Soul of Cinder

by Bree Barton

  “I told you what happened on Prisma,” Mia said gently. “Would you tell me what happened at the House?”

  And there it was. The wall Pilar had knocked into a million times before. Someone asking to hear her story—and her hands balling into fists. Nails digging into palms. Her body reacting physically, like she’d absorbed a blow to the gut.

  “It’s . . .” Her throat clenched. “It’s hard to talk about.”

  “You don’t have to. I mean that.”

  Mia placed one hand over her heart and the other in the air.

  “I hereby swear: I won’t keep trying to fix you, or force you to talk about things you don’t want to talk about.”

  “Thanks for that. The thing is . . . I think I do.”

  Pilar uncurled her fingers. The nail grooves began to fade.

  She took a breath.

  Pilar told Mia how the Gymnasia smelled like sweat, even in the early morning before anyone sparred. How just being there made her happy.

  She described the thrill of teaching Stone, how hungry he was to get better, and the even bigger thrill she’d felt the day Shay pinned her to the floor.

  She talked about her fight students, how they wanted to eat with her in the Swallow, tell her stories, make her laugh. When they were hurt or scared or angry, they came to the Gymnasia. Sometimes she’d spar with them. Other times she’d just listen while they poured out their hearts.

  She told Mia about the night Stone broke Shay’s heart.

  She told her about Celeste.

  “What?” Mia was shocked. “I take back every nice thing I ever said about that woman.”

  “Blame the Shadowess. She’s the one who wanted to get rid of me. Not to mention she appointed a Keeper who abuses her power every time she attacks you with a kiss.”

  Mia knit her brow. “Something doesn’t add up. That’s just not who the Shadowess is.”

  “Maybe you don’t know who the Shadowess is.”

  Rose held up her hands. “I don’t want to fight.”

  “Me neither.” Pilar snorted. “For once.” She stared at the bloodbloom charm on her palm. “I know I came back to Glas Ddir to stop Quin. And that’s still the plan. But I think really, from the moment I got on that sad excuse for a boat . . . I was coming back for you.”

  The words nested quietly between them. The night was still. Pilar felt still, too. Her body felt the way it always did after a good fight: exhausted but content. Empty and also full. The words had poured out of her, and they were there now, in the space between.

  Pilar thought she’d feel exposed. Instead she felt seen. In a good way. Mia had seen and heard her without trying to heal her broken parts.

  Maybe that was how it felt to have a sister. To be seen, known, loved, exactly the way you were.

  “Want to see how it works?” Mia nodded to the bloodbloom tree. “Only if you want.”

  Pilar realized she’d been rubbing the charm. There was power inside the wood. Inside her hands, too. She could feel it thrumming.

  “Do I have to chant?”

  “There will be no chanting. I give you my word.”

  Pilar didn’t shrug. Just handed the tree to her sister.

  “Let’s make it bloom.”

  Chapter 45

  Into the Hats

  MIA COULDN’T STOP STARING at Pilar’s hands. They were so different from hers. Smaller, with shorter fingers and broader thumbs. Far rougher—and infinitely stronger, Mia had no doubt. Weeks on the sea had healed the scabs on Pilar’s knuckles, leaving her olive skin a pale, wrinkled pink.

  In the Curatorium, Mia had made a tincture that worked wonders on scar tissue. She was dying to offer it. But she refrained. If Pilar wanted to heal her scars, she would heal them herself.

  “What I like about the bloodbloom,” Mia said, as Pil cupped the charm in her palm, “is that it works in tandem with your own body. We each have great power to heal ourselves, magic or no. But we still need tools, the same way that we need other people.”

  “And if I don’t want to need other people?”

  Mia shot her a shrewd look. “I think it might be time you evolve that view.”

  She waited for Pilar to chuck the charm into the forest and storm off the porch.

  To her surprise, Pil didn’t move. Her face was open. Curious.

  “I suppose all I’m saying,” Mia continued, “is that we form communities to survive. Families. Friendships. Whole villages. These people can help us find our way.”

  She nodded toward Pilar’s hands. “Can I ask you to look at your own hands? Really look? I’ll do it with you. Imagine you’re studying for a test and your hands are the primary text.”

  Pil rolled her eyes dramatically—but complied.

  True to her word, Mia began to examine her own hands. Beneath ivory skin dappled with orange freckles, blue veins coursed close to the surface. When she undulated her fingers, the phalanges and metacarpals crested one at a time, each bone exquisitely contoured.

  “Other side,” she said, and they both flipped their hands palm up.

  The human body really was amazing. Mia marveled at the delicate lines etched into her palms: a unique and inimitable map. Each fingertip so distinctive, not even two of her own fingers were alike.

  A thought came unbidden: King Ronan’s Hall of Hands. Where blood and bone and muscle had once worked together in exquisite harmony, they had been severed, carved into inanimate parts.

  What had those hands done in the time before? Had they turned the pages of a book? Strung an arrow in a bow? Cradled a sick child? Flourished and fluttered to tell a lively story? What kinds of magic had they wrought?

  “I understand you like hands an awful lot,” Pilar said, interrupting her thoughts. “I get it. You grew up terrified of them. Wearing gloves. All of it. I’m just wondering . . .”

  “What this has to do with anything?”

  “I’m getting the sense this might be a fetish.” Pilar shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  Mia burst out laughing. “Your point stands. I’ll skip ahead.”

  She placed her left hand over her belly. Pilar echoed the movement.

  To Mia’s surprise, she felt nervous. After all those sessions with the Shadowess, this was the first time she had tried to teach someone else. She’d wanted to teach Angelyne, sitting in her imaginary castle: Mia’s last desperate attempt to save her little sister. Her big sister, on the other hand, did not need saving. Pilar simply wanted to learn.

  Mia’s breath was jittery, uneven. She heard a reproachful voice in her head: Really? Your breath is still ragged? Have you learned nothing?

  But as soon as the thought wormed into her mind, she thanked it and bid it farewell. This was simply her breath right now. It would be different tomorrow, in an hour, even in one minute. She would breathe smoothly and roughly, roughly and smoothly, for the rest of her life. It didn’t mean she was broken. It meant she was human.

  “Inhale through your nostrils,” Mia said. “Nice, deep breath. Then let it out your mouth slowly. Feel how your hand actually rises when you exhale? That’s your diaphragm expanding. You’re breathing all the way into your belly, not just your chest.”

  She winced, waiting for Pilar to say something snide and walk away. She remembered standing in the Creation Studio as Pil had sneered at her for belly breathing. Rub your little wooden tree. ’Cause that’ll solve everything.

  But there was no trenchant commentary. No movement other than Pilar’s hand over her belly, rising and falling. Mia felt a tremendous surge of pride.

  “Look,” she whispered, nodding toward the charm in Pil’s right hand.

  The little tree had blossomed. Expanding on the inhale, wood creaking, branches reaching toward the starlit sky. On the exhale, wind streamed through the leaves, tiny red flowers opening like jewels.

  Pilar stared at the tree growing in her hand. Incredulous.

  “It’s really me? I’m the one making it do that?”

  “You are.�
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  “It feels good. Really good.”

  “You think I’d spend all those hours in the House doing something that felt bad? Give me some credit.”

  “You can be a glutton for punishment,” Pil countered, and Mia couldn’t disagree.

  They breathed together awhile. Left hands on their stomachs. Mia’s right hand pressed to her heart, Pilar’s cradling the bloodbloom as it creaked and bloomed. Mia felt a profound sense of comfort that they could bring their own breath back into alignment—without manipulating the elements, or siphoning from a history of oppression, or creating any kind of imbalance at all.

  The best part was that they didn’t need the bloodbloom. It was nice, but it was just a tool. Their hands had the real power.

  They could heal themselves.

  Mia wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she finally let her hands fall. The night had grown colder, but she felt centered and refreshed. The grief that had consumed her as she paced the halls of her childhood home had quieted. She could manage it now.

  “Here you go,” Pilar said, holding out the bloodbloom.

  “Keep it. I want you to have it.” She rubbed the heat back into her arms. “We should probably go.”

  “To Kaer Killian?”

  She nodded. “I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I keep seeing Quin under the snow palace. That hateful look in his eyes.”

  “Me too.”

  Pilar cleared her throat.

  “Listen, I heard something on the way here. It’s probably nothing. The river guide was going on and on about how the Kaer fell off the mountainside. But he was pretty old and batty. You should’ve seen what he was wearing—he had these long, drooping sleeves.”

  Mia sat up sharply.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  “I . . . didn’t think you cared about sleeves?”

  “What color were they?”

  “Green and yellow, I think. Though the yellow might’ve been gold.”

  Terror seared through Mia’s chest. She stood.

  “Those are the colors of Clan Killian.”

  “I mean, is that surprising? We are in the river kingdom.”

  “You don’t understand. Those are the mourning sleeves. They mean a Killian is dead.”

  Pilar went silent. She, too, brought herself to her feet.

  “But all the Killians are dead, right? The king, the queen. Karri.”

  “That was months ago. The sleeves are worn when a death is still fresh.”

  She saw her own fear reflected in Pilar’s eyes.

  “Come on. We’ll get to the Kaer faster if we ride.” Mia leapt off the porch, skipping all five steps at once. “I know where we can find a horse.”

  They rode through the night, Mia astride her father’s blond mare, Pilar on a white stallion they had wheedled out of the sleepy stable boy by promising him a pouch of Killian gold.

  “I’m the princess,” Mia had proclaimed. Then, with slightly less certainty: “I was the princess.” And, finally: “I might actually be the queen?”

  She had still never managed to confirm the validity of her marriage vows, since the wedding had been so violently interrupted. Were she and Quin married? It hardly seemed to matter now.

  “I see you’re wearing the mourning sleeves,” she’d said to the stable boy.

  “Don’t you know? It’s the end of Clan Killian.”

  Mia’s heart contracted. “Isn’t King Quin in the Kaer?”

  “There is no Kaer,” the boy said. “And no king. Not anymore.”

  After that, she and Pilar said nothing. They rode through the forest side by side, each lost in her own dark thoughts, stopping only to feed and water the horses.

  Mia believed she had made peace with Quin’s death. After all, she’d lost him months ago, crushed beneath the snow palace. Only when she and Pilar received the letter had she dared imagine seeing him again.

  Then why did it hurt so much to know she wouldn’t? Was it the knowledge that he had been alive, and she hadn’t made it back in time? Or was the real fear that he had become the tyrant he’d sworn never to be—and that only in his death, Glas Ddir would finally find its freedom?

  No king. Not anymore.

  In every village, Mia saw one or two drunken revelers stumbling around the dark, the gold-and-green sleeves draped over their arms.

  Every time, she had to look away.

  By the time they made it to Killian Village, dawn was breaking. Mia felt weary down to her very bones.

  She and Pilar dismounted, tying their horses to the fence beside a snowmelt well.

  “You Glasddirans sure do get up early,” muttered Pil.

  Despite the hour, the town was already abuzz. Mia leaned into the fence, taking a moment to get her bearings. Nearby, a blacksmith hurried out of his forge. In a sudden jolt of recall, Mia remembered standing in the same spot to catch her breath after she and Quin fled the castle.

  The man wore the mourning sleeves. Everyone in the village wore them.

  But somehow the mood didn’t seem quite right for mourning. People ducked into bakeries and out of hat shops, often with a smile on their lips.

  “I think that used to be a brothel,” Pilar said, pointing. “When I was a scullery maid at the Kaer, I used to go to the village to get food, and there were always ladies standing on the porch in silks and garters.”

  And indeed, ladies there still were. But these wore neither silks nor garters. They stood behind a long table, handing out baskets of bread—fresh-baked, by the smell of it—cartons of vegetables, and cuts of meat wrapped in crisp brown paper to the people lining up outside.

  Mia’s jaw dropped. The women had their sacred mourning sleeves rolled up and tucked into the tops of their trousers, leaving their hands unencumbered. What sacrilege was this?

  “Pilar!” called a familiar voice. “Mia!”

  She turned to see the Shadowess walking toward them. Muri looked tired, dark circles under her eyes, but also happy.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Mia said, relieved. Who better than Muri to help her process the loss of Quin?

  She felt Pilar bristle at her side. In Mia’s joy over seeing the Shadowess, she had forgotten Pil did not share the same cuddly feelings.

  “I’m glad to see you, too, Mia,” Muri said, though she sounded hesitant. She turned to Pilar. “I’m hoping you and I can speak, Pilar.” She paused. “Privately.”

  It took Mia a moment.

  “Oh! Oh. Privately.”

  She was flustered—and a little jealous. Then deeply embarrassed over feeling jealous.

  “If you need me, I’ll just be . . .” Mia glanced around, mildly panicked. “In that hat shop.”

  She turned and fled into the arms of a milliner. Or at the very least, into the hats.

  Chapter 46

  Softer Falls

  PILAR SCOWLED AT MIA’S retreating back. She hadn’t asked to be alone with the Shadowess, the last person in all four kingdoms she wanted to speak to. Second to last. Celeste claimed first prize.

  But off Mia went, bolting into a hat shop. Even though she had never once worn a hat.

  Pilar fixed her gaze on the Shadowess. Crossed her arms.

  “You got what you wanted. I’m out of the House.”

  The Shadowess’s expression was grave.

  “There’s been some confusion, Pilar.”

  “Why are you here? You said you were sending your ambassadors to the river kingdom.”

  The Shadowess removed her glasses. Looked Pilar in the eye, no lenses between them.

  “There were things I was only recently made aware of that need to be addressed. In an effort to address them effectively—”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  Muri sighed.

  “Because of you, Pilar. I came here for you.”

  She slid her glasses back into place.

  “I owe you an apology. Many apologies.
And I will give them all to you, happily. Though I would love to sit down first. I’m not quite as young as I used to be, as my knees often remind me. Can I offer you a hot meal and a cup of cocoa?”

  Pilar appraised her. She found it hard to believe Muri had crossed a whole desert just to apologize to her. To Mia Rose, maybe. Since when had Pilar d’Aqila mattered to the all-powerful Shadowess?

  Pilar stared into Muri’s deep brown eyes. She saw kindness. Her mother had had deep brown eyes, too. They were never kind.

  “I don’t want cocoa,” Pilar said. “Thanks anyway.”

  She savored—she couldn’t help it—the crestfallen look on Muri’s face.

  “That said . . .” She shrugged. “I will take a nip of rai rouj.”

  Pilar did not order rai rouj. It was just past dawn when she and Muri stepped into the inn: too early for spirits. Besides. After the man on the boat from Shabeeka fell overboard from drinking too much banana wine, she had decided to lay off the rai rouj for a while.

  When the Shadowess said to get whatever she wanted, Pilar took her at her word. She ordered a cup of coffee and her favorite Glasddiran breakfast foods—thin potato cakes with honey, salted pork and cheese curds, cornbread dumplings, and sweet buttermilk pudding.

  The inn was packed. Every time she saw the mourning sleeves, her stomach tightened. She was having a hard time accepting Quin was dead. The frustrating part was that she thought she’d accepted it months ago. Why was it hitting her so hard now?

  Maybe it was less about him and more about her. She’d only come back to Glas Ddir because of Quin’s letter. She had sworn to stop him, save him, maybe both. Now she could do neither.

  Then what in four hells was she doing here? She had no great love for the river kingdom. She liked the buttermilk pudding—less so the pasty, backstabbing people and their diluted excuse for spirits. This was Mia’s home, not hers.

  But where else could she go? The volqanoes were actively burying her homeland under burning ash. Even if they weren’t, it had been a long time since Fojo Karação felt like home. Pilar was placeless. An island adrift.

  “I want to start,” Muri began, “by saying how much I appreciate all the time you have spent with Stone. It really does mean the world to him. He has been happier training with you than I’ve seen him in a long time.”