“Found out what?” Gretta says.
Katla looks from one face to the next. Her brows furrow. “You don’t know? Seas. It’s everywhere. There’s some sort of illness. People are calling it a plague. All across the city, I heard people shouting about it, not to mention everyone I saw stumbling around sick. I thought . . . Why are all of you looking at me like that?”
51
NATASHA
They’re calling it the bog plague.
I hear it muttered on the mouths of guards who leap to the side of the hallway as Katla and I drag Sofie to the infirmary. We each hold one of her pale arms around our shoulders. Sofie keeps trying to make us laugh, insisting that she feels fine, and why do we look so afraid of an upset stomach? Ella and Gretta trail behind us.
The infirmary is long and stark, a colorless room not meant for living. Each side is lined with pallet beds. Sleeping bodies curl in a few of them. A nurse bustles toward us and tries to take Sofie out of our arms. I have an urge to pull Sofie closer to me and away from the woman’s clutches.
A white mask covers her face, arching out from her nose in a long, pointed beak. It’s tied around her head with string. Each eye is visible through a thin slit. Her hair, a cloud of frizzy blond, bursts from the edges of the mask. She looks like she’s wearing a giant bird skull.
“No one in here but the sick.” Her voice echoes around the insides of the mask. “Give her to me, quickly now.”
Sofie takes a step away from the nurse. Katla and I hold her up. “I’m not sick,” Sofie says. “Really, I’m not.”
The nurse holds out her hand, opening and closing pinchy fingers. “You’re pale.”
“I’m always pale,” Sofie says.
I hold her arm tightly. “It’s okay. We just want to make sure you’re fine.” I try to keep my voice steady, for her sake, but I don’t want to give her to the bird-masked woman.
Sofie lurches forward, bending at her waist. The nurse has a bucket underneath her within five seconds. It’s just enough time to catch the next wave of vomit.
“For seas’ sake,” the nurse says, “lie down.”
When Sofie finally concedes to the pallet bed, I examine the heavy shadows swelling underneath her eyes. The nurse is right: Sofie is even paler than usual.
“I’m fine,” she says again. But when she glances around the infirmary at the other beds, the sleeping forms, she bites her lip.
As the nurse turns to us, the beak of her mask cuts a deep shadow down her front all the way to her belly. “Anyone who isn’t sick leaves.”
I start shaking my head before she finishes her sentence. “I’m staying.”
“Are you mad? You can’t be around this.”
“We’ve been around her all night,” I say. “We’re still walking, aren’t we?”
The slitted eyes stare back at me. “There’s a miasma in here. Bad air. You breathe it in, you could be the next one turning your guts inside out.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” I say.
“This is my job,” she says.
“Well, they’re my job,” I say. They are. These girls. Their lives.
The nurse considers. “You’re the principal flyer, aren’t you?”
“I’m not leaving,” I say.
“Fine,” she says. “But the rest of your girls have to go.”
I turn to Katla before she can start hurling insults. “You have to go find Ness. Make sure she’s okay.”
“But Sofie—”
“Please,” I say. “Please.”
I don’t realize I’m gripping her hands until she squeezes back. I can’t find the words to describe the fear coming alive within me.
Did I ever really think I could stand at Nikolai’s side on the royal fleet while the other flyers sank with Kostrov? I will not see them hurt. I can’t.
“Okay,” Katla says. “But I’m coming back once we find Ness.”
I nod.
Gretta is the first one out the door. She buries her face in the collar of her sweater, a weak mask.
Ella lingers by Sofie’s bed.
“Help find Ness,” I say.
Her face is tight like she’s gritting her teeth.
“Go,” I say.
When my girls have gone, the nurse hands me a mask.
I swallow my discomfort and take it. The face is rough canvas, the beak cold metal. When I raise it, the metal clatters. It smells like René’s herb collection—some clean and earthy mixture of thyme and rosemary.
“Aromatics,” the nurse says, nodding her own beak. “Fights the miasma.”
My vision reduces to what I can see through the mask’s slitted eyes.
“You look terrifying,” Sofie says.
The mask is a relief. Through it, Sofie can’t see the fear written plainly across my face. “Maybe we should wear these in a flight. Very crane season.”
“More like dead crane—”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. I hand her the bucket.
I lose my sense of time in the amber light of the infirmary. Whenever the door opens, I look up, my mask bobbling. I watch as guards and servants stumble in alone or are lugged by friends. The other flyers don’t come back.
Sofie and I talk of little nothings. Pippa’s pregnancy, and whether or not she should name the child Baby Gregor. Katla’s siblings. If the deer season flight is better than the seal season one. We don’t talk about storms or Floods or plagues.
She falls asleep when the infirmary beds are half-filled.
The door opens again.
“Seas,” the nurse says. “Not another one.”
At first, I don’t see Ness. I just see Twain, his round belly, his boyish brown face, his deep blue guard uniform. Ness is so small beside him. She clings to his side. Tears stain her face; splotches of brown, her front.
“There you are, up you go.” The nurse maneuvers Ness out of Twain’s arms and into the bed beside Sofie. Ness lets out a series of watery coughs.
When I stand up, she recoils from me. I put a hand to the edge of my mask. “Ness, it’s me.”
“Tasha?” she says.
I sit down on her bed. “I’m right here.”
“I’m scared,” she says. “I don’t feel good.”
I try to swallow. I try to speak. In the end, all I can do is squeeze her hand.
* * *
~~~
Adelaida arrives as the sunrise soothes the grisly night shadows. She opens the door and waves me over but doesn’t pass the threshold.
It takes me a long moment to rise from the chair I situated between Ness’s and Sofie’s beds. My neck aches from the weight of the mask.
In the hallway, I take off the mask. Morning air chills my sweat-licked face. I raise a hand to my cheek and find a divot in my skin from the pressure of the mask’s frame.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I blink at the sharpness. “Sitting with Ness and Sofie.”
“You’ve been there all night?” she says.
“They’ve been sleeping,” I say.
“I didn’t ask about them,” she says. “I asked about you.”
“But I’m not sick,” I say.
“Keep breathing the air in there and you will be soon.”
I sat silently with my fear for so many long hours. I welcome its flow into anger. “They’re sick. Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care. Why do you think I spent all night trying to find the six of you? Why do you think I forbade the others from coming back here once they told me about Sofie? Sofie and Ness are already sick. The best I can do is keep the rest of you from catching it.”
I tighten my hands into fists. “Sofie and Ness are your girls too. Not just mine.”
“I’ve seen dozens of girls come into this palace and go out agai
n. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the backs of more before the Flood.”
“That’s all we are to you?” I say. “Names in an endless list?”
“No,” she says, vicious. “There are names on an endless list, and then there is you.”
For a moment, I’m almost fooled into believing she cares for me the way a mother would.
Then she says, “If you die, who do you think will bring me on the royal fleet? Gretta?”
We stand in silence for a long moment. I realize I’m mirroring her. Our hands are fisted. Our chins are held high. We both lean forward, ready to fight.
But I won’t be like her in this way.
“Let the other girls come back if they want to,” I say. “If you’re so determined to see me safe, you’ll have to come in there yourself and drag me out.”
I tie my mask around my face as I step back inside the infirmary.
“Natasha,” Adelaida says. But she doesn’t follow me.
It’s only a few hours before Katla and Ella appear to ask the nurse for masks of their own. She tries to shoo them, but they stand fast.
“We already breathed plenty of Sofie’s miasma,” Katla says. “Besides, what do you care? I’m bound to be another Storm One victim anyway. Let me stay with my friends.”
The nurse gives them masks, but she doesn’t do it happily.
When Sofie and Ness wake, they’re in good spirits. They smile and joke and reassure us that they feel much better.
“Really,” Ness says. “I think the worst is over.” She glances around. “Is Twain here?”
“He wanted to be,” I say. “He had a shift.”
She looks down at her hands.
“As for Gretta,” Katla says, “she’s just being selfish, but we already knew that about her.”
“She was crying,” Ella says softly. “She’s just scared.”
We all quiet for a moment.
“Well,” Sofie says brightly, “nothing to be scared of. I feel good.”
By the next day, I don’t believe her.
Day three sees Ness and Sofie fluttering in and out of sleep, and day four sees them drifting still further away from us. Katla, Ella, and I leave only when we can’t keep our eyes open any longer. We bring them porridge and toast. They vomit it back up. Sofie shivers; Ness cries. The Captain of the Guard made a rule that no guard is to enter the infirmary, but Twain defies it. He sits with Ness whenever he’s off duty, and when she wakes, her smile shines for him.
Ness’s parents arrive at the palace by special escort. They ask to take her back to their home. The nurse won’t allow her to be moved. Pippa, through Gregor, begs to be allowed in to see Sofie. In a spurt of fierce coherence, Sofie makes me swear I won’t let Pippa inside. For both Pippa’s and the baby’s sake.
By day four, all the beds are full. By day five, some have emptied again. It’s not because anyone has gotten better.
That morning, I wake after four hours of nightmares. I’m sore but not sick. I haven’t been able to make myself eat more than a few bites each day. I’m too afraid of vomiting it up again.
I can’t remember the last time I went a week without flying. Not since I was seven or eight.
Ella is already at their bedsides when I arrive. Her mask lies lopsided on her face. “I don’t think they’re awake,” she says. “What’s that?” She nods at the book in my hands.
“Tamm’s Fables,” I say. “Can you help me? I couldn’t tie my mask with the book.”
Ella smooths my hair over my shoulder. Her hands are careful and steady and soft against my head. When they drop, I take a shaky breath.
It didn’t occur to me until the third day to be surprised that Ella joined my vigil. But it’s no trivial thing, not just to risk the miasma, but to bear the fear so intimately. I wouldn’t blame her if she kept her distance; I don’t blame Gretta. But I’ve never been able to predict what Ella will do. She’s only known Sofie and Ness for a few months, and yet, here she stays.
“You can have the chair, if you want,” she says.
“Or we could share?”
She nods. Her mask bobs.
The chair is big enough for both of us, but it’s close. When I open the book—large, water-stained, dog-eared—its spine settles between our legs.
I look at Sofie, her hair stuck to her forehead in sweaty clumps and her thin lips pursed. I look at Ness, her curls deflated, her head sunken into the pillows like they might consume her.
The knot in my throat isn’t an easy thing to clear.
I’ve considered throwing this book into a canal every day since my mother died. It’s my most precious and most painful reminder of her. And it’s the only thing I can think to offer Sofie and Ness. It’s what my mother offered me, after all, whenever I felt small and powerless and alone.
I offer them a fairy tale. A story. Hope.
* * *
~~~
Behind seven mountains and beyond seven seas, there was a king with twelve daughters. Each daughter was clever and each daughter was beautiful, but Talia—the seventh daughter—was the most adventurous. While the fifth princess read and the ninth princess sang and the third princess stitched and the eleventh princess danced, Talia took her father’s smallest sailboat onto the sea. The sea in her father’s kingdom was cold, and so Talia wore her warmest furs and her softest gloves as she steered her boat around big floes of ice. The ice held many secrets.
A small black bird landed on her bow.
“Hello there, friend,” Talia said, extending a hand.
The bird hopped to Talia’s finger. He was a dovekie, she decided. She recognized the white belly and webbed feet from illustrations in books in her father’s library.
With one flap of his wings, the dovekie landed on the boat’s tiller.
“No, friend,” Talia said. “That is my tiller, and I need that to steer.”
The dovekie let out a long, desperate cry.
Talia felt overcome by something deep inside her she could put no name to. She reached for the tiller and gave it a sharp turn. The sailboat responded in kind. Not a moment had passed before a black whale thrust its head from the water beside Talia’s boat. The whale’s big shiny eye met Talia’s, and then the beast slowly sank back under the sea.
Talia let out a breath of wonder. If the dovekie had not warned her, her sailboat would have overturned.
“Thank you,” Talia said, and the dovekie fluffed his feathers and took skyward.
From then on, every day that Talia spent on the water was a day spent with her dovekie friend. The dovekie guided her, and when she followed his instructions, she found herself sailing into seascapes more beautiful than she had ever known. She grew to trust the dovekie, and it was to him she turned for counsel when the storms began to come.
These were no normal storms, the king told his daughters. These were storms destined to change the shape of their world. There would be ten, as old legend dictated, and after the tenth, all the world would flood for twelve long moons. The king told each of his daughters to think as hard as they could of a way to save themselves and their kingdom, for if they didn’t, all would drown.
Talia spent many moons musing with her sisters, but by the time half of the storms had come and gone, she began to fear for her dovekie friend. Birds across the kingdom vanished, and she was sure she wouldn’t see him again. Another storm came and went, and Talia could no longer bear the castle walls. Only the sea air could calm her anxious heart.
While all the daughters were troubled by the thought of losing their family, each daughter carried an extra trouble on her shoulders. The fifth princess wondered, “What will the world be without any books?” The ninth princess asked, “And what of a world with no music?”
As Talia sailed through the choppy waters, she said aloud, “What of the boreal pines, the long-eared hares, the ind
igo wildflowers that rise through the snowmelt each deer season?”
The dovekie landed on her bow. For a moment, Talia was overjoyed. Then she thought of the storms and the terrible fate that awaited them. “Ah, friend,” she said. “What of you?”
When the dovekie guided Talia’s ship that day, he took her to a place they’d never gone. She sailed and she sailed until she reached a mountain of dark stone rising from the sea. Smoke curled from its crown.
“A volcano?” Talia asked.
The dovekie flew to the shore and looked expectantly at Talia. Talia, never daunted by danger and trusting the dovekie, moored her sailboat and climbed ashore.
It was a long trek to the top of the mountain. As Talia climbed, big clouds began rumbling on the horizon. She was coming to recognize such clouds. Another storm was approaching. Talia climbed faster. The dovekie flying beside her was tireless.
By the time she reached the top, rain was falling. Talia looked over the edge of the volcano. It was a pit of liquid fire, and her whole body burned from being so close.
The dovekie tilted his head at her. Talia felt a tug in her stomach, just as when the dovekie guided her hand to avoid the black whale. She felt as though she could hear a voice in her head, like that of the dovekie, or the volcano, or those who died in the last Flood.
Talia leaped into the volcano.
At her sacrifice, the volcano grumbled. The fire roared. As the storm began to rage overhead, the volcano raged back. The dovekie let out an anguished cry and took flight. The volcano erupted behind him, throwing rock and smoke and fire into the air.
That night, when the storm had gone, the eldest princess frowned. “Talia still has not returned,” she said. She went to the balcony of the castle and looked out. She did not see the silhouette of Talia’s sailboat traveling back to her through the rain. Instead, she saw a plume of smoke, silver in the night sky.
A drift of white volcanic rocks floated along the horizon, so vast they could have been an island unto themselves. A dovekie flew toward the raft of floating stone, clutching the green bough of a boreal pine in his talons. He landed on the rocks and dropped his branch carefully. From the bough, a pinecone, scales still tightly pinched, protecting its seeds—stoically, patiently—from the world.
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 26