Home > The Hollow Heart (Forgotten Gods #2)(3)

The Hollow Heart (Forgotten Gods #2)(3)
Author: Marie Rutkoski

“Little godchild,” Roshar says, “I have never lied to you.” He rests a hand on mine where it grips the taffrail, his dark brown skin covering my pale fingers. All gold, Herrani say when they see me. They don’t say it nicely. I look very Valorian. I look like the people who conquered my country thirty-some years ago. Like my mother. I slip my hand out from beneath Roshar’s and the weight of his heavy ring, set with a dull black stone. He says, “I wish I didn’t worry that Kestrel might die, but I do.”

Think, tadpole, my mother said as I stared at the floating apple.

Because the apple is bigger? I said. Like a boat?

She smiled in encouragement—which is against her rules. She disdains giving hints, and if you go up against her you can be sure that nothing in her expression or gesture will reveal what she does not wish to show. But I was small, and she did want me to see a truth: her love. She gently tugged one of my braids. My hair was long then. When I cut it a few years ago, on my fifteenth nameday, her expression radiated hurt, because she believed I had done it so that I would look less like her.

She was right. She always is.

But the apple and the stone weighed the same, she said. You felt that when you held them. Why would one sink and the other float? Why would the apple’s bigness make it buoyant?

I had no answer. I studied apples and stones for days. I dropped pebbles into the atrium’s fountain. I cut open apples. I pried out seeds—brown teardrops, as though each apple, cheerful on the outside, wept at its core, or had several tiny, hard, bitter hearts.

Tell her, my father said to my mother.

No, she answered.

Finally, I announced, It is because an apple is filled with air. It doesn’t look that way, but it is. The air makes an apple go crunch between your teeth.

She looked so proud. I felt proud, for making her proud. My darling, I knew you could do it.

She promised a ride on her stallion as a reward. Javelin was strong, enormous. He was in his prime then. I always begged to ride him. She would say no, not because she worried that he’d throw me, but that I’d lose my seat and fall.

This time, I didn’t even have to ask. Javelin was a gift freely given. Up you go. She boosted me into his saddle. I was a sudden giant. I looked down at the crown of her head, her braided hair the color of lamplight. She fussed with a stirrup. She was going to walk beside me, I could tell, and I became instantly frustrated. I had done what she had asked. I had worked hard for my answer to her question. And now, to be babied? Rebellion lit my blood. My heels kicked into Javelin’s sides. We flew. I did not fall.

I think I was five years old.

Many years later, when I yelled at her, when I said I would never do what she wanted, that she could go to hell, when I shouted with all the fury she might have shown me that time I took off recklessly on her horse, she said, You are an apple, Sidarine.

What? I wanted to tear my hair out. I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t, then, remember that day by the pier, her test. I said, For once, say what you mean! I am sick of your riddles. I am sick of you. How dare you expect me to marry. I do not want him. I do not want any man. Do you hear me? I never will.

I think, she said coldly, you know exactly what I mean.

I remembered, then, the apple and the stone, and saw instantly her insult. This was how she saw me: filled with sweet air. I had given myself over to pleasure. All the girls I had taken to bed. She knew about them. Of course she did. She was the queen of spies. Clearly, she thought I liked a fresh dessert so much that I had become one. What did I know, her expression said, of duty?

Well, she was right. I knew nothing of duty. I refused to know it. I slammed the door to her suite behind me. I gathered my things and stole a few others. I cast off from the city that very night.

Roshar has left me alone at the ship’s rail. I wipe my wet face. My old hurt pushes against my new one. Was this why Nirrim said no? I love you, I said, but she didn’t feel the same way. Maybe she saw in me what my mother saw: someone unworthy.

My mother might die.

I say this to myself, over and over. Though I only half believe in gods, I pray for wind.

She cannot die. Impossible. She is strong. Hard. A weapon if need be. You’d have to break her open to see what’s inside. My mother: dropped down deep, secret and invisible below the waves.

My mother is stone.

 

 

NIRRIM

 


THE TAVERN IS DARK AND cool 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.

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