one day be your own.”
I do not give Sarsine the satisfaction of knowing her curse has already come to pass.
I linger in the salon where my mother’s piano hulks, its shining black shape as big as the boulder of guilt that rests on my chest. I touch the keys lightly, soundlessly, remembering my awe as a child to see my mother play, the simple harmonies I initially produced, how I grew in skill only to realize that I would never be more than merely good. For a few moments, I do not know how long, I believe the disquiet in my belly is shame, but then I realize it is more than that. It is fear of seeing her. Frustrated with myself, annoyed with the salon’s stillness, how it now seems like a smug, knowing witness to my cowardice, I bound up the stairs to the east wing, boots loud on polished oak.
On the outermost door to my mother’s suite, the kestrel carved into its wood peers down at me with narrow-eyed reproach, its expression dangerous though its body is small, its wingspan dainty, its tailfeathers spread in a dark-patterned fan. The door is not locked. My heart raps against my ribs. The indigo flowered rug of the empty greeting room deadens the sound of my boots. The quiet reminds me that my mother might be sleeping. I must not wake her. I walk softly but swiftly through her suite, hoping I can make everything right, that the queen’s forgiveness will be as easy to receive as the king’s. Nothing has been done that cannot be undone, surely. My mother will be well again. She will recover from this sickness. It is a matter of time. She is Queen Kestrel, master of spies. She survived so much. She is daunted by no one. Nothing.
I lift a vow to the god of souls, in whom I half believe. The god, who rules love, brokers deals for what mortals want most. Save her, I plead, and I will marry to please my parents.
As I move through each gray-and-pearl-colored room of the suite, I imagine telling my mother my vow. She will smile, and love me like she once did.
I pause before her bedchamber. The door is ajar. Beyond it, the tiny form of my mother rests under mounds of blankets though it is not so cold; autumn is not here yet. She has the body of a child. I shot up past her years ago. Towering over her used to give me some satisfaction, but now she looks too small, like she will dwindle away. Her loose hair, undulled by age, is a fire against the bedsheets. Her dagger, normally worn at her hip as I do mine, hangs from its hook on the bedpost. My father kneels next to the bed, his back to me, his hand on hers, his shoulders bowed. My mother doesn’t see me standing at the door. She sees only him. Her whisper reaches me: “I don’t want to die.”
“Little Fists.” My father’s voice is rough. “You won’t die.”
“I don’t want you to grieve. I don’t want to leave you alone in this world.”
My father is silent. I know without seeing his face what is there: his devastation. His large fingers trace the thin gold ring on her smallest finger. He made it for me, my mother told me, her face luminous with memory.
My mother says, “Who will protect you when I’m gone?”
My father, all muscle and strength, gently presses his face into her palm.
“I worry,” she says.
His shoulders lift and fall. Hurt burns my throat. I am like my father and mother: full of grief. And I am me, too: so jealous. I know it is wrong. Selfish. But I wish my mother worried about me, that it was me she wanted to protect, for me that she wished to live.
I know I am second best. I cannot measure up to their love for each other. Yet I want to be at least enough.
“Sid has returned,” my father says.
“She has?”
“You must not worry. You will live. And I have her.”
My mother sighs. “No,” she whispers, “you don’t.”
When I enter my rooms, which were my father’s rooms when he was a child, before the invasion, when Valorian soldiers forced their way into this house and murdered his family, I find Emmah going through my wardrobe, unwrapping my clothes from their tissue paper shrouds. The paper rustles as she catches sight of me and grips the clothes. Her deeply wrinkled face splits into a smile. “Sid! You sneak. How dare you skulk away for months on end!” She offers her cheek. “Come and give your nurse a kiss.”
I do, grateful that if she sees anything wrong in my expression, if she can sense how my mother’s words stamped down into my chest, heavy as a war horse’s hoof, she makes no mention of it. She still wears the little gold earrings I made for her when I was a child. My father refused to teach me how to blacksmith, saying he did not like to remember how he’d been forced to learn the skill, and no child of his would be made to work. I argued that this was not smithing, it was jewelry making, and if he had made my mother’s ring, surely he could help me. I want to make something Emmah loves, I said, and he smiled, and said, All right. Emmah cried when she unfolded the velvet I had wrapped around her Ninarrith gift.
She holds my face between her palms, green eyes shining. They are pretty, and make me wonder, as I often have, how she looked before the war. Her wrinkles were not caused by age—she is no older than my parents—but by fire or acid. Once, when I was little, I asked my parents what happened to Emmah. You must never ask her, my mother ordered, appalled. More gently, my father explained that we could not expect to know all that the Herrani had suffered during the invasion, when General Trajan, my Valorian grandfather, conquered this country and enslaved its people, or during the decade of colonization that followed.
You love Emmah, don’t you? my father said.
I nodded.
Then don’t pry.
But Roshar has scars on his face, I said. And I love him, and I asked him, and he told me.
What did he say?
That Arin did it, I answered. When I saw my parents’ startled expressions, I hastily added, I mean, Arin the tiger. Not you, Etta. Roshar said his tiger did it, that bad boy.
Dear one, my mother said, Roshar lied.
My father touched my cheek. He explained, Some truths are too hard to say.
“What a fright you gave me,” Emmah says. “You could have gone down in a shipwreck! You could have fallen in love with some girl and never returned!”
“Never.” I ignore the twitch of pain in my chest. I ignore the heat in my belly, my chest, my throat, as I remember peeling away Nirrim’s dress to kiss her skin. The feel of her body beneath mine, the way her eyes slid shut with pleasure. Nirrim’s eyes resemble Emmah’s, though Nirrim’s are larger, more luminous. Greener: a leaf lit by the sun. Look at me, I told Nirrim as I touched her. Open your eyes. She did, and I was lost.
No more. The memory is punishing. I must forget Nirrim. At least, I must do my best. Trying on a sly smile that feels fake but is familiar, because I am performing an old version of myself, I tell Emmah, “I am too canny a sailor to be sunk, and the god of souls knows I am too delicious to be given to one woman. I must be shared.”
Emmah turns serious, hands falling to her sides. “Have you seen your mother?”
I toy with a bit of downy tissue paper. It is tishin paper, made from pounding the stems of mulberry trees and soaking the pulp in a vat of water and hibiscus sap. Incredibly thin and sheer, tishin is barely paper. It feels the way clouds look. Made a little thicker than what I hold between my fingers, it can be used for paper lanterns. A little thinner, and my mother can use it for her own purposes. Watch, she once told me, laying an airy sheet of tishin over a page filled with writing. The writing vanished, and appeared to be a blank page that could easily be stitched into the final pages of an innocent-seeming book shipped along with its secret message to the recipient, who would scrape away the tishin to reveal the words beneath. Even paper, my mother said, has its secrets.
I think about the paper, and not the way my eyes burned to hear my mother dismiss me to my father as though I were tissue-thin. Next to nothing.
“Well?” Emmah presses. “Did you see the queen?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I did see her. She simply didn’t see me.”
“Let’s choose something suitable for you to wear, then, to visit her again.”
My gaze flicks warily to the dresses gathered together like flowers.
“Something you like,” Emmah corrects herself, and reaches for a Herrani men’s jacket: deep blue, with a high collar. My lungs loosen. It means something, that Emmah knows who I am and has never tried to change me. It gives me the courage I need.
My mother’s eyes are closed when I enter her bedchamber. I am clean from a bath, sea salt scrubbed from my skin. My boots are glossy black leather, my jacket tight across my chest, a Valorian dagger heavy on my hip. I refuse to kneel by her bedside the way my father did. She and I are alone in her bedchamber, and as she sleeps I take this moment to study her. I am glad my features are not so delicate. Even now, with the pallor of an invalid, she is beautiful. Beside her, on the dove-gray wood of the nightstand, rests a speckled yellow feather that I have sometimes seen in my father’s suite, sometimes seen in hers. It is a kind of code between them. What it means, I will likely never know. My parents might as well have their own language.
Her eyes flick open, startling me. I can’t tell whether she was faking sleep, or if her intelligence is such that even her dreams can’t keep her from sensing that for one moment, I had the advantage and was able to study her without her studying me.
“Sidarine.” Her voice is weak.
“Sid,” I correct.
She nods slightly, golden hair brushing the pillow. “Sid,” she says, and I feel petty for forcing her, in her illness, to use my little name. But she knows my preference. It is not new, and she is too smart to pretend she forgets. “I need to tell you something,” she says.
“Yes?” I try to keep the eagerness from my voice. Is it that she missed me? That she is glad I’m home?
“You cannot tell your father.”
Gods in their heaven. Never, to my knowledge, has my mother shared a secret with me that she kept from him. I bend closer. I find that I am ready to kneel, to hear her better, and stop myself just in time.
She must notice; she smiles. “I need my spy.”
“I quit being your spy.”
“I can’t tell Arin,” she continues, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He will raze Herran looking for the culprit.”
I crush my disappointment into a ball inside my chest and make my voice sound bored. “You are stringing me along, trying to stir my curiosity so that I become desperate for your secret, when really you’re assigning another job for me to do. Might as well say what it is.”
“I am not sick,” my mother says. “I have been poisoned.”