“Magic,” I breathed.
“No, just a trick, like festival clowns do,” said Mala. “My father showed me how to do it. He says it’s useful for a cook to be able to make things disappear, but I’m sure that’s not where he learned it.”
“Can you show me?” I asked, entranced.
“Of course,” Mala said. And she spent the rest of our talisman time that afternoon patiently coaching me until I could make small objects disappear almost as effortlessly as she. I never did learn to riffle the cards as smoothly as she did, though.
* * * *
“What’s your biggest secret?” Mala asked. We were backstage in the theater hiding from Gertin, who had decided to add an extra session of recitations from The Book of Gods to what was supposed to be our afternoon off. I was good at reciting and a quick study—my father made sure of that—but who wants to spend a precious free afternoon reciting? Luckily one of the palace runners was in earshot when Gertin mentioned his plans to the dancemaster. The runner’s warning spread quickly to the kids in the palace that we needed to disappear before Gertin could find us.
“You first,” I said.
“Okay,” Mala answered. She looked both ways as if to be sure no one was watching. “My mother lived with someone else before she married my father. She and the man she lived with were both up for jobs at the palace and you need to be married to work as a servant in the jobs they wanted, so they asked to be allowed to marry each other. But then she was accepted for the palace and he wasn’t, so the Empress had her marry someone else and forget the guy she’d been living with. So she doesn’t even remember that she loved someone else before she knew my dad.”
“Wow,” I said. “The Empress did that herself? Why would she care about who your mother married. Isn’t she too busy?”
Mala giggled nervously. “That’s what I was told. I don’t know if it was really the Empress or someone acting in her name. But it really happened.”
It was tough to take in. “How did you find out? I thought they took all the memories away when that happens.”
“They’re supposed to,” Mala said, “but sometimes they mess up, especially in the countryside where records aren’t checked as closely. I was visiting my grandmother when I met this old guy who kept telling me I looked just like my mother. It was creepy. He told me the whole story but made me promise never to tell my mother. He smelled bad, like he drank a lot.”
“That must have been strange,” I said.
“It was.” Mala’s eyes glittered. I wanted to ask her more questions, but she shook her head. “Now you tell me yours.”
I thought for a moment. She knew most of my secrets already except the ones my father didn’t want me to talk about.
“Well, there is one,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“I had another name when I was little. But then when my mother got very sick, my father sacrificed my name to a god, with the promise of even more if she recovered.”
“Which god?” Mala asked.
“I don’t know. My father never told me. But after that, I couldn’t remember the old name and neither could anyone else. When my mother died anyway, my father told me to use her name, Ketya, to remember her by. And that’s the one I’ve had ever since. But it’s not really mine. I don’t have a real name anymore.”
“Like the Empress and her chancellor? They don’t have names either.”
For a moment I felt bitter. “I guess a little like that. But at least they got something in return for giving up their names. My name wasn’t good enough to bring my mother back.”
Mala opened her mouth to ask another question, but then we heard Gertin coming, and we had to burrow back into the costumes and stay absolutely quiet until he gave up looking for us.
As it turned out, that afternoon was the last time I ever saw Mala.
Chapter 5
Ketya
The Drowned City: Nine years before the Loss
Something felt off in the kitchens. The bowls were arranged differently on the shelves. The big pile of tamiya roots on the table didn’t have the normal shape. I didn’t recognize the people sitting at the table, cutting the tamiya roots.
I didn’t recognize the people sitting at the table.
“Where’s Mala?” I asked. Was something wrong? Was she sick? She always told me when we couldn’t meet in the kitchens at the usual time for some reason.
The two men at the table didn’t look up. They continued cutting and sorting the roots as if completely intent on the work. Even I didn’t have to concentrate like that on tamiya roots, and I’d never spent time in a kitchen before I met Mala.
“Is everyhing okay? Is Mala okay?”
Neither of them would meet my gaze. I stood waiting while they stared uncomfortably at the tamiya. By now they had abandoned all pretense of working.
One of the men finally looked up, glancing around as if wary of predators in the kitchen.
“You should leave,” he said, his accent thick from a lifetime in the countryside.
* * * *
I don’t know how my father found out about the secret I’d told Mala. I don’t know how I knew that my father was the reason she and her family were gone. I just knew.
I ran through the palace, dodging messengers and servants. People called out to me but I ignored them. By the time I got to the top of the stairs that led to my father’s tower chambers I felt lightheaded and out of breath but I kept on going, pushed right through his door and into the central room of his chambers.
My father looked up from his table. I hadn’t thought about what I would say if there were people with him, but he was alone, studying maps.
“How did you find out?” I said. I didn’t ask why. In my heart I knew why Mala was gone. I had told her the secret. But I had thought it was safe, had thought that I could tell someone and not have to keep it so completely inside.
He gave me an indulgent smile. “You really think an eleven-year-old girl can keep a secret? Of course I found out.” I kept a secret, I wanted to say, I kept the secret for all these years, except even as I thought of the retort, it hit me that it wasn’t true anymore.
He must have read the words on my face, even though I hadn’t said them. “You are growing up, daughter. It is time you understood that words have consequences. Sometimes when you reveal something you shouldn’t, the price isn’t paid by you, but by the people you care about.”
“What...what did you do with her?” It suddenly crossed my mind that he might have had her killed. I didn’t know if I could live with the guilt of knowing that something I said had gotten my only friend killed, along with her parents who had been so nice to me.
“Realize that what I did is purely my decision, caused by your indiscretion. And it would have been perfectly fitting for you to pay a harsh price for what you did. But because I am not ungenerous, I did no such thing. And I will not have you sneaking around the palace asking about them, either. So I will assuage your curiosity.”
“What did you do?” I asked again, my voice barely a whisper.
“I sent them away to the colonies. To Elessethe. They will be running a dining room in the government plaza in Elessethe City, serving Ananyan food to soldiers and clerks who miss the taste of home. I might have punished them, but I gave them a better opportunity instead. They treated you well, and the fault of what happened did not lie with them. As I said, I am not ungenerous.”
My father looked back down at the map, supposing he had said all that he needed to. I tried to parse his words. I felt numb; the impact hadn’t hit me yet. Then it started to:
“Elessethe City? That’s a month away, by cable-carriage and ship. And you can’t even go there without special permission. I’ll never see them again.”
He looked up again and smiled. “That is correct,” he said agreeably.
“Why couldn’t they have stayed here? You even said it wasn’t their fault.”
“Fault does not matter. They had knowledge that
could cause damage—to me, to the Empire. They could not remain here where that knowledge would spread. Cooks talk, and that talk would have spread through the palace. In the wrong ears, that talk might have been the end of everything.”
That puzzled me. I didn’t see how the story of my name and my mother’s death was so important. I was just a kid, and my mother was gone. What did that have to do with the empire? But even at my most upset I knew better than to ask. So I tried to ask a safer question to see if I could get him to explain.
“Is there anyone I can ever tell secrets to? She was my best friend, I thought it would be safe to tell her anything.”
I thought he would answer me with some sort of platitude, but he actually paused to consider his words carefully.
“For now, while you are young,” he said, “you must never tell secrets to anyone. Someday you may have a soulmate whom you can tell anything to, but until then you must tell no one your secrets.”
“Not even you, father?” I expected an of course you must tell me everything, but he shook his head.
“Not even me.”
I almost didn’t have the courage to ask the next question, but something made me do it. “Was mother your soulmate?”
Surprisingly, my father didn’t seem bothered. He got a faraway look in his eyes.
“She was,” he answered. “You only have one soulmate. I will never have another.”
“So who do you tell secrets to?”
“No one. And neither should you.”
Aren’t you lonely, I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead, I tried to make a final plea for my friend and her family.
“But maybe Mala was my soulmate!” I burst out. I didn’t really know what he meant by soulmate at the time.
And his answer didn’t enlighten me:
“She was a cook’s daughter. Cooks’ daughters can’t be soulmates.”
I sobbed. “I don’t know if I can keep secrets the way that you do. I already left all my friends behind when we moved here and now I’ve lost my best friend, too. I lose everything.” Tears ran down my face uncontrollably, but he didn’t seem to notice. He still had that faraway look.
“No, you haven’t lost everything,” he said, his tone almost musing. “Someday you will lose everything, and you will realize that all you will have left is me.”
My sobs stopped abruptly and I felt a shiver on my arms. I knew he was right, somehow.
“But what will you have left?” I asked my father. At age eleven, I still didn’t know what a hopelessly naive question that was. I wanted him to say that he would have me, and a part of me thought that he would.
But he just looked at me sadly.
“I will have duty, and the memory of your mother.” He said the words with no hesitation, as if he had thought about them a lot. And with that he turned back to the maps, and never said another word on the subject.
At the time I never questioned what he told me, that he had sent them to Elessethe. And I never did see them again. Sometimes later, after I’d grown up a lot, I would wonder if he really had gone to so much trouble for a family of cooks, or if he had just had them killed. I never knew the answer, and any records which might have revealed that particular secret perished in the disaster that still lay eight years in my future.
* * * *
My father sending Mala away didn’t keep me out of the kitchens. We all still went there. As kids we were were perpetually starving, at least in our minds, and our adventures around the theater and other little-used parts of the palace invariably took us through the kitchens at some point to see what food we could scrounge up. Even after Mala’s family was sent to another place, some of the cooks had kids my age, and a few times we would play together. It never lasted, though. The next time I would go looking for one of the cooks’ daughters to join in an adventure she would be nowhere to be found, or if I could find her she would avoid eye contact.
Their parents were forbidding them from playing with me: I realized that much at the time. What I didn’t realize was that they were doing it out of fear of my father. As far as I know he never said a word to them—for all his enjoyment of cooking, my father wanted very little to do with palace cooks and servants—but any servant family whose children seemed too friendly with me was soon sent elsewhere, to a less desirable location than the palace. He started with Mala and her family. The others got the idea quickly.
That was his way of teaching me to make what he thought were suitable friends, I think. The lesson never really took. My next close friend turned out to be suitable, but that was just an accident. All I learned from my father’s lesson was that friendship was fleeting, and that someone who was friendly one day was likely to be gone the next.
Ketya
The Drowned City: Seven years before the Loss
I sat at my usual table in the library studying the same passage in two different translations of The Book of Gods when I heard a girl’s voice say, “Hello there.”
A girl about my age, maybe a little older, stood in front of the table looking at me. She wore her blonde hair in long ringlets, a style I had never seen before.
I glanced around to see that my father wasn’t watching, then said, “Hello, I’m Ketya.”
“I’m Tenia,” said the blonde girl. “Why did you look around that way before you answered me?”
She seemed very self-assured for a girl I had never seen at the palace before. I wondered who she was. I couldn’t imagine anyone else asking so direct a question. Which may be why I answered it honestly.
“Sometimes my father doesn’t like it when I make friends with other girls in the palace. If he sees me talking with them he has them sent away.”
My words seemed to amuse Tenia. “Oh. Well, I don’t think he will mind you talking with me. And I just got here, so I don’t think he will send me away.” She extended a hand. “You must be the chancellor’s daughter. I’m pleased to meet you, Ketya.”
I took her hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who....”
That seemed to charm her. “My mother is the Empress, silly. One day I’ll give up my name and be Empress too, so best be nice to me now.” She said the words with a smile but a little tiredly, as if she’d said the same thing too many times.
My hand flew to my mouth and I felt my face coloring. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know....”
“You didn’t even know that Empress had a daughter? I was away at school but now I’m home on holiday. It seems like the sort of thing your father should have told you, though.”
“He’s very busy. Maybe he just forgot.”
“I’m sure he did. Daughters aren’t very important at the palace. Only when they make the wrong friends.” This time her smile looked more genuine. She pulled up a chair and sat opposite me. “Now show me what you were reading in The Book of Gods. I’m good with most things but I can’t make any sense of poetry, so maybe you can help me. Maybe you should be my chancellor just like your father is for my mother.”
* * * *
“Number 178, please,” my father said. He sat at the small table in the alcove of his chamber. The table was set for two, and the dishes of food in its center steamed delectably.
My stomach growled. Don’t look at the food! Just concentrate on the verse, I thought. I know that one. It’s one of the easy ones, he asks that a lot.
I still hesitated a moment, making sure I had the words right in my head.
“Number 178?” he asked again. “I would hate to have half of this delightful lunch go uneaten.”
“‘Concerning Speaking with Gods,’” I started, then recited:
Wear clothing appropriate to the occasion; if you wear
false clothing or false names the god may refuse
to speak with you or may speak falsely without penalty.
But if you dress aright the god must speak truly,
and promises may not be unmade without penalty.
“Not bad,” said my father. “Except for the hesitation. Of course th
at is one of the short ones. Perhaps something a little harder, before we share this meal. How about number 249?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew that one. Having Tenia help me drill with the cards that held the Truce really helped: She would sit across from me on the big bed in my chambers and hold a card in front of her while I recited, stopping me at every missed word. It was good chancellor training, she told me, and I was going to be her chancellor someday.
“Hesitation again?” my father prompted. “I would hate to have to send you back downstairs to your room to study some more instead of enjoying this meal together.”
“No,” I said. “Just gathering the words. And now I have them: `Concerning Worship’”
The gods must be spoken of with respect
nor may their contributions be minimized
save when they failed to fight beside their brethren.
But no one may be compelled to worship a god
or encouraged by promises true or false.
If one chooses to worship a god that person
shall expect no favor in return:
Worship confers no obligation
and worship unasked for confers no glory.
The gods’ names shall be remembered
and their deeds spoken of at festivals
but in no other ways shall their words be marked
save those required in this treaty.
The magic that the gods confer
is provided only to secure an end to fighting
and to pay for the magic that people now forswear.
Worship and the desire for worship has brought
both sides to ruination;
it shall be discouraged from this day forward.
I didn’t really understand that one. Why would anyone want to worship a god? And why were there obligations—was someone paying to be worshiped? Both sides seemed pretty concerned about it in the language of the verse, so they must have been worried about something.
Sometimes I could ask my father to explain one of them, but usually he would send me to another book, or get angry that I hadn’t picked up what he saw as the clear meaning of the verse. I certainly wouldn’t risk ruining his good mood.
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