The Bone Shard Daughter

by Andrea Stewart

  “Six nuts?”

  One more nut was all it took to tip the scales in my favor. Both constructs reached for the bar. The wood squeaked as they pushed it out of place, the shutters pushing inward briefly.

  And then the bar was free and I opened the shutters. The cool, damp air had never felt so good against my face. My little spy construct leapt inside. I counted out six nuts for the other construct and watched as it stuffed them into its cheeks. There was power beyond that carved out by commands. Shiyen might have created me, but he didn’t know me.

  I gathered my things, half-formed plans running through my head. I couldn’t take my father on alone. Even unlocking his doors I’d needed help. He had too many constructs – watching, guarding the walls, awaiting his orders. My father might not have truly known me, but I knew him. He’d had no doubt he could keep me in my room. He wouldn’t have moved right away to fix Mauga and Uphilia; they still worked after all, and he had Ilith to repair. And me. His broken wife. If I was right about him, I still had Mauga and Uphilia. I had my little spy. I tucked the engraving tool into my sash pocket. They wouldn’t be enough. But there was someone else who might help me.

  I started to second-guess my plan when I was clinging to the roof tiles, a light drizzle beading on my eyelashes. Ahead of me, the spy construct sprang to the peak of the roof as though it were merely out for an afternoon stroll. I’d sent Hao through the halls of the palace, but there were simply too many servants and constructs this time of day to make my journey safely. Not that this was any safer.

  When at last I slid off the roof and onto a balcony, my arms were ready to give way. This was the right room. I just had to hope he was here.

  I rapped on the door lightly. It swung open.

  Bayan’s handsome face greeted me. Although, by his sour expression, “greeted” was a stretch of the word. “What are you doing here? Are you here to rifle through my things again?” He wrinkled his nose and glanced up. “Did you climb here?”

  “No, idiot, I flew.” I pushed past him into his room. Did I have to rebuild that fragile foundation we’d begun to form together?

  He stared at me for a moment, but then closed the door.

  “What do you remember?” I asked him.

  “More than you.”

  I clenched my fists in frustration. “No. You don’t get to do that. Not right now. I just spent the whole morning convincing constructs to act against their nature, and trying to figure out what it is the Emperor has done to me.”

  “You… what?”

  “Do you remember the library? The Emperor striking you in the dining hall? The cloud juniper?”

  His face, which had been a mask of contempt, crumpled. “Yes.”

  I closed my eyes, relief making me weak. I sank onto a nearby chair. “And after that?” The agony on his face told me all I needed to know. “You can tell me,” I said, my voice low and soft. “We’re not enemies, I promise.”

  He gave me a hopeless look. “There’s a gap. I don’t know what happened that night. I thought – maybe the sickness is coming back. Maybe I never really beat it.”

  “It’s not the sickness. It never was.” I couldn’t think of how else to explain it to him, so I rose to my feet. I put a hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat below my palm, rapid and strong. “Try to relax. I’m not going to hurt you.” Slowly, I pushed my fingers inside.

  He went still, but by the way his panicked eyes held mine, I knew he could push past the stillness if he really tried. “How are you doing this?” He choked out the words.

  I stepped away, hands held up, palms toward him. “Because we weren’t born, Bayan. We were made. He made us. The night you don’t remember? I found you in my room.” The skin peeling away from his eyes, the sagging, lumpy flesh. “You were falling apart. He’d tried to change something in you, but he’d done it wrong.”

  “What’s wrong with you? That’s madness. A person can’t fall apart.” Despite his words, his face was still pale.

  “A construct can.”

  He scoffed. “I’m not a construct.” But he didn’t sound sure when he said it. He waited for me to say something else. When I didn’t, he waved a dismissive hand at me. “And what? You’re a construct too?”

  I met his gaze and held it. “He said he grew me. I don’t know what that means.”

  He peered into my face. “You’re serious.”

  “Why would I lie about something like that? You told me he was growing people, that night you came to my room for help. You think I want to be something he’s made? The Emperor wants me to replace his dead wife. He made me for that purpose. If I wanted to lie, I’d come up with a better lie, one I’d actually want to be true. Like my father named me his one true heir only a moment ago. I’ve come climbing over the rooftops to tell you.” Perhaps it was a trifle sharper than I’d intended, but there simply wasn’t time.

  “If you’re so clever, why’d he make me?”

  I threw up my hands. “That’s your business, not mine. Don’t you have any clues? Has he said anything to you?”

  Bayan stared at me, and I could see the panic lurking in his widened eyes, the tremor at the corner of his lips. “Only that I could be the heir if I tried hard enough. That I might one day replace him.”

  More pieces clicked together in my mind. “No,” I said. “That’s terrible.” But I’d thought him and Bayan so alike. And now I could see the similarities in their faces – the high cheekbones, full lips, large, dark eyes. Oh, he had meant what he’d said. A replacement.

  He bristled. “My ruling as Emperor would be terrible? For you, perhaps.”

  He didn’t remember. “Bayan, he has a machine. It puts memories into your head. It must have worked better for you than for me. But he didn’t give you his own memories, not yet. He gave you someone else’s. He doesn’t want you to rule as Emperor. He wants to rule as Emperor, for ever, in the body he’s made for this purpose.”

  Bayan whirled away from me, pacing the length of his room and then back. “This is a trick meant to distract me from my goals.”

  I stuffed down my own panic. I had to convince him. “If I was trying to trick you, don’t you think I would tell you something a little more believable? Think about the gaps in your memories. You know I’m telling the truth.”

  He collapsed onto his bed, his shoulders slumped, his fingers pressed to his temples.

  Shiyen would have pressed harder, would have demanded that Bayan face the truth. But I wasn’t the Emperor. “I laid in bed, useless, after I figured it out,” I said softly. “I know I’m asking a lot of you, more than I asked of myself.”

  I watched him breathe, the rest of him unmoving, hoping he wouldn’t turn against me. And then he glanced at me from beneath the curtain of his hair, giving me a weak smile. “But how high a standard is that really?” To his credit, he straightened – absorbing the information and standing against it. “What do we do to stop him?”

  I wanted to weep with relief. I wouldn’t do this alone. “I’ve taken two of his constructs. I think we can take the last two if we work together.”

  My spy construct sat on the bed next to me, alert, awaiting my instructions. I’d not told it to wait there. A made thing could grow and change beyond its original purposes.

  I would show the Emperor: I’d grown beyond mine.

  41

  Jovis

  Nephilanu Island

  I knelt and packed my things in the room the rebels had assigned to me, heedless of any questioning looks. I had to get out of here. I had to get to Maila. Emahla might be there even now, looking out over the horizon, waiting for me to come for her. What would I tell her? That I’d given up for a time? That I’d fallen in with the Ioph Carn? There was nothing I could do to make it up for her except to rescue her.

  Mephi pushed his head beneath my hand. “Calm, Jovis. I am here.”

  Without even thinking, I stroked his head, moving my fingers to scratch behind his ears. His words were clearer than they’d b
een before he’d fallen ill. My fingers stilled. The shiny nubs on his skull had been replaced with two budding horns. Only now did I notice that Mephi had not come out of his illness unchanged. He was taller, his face and legs longer. His tail had become bushier, the webbing between his digits more distinct.

  I swiveled on the balls of my feet. “What happened to you? What made you sick?”

  He shook his head. “Not sick. Just changing. It makes you tired. Very tired.” His head drooped. “Couldn’t help you. Sorry.”

  Changing. I stroked Mephi’s cheek. “Don’t be sorry. You’ve helped me more than enough.” My fingers shook. I snatched back my hand.

  “Jovis all right?”

  Of course I wasn’t all right. I couldn’t ever be all right. I’d spent too long not getting to Emahla, running about, acting the part of the hero. I wasn’t a hero.

  She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. She was waiting for me.

  “No,” I said. My eyes itched; heat gathered behind them. “I’m not all right. We need to leave.”

  Mephi tried to help, picking up clothes in his teeth and handing them to me – a little moist and worse for the time spent in his mouth. But I couldn’t complain. I was shaking now. There was a tremor building within me, and it wasn’t Mephi’s magic. I could hear Ranami’s voice, over and over: “She’s dead.”

  No. I would know it if she were.

  At last I had all my things in a bag. My hair curled in the moist air. I was a half-blooded smuggler, and I finally had the information I needed to rescue the woman I loved.

  Mephi leaned against my leg, steadying me. “We could help here,” he said.

  I thought of Gio, who wanted to take the islands for his own, whose plans I did not know. I thought of Ranami and Phalue, who didn’t know they’d already been betrayed, of the children being marched to trepanning rituals, of the gutter orphans who’d wanted to rob me. It was true: we could help here.

  It didn’t mean we had to. “No. Emahla. She is my priority.”

  Mephi made a small, confused noise. He didn’t know her.

  “You’d like her,” I told him. “But she’s in danger. She’s been gone for seven years and now I know where she might have been taken.”

  “We go there?” He wound around me.

  I didn’t know. Maila was treacherous, and I wasn’t sure I could slip past its reefs without crashing. “Yes.” I put my hand on the floor, ready to push myself to my feet. Even this seemed an effort.

  Mephi put his paw on my knee. “She is one. These people are many.”

  Everything terrible I’d been feeling over the past three days welled within me, overflowing. “I don’t care about these people! They don’t care for me except for what I can do. They don’t know me. Emahla knows me. She loves me, and I’ve let her down for too long.”

  The creature didn’t even look away or flinch. “I know you.”

  “Do you?” I jerked away from his touch and rose to my feet. But, Endless Sea help me, I stopped to check if he was following. He was, his head so low that my heart shattered a little to see it. But I couldn’t stop now; if I did, I might not ever start up again.

  The few rebels who remained in the caves watched me go, and said nothing.

  My boat was where I’d left it, hidden behind some rocks on the shoreline. Mephi slipped into the water, graceful as a sea lion. I waded into the water as he scrambled aboard. The ocean had cooled with the migration of the islands north-west, and the chill of it seeped into my shoes. I stripped off my wet clothes once I was aboard, put on dry ones and hauled up the anchor.

  Mephi lay on deck near the bow of the ship, his head between his paws. He watched as I readied the boat to leave, as I tested the wind. Most times, when I’d rebuked him, he’d either ignored me or taken it with the irrepressible good humor of a puppy. This time, he lay apart from me, as though his heavy heart had anchored him to the bow.

  I couldn’t keep thinking about everyone else.

  The wind was good. It would take a long time to reach Maila, but the sooner we left, the sooner we’d arrive. I’d have to figure out the reef on the way. “No more stopping,” I muttered into the night. The moon was full, and enough to see by. “No more sad stories about children who need to be saved, or regimes that need toppling. We go straight for Maila.”

  Mephi only huffed out a sigh and looked toward the horizon.

  I remembered the dreams we’d told each other. I would be an Imperial navigator, and she would sell pearls. Emahla had stopped collecting clams at the beach and had started diving for pearls when she’d turned fifteen. She could hold her breath for far longer than I could, and never seemed afraid of the depths beyond the shoreline. “Sometimes,” she’d told me as we’d lain on the beach together, “I think I’ve reached the part of the island where it stops sloping out and starts falling straight into the darkness. At some point, even after that, they must slope inward. The islands float in the Endless Sea. I wonder if any diver has seen the bottom of an island?”

  “You’d be the first,” I’d said, pulling her into my arms and kissing her brow.

  She’d laughed and pushed me away. I still remembered the jasmine scent of her, the touch of her thick black hair against my neck. “I’d drown.”

  “There is no one as clever as you, as smart, as strong.” I’d buried my fingers into her hair.

  “You are such a liar.” But she’d smiled as she’d kissed me.

  Darkness had begun to cloak the sky. I couldn’t see the stars. I hadn’t been lying to her. She was smart, and clever, and strong. She’d never needed me. She’d chosen me.

  If there’d been a way to escape her fate, she would have found it. She hadn’t. It had been seven years. No one else who had disappeared had ever returned.

  I told a great many lies to others, and I told a great many to myself. This perhaps was the greatest lie of all. Emahla is alive. She is waiting for you. She needs you to rescue her. It was the only thing that kept me getting up in the morning, that kept me from giving up and giving myself over to the Endless Sea or the Ioph Carn.

  My legs folded beneath me, my knees sinking to the deck. “Mephi,” I whispered.

  He was there, beside me before the tears even began. I clutched at his fur so tightly I was sure I must have hurt him. But he didn’t move, steady as a cloud juniper.

  She was dead.

  All these years spent searching and wanting. It didn’t matter if I found her; I had no power to bring the dead back to life. All my life stretched ahead of me – without her. I forced myself to face it, to push the lie aside. “I don’t know who I am,” I said, my fingers digging into Mephi’s undercoat. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “When I was in the water,” Mephi said, “I didn’t know where to go. I had to find someone to help me. I swam to you because I knew you would help me. I know who you are.” He nuzzled my shoulder. “You are the person who helps.”

  Was I? I’d been finding reasons to rescue these children without ever having to commit myself to the cause. Someone had saved me, but no one had saved Onyu. No one had saved Emahla. I felt their absences every day I kept living. Sometimes one was enough.

  Sometimes it wasn’t.

  I could help all the children who were so much like my dead brother. I could help the shard-sick and the people who loved them. I could help the people stolen away by the Empire’s constructs. I had the power to save more than just one here, one there. If I simply tried, I could do more than chase whispers of Emahla; I could go to the heart of the Empire and take a stand against it. I could believe in this, and it wouldn’t be a lie. I wiped the tears from my cheeks, though the ache in my chest remained. Some wounds would never heal. “It sounds like a lonely life, Mephi.” No one was telling the truth to anyone else. Even the Shardless Few was fractured.

  “No.” Mephi rested his chin on my shoulder. “Not lonely. I am here with you.”

  I reached up to rub his cheeks. The shore was still close; it wouldn’t take long to get
back. Somewhere in the darkness lay the Shardless hideout, filled with people who yearned to break free. I couldn’t save all of them. I couldn’t. But I could save more than my fair share. I pushed myself to my feet. “Then it’s settled. Let’s go topple an Empire.”

  42

  Lin

  Imperial Island

  We went first to gather Uphilia from her lair. Bayan crawled up the roof tiles after me. “You did this once already?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a little bit mad, you know that? I wonder –” He huffed out a breath and reached for the next handhold. “– if your mother was like this.”

  I wished she’d been my mother, but she was not. She’d seemed like a normal enough young woman in her journal, but she’d aged before she’d married my father. Something must have changed between that time and when they’d wed. Bayan didn’t say anything after that, only put his head down and concentrated on the climb.

  The broken ironwork piece was still there on the eaves. When I peeked over the edge of the roof, I could see Uphilia curled in her alcove, her tail over her nose and her wings tucked to her sides.

  “Uphilia,” I whispered to her, “you must come with me.” I wasn’t sure why I whispered, except that I was unsure of my own work. If I hadn’t altered her commands correctly, she’d awaken and send up an alarm. Or Father – the Emperor – might have already altered her commands back. Her ears twitched, but that was all. The wind had swept my voice away.

  This wasn’t the time to let fear rule me. I tried again, louder, more sure. “Uphilia, awaken and come with me.”

  She rose, stretched her wings and sprang from her alcove. With a quick turn of her wings, she was on the rooftop, amber eyes looking into mine. She did not send up an alarm.

  Behind me, the spy construct squeaked in surprise.

  “No,” I said, putting a hand behind me. “We’re on the same side now.”

  “Even with Uphilia and Mauga, can we take on Tirang?” Bayan asked. “Tirang is strong and has war constructs at his disposal.”