By now that man should know what the sea is capable of.
11
NATASHA
When we have to cut an audition short for the third time because the girl can’t do a cross-back straddle, I glower at Adelaida. “Have these girls ever seen silks before?”
“I need more whiskey.”
Adelaida and I sit on the floor with our backs against the mirror. We started the day standing. We lost that kind of willpower after audition twelve.
“I hear some of the studios are losing girls,” I say. “No one wants to send their daughters to flying practice when they’re worried about drowning, I guess.”
“Well, that’s a lovely excuse for the gross incompetence we’ve seen today.”
A guard escorts in our twentieth audition. The girl is even taller than I am, with close-cropped blond hair and broad shoulders. She introduces herself; her name doesn’t register.
Ten seconds into her clumsy climb, I’m staring at the bottom of my teacup. A few dark leaves are drying to the porcelain.
I want Pippa back. The other girls are off visiting her now, making sure she managed the storm. Gregor passed Pippa’s new address on to Sofie, and I wish I’d been allowed to join the party. But as principal, I have to sit with Adelaida, hour after torturous hour.
The girl grunts with exertion as she attempts to tilt herself sideways into a hip key. The silk tangles on her foot.
“Thank you,” Adelaida says. “But that’s really quite enough.”
“Wait,” the girl says. Her voice is fast and thin. “Please, let me try again.”
“We’re very busy today,” Adelaida says.
But the girl tries again anyway, and yet again, her foot catches the silk. She lets out a frantic, animal whine.
Adelaida calls for the guard.
“Wait, wait,” the girl says. “Please. I know how to do this. I promise.”
The guard puts his hand on her shoulder.
“Please,” she says, eyes wide and desperate. “This is my only chance.”
My cold, dead heart gives a hollow thud. The guard escorts her to the door. I pull on the neck of my full-suit, my breathing tight.
The girls who come here think they’re auditioning for their own survival. But we can’t even give them that. Maybe, when we turn them away, they’ll try to marry Nikolai instead.
In the brief respite between auditions, I say, “When can I tell the girls?”
“About?”
“The truth. The fleet.”
“You can tell them just as soon as you’d like the Royal Flyers to completely fall apart.”
“That’s not fair,” I say. “I don’t want to lie to Katla. To any of them. And besides, Sofie already knows. It’s only a matter of time until she stops keeping it a secret.”
Adelaida sets down her teacup. A vein in her neck is bulging. “Then make Sofie understand why the rest of the girls can’t know.”
“Do you really think they’d fall apart?”
“Of course,” Adelaida says. “And you do too. That’s why you didn’t tell them before the festival.”
I tip my head back against the wall. “Seas.”
Adelaida snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Come on. We have three more hours to go. Pretend you care.”
“Fine.” I set down my teacup and get to my feet. I bend all the way forward, stretching until my palms flatten on the floor. “Who’s next?”
Adelaida checks her list. “A girl from Luda’s studio.” She makes a face. “I’m not fond of Luda.”
I unfold and examine myself in the mirror. My reflection looks back at me with sympathy. “What’s the girl’s name?”
“Sounds foreign,” Adelaida says. “Ella Neves.”
12
ELLA
A dark-haired guard escorts me through a blue door at the back of the palace, inconspicuous if not for the men with guns on their hips standing in front of it.
The small, unadorned vestibule on the other side is nothing like the grandeur that Cassia promised me. I have to assume they save the good bits of the palace for the royals.
The guard pushes through another door.
It opens onto a massive studio. I’ve never been under such a high ceiling. The silks that hang from the beams are vibrant and so endlessly long that my hands itch to climb.
I recognize Madam Adelaida and Natasha Koskinen from the festival. Madam Adelaida is a broad-shouldered woman, like my mother was, with brown skin and a blocky jaw. She sits at a wall of continuous mirrors, Natasha standing beside her. Without makeup, Natasha looks younger than she did at the festival. Even when her body rotates to me, her gaze hugs her reflection in the mirror, like some vanity keeps her transfixed.
If it is vanity, it’s hard to blame her.
Her eyes land on mine. They’re an indecisive shade of green-brown. Her skin is pale and freckled. She’s as vulpine a person as I’ve ever seen, with burnt-orange hair, a long neck, and a sharply pointed chin.
“Have we met?” she says.
“No.” I watch her with my breath held in my mouth for one, two, three seconds.
Natasha keeps frowning at me. “Well?” she says when I haven’t moved in a beat too many. “Climb the silk. Try not to fall.”
“We’re not supposed to fall?” The words are out of my mouth before I can think better of them. Natasha’s mouth bends into a bridge. Madam Adelaida laughs, sharp and surprised.
“I think we can agree,” Madam Adelaida says, “that there’s no such thing as a good fall.” She puts a hand on Natasha’s shoulder. “Cheer up.”
Natasha doesn’t look cheered.
I set my cloak on the ground and double-check that my sleeves are snug around my wrists. I walk to the silk. My fingers twitch around it.
I put one leg on either side of it. Raise my hands above my head. Lift a leg, hook the silk, twist. Catch the slack. Pull myself up. Again.
The silk is serpentine around me. I know I should be demonstrating my ability to do fundamental moves—Look, a footlock! Aren’t I competent?—but this silk, this studio, the knowledge that I’m being watched and evaluated on months of hard work, makes me hungry for so much more than that.
I catch Natasha’s eyes far below. She says something quiet to Adelaida. Adelaida scratches her neck vacantly.
I knit myself into an S-wrap.
I’ve only ever been able to practice wheeldowns on a short stretch of silk, just enough for two rotations. Now I have feet upon glorious feet of fabric, and my body is greedy for it.
My legs fan out. I take a breath.
I spin, and the studio spins around me. My split legs parallel the silk. My hands move fluidly over the tail of the fabric as it streams out behind me. And then, just before the ground surges to meet me, I hook my knee around the silk and stop.
Adelaida’s and Natasha’s faces are level with mine.
They don’t look bored anymore.
Natasha takes a step forward. “Can you do an infinity salto?”
Can I do an infinity salto, she asks.
Fifteen minutes later, my arms are trembling but my lungs are giddy. Every breath I take seems to pull air deeper into my body than I knew possible.
By the time Madam Adelaida tells me I can go, I’m sweaty and alive.
“We’ll release the name of the new flyer tonight,” Madam Adelaida says. “You can check the Wharf District for the posting.”
I collect my cloak. A guard walks me out. On the street, it’s misting. A smile keeps bubbling to my lips.
For the first time since Cassia died, I feel like I did not die with her.
13
NATASHA
“You saw it, didn’t you?” I say in the echo of the closing door.
Adelaida tilts her head to look at me. “The tattoo?”
&
nbsp; “Yeah.”
She lifts a shoulder. “I don’t particularly care.” A pause. Suspicious eyes. “Do you?”
“No,” I say, too loudly and too quickly. She traps me in a narrow gaze. “I’m just worried about Nikolai’s reaction. Or Gospodin’s.”
“You know as well as I do that Sofie probably deserves that mark.”
“Deserves?” Does anyone deserve to be branded?
She waves her hand. “You know what I mean. If Gospodin has a fit that she’s a siren, we’ll just tell him we’re helping an unlucky girl heal her brokenness.”
The word enters my stomach, invasive, and settles there. “Brokenness?”
“Seas, Natasha. Semantics. I’m just using the words the Sacred Breath would use.”
I wonder how it happened. I wonder if someone held down her forearm and pricked her skin with a needle as she wept; I wonder if she fought; I wonder if she stood perfectly still because someone told her it needed to be done.
“She was the best we’ve seen all day,” I say.
“By a lot. My apologies to Luda.”
“She seems . . .” I pause. “Hostile.”
Adelaida snorts. “You just don’t like her because she made fun of your fall.”
“Yes, and?”
“You’ll make her do lots of pull-ups and she’ll know not to tease you anymore. We’ll get her a full-suit with very long sleeves. She can do a perfect wheeldown, and that’s really all I can ask of the sorry lot we’ve seen today.”
There was something in the way Ella looked at me, like she could see straight through me. I recognize her. I can’t say from where.
Instead, I say, “Fine. Welcome to the Royal Flyers, Ella Neves.”
14
ELLA
When Edvin brings us the news, Maret throws her arms around me.
“I told you,” she says.
Edvin stands by the door, hands clasped in front of his hips. He’s sporting half an inch of pale stubble and bags under his eyes. Maret invites him in for a celebratory toast, but he shakes his head.
“I’d better get back to the university. The infighting is only getting worse.”
I frown at him. “Infighting?”
“It means fighting between colleagues,” he says.
My jaw twitches. “Why is there infighting?”
He swats the air like my question is a buzzy fly. “A division about whether or not we should follow the birds on their exodus to see where they’re going. Most of us think they all drop dead somewhere over the ocean. That’s what Captain’s Log indicates. But it’s so like the ornithologists to stir up trouble.” A pause. “An ornithologist studies birds.”
“A criminologist studies why people get murdered,” I say. “Three times out of ten, it’s because they were condescending.”
Maret claps her hands. “Lovely anecdote, Ella!” She grabs Edvin’s shoulders and steers him out. “Off you go. Thank you for the news. Bye-bye.” When we’re alone again, she turns the full radiance of her smile on me. “You’re a terror, aren’t you?”
“Only sometimes.”
Not at Our Lady of Tidal Sorrows this morning, when I couldn’t summon a word of self-defense. I consider telling Maret about the incident, but I don’t want to be comforted. I don’t want someone to smooth out the edges of that moment, to tell me it’s okay, because it’s not. I want that moment to feel like barbs on my skin.
I don’t need Maret to boost my morale. My morale will be just fine once I kill Nikolai.
“You’ll have to be careful, but you already know that,” Maret says. “Keep watch for the men who assassinated Cassia. They might recognize you.”
I nod.
“And remember, we have time. We’ve only just passed Storm Five. So ingratiate yourself. Snoop. Figure out where Nikolai goes, and when, and if you could ever meet him there with your new knife. And you’ll come back and report what you’re learning, yes?”
“I will.”
She lets out a big breath and pulls me to her chest. I’m surprised how much my body relaxes into the maternal embrace. But Maret’s not my mother. I don’t need embraces any more than I need morale boosts or reassurances.
“I’ll miss you,” she says. “You’re the dearest murderess I’ve ever known.”
I step back and she drops her arms.
“The newest Royal Flyer.” She shakes her head. “Sleep up. You have a big day tomorrow.”
When I lie in my narrow bed, I splay my hand across the scratchy sheets. It’s the last time I’ll sleep here. From now on, I’ll live in the palace, in the halls where Cassia grew up, under the same roof as her killer. I’ll see the big library she loved; the garden full of rocks and rainwater; the thermal pools and their clouds of steam.
That’s where I’ll live. That’s where I’ll die.
I flip over onto my side and stare at the wall.
Sleep never comes.
15
NATASHA
With the auditions over, my thoughts drift back to a dark place. I still need to tell the girls what I overheard. The new flyer—Ella—probably thinks she just secured herself a place on the fleet. I’ll have to tell her too. I hope they don’t all quit.
I’m sulking through dinner, mashing my fork against my potatoes and watching them squelch through the tines. Is marrying Nikolai really the only way I can survive the Flood? Half of Kostrov will be trying to get his attention. I’m ashamed of how little thought I’ve given survival plans to this point. I was so sure the flyers would be on the fleet. Now that certainty makes me feel childish and naïve.
Gretta is the only other flyer at dinner. If she notices I don’t want to talk, she doesn’t let on.
“I just don’t see why they had to leave without me,” she says. “I would’ve gone to see Pippa, if they’d invited me.”
We’re sitting across from each other at a long, empty table in the kitchen. While the benches are usually packed with bodies, most of the guards and servants, if they’re not on duty, are probably checking in on friends and family, like they always do after a storm. I wonder if some of the sober faces here have already checked.
I poke at my bowl of potato mush. “Is there fish in this?”
Gretta makes a face. She hasn’t touched her food. The head chef, René, uses us as test subjects. Though it’s hard to complain about a warm meal, given the state the country is in, I got tired of René’s creative cooking when I was twelve. Gretta has had even more time to get sick of it, having eaten in this kitchen her whole life as the daughter of the Captain of the Guard.
Gretta leans across the table. “So. The auditions.”
“You’re glad you missed them, trust me.”
“Have you announced the new flyer yet?”
“Adelaida should be posting it now.”
Gretta’s eyes are wide. “Tell me.”
“She’s good. Not very polished, but strong.”
“How strong?” Gretta says. “Sofie strong? Or only Ness strong?”
“Have you considered being ten percent less competitive?”
“Is that how you got where you are?”
I cross my arms. Gretta mirrors me.
Of all the flyers, Gretta is the one who looks most like me. Not in coloration—her skin is light brown and her hair is dark, but we’re both made of long lines. Stretched limbs, fingers. Her build means she has the same strengths and weaknesses as me in the silks—hands that can reach but narrow hips that can’t keep the fabric secure.
What I most see of myself in her is fierce determination to be more. To be the best. At any cost.
Now that I’m principal, I don’t have to fight my girls for solos. But I’m not proud of the way I pressed myself not just to be good, but to be better than my friends, on my way here.
I don’t think Gretta would ever
sabotage me. But I doubt she was heartbroken to see me fall.
“What’s her name?” Gretta asks. “Whose studio is she from?”
Before I can answer, the kitchen door opens. Katla, Sofie, and Ness come through in a waft of laughter. Their cheeks are pink with evening air. They have cloaks slung over their shoulders.
Ness waves. When they sit, she eyes my bowl. “Ooh,” she says. “Is that good?”
“No. Want some?”
Ness takes a forkful. “Oh,” she says. “My.”
“Pippa says hi,” Sofie says. Her eyes are brighter than I’ve seen in days.
“I hope she marries Gregor,” Ness says. “He’s Nikolai’s favorite guard. I bet if they’re married, she can come on the fleet with us after all.”
I catch Sofie’s gaze over the table. Her mouth tugs to a frown.
Katla’s eyes sweep from me to Sofie and back again. “Tasha? I need a moment in private.”
“Wait,” Ness says. “I want to hear about auditions. What do you two have to talk about so secretively?”
“Hip key climbs,” Katla says. “Eat your slop.”
In the hallway, the smell of seafood and peat smoke fades. Katla crosses her arms.
“Remember that time my full-suit split right down my ass before the seal season festival?” she says.
I smile faintly. “Yeah.”
“And you ran all the way back to the palace to get me a new one so that Adelaida wouldn’t get mad at me?”
“The flyers should run more. It really is a good exercise.”
“You did it because you’re my best friend,” Katla says.
“It feels like this story is going to have a moral,” I say.
Katla exhales loudly through her nose. She says nothing as a pair of manservants pass. When they open the door, the kitchen belches smoke at us. Once it closes again, she says, “Right before we left, Sofie pulled Pippa aside and told her something. Sofie wouldn’t tell me what.”
For a moment, I consider not telling her. But that’s ridiculous. Too selfish, even for me. I’m just afraid. Afraid she’ll think I’ve failed her, failed the flyers. Afraid she’ll think there’s no point being in the flyers anymore and leave.
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 7