“May I try?” It is a little boy of perhaps eight years, lifted by his father above the crowd. I invite the brave boy forward. I try to look benevolent, my lovely face as calm and gentle as a statue’s, because the crowd will appreciate that. I touch his cheek. The bird sings again.
It sings for another Half Kith. And another, and another, its call jangling in the agora as the sky darkens.
Later, when the sun fades and the crowd has divided into the disappointed and the lucky, Aden turns to me. “What game are you playing?” he murmurs. “What do you want?” I look straight into his blue eyes and then over his shoulder, letting my gaze trail to the wall that for centuries imprisoned our people. He knows, as I know, how we once feared being tithed for committing small sins. We were made to give our blood to the High Kith. Our hair, our limbs. Our hopes. Even children were taken. We will not return to who we were: cowardly, pathetic animals penned in a cage. We will never be the same, any more than I will return to the person I once was—kind, considerate Nirrim, so ready to put others’ needs before her own. That girl is gone.
What do I want?
Revenge.
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.