“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.”
NIRRIM
A FULL MOON POURS ITS silver over the city, whitening the pavement as I leave the Ward. I pass through the ruins of the wall, stepping carefully through the rocky debris. Cheers erupt behind me, the sound large yet softened by distance. A few minutes later, as I enter the Middling quarter, with its modest yet pretty houses, lit by bluepaned lanterns, the cheers echo again from the agora. Aden selected the prisoners to be executed, beginning with several councilmembers. They had once ruled over all of Ethin, acting in the name of the Lord Protector, whom we believed was elected by the Council whenever the former Lord Protector died. Instead, he had been the god of thieves, punished by the pantheon of gods to watch over this island. Every generation, the god of thieves pretended to be a new Lord Protector, risen from the ranks of the Council, and stole everyone’s knowledge of the truth.
The Council is complicit, Aden said, and I agreed. Only High Kith could become councilmembers, and they saw to it that their laws were ruthlessly enacted. If a Half Kith wore sandals that were too nice, the leather too smooth, by the Council’s orders she could be arrested, her toes lopped off one by one. If a Half Kith dared to leave the Ward, and was caught, as Aden’s mother had been long ago, the sentence was death. Their blood will spill in the agora, Aden said, as red as the Council robes they once wore.
Kill all the councilmen, I told him.
And all the High Kith.
I felt a prickle of annoyance. No. I said ten percent.
That is too little.
Don’t do this, said that voice inside, that other, old version of myself.
Silence, I tell her. I do not listen to you. My resistance to Aden was not out of guilt, or some ghost of my former self. It was because I had given Aden a clear command, and he had decided to act as if he knew better. “Ten percent only,” I told him. “Do as I say, or I will add you to the tithe.” He smirked as though I had been joking, his smile edged with resentment, but he agreed.
Another burst of cheering comes from the agora, even fainter now.
In the Middling quarter, the streets are empty, the houses’ shutters closed, though one shutter creaks open, revealing a child in the window, his head just above the sill. His eyes widen when I meet his gaze. A hand from behind snatches his shoulder and drags him back into the room’s darkness—to protect him, I suppose, from me. My people, free now, are roaming the street, dragging High Kith from their homes.
And what of the Middlings? Aden said.
I have not yet decided.
They carried out High-Kith orders. The Middlings are just as guilty. They must be punished, too.