Girls at the Edge of the World

by Laura Brooke Robson

  I am so, so alone.

  32

  ELLA

  After the ball, the flyers separate into camps. In the first, Natasha, Ness, and Gretta, who all have an edge to survive the Flood. In the second, Katla and Sofie, whose prospects are markedly bleaker.

  I don’t realize that I’ve been invited to join the latter camp until, on a particularly cold morning a few days after the ball, Katla and Sofie come into the studio and head straight for me. Sofie sips a cup of tea. Katla holds two more. I’m confused, at first, when they sit down on the floor beside me. Katla extends one of her cups.

  I stop stretching to look at her.

  “Nasty cold out,” she says. “This helps.”

  It tastes like cinnamon and burns the back of my throat. When Natasha comes in, wearing her big sweater and a knit hat, she glances at the three cups. Her eyes slide over them quickly. She goes to her silks without a word.

  I start to spend nearly all my time with Sofie and Katla. When I eat, they sit beside me. When I practice a new element, they offer to help.

  I enjoyed fashioning myself as a detached, indomitable outsider. I’m disappointed by how much I appreciate their company. As it turns out, you can call yourself an assassin and still want friends.

  I can’t remember the last time I had friends. Cassia was always more than that. Before her, I had my brothers and a few acquaintances near my age, but even our closest neighbors were a generous walk from our farm. There was the flower girl in town I always held a candle for, but I hardly knew more than her name.

  But the more I see of Sofie and Katla, the less I see of Natasha. She misses meals. She practices hard and leaves quickly. I feel a pinch in my stomach whenever I think of the way she danced with Nikolai, but still, it’s hard not to worry.

  As the weeks pass, no one shows any sign of budging. The sun is sleepy and more reluctant to rise each morning as we tumble toward bear season. We’ve all been counting the days since Storm Five. Two months? Already? Our luck can’t last forever. The feeling of Storm Four, overdue, hangs in every heavy cloud. I’m antsy for its arrival. Unlike everyone else, I’m not counting to Storm One—I’m counting to Storm Two, when I get to kill Nikolai and finally be free of the suffocating weight of vengeance. And also be dead. I’ve been hung up on that whole “dead” part lately.

  On the coldest morning I’ve faced yet, a Friday, I’m stretching on the floor of the studio. Trying to remember if I have anything planned for the weekend ahead. I have no excuse not to go visit Maret, except for the fact that I don’t want to. She’ll want to talk about murder and Cassia and Nikolai, and—I just want to think about something else. For once. Just for a few days.

  Katla sits down next to me. “It’s my sister’s birthday,” she says. “Sofie and I are going to visit her. You should come.” When I pause, Katla adds, “I can promise cake much better than René’s.”

  But ten hours later, after practice is over, I don’t just find Sofie and Katla by the door.

  “My sister said I had to invite Natasha,” Katla says, rolling her eyes. “Please, Katla, Natasha’s so nice. Please, her flying tips are so much better than yours. She’s so good at sucking up to royalty, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Wow,” Natasha says, straightening her knit hat. “That felt really good. Like a big hug to the soul.”

  “Let’s just go, okay?”

  The four of us hurry through New Sundstad by the dying light of the sun, carrying unlit lanterns for the way back. Katla has a rucksack with presents—a set of playing cards and a burnished brass compass. We have to trek along a muddy road, past the fields of harvested rye, before the path becomes an elevated wooden platform beneath us. We cross a stretch of upturned mud, and Katla tells me it’s where they’ve lifted bricks of peat out of the earth. After all that mud, when we’ve gone so far the lights of New Sundstad are barely a twinkle behind us, our surroundings turn wild. The fog is a soup; the trees are few, scraggly, and determined. Katla’s bright red home perches on the edge of a pool of dark water, hemmed by golden grass.

  “That pool wasn’t there when my parents built the house,” Katla says, frowning. “I think it gets closer to the door every time I come back.”

  I’ve seen enough maps of Kostrov to know that this is its skinny neck. New Sundstad is nearly a country unto itself, edged on all sides by ocean and bog. All the other little Kostrovian towns sit in and beyond the boglands. I once asked Maret if she’d ever visited the rural towns, and she just waved a hand. “Growing rye and complaining,” she said. “That’s what they’re good for.”

  Katla pushes open the front door without knocking. We’re quickly engulfed in a flurry of small bodies. Two of them leap on Natasha so enthusiastically, I’m surprised she doesn’t topple over. Katla has three sisters and four brothers, all younger, and they manage to all shout their names at the same time.

  “Don’t worry.” Sofie puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been here twice before and still don’t know anyone’s name.”

  Katla’s mother is taller than she is by a head and her father wears a beard. Half the siblings have Katla’s dark hair, and the other half have waves of potato-blond. Every nose is identical.

  It’s impossible not to notice that Katla is the only sibling who doesn’t look dangerously underfed.

  I glance around the cramped room. I spot Katla surreptitiously sliding a little bear, carved from wood, behind a picture frame on the mantel. Maret told me that a lot of the people who live in the boglands—Brightwallers, she called them—refuse to believe in the Sacred Breath’s teachings, no matter how much trouble it gets them into. Maret said Brightwallers believe in nature spirits—the things people believed in when this country was called Maapinn.

  Quietly, Sofie says, “You don’t have to do that on my behalf.”

  “My parents should know better,” Katla says.

  “No,” Sofie says firmly. “I couldn’t care less.”

  I don’t think I’m supposed to overhear any of it, but we’re squished too tightly together to help it.

  I learn that the birthday girl is the oldest sister after Katla. In my head, I take to calling her Sister One. She’s one of the potato-blond siblings, and she wears a gray frock with a blue ribbon around the middle. She’s more subdued than the rest, and she watches us with a discomfiting intensity.

  The youngest brothers, by my guess nine and seven, fawn over Natasha. Apparently, they remember her from when she last visited, and they are determined to show her their pet lizard. Brother Three promises Natasha he’ll be right back and runs into the bedroom.

  “We named him Fredrik,” Brother Four says, “but that might’ve been a bad name, because Fredrik had baby lizards.”

  Brother Three returns, holding aloft a scaly horror. It looks like it couldn’t decide between being a snake and being a lizard, so it resigned itself to doing both poorly. Its long tail snaps and curls around Brother Three’s wrist.

  Natasha squats to look it in the eye. “Hello, Fredrik.”

  “You probably don’t want to stand so close,” Brother Three says. “He’s bitey.”

  I stare at the creature. Its hands are like bird talons, fingers tapering to points, and its scales are tiny and rounded. Each gleams a different shade of gold, amber, and onyx, enough to make a jeweler jealous, rippling as it moves, like a pebbled riverbed through the water.

  “What did you do with the eggs?” Natasha says.

  “Eggs?” Brother Four says.

  “You said he had baby lizards.”

  “He didn’t lay eggs,” Brother Four says. “The baby lizards popped straight out of him, all slimy and alive.”

  “Lizards can’t do that,” Natasha says patiently.

  “Fredrik did,” Brother Three says.

  Brother Four nods emphatically. “It was gross.”

  Fredrik squirms, trying to wriggle o
ut of Brother Three’s hands.

  “He keeps trying to get away,” Brother Three explains. “Ever since Storm Five.”

  “But Storm Five is for birds,” I say. “Not weird lizard things. No offense, Fredrik.”

  “I know!” Brother Three says. “Cool, right?”

  I lean against the wall and take a breath. The backs of my eyes burn. I don’t want anyone to see me upset, but seas, the boys remind me so much of my brothers. When the twins were seven or eight, Milo caught a water vole. It looked like a rat, but fatter and more courteous. Filip named it Paulina and made it a bed out of duck down he pulled from one of our mother’s good pillows.

  I shut my eyes, just for a second. But when I open them again, Natasha’s looking at me. I push off the wall. Drop her gaze.

  Katla’s mother sets a hand on each brothers’ back. “Boys, put your lizard away. We have to sing to your sister.”

  “Fredrik can help sing.”

  Katla’s mother stares at her sons in a way that leaves no doubt that Fredrik is not invited to the singing.

  The cake is a twist of soft dough, decorated with honey and dried cranberries. It’s good enough that I’d ask for more if it weren’t already too small a cake for a party of thirteen. We eat with our fingers off wooden plates. It’s so crowded that I end up sitting on the front step outside, braving the night to escape the intense heat of all those bodies pressed together.

  I lick the last bubble of honey off my finger and stare into the fog. Water laps against shore. It’s a different flavor of wild than the forests of Terrazza, but I find I like it anyway, despite the sulfuric bog smell and the sharp cold in the air.

  Brother Three finds me outside. “Oh,” he says. “I was hoping you didn’t like your cake.”

  I look at my empty plate. “Sorry.”

  He shrugs. “Hey, want to see something cool?”

  I’m skeptical. “Is it another lizard?”

  Brother Three drops to his knees and begins picking through the dirt in front of the house. His face glows white like a second moon. A moment later, he sits up again, a shiny beetle pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

  “No offense,” I say, “but I liked the lizard better.”

  “You have to watch,” Brother Three says. With his non-bug-laden hand, he gestures for me to crouch at the corner of the house with him. He squats in front of a plant, bright green stalks with feathery pink whiskers at the ends. If it’s a flower, it’s like no flower I’ve ever seen. “This isn’t the biggest one, but all the others bloomed in Storm Eight and never opened up again.” When I don’t rush to join him and his bug beside the plant, he gestures wildly at me again. “Well, come on. I can’t hold this thing forever.”

  I squat next to him. Brother Three extends the beetle toward the pink whiskers of the plant, each of which is beaded with a delicate dewdrop. The plant moves so quickly I think at first that it must have been the wind. But no—the beetle struggles valiantly against the whiskers as the plant draws it into a mouth I can’t see. Just as quickly as it started, it’s done. The plant is still and plantlike again.

  “What is that?”

  “Isn’t it fun?” Brother Three says.

  Brother Three and I have different definitions of fun. “Did it eat that beetle?” I ask.

  He nods. “Some of the really big ones can eat other stuff too, but like I said, they’re all asleep or dead or something now.”

  “Could it eat a person?”

  Brother Three giggles. “That’s silly. People are too big to fit inside plants.”

  I stand up again and brush the dirt from my knees. “You know an awful lot about plants and animals, don’t you?”

  He shrugs again, but I can tell he’s proud. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t, when they’re around you all the time. You just have to pay attention.”

  His father calls for him and he heads back inside, but I stand by the strange, hungry plant for a minute longer. I feel like he’s struck an edge of something important, but I can’t yet put words to it. What sorts of things does a child learn, living with pink-whiskered plants and lizards that don’t lay eggs and leaves that rustle like the first notes of a song? Different lessons than you find jammed between stone buildings.

  When I go back into the house, Sister Three, in her nightgown, tugs on Natasha’s arm.

  “When are you going to come back and finish reading to me about the twelve princesses?”

  “I can read to you,” Katla says.

  Sister Three lets out a soft whine. “You don’t do any of the voices.”

  “Very soon,” Natasha says. “I promise.”

  Over the top of Sister Three’s head, Katla narrows her eyes.

  Katla’s father sweeps the girl up in his arms, promising lots of voices tomorrow. Soon, all the young siblings have been spirited off to bed. In the end, it’s just the flyers, Katla’s parents, and the birthday girl: Sister One, who turned sixteen today. We gather around the wooden table. Katla’s mother sets a pot of tea on a cloth napkin in the middle.

  Without the children, the evening takes a hasty somber turn. Katla sets her rucksack on her lap and begins removing jars: flour, salt, lard. I realize she must’ve stolen them from the palace kitchen. She pushes them across the table with her mouth set in a stubborn line.

  “Make sure Sander is eating,” is all she says. “He looks like a ghost.”

  Then she pulls a book from her bag. I recognize it. That was the book I found snooping through her room. The one I couldn’t read.

  “Can you take this? It’s making me nervous, having it in the palace.”

  Katla’s father takes the book, frowning. “Maapinnen’s not a crime, last I checked.”

  “Yeah,” Katla says, “but sometimes it feels like it’s about to become one.”

  Sister One sits quietly, but it’s impossible to ignore the way she watches us. I wonder how often she gets to see people outside of her family—if she’s anything like I was on the farm, the isolation gets to her.

  As Katla’s father puts the jars into their cupboards, her mother begins pouring tea. “There was an arrest not far from here,” she says, handing Katla the first cup. “Just today.”

  “An arrest?” Katla says. “Seas, did someone try to stockpile Flood supplies again?” She glances over at me and adds, “Our neighbors keep trying to evade the tithes. It never works. They always get caught and someone gets arrested.”

  “They weren’t even Kostrovian.” Katla’s mother hands me a cup of tea. “Skaratan.”

  Katla frowns. “Why would anyone come all the way from Skarat this close to Storm One?”

  “Scholars,” her mother says, as if this explains it.

  “I used to see the Skaratan scholars wandering around Eel Shore,” Sofie says. She tilts her head toward me. “That’s where my father lives, near the university.”

  I’m about to say that I know as much—Maret’s apartment isn’t far from the university walls—but I catch myself just in time. Instead, I say, “What law did the Skaratans break?”

  Katla’s father rejoins us at the table. He takes the teakettle and pours his wife the final cup. I like the way they sit together, Katla’s parents. They don’t share any coy smiles or pointed glances, and yet, their shoulders are glued firmly together in some gentle reminder of the other’s presence. They’re a steady, earthen pair; watching them makes my heart ache for what I will never again have.

  “They were digging for fossils,” Katla’s father says.

  I blink. “Fossils?”

  “What’s illegal about fossils?” Natasha says.

  “And why would anyone want them?” I ask.

  Sofie smiles around the edge of her cup. “I think it’s the Skaratan mandate to pursue science until the end of days.”

  Katla wrinkles her nose. “It must be a stodgy place
, Skarat.”

  “But why fossils?” I say.

  Katla’s father studies me, as if wondering how freely he can speak in the presence of a stranger. In the end, he must decide to trust his daughter’s judgment of character. “I met one of them out in the boglands while I was looking for a new harvest site. He was nervous of me at first, but I gave him the lay of the land, speaking slow and easy so he could translate. He took a liking to me, so I offered him a drink. Ten minutes later, he tells me he’s looking for polar bear fossils.”

  I glance at the others. “This is a joke, right? There aren’t polar bears on Kostrov.”

  “Definitely no polar bears on Kostrov,” Natasha says. “Skarat, maybe. Not Kostrov.”

  Katla’s father affords us a smile. “I laughed too. But that’s what he said he was looking for.”

  There’s a joke that Skaratans think they’re smart enough to solve anything—give them a heart and they’ll try to make it beat again. In Terrazza, I occasionally heard mutters that some miracle of science would burst from Skarat to cure us of the Flood. My hopes were never particularly high, but still, I’m disappointed to learn that what their brightest minds have been working on isn’t a glass bubble to encase the world, but the search for polar bear bones in a country without polar bears.

  “I don’t profess to know a great deal about the scientific method,” I say, “but that sounds like a really stupid way to spend your time.”

  “Ah.” Katla’s father nods. “I said the very same. And he told me: ‘No polar bears in Kostrov now, yes. But what of the land that was here before?’ Then I suppose he figured he’d said too much, because he hurried off without finishing his drink. No surprise they got caught, I figure, with lips as loose as those.”

  I’m still confused, but the same sensation I felt looking at the pink-whiskered plant grips me again, like I’m on the brink of something.

  “Land that was here before?” I say. “Like, before the last Flood?”