Drowned (6 page)

I swallow. I have no idea what I’d converse with her about. It’s doubtful she’d want me to go into detail about how to clean a craphouse.

“You’ll begin training right away. Of course, next season, your sixteenth Soft Season, you will be given Kirba’s position in the formation. Space twelve. I’ve not made much of a study of the formation, but it’s quite a valuable piece of real estate, or so I hear,” she says.

Space twelve! Space twelve! I’d always assumed that once I reached adulthood, I’d be cast into the outer ring of the formation. Space twelve is very nearly at the center. I am sure I am salivating. “But...what will become of Kirba?” I repeat, softer this time.

She laughs. “I am offering you the world, and you are inquiring about a scrap of seaweed?”

I swallow. “No, Your Majesty. I just—”

“Kirba is not your concern, but she will be placed in the formation according to her new duties, since you must know. Kirba has always been like a mother to me, and I will not neglect her.” She pauses. “One thing, though. Since you will not look me in the eye, I need to ask. Are you trustworthy?”

I open my mouth to answer in the affirmative, but she stops me. “What I mean is, you will be living in a new world now. In the castle. But of course you will travel out for various tasks, and of course for formation. You must never tell anyone outside what goes on within these walls, do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I say, breathless. That, of course, goes without saying. My cheeks are already burning from the exhilaration. I can’t help feeling that no matter how many tides I have left in this world, when it all ends I will look back and remember today sweetly, as the day that my life—my real life, as someone with purpose—began.

Four

Fading Star

I
’m led down a never-ending, arched hallway, glimmering with mother-of-pearl everywhere. It’s so bright I almost have to shield my eyes. As much as I had heard and dreamed, I had no idea it was this amazing inside. I don’t think anyone on the outside could imagine this.

Burbur, the head of castle housekeeping, scurries about the floor quietly, fussing busily over who-knows-what. I’ve stood close to her in the formation—she is number four—and she is always dressed very smartly in a plain, but always clean, white tunic. She’s about five Hard Seasons older than me, and her face is always pinched as if she’s smelling something bad. I’d always envied her, but now, things are different. I wonder why the princess didn’t pick Burbur as her lady-in-waiting. After all, she’s more refined than I am, and she has both hands.

She leads me upstairs, past at least a dozen other rooms. Each one is blocked off by a red curtain, and there is a square tub outside each door. I wonder what the tubs are for. She takes me into a room that she calls my quarters. My
own
quarters! It’s about the size of the craphouse, but size is the only thing they have in common. There’s a mat in one corner and a large circular stone tub in another. Orange curtains swirl in the breeze, carrying the scent of the sea and the screech of seagulls. I walk over to the tub. There’s a strange white foam billowing in there, and when I inhale, there’s something I’ve never smelled before. Something beautiful.

“Lavender,” Burbur says with a rare smile. “We have very little left in our stores. But the princess said you’d need it. And I have to agree.”

“Oh,” I say. “Does it...”

She laughs sourly. “Burn off your skin? Ridiculous. I am sure there are many rumors that you have heard on the outside that you will find to be untrue.”

I blush, inhaling again and again until my nostrils burn and I feel giddy. There’s a pile of green cloth so thick and dry near the tub that I have to fight the urge to bury my face in it. I whirl around, trembling, wanting to scream my thanks from the top of the tower, when I suddenly come face-to-face with it.

With me.

I take a step closer.

“It’s called a mirror,” Burbur says, but I already know what it is. I know it from a story I’ve read.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

“Oh?” I murmur, feigning ignorance as I step so close that my breath creates a circle of fog at my lips. My cracked, bloody lips.

“Everything you need is on the dressing table. Your new garment is hanging on the door. I’ll leave you now,” Burbur says, and disappears as if she can’t stand to be with my stench a moment longer.

For the first time, I am completely alone, in a room of splendor and beauty. And yet all I can look at is the ugliest thing here. My reflection. It’s fascinating and shocking at once, more vivid than anything I could see in the tide pools. My eyes look like two empty pits, black walls with those two round pink eyes at the bottom, like festering sores. My shoulders jut away from my neck at an awkward, upward angle, and there are deep holes in my collarbones. I look like a skeleton. Except for the scars. Strangely, the scars make me look alive.

I pull my tunic off my shoulders and let it slip to the ground so that I am naked. I can’t remember a time I was naked, since we are never alone. My breasts are shocking to me, high and white, and would probably be something to be proud of if not for the red lashes crisscrossing them. For the first time in a long while I can see, under my breasts, the worst of the scars. There are two deep red slits between my ribs on either side, windows to my rib cage, two hideous smiles that seem to grow wider every time I inhale.

And the hair. Goodness, the hair. High tide isn’t for a long time yet, but I’d need a hundred tides to fix the wild, miserable mess above my eyebrows. It’s crisp and brackish and black like a dried piece of seaweed, matted with sand. There is a hairbrush on the table, a comb, some barrettes and ribbons like those Star wears... All useless. There are other things in jars, a small hand mirror and a few shells and stones arranged there...for decoration, I guess. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything for decoration. King Wallow thinks that’s useless. It wastes time. For commoners, anyway.

I wrap my hand around a sharp piece of coral. What I need is to start over. To hack it all off. I bring it to the back of my neck, pull a tangled piece taut and am just starting to saw away when I hear, “Oh, no, you don’t!”

I whirl around. Princess Star is staring at me from the doorway. Her eyes widen when she runs her eyes over my scars, as if she’s seen something terrible, as if I’m so much more hideous undressed than she’d possibly imagined. “Those lines on your body,” she gasps.

“Scribbler scars,” I mumble. Instinctively I avert my eyes, then drop to the floor, searching desperately for my tunic, cheeks flaring.

She stands there, confused. “Scars?”

I nod, grabbing for the fabric. Surely she knows about the accident that nearly took my life. It was shortly after that I was forbidden to play with her. My father never said as much, but I knew the scars made me too hideous to be in the company of someone so ethereal.

She rushes forward and tears the coral out of my hand. “I will not have my lady-in-waiting looking like someone’s bottom,” she says. She kicks the tunic away from my grasp and motions to the tub. “Get in.”

Using my hand to shield my skeletal frame from her, I scramble into the tub. The water is warm, but any sense of pleasure I would have gotten from my first real bath ever is gone because
she
is here. Without warning, she pulls out a very menacing weapon, two horrific blades that move together in an awful, shrieking sound. “What are you—”

“Quiet,” she says, bringing the blades close to my head.

I can’t help it. I scream and duck my head under my arms. When I look up again, she’s standing with the blades in one hand and a knotted ball of my hair in the other. “These are scissors,” she says. “I do not think we will be able to salvage all of your hair, but we should be able to salvage most.”

“Oh.” She continues snipping away, and soon little tangles of my hair blow about on the breeze wafting in from the large picture window. Then she reaches over, grabs my head and dunks me under. I come up, sputtering. “What—”

The next thing I know she is pouring some nice-smelling green stuff onto my hair. She starts to rub it in. This is all so surreal. The princess is washing me. I thought she had servants to do that. I thought she had servants who washed her servants. “Very simple,” she mutters, working it in. I feel her picking through my hair with the comb. She groans. “Just stay still. It’ll all come out. Eventually. Goodness. Have you
ever
combed your hair?”

“I’ve used my fingers. I do not have a comb.”

“I do think most of the beach is in here.” She reaches over. More green stuff. It smells sweet, like the lavender, but different. Maybe another flower. My dad told me that there once were hundreds of kinds of flowers. I have a drawing of one of them in my book. She starts to comb again. My scalp screams. I think soon I
will
be bald, despite her best efforts. “I think you will be pleasing to look at once you get this under control. Even with those—
scars.
” She says the word as if it’s foreign to her, and I suppose it is.

I snort lavender-scented water out my nose, doubtful, wondering if that’s a requirement for the job. What if I disappoint her?

She combs for a few moments in silence while a thousand thoughts jumble in my mind. I stare at the wall ahead of me, at the shadows of our heads. Hers is smooth and perfect; mine still sticks out in all angles. Beyond that, for the first time, I see that there is an intricately engraved panel on the wall, and there are letters above it. A N R Y, I think it says, but the letters are very faint.

She catches me looking. “Nobody knows what those things mean. They’re all over the castle. I think they had the silly notion of naming all the rooms, when reading and writing were of importance. Can you imagine, naming a room as you would a person? Absurd! Do you remember?”

“Remember?”

“When you and I were just babies and used to play together here,” she says, which shocks me. So she does know that I was the one who used to play with her. Perhaps that is why she is being so nice to me. “You do remember, don’t you?”

“Not very well,” I admit. I remember chasing down a long corridor after Star’s braided head, her giggles echoing upon the stone walls, but I don’t remember anything else about the castle. I think I lost a lot of old memories. It’s almost as if my life began when the scribblers tore off my hand.

She sighs. “Oh, that is right. You are younger than me by more than two entire seasons, so I often had to explain things to you. Well, we used to run up and down here and pretend we knew what all the words said. The three of us pretended it was our own language, and only we could speak it. You and I thought they were the names of the people who once lived in the rooms. But Tiam said it was a secret code that would lead us to treasure.”

I can’t help but laugh. That sounds like him.

“He made us swear together that one day the three of us would crack the code and find the treasure.” She smiles a little wistfully. “It’s silly. But even after we stopped playing together...after your—” her eyes trail down toward my stump, which thankfully I’ve buried under the suds “—after we could no longer play together...I kept trying to find the treasure. There
is
treasure here, you know.”

I believe she is right; this whole beautiful building is the most wonderful treasure I’ve ever seen. And yet, she must be very brave to venture out in this castle alone. One of the oldest legends about the castle is that it is haunted by the ghosts of the dead. There are so many dead, it must be quite crowded with them. “Have you ever seen one of the ghosts?”

She laughs. “Oh, there are plenty of ghosts within these walls.”

“So it is true?” I ask, inspecting the walls. While the bed in the corner looks comfortable and welcoming, if staying here means being visited by spirits, I’d much prefer the cramped sleeping compartment.

“I’ve never seen one. But I know how the servants talk. They come up with their own legends. You don’t remember the Dark Girl?” She shakes her head. “Oh, of course you don’t. You were probably too little. But when I was a child, all the servants talked about was the Dark Girl. They saw her all the time—hair black as night, with the palest, most translucent skin, roaming the castle hallways at night. They’d see her one moment, and the next moment, she’d be gone. They were all so terrified! Their stories made me terrified, which was one of the reasons I played with you. I wasn’t so scared when you were around.”

“The Dark Girl?” I repeat. It sounds dreadful.

“Don’t worry, though. Nobody has seen her in ages. And I certainly
never
have.” She sits back on her haunches and picks up a strand of my hair. “I’m sure that if you go walking the castle at night, they might think she has returned. Your hair is so very odd. It reminds me of...someone....”

“Who?” I ask. Someone from a dream, obviously. No one at all has hair the color of night, as I do. Most have silken white-blond hair that reflects the sun.

She blinks. “No mind. It is a beautiful color. I am jealous.”

Of me?
And all this time, I’d been jealous of Star’s reddish hair, like the color of the sunrise. The tops of my knees are sticking out of the water, and goose bumps begin to poke out on them. “Why are you...”

“No, I don’t normally wash my servants’ hair, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She straightens, sticks her chin out. “And don’t think I’ll ever do it for you again.... It’s just...I want us to be friendly.”

“Friendly?” I choke out.
Friendly
is not something we islanders do. We keep our distance. We’re wary. We do not trust.

She smiles. “Yes.” She looks around, and her face turns serious. I feel something on my head trickling over my forehead and edging toward the corner of my eye, making it twitch. “There was something I could not tell you out there. Something you are not to share with anyone.”

At that moment, the horn in the tower blares. From here, it’s such a horrible and jarring roar that my eardrums rattle. The two tower guards manage the task of sounding the horn. It’s the horn that signals low tide. It means that the tide has reversed and is now coming in, and our completely safe time is over. Usually it means there is still plenty of time remaining before formation, but one never can tell. During Hard Season or a storm, the tides come in with much more fierceness, so one always needs to be on guard once the horn blares. But instead of worrying about that, all I can do is stare at Star, knowing somehow that her next words will be ones which I will regret hearing.

“I don’t need a governess,” she says, rocking back on her knees. I know that my hair can’t possibly be fixed yet as it would take a hundred tides and a miracle to make it like Star’s, but Star sighs and begins to absently play with her long red braid. “Kirba was always checking to make sure I ate up, and washed up, and kept my posture and said ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Those things are important to my father, because a royal needs to behave with grace and dignity. But I dare say I’m easily the most graceful and dignified being on this island. Her work is done.”

White foam drips into my eye and down my nose. I try to blink it away, but a moment later it begins to burn worse than jellyfish stings. I yelp.

She reaches for a cloth and carelessly places it in my hand. I swab desperately at my eye. How can something that smells so sweet hurt so terribly? “I don’t even really need someone to dress and converse with me.”

The stinging subsides. I open my mouth. “I thought you said...”

“Yes, I know what I said. That’s what I want the others to think. But I need to trust someone, Coe, and Tiam recommends you. And he says you are an expert at melting into the scenery, at living among the people unnoticed and learning things that may be of use to me.”