The words felt like a vow, and she wanted to make them true. There would always be the sea, cold and sure and full of teeth. It was there for her if she needed it. But not today.
Chapter 37
The Punishment Is Death
After the Slaughter, while the cyrs picked the uul bones and the year’s crop of flies died in winter’s first frost, Nova married Shergesh—or was married to him; the ceremony did not require her consent. That morning, beforehand, she went down to the beach. In bride’s garb, amid the skeletons and the swirling contemptuous carrion birds, she stood and considered the sea.
The sharks had left the shallows. She could probably drown before they got her. If she breathed water in, it would be over quite fast, with hardly any pain at all.
Such thoughts were only playthings, though. She wasn’t going to do it, but it helped. It still helped every day to remember that she could.
She went back up the switchback path, and walked alone to her own wedding. No one worried that she wouldn’t turn up. After all, where could she go? For the whole of the ceremony, which had not space in it for her to utter so much as a single word, she stared at the old man who’d bought her for five coins. She stared without expression, hardly blinking, never smiling, and spoke to him with her mind, as though it were a conversation.
There are things you can’t own, old man, not for five coins or five thousand.
And:
I am not what you think. I’m a pirate. What do you say to that? Did you know I stole power from the Mesarthim smith?
He feared me.
I saw it.
He struck me.
I remember.
I hate him.
I hate you.
I’m not afraid of him.
And I am not afraid of you.
If she said it enough, would it become true?
I’m not afraid of you, I’m not afraid.
I. Am not. Afraid.
Shergesh didn’t care for the weight of her stare. Later, he made sure it was dark, so he couldn’t see if her eyes were open. They were open, the whole time, and he felt their weight as she felt his, crushing her flat in their sleeping furs, his rancid breath on her face.
Weeks passed. Days shortened, which, perversely, meant nights lengthened. Nova still went, while she could, to play her game with the sea. This, too, became a conversation. With Kora by her side, she’d always had someone to talk to. Now that she had no one, she talked to everything, but only inside her head.
Good morning, sea, still here?
She imagined its voice, seductive. It knew her by her old name only, and she didn’t correct its mistake. Koraandnova, it called her, beckoning, and she closed her eyes and smiled. Are you coming to me today?
No, thank you. I think I’ll stay ashore. You see, I’m expecting my sister.
It’s too late, said the sea, but Nova didn’t listen. She knew—she knew, she knew—that Kora would not desert her. So each day she turned her back on the sea, and mounted the path that would take her back up to the village and the labor and the old-man husband that were what passed for a life. And every day, morning came later and dimmer, until the sun clung sluggish to the horizon, barely peering up at all before subsiding. Deepwinter’s Eve dawned—the day when Kora and Nova had always climbed the ridge trail to bid the sun farewell for an entire month.
This year Nova went alone. The trail was treacherous with ice, and sunless but not dark. Cold starlight lit her path. She stopped at the ridge, toes inches from the edge, looked up, and chose a star. She chose it of the thousands and, as was now her way, she talked to it.
Is she coming? she asked it. You should know. I bet you can see everything from there. Will you give her a message for me? I don’t know how much longer I’ll last. Tell her that. Tell her the sea knows our name. Tell her I’m waiting. Tell her I’m dying. Tell her I love her.
The rim of the sun appeared. It had never seemed so flimsy: That rind of light was all that stood between her and a month of darkness. She knew better than to look right at it—it was slim, but it was the sun—but she couldn’t help herself. She looked. She must have looked too long. A white aura bloomed in her vision. She blinked but couldn’t look away. Something about it...
The sun vanished but not the white aura. It must have burned into her eyes. It was dead center and growing. She blinked again. It was getting bigger. She squinted. It had a shape.
And then she saw what it was—if she dared to trust her sun-
struck, wondering eyes.
She would ever after believe the star had passed her message to Kora. Because the shape gliding toward her was the huge white eagle that had effused from her sister’s chest. How was it here? Was Kora here, too?
Nova was filled with lightning—the brilliant flare, the thunder’s peal. She opened her arms to the bird. She wept. Her tears froze on her lashes. Kora had come to save her.
But where was she?
There was only the bird. There had been no vessels in the harbor for weeks, and wouldn’t be now for months. The ice was closing. Winter was upon them, and the sea around Rieva became a treacherous wilderness of tide-borne ice shelves crashing together, buckling, heaving open into narrow straits only to smash shut again and splinter any ships caught in between. No one could approach. No one could escape. Kora couldn’t be nearby. There was only the bird, but the bird was Kora. Wasn’t that what the Servant had said?
It’s not an ‘it.’ It’s you, Korako. That eagle is you, as much as your flesh and blood is you.
Its wingbeats stirred a wind. Huge as it was, it seemed weightless, coming to hover in front of Nova. Its eyes pierced her and she wondered if her sister was really looking at her through them. She tried to smile and be brave. “Kora,” she said. “Can you hear me? Can you see me?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, and she realized only then that it had been weeks since she’d said anything out loud. Shergesh preferred her silence, and whom else did she have to talk to? All her conversations happened only in her head.
“I miss you,” she choked out. “I can’t...” She started to say what she’d told the star. I can’t bear it. I’m dying. Save me.
But the words wouldn’t come. They filled her with shame. The bird made no sound but Nova felt Kora’s presence, and she wanted to be strong for her. She summoned a smile. “It’s Deepwinter’s Eve. I don’t suppose you have that in Aqa. Well, let me tell you,” she said, and tried to hide her desperation under a thin veil of chatter. “The Slaughter was a fine time this year. I’ll bet you’re sorry you missed out....”
The bird was fading. Nova blinked. It was luminous in the starlight, but it was dimming like a dying lamp. Nova wondered with a lurch of her heart: Was it really here at all? What if she was only imagining it, some thread of sanity snapped? But then it clicked its beak and shifted in the air, its great taloned raptor foot thrusting a bundle at her. It was small. She clutched it to her chest with her mittened hands and gasped as the bird vanished before her.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, but it was already gone.
She thrust the bundle down the front of her coat; she couldn’t open it with her mittens on, and didn’t dare take them off in this cold. She went back down the ridge trail to her husband’s house. No one paid her any heed. She crept in quietly and built up the fire before removing her outer layers. Shergesh was snoring. She hated the sound, but hated it less than his querulous voice snapping orders at her unceasing.
With shaking hands, still numb from the cold, she opened the eagle’s bundle. A part of her mind still thought she’d imagined it, bird and bundle and all. Maybe even now it was all hallucination, however real it seemed in the firelight of the house.
It was a length of cloth finer than anything she’d touched— slippery as water, the light gliding over it, dancing like the aurora. It was patterned with tiny flowers in a hundred different colors. She thought she’d weep, it was so lovely. But that was just the wrapping. She unwound it.
There was a letter. It said:
My sister, half of my own self. I am not free to come for you, as our mother could not come for us. It is not as we imagined here. The empire is failing.
Nova blinked. The words were senseless. The Mesaret Empire was everything, and always had been. It could not fail. What did that even mean? The letter did not say. It went on: I send you this with deep misgiving. I don’t know what else to do. I know you know this, Novali: The punishment is death.
For what it’s worth, I heard the Mesarthim talking. They said that when you stole their gifts, you made them stronger—the way a lighthouse lens amplifies light. Nova, my heart. You are stronger than Rieva. You are stronger than the sea. Find me.
Find me. I am not free.
Nova’s heart stuttered, then it raced. I am not free. Twice Kora had written those words. All this time, Nova had imagined her sister training, growing strong, living the life they’d dreamed of. It had been so real in their minds. How foolish it seemed now. It hadn’t even occurred to her that they’d invented it whole cloth. She’d been so deep in her own self-pity, she’d never even considered...What was Aqa really like? What was Kora’s life, if it was not the one they’d imagined?
And the empire... failing?
Nova would have been less stunned to see the sky shatter like a sheet of ice.
There was an object in the bundle. She saw it and stopped breathing. She knew better than to touch it. Through the wall, she heard Shergesh’s snores falter into the snorts that heralded his waking. Her hands were shaking so badly she almost dropped the thing several times trying to wrap it back up. She shoved the bundle into the back of a cupboard, but the letter, it was still in her hand. She heard Shergesh’s sitting-up grunt, then thump-thump as he swung his feet out of bed, and she panicked and threw the letter in the fire.
No no no no no. She tried to grab it out. It was Kora’s writing, and she didn’t want to lose it as they had lost their mother’s. Too late. It crisped and curled, and then Shergesh was in the doorway, scratching himself and wanting things, as was his way.