Given to the Earth

by Mindy McGinnis

  “In the end,” I repeat, thinking of a moonlit beach and a wave that rose as high as the Lures’ cliff on the Stone Shore. The Feneen were spared that sight, their attack on the front gates shielding them from the merciless sea. It was Pietra and Stillean who saw a watery death fast approaching, the strength of the depths come to crush them. And though the Feneen may be Pietran eventually, I’ve learned what no Lithos can know too well.

  In the end, we all go to the depths.

  CHAPTER 3

  Khosa

  Would you have the coral or the seafoam?” the girl asks, and Khosa closes her eyes against the color choices that mimic her greatest tormentor.

  “Your decision,” Khosa says, flipping her wrist in the dismissive way she’s learned from watching Dissa, her husband’s mother, a woman long acquainted with the vestiges of power.

  The girl flushes with pleasure and hangs the seafoam dress back into place. The fabric falls around Khosa’s ears, even the noises it makes mimicking the sounds of the tide. She grits her teeth as the girl fashions her hair, yet another style that calls to mind seashells cupping the sides of her face. Only two moons ago, the same people she now rules over would have rejoiced to see real shells against her skin, the soft, uncountable legs of sea-spines crawling upon her rotting flesh as her body tossed in the depths.

  Yet she is no longer the Given, the wave that her sacrifice was supposed to prevent being not a punishment but a deliverance, as it tore the Pietran army from the sand like weeds from a wet garden. They went in her place, and now Khosa is the Redeemed, her husband the king, and all of the young girls vie for the chance to dress her in sea colors and fashion her hair after salt creatures.

  “Enough,” Khosa says, her voice unintentionally harsh as the girl’s fingers brush against her temple. The girl pulls back as if bitten, and Khosa fights to find the appropriate smile to calm her, settling on one her own husband wears for her every night as he climbs into their bed.

  “I would finish alone,” Khosa says, finding the girl’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Do you not care for—”

  “It is lovely,” Khosa says, and manages to deliver the lie well. “I only wish to be alone.”

  “Yes, of course.” The girl nods to her as she leaves, unable to conceal the disappointment as her time with the Redeemed queen is cut short. Another may not have spotted the small twitch at the corner of her eye, the slightest flicker deep in the girl’s gaze, but Khosa has spent a lifetime learning to read others so that she may replicate their emotions later, her own face never naturally expressing the intricacies of emotion.

  Khosa practices now, staring at her reflection in the mirror as she perfectly executes the girl’s expression. Her Keepers taught her mimicry early, so that Stille would not know that the Given was not entirely whole. It was a charade meant to last only until she produced an heir, the next Given, and then all playacting could be abandoned, as the depths cared not how she reacted to death, only that she died.

  The muscles in her face convulse as Khosa stares at her hair, obscenely twisted into seashells. Every part of her body remains at the mercy of the Stilleans, though now they curse her to live instead of drown. The game she was meant to play for a short while now grows long, her death as a young sacrifice now usurped by wishes of a long life for their queen. An heir is still demanded, but this one to live and to marry, produce another and another after that. How long until the Feneen blood of her father comes to the surface? Until a wild thing emerges from her womb, tearing and spitting?

  She rests her face in her hands, a heavy sigh drawing her chest tight against the lace framing it, fashioned in the shape of whitecaps. She need spend little worry on the quality of her descendants, as she cannot bring herself to make even one. Vincent is patient with her, climbing into their bed every night expecting nothing more than a quiet “good night” and her back facing him. It is not his demands that worry her, but those of Stille, and his mother.

  “Stille needs a child,” Dissa had said, handing her a vial of alium water, rumored to quicken the womb.

  “Stille needs . . . Stille needs,” Khosa says to herself, eyeing the vial that rests on her vanity. She’d choked back a retort to Dissa that a child would be short in coming if Donil were sent to Khosa’s bed in place of her son, though the heir would surely bear speckled Indiri skin.

  Heat rises in her even at the thought of him, a new experience for Khosa, who knew only irritation at another’s touch until she brushed hands with Donil. She should have handed the alium water back to her husband’s mother, asking instead for a flask of wine if she truly wanted a grandchild.

  And that particular route had been attempted, at Khosa’s own request. Vincent brought a bottle for each of them to their bed one evening, shamefaced with anticipation. It had ended not with their bodies twisted together under blankets, but with both of them retching over the nightbowl, emptying their bellies of a batch of bad wine.

  Only Khosa was able to spot the smirk on the kitchen girl’s face the next morning, buried under supposed concern for the queen’s well-being. Donil had assured her that Daisy had no malevolence in her, that bad food finding its way to Khosa’s plate was merely chance and not the result of him spurning his former lover. But Khosa is not the only girl who can interpret a glance, and Donil is not well trained in hiding his emotions. Every look he gives her burns.

  Khosa raises her head to her reflection as the girl returns, knocking softly on the door before she enters.

  “I’m sorry, milady,” she says. “Your husband is waiting.”

  A smile twists as Khosa sets the Stillean crown on her head.

  “You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Vincent

  Vincent taps his fingers on the edge of the table, the lacquered base of a massive tree whose edges roughly mirror the island kingdom.

  My kingdom, he thinks to himself, not without bitterness. All his life he’d dreaded taking the throne and claiming the fate that had been determined for him the moment his older brother, Purcell, died. Peace and long Stillean lifelines had assured him a lengthy, but not unwelcome, wait. Now even that had been taken from him, and his ascension did not come with glory or shouts of joy from his people.

  His failure to protect his grandfather from the Feneen in the field of battle brought him one step closer to his fate; his mother’s rage and his own complicity in his father’s murder sealed it. And when he walks the streets of his city, it is his wife’s name the people call. Yet none of it rankles, for how can he demand respect when he knows himself to be a coward and a patricide?

  He knows well why the Stilleans call for Khosa, shower her with dried alium petals, and bring her strings of sea pearls torn from dying mussels. She is their savior, not he. Even in his own mind, he has caught himself thinking of her as the Redeemed, a lie repeated so often it feels real. In one evening the Curator had sent stories throughout the people, half-truths that spoke of Khosa dancing on the beach to call the wave down on the Pietran army. She had danced, to be sure, but the wave came of its own volition, and Khosa would have never stood on the sand if not for Dara.

  Dara. Vincent’s hand curls into a fist as he thinks of her, whether to drive it into her face or clutch tightly to her and beg her not to leave him, he does not know. She had gone without a word, unable to watch him wed another—especially the Given, the girl she had led to the sea but failed to drown. No, Dara the prideful Indiri would never have stood by as he married Khosa the Redeemed, the wife he loves and cannot touch.

  As if the thought of her were a summons, the door opens and Khosa enters, the spires of the crown preceding her as she tilts her head toward his mother. Dissa rises and dips into a small curtsy, an action that has never been required of her toward another woman. He can see resentment in the stiffness of her spine, the tightness of her mouth. And if he can see it, Khosa can too.

  Yet she has
never asked that his mother not pay her that respect.

  “You are waiting for me?” Khosa asks, coming to him with one gloved hand outstretched. He takes it, squeezing her for a moment, which she allows before pulling away.

  “Yes.” Vincent nods to the table before them, the burnt etchings that mark the stony shores of the Pietra, the dead plains of Dunkai where the Indiri fell, and the sprawling Stillean lands. “The sea took many Pietra, but others will come. We must decide what action to take.”

  “Action?” Khosa’s brow furrows as she looks at the table before her, her fingertips brushing the smooth surface. “And what do I know of battle, husband?”

  “Of battle, not much,” a new voice says. “But of the sea, you can speak leagues.”

  “Sallin.” Dissa greets the Stillean military commander, who makes a quick bow to Vincent and Khosa.

  “The sea,” Vincent hears his wife mutter under her breath, those small words filled with more venom than an igthorn bush.

  “And what is the sea, to a battle commander?” Vincent asks, raising his voice to cover his wife’s tone.

  “Our greatest enemy,” Sallin says as he circles the table. “One that rises still and surrounds us on all sides—something I need not explain puts us at a distinct disadvantage.”

  “No, you need not explain,” Vincent says. “Although I fail to see how we would fight an enemy that would rust our blades and flood our lungs.”

  “Then who do you propose we fight, young king? The Pietra?”

  “Who else?” Vincent asks. “Who other than those that came to slaughter us?”

  “And slaughter us they would have,” Sallin says, running his finger along the edge of the table to the point on the beach where the wave had swept the Pietran army away like so many ants. “If not for the Redeemed—”

  “Do you think so poorly of your own men that you lay the salvation of our kingdom entirely at my wife’s feet?” Vincent interrupts.

  Sallin pauses, weighing his words. “It is not courage they lack, but training. If Stillean swords had crossed with Pietran, I have no doubt the sand would have been as wet as if the wave had come, but with our blood spilled upon it.”

  “But you mean no disrespect, of course,” Dissa says, laying a hand on her son’s shoulder.

  “Disrespect means little to a man bleeding out,” Sallin says.

  “And what battle would you have us fight against the sea?” Vincent challenges him. “With what weapons shall we stab it, and how are wounds made upon the tide?”

  Sallin smiles and turns to Khosa.

  “How better to fight the sea than with ships?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Donil

  Than with ships, he says . . .” I watch Vincent take another pull from his wine bottle, one that I made sure didn’t pass through Daisy’s hands, just in case.

  “Ships?” I can’t help the stirring in my belly at the very thought, as if I were at sea already, the sturdiness of dry land gone from beneath my feet. “Ships to take us where?”

  “There is nowhere else,” Vincent and I say at the same time, then drunkenly raise our bottles to each other.

  “Truth.” I nod. “Stillean, Pietra, Indiri, even Feneen. That is one thing we agree on.”

  “Which is why we all fight so boldly for what land there is to be had,” Vincent says, his voice trailing off as his gaze becomes unfocused.

  I don’t tell him that the men of Stille had not fought so boldly when the Pietra took the beach. Some did, to be sure, but most did exactly as Dara and I had feared. Dropped their weapons or, worse, ran home with them in hand to protect their own families, instead of fighting where they stood. Discipline could not be taught within a few moonchanges, and Stille had enjoyed peace far longer than they had feared war.

  “So this commander . . .” I prompt Vincent.

  “Sallin,” he provides, draining the last of his bottle and nearly missing his mouth in the process.

  “Sallin proposes what? That you sail in hopes of finding something out there? Depths, Vincent, you wouldn’t even know which way to sail.”

  “Or how to,” my friend adds. “No, it’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard. And yet . . .”

  I raise an eyebrow, watching as Vincent rolls his empty bottle against the table, a hollow sound filling the silence while he searches for words. I try not to follow the curve of his fingers, or think of him going to his bed after this, to his wife. To Khosa.

  I clear my throat. “And yet?”

  His eyes refocus on mine, his thoughts back in the present, as I will mine to cling to this moment with my friend, and not how he passes nights with his wife.

  “And yet is it so mad?” he finishes. “We know the seas rise. Even should we win every handsbreadth of land on this entire island, what do we gain? A generation to catch our breaths? And for what? So that our grandchildren fight, facing each other down with the tide touching both their heels?”

  I shiver at the thought, imagining our whole world shrunk to a sliver of land where the blue edge of the sea can be seen from all sides.

  “I don’t know, Vin,” I admit. “But there is nowhere else.”

  “Do you know this?” he asks, voice low. “Or do you only believe it?”

  “I . . .”

  “It’s a strong demarcation, is it not?” Vincent’s hands return to the bottle, this time to bring it to his wine-stained lips and blow a hollow note over its rim. “There were things I thought I knew, before . . . and now I’ve come to find I only believed them.”

  “Knowing is a strong thing,” I tell him. “You’re aware of what the Indiri call ourselves.”

  He nods, blows another note on his empty bottle. “Born knowing,” he says. “Able to walk and talk at birth because your mother knew how.”

  “And fight,” I add, thinking of Dara, my fierce twin.

  “And love and hate, and all the other things we manage to do in our lifetimes.”

  “As well as those before us,” I remind him. “We know everything our ancestors knew, back to the dirt in our mouths and tree roots in our eyes.”

  “But have you actually seen that?” Vin asks, the mouth of the bottle now pointing at me. “That’s what I’m wondering. Have you followed your Indiri memories back to the beginning, to the rain that woke your people . . . or do you only believe it?”

  I look past the mouth of the bottle, down the thin neck and the wider base to the eyes of my friend, a brother in so many ways, the husband of the girl I love, and now the king of Stille.

  “Why do you ask these things over wine? We should be playing ridking, or watching Rook pissing on the helmets of the gate guards from the parapets.”

  Vincent drops the bottle to the table, where it spins aimlessly. “I ask because I’ve seen how the histories are written, brother,” he says. “And I know that the hand that holds the quill sometimes has its own aims.”

  I glance around the kitchen to ensure our privacy, then drop my voice so low Vincent has to lean in to hear me.

  “I know as well as you that Khosa is no more the Redeemed than you are a rankflower,” I tell him. “That wave would have killed her, you, me, Dara, anyone standing on that beach. It was only chance that the Pietran army stood on the sands when it came, and Khosa no more called that wave than a baby lamb calls for a Tangata cat. But saying so can lead only to harm, and if the histories lie, then I say let them. They’ll all float in the water soon enough.”

  “Unless we go elsewhere,” Vincent says, holding up one hand to stop me from repeating that there is nowhere else. “The histories insist we stand on the only earth, but they also say I stood as tall as five sea-spines on my last Arrival Day.”

  “Are the bottom three crushed?” I ask, and he kicks my foot under the table.

  “You take my meaning, whether you want to hear it or not,” Vincent
says. “The histories tell us many things, and I no longer know which are true and which I believe because that is what I have been told.”

  “And how do you weed out one from the other?”

  My friend shakes his head, his fingers going to the indentations that the Stillean crown has formed at his temples. “I do not know, brother,” he says. “I do not know.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Khosa

  The weight of her husband’s body hitting the other side of the bed startles Khosa awake, and sends her hands gripping the covers and pulling them to her chin.

  “Hush, it’s only me,” Vincent says, his breath thick with wine, no doubt the reason why he sprawled so casually on their shared bed. Sometimes in his sleep he moves as if he were still alone, and more than once he’s called out Milda’s name. Though the baker’s daughter has long since been sent from his side and she herself is unwilling to fill the absent girl’s duties, it rankles. In sleep, her husband’s body acts as if she were not there, and his dreams are filled with another.

  “Vincent?” She reaches for him carefully, every evening attempting to see how much contact she can bear. Tonight she manages to stroke his face, a quick swipe of the jawline before the sound of her skin brushing his sends clam chowder, burning with bile, back into her mouth.

  He takes her fingers in his and presses them against her own pillow, giving her palm a chaste squeeze.

  “I’m sorry I woke you,” he says. “I had a drink too many with Donil.”

  “Or a bottle too many,” she chides, aware of how slow his voice is, his movements clumsy.

  “It’s rather difficult being married to a woman so adept at reading others,” he says, but his laugh is bitter rather than amused. She coils into herself further, managing a quiet “good night” and a halfhearted stroke of his hair before closing her eyes.