He looks at his hands. They, too, are too large for his body, and I can see, in this scrawny boy, his future self—so large that when I was a child I felt he could protect me from anything. I wonder if this is why he asked my forgiveness—because he can’t protect me.
“No,” he says. “I want you to forgive me for being so afraid of you.”
“Of me?”
“Of what it would mean to lose you.” The boy looks around the music room, and I notice that it is not decorated, not quite, in the way I recognize. The curtains are an old-fashioned color, and I do not know the furniture. The piano, I realize, is gone. “It meant so much to me to have a family. Kestrel. You. We were enough, the three of us. All I could want. At the same time, I was terrified. You were so small. Fragile. The slightest thing could kill a baby. And then you lived and grew and were strong. Bold … yet boldness could kill a child. I sought ways to check you, to keep you in line as you grew, out of fear that one day something horrible would befall you that I could not prevent.”
The boy looks so worried.
“Arin!” a woman calls from a faraway room. “Where are you?”
“Do you forgive me?” he asks.
I say, “Isn’t what you’ve described the way all parents feel?”
Tentatively, he smiles. “One day you will know,” he says, then laughs at my expression.
“Is this for you?” I offer him the Elysium feather, but he shakes his head. “You don’t need to give that to me,” he says, “any more than you needed to give the yellow feather to Kestrel. She accepted it for your sake, not her own. She accepted it because you felt you needed to give it. But you don’t need to pay a fee to come home. Home is always free.”
“Arin?” the woman calls again.
“Is that your mother?”
He nods. “She promised to tell me a story.”
My heart wells with pity. I cannot bring myself to tell him that his mother will be murdered when he is nine years old. Then I look into his gray eyes, and see that he already knows. I place my palm against his cheek. He startles and looks like he will object, but when he does, I am surprised that the reason has nothing to do with me, or with me being a woman. “I am too young for that,” he says. “I am not a man yet.”
“Does it matter?”
“No,” he says softly, and places his palm against my cheek.
“If you won’t take the feather, I have nothing else to give you.”
“Sid,” my father says, “you are yourself a gift.”
NIRRIM
THE SOUND OF WARFARE DIMS. The loud, explosive weapons stop shuddering. I look at the dagger in my hand. Has the war paused because this is the answer—to plunge the dagger into Sid’s heart?
The dagger is finely made. I know nothing of weapons but I know this. I can tell by how perfectly balanced the blade is, and how the edge is so sharp it looks like you might not feel, at first, any pain. I have held this dagger only once before, when I used it to prick my finger, and did not look closely at it then, but I see it better now: the slightly blue tint to its hammered steel, and the sigil on the hilt of two eyes lightly closed. It is the sign of Sid’s family, the family she loved so much that she left me for them.
But now she is mine.
She sleeps, her mouth the perfect shape for mine, her hands long and a little large, folded over her heart. I shift them aside, and although before her body had been stiff, as though dead already, now her hands slide away easily at the slightest pressure. I see where I must stab.
Do you not love me like I love you? I remember her saying. Will you come with me?
I remember the force of my love. The memory fills me so strongly that the difference between past and present feels like a lie.
I can do nothing to hurt her, because I realize that to hurt her would be to hurt myself.
I drop the dagger to the floor.
SID
I STAND IN NIRRIM’S ROOM in the palace, in that place of hasty finery, as though flung together by someone who had little idea of what it meant to be rich and powerful, and put together a few expensive items to ensure that everyone would think that she did know.
Nirrim is there, at a distance from me, looking down at someone stretched out on her bed. I see her shift, lifting a dagger high, and when she moves, I see that the person lying there is me.
That is my dagger. It is poised to stab into my heart.
But Nirrim’s hand unclenches. The dagger falls with such a clatter that I can’t help but wince. She might have damaged the blade’s edge. I am about to stride over and snatch the dagger from the ground to inspect it thoroughly, when someone behind me says, amused, “Only you would be more worried about your dagger than the fact that I was about to kill you, Sid.”
I turn, startled, to see Nirrim, dressed as she was the first time I saw her, in an uncomfortable-looking, horribly unbecoming beige dress. She smiles. Yet when I glance over at the bed, Nirrim is also there, dressed in finery, staring down at my sleeping form, her expression twisted in grief.
The Nirrim in the beige dress says, “She doesn’t understand what she has lost. She only knows that she is lost.”
I am very confused. “Are you…?”
“I am Other Nirrim. I am her memory.”
“Thank the gods.” I lift my left hand, the one that holds her heart, and say, “This is for you.”
She smiles again, a little sadly this time. “Not for me. For her. I don’t actually exist anymore.”
I trace the shape of her mouth. “You do for me.”
“Sid,” she says, her voice full of wonder, “you went to the realm of the gods for me.”
“And came back.”
“Not yet. Not quite. Sid, you are going to have to let me go.”
“No,” I say sharply. “I have been letting everyone go. Find your way home, the god said. It has been a journey of loss.”
“And gifts. And forgiveness. You know this. I, too, must ask you to forgive me for not being here if you return to the mortal realm. Even if you give me my heart, I will never be the same person.”
“Who will you be?”
She looks over my shoulder, and I see that the Nirrim with starlike earrings, as bright as tears, weeps over my sleeping body. Other Nirrim says, “I will be the woman who, even with no mercy in her heart, could not bear to destroy the person she loves most. Will you go to her?”
NIRRIM
IF YOU WISH TO RULE alone, you must destroy her.
Maybe, however, the tree’s fortune was intended to show that I was not meant to rule alone, but beside someone.
Or that I am not meant to rule at all.
The silence rings like that after a thunderclap. I look down at Sid as she sleeps, and I miss her. I miss who I was with her. I retrieve the dagger from the floor and place it beside her, near her right hand. Straightening, I brush my hands over my hair, to smooth it, and wipe my wet cheeks. I am not strong enough to carry her to the Herrani, but I am strong enough to surrender.
Many of my people are dead. I have driven away my friends. The person dearest to me is lost. My message to the world does not matter anymore, or at least I no longer believe I am fit to carry it.
Let the Herrani do with me what they will. I have done much to deserve it, and although I know that compassion exists, that mercy is real, I cannot imagine anyone would feel that for me.
For the last time, I touch Sid’s hand. I do it in the way she told me her people do, with three fingers on the back of someone’s hand, as a way to ask forgiveness.
Sid’s eyes open. They are entirely black, as black as a void, the blackness spread fully across what would be the whites of her eyes. My breath snags in my throat, and I don’t know if I should be elated or afraid, if she has been cured of her sleep or if this is a worsening of her condition, if she has returned to me cursed to be my enemy. Then she blinks. The blackness shrinks to the center of her eyes. She sees me and smiles, cozying into the bed as though roused from a blissful nap
. “You know,” she says, “I thought being a hero meant I would be rewarded with a kiss.”
Stunned, I repeat, “A hero?”
“Frankly, I think I am owed much more, but I will settle for a kiss for now.”
“Oh?” I say caustically, suspecting some trick or game. Sid is full of them. “Is sleeping for a month newly recognized as an act of heroism?”
She yawns. “This bed is cold. Come lie down next to me.”
“There is a war outside!”
“Sounds quiet enough for now. We will go settle everything in just a minute. I don’t suppose you have any of that nice, hot Dacran drink I left behind in the house on the hill?”
Even without my heart, I’m infuriated by her. Even without my heart, I love her. “I nearly killed you!”
She lifts her hand to brush hair from my face. “But you didn’t,” she says gently.
I step away so her hand falls. “I have done terrible things,” I choke out. “I cannot forgive myself.”
Serious now, Sid tips her chin in acknowledgment. She opens her left hand, and although I see nothing there, the energy in the air changes, and I feel as if I am held in her hand. “This is yours,” she says. “I won it from the god of thieves. I think it is not something you can be forced to take, but I brought it back for you to have if you want it.”
“Are you saying you have my heart?”
“Yes,” she says, a little smugly. “I am.”
“How?”
“I went to the realm of the gods and made them give it to me.”
“We agreed. We agreed about the bragging.”
With her right hand, Sid lifts one finger, tocking it back and forth in a kind of scold. “It is not bragging if it is true.”
I stare at her left palm, and although there is nothing there, I believe her. I want my heart back … yet I do not. I am afraid of what I will feel. Afraid of who I will be. I have gotten used to the hollowness inside me. But as Sid looks up at me, expression somber now, I know that she does not deserve to be with someone less than whole. “You saved me.”
“And I would do it again. Be with me, and let me do it forever.”
I touch her left palm and seem to see a flutter of pink smoke.
“Will you accept my gift?” Sid says.
I kiss her, sinking down beside her, mouth hungry for something only she can give.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
THE GOD
“NOW,” SAYS THE GOD OF games, “there is the small matter of your punishment.”
It is only us. The pantheon has dissipated. “Mete it out. Decide, and let us be done.”
If she were a human in the mortal realm, the god of games would have stretched out, as satisfied as a cat on a comfortable chair. As it is, her smirk is all too human. Sometimes I forget she used to be human, before she gambled for immortality and won.
“You must tell me a story,” she says. “That is your punishment.”
I search her expression, looking for the trick, the sting in the scorpion’s tail.
“There is no trick,” she says. “It is what I want. Your story is what all this has been for: the winding path that led my godchild, that sly Herrani gamester, to your mortal-born Nirrim. Really, I chose you. Aren’t you flattered? We are family now! Go on, tell me everything that happened from the time I changed you into a rose. Tell me about Nirrim and Sid, and what they will do in their world. Tell me what they are doing right now. Make it good, Liar, or you shall suffer my displeasure.”
And so I tell her about Irenah. I tell her about my grief. I describe the prison where Sid and Nirrim met. I describe how Sid and Nirrim pick their way through a damaged city to meet Arin, who pulls his daughter into his arms. I paint the colors of the Elysium bird diving down from the sky to Nirrim’s shoulder, and of the crimson feather Nirrim offers yet again to her sister, Annin, who accepts it. I explain how Morah, whose gift is knowing the truth, recognizes from Nirrim’s expression that she cannot yet forgive herself, even if Annin forgives her. Morah thinks about how the path home is not always easy. Then when she glances into the crowd, she immediately forgets her thoughts, because she sees someone she knows: the boy Killian, Sid’s young spy. Killian is hers. She sees it in his face. He is the baby who was taken from her, grown into a boy of nearly twelve years. She dives through the crowd to reach him. And although Nirrim will live always with the damage she has done, she will take consolation in this one pure thing: that a mother found her child, and that it would never have happened without her reckless bargain with the god of thieves. She had given her people the truth—of their gifts, their history. The truth is not nothing. Sometimes, it can be everything.
I should know.
“And you?” the god of games says. “Will you see your child one day?”
“No,” I lie, for that is my nature. In the mortal world, night falls. It is Ninarrith, when the Herrani light candles in the hope that we gods will return. Their wish, I feel, is already coming true. A new era is upon us. Gods will mingle among mortals again. We cannot resist one another.
“Start again,” my sister says. “From the beginning.”
I tell her everything. I tell it to her as I have told it to you, omitting nothing. She listens, waiting for more, and I give it to her, for the god of lies is also the god of stories.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m so grateful for my sons, Eliot and Téo, whose love shapes everything I do and write. Many thanks as well to my partner, Eve Gleichman, who somehow sees right through me in the most tender way. I’m glad I get to quarantine with the three of you. And the cats, too, I guess.
My fellow writer friends—what would I do without you? Thanks for all your help, whether it was reading drafts, giving good advice, having writing Zoom dates with me, being the world’s best host, or badgering me to just finish the book already: Marianna Baer, Holly Black, Kristin Cashore, Cassandra Clare, Zoraida Córdova, Adam and Sabina Deaton, Morgan Fahey, Donna Freitas, Anna Godberson, Daphne Grab, Anne Heltzel, Josh Lewis, Sarah Mesle, Jill Santopolo, Eliot Schrefer, and Ashley Woodfolk.
My agent, Alexandra Machinist, and everyone at ICM, including Lindsey Sanderson, as well as Felicity Blunt, Roxane Edouard, and the Curtis Brown team on the other side of the Atlantic, are stars. Thank you as well to my editors, Trisha de Guzman and Joy Peskin, who always believed in The Forgotten Gods duology, and everyone at Macmillan, including Jen Besser, Beth Clark, Molly Brouillete Ellis, Teresa Ferraiolo, Kathryn Little, Kelsey Marrujo, Mary Van Akin, and Allison Verost. Ruben Ireland, what a stunning cover you gave me! Thank you as well to everyone at Hodder UK, especially Molly Powell.
Sabina Deaton, Laura Fields, and Anna Tabachnik, I always appreciate your art and design feedback. A special thanks to Laura Fields for introducing me to the Lightning Fields, an art installation by Walter de Maria that inspired the field of ethereal and earthly poles in this book.
Finally, thank you to all of the booksellers, librarians, and readers. When writers talk about world-building, we mean an invented world’s habits, cultures, maps, and landscape. But you are the true builders of worlds, for nothing in these pages would exist without you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie Rutkoski is the author of The Midnight Lie, The Shadow Society, the Kronos Chronicles, and the New York Times-bestselling Winner’s Trilogy, which has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and was included in lists for Best Books of the Year by Amazon, YALSA, and Kirkus, among others. She is a professor at Brooklyn College and lives in New York City. Visit her online at marierutkoski.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
The God
Nirrim
Sid
Nirrim
Sid
Nirrim
The God
Sid
The God
Nirrim
The God
Sid
Nirrim
Sid
The God
Nirrim
The God
Sid
The God
Nirrim
Sid
Nirrim
Sid
The God
Nirrim
Sid
The God
Nirrim
Sid
The God
Sid
The God
Sid
Nirrim
The God
Nirrim
Sid
Nirrim
Sid
Nirrim
The God
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Marie Rutkoski
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
A part of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271
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All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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First hardcover edition, 2021
eBook edition, 2021
eISBN 9780374313852
The Hollow Heart Page 25