The Caged Queen Read online

  Or so the story went.

  Corrupted spirits were dangerous things. It was why the rules for relinquishing needed to be upheld.

  But even if the story was true, the man’s spirit had long since moved on.

  After dismounting and tying Poppy to a branch outside, Roa stepped through the crumbled entrance of the ruined house. As she walked through the roofless halls, Roa thought of that empty chair. It was an obvious insult. But Theo had been insulted first. Sky was the only Great House who voted against Roa helping Dax in the revolt. And in the scrublands, a unanimous vote was needed before anyone could march an army across the sand sea. Roa had broken scrublander law to do what she’d done.

  And then she’d broken Theo’s heart.

  Roa checked every room in the ruined house. All were empty. She checked them again.

  He didn’t come, she thought, her heart sinking.

  Theo hadn’t wanted her to help Dax. He told her that if she left, she wouldn’t come back.

  You were wrong, she thought. I did come back.

  She was here now, wasn’t she? She’d been here in this ruin—their usual meeting place—waiting for him for five nights straight.

  And for five nights straight, he didn’t come. Because Roa married Dax. Because Roa was queen now.

  It was too late for her and Theo.

  As the wind rattled the canopy above, she climbed up onto the windowsill of a half-crumbled wall. Leaning back against the cool and dusty stone, she pressed her face into her hands.

  You’re queen now, she told herself. Queens don’t cry.

  It was something Essie would say. If Essie were here.

  As she waited for her sister to arrive, Roa thought of the shame in her father’s eyes. In all their eyes.

  Maybe it was better this way. She wasn’t sure she could bear that same look on Theo’s face.

  When a hundred-hundred heartbeats passed and Essie still hadn’t shown herself, Roa looked up to the canopy. To the patch of darkening sky beyond it.

  Instinctively, her gaze found Essie’s two favorite stars. Twin stars, Essie liked to call them. The stories Essie most loved were ones about the Skyweaver, a goddess who spun souls into stars and wove them into the sky.

  Roa thought of Skyweaver spinning Essie’s soul into a star, then putting it up there, all alone, without Roa.

  A cold feeling knotted her insides.

  What was taking her sister so long?

  Roa reached for that normally bright hum. Even before Essie’s accident, the hum had always been there, warm and glowing inside them both.

  This time when Roa reached for it, she found it dim and weak. Like a too-quiet pulse.

  Essie?

  No answer came.

  Roa pushed herself down from the sill and walked back through the empty, ruined rooms.

  “Essie?” she called, her voice echoing. “Where are you?”

  Silence answered her.

  Roa’s pace quickened, thinking of the way her sister’s thoughts had flickered strangely. At how distant she’d felt earlier.

  Essie, if this is a joke, it isn’t funny.

  At the entrance, Roa untied Poppy and quickly mounted, nudging her back toward the tree line. When they got there, the sun was long gone and the sky was blue-black. She couldn’t see any sign of a white bird in its depths.

  Roa cupped her hands and called her sister’s name.

  “Essie!”

  Her voice echoed and died. The wind rustled the leaves at her back.

  It was something the two sisters never spoke about, as if speaking it would make it come true: an uncrossed soul couldn’t exist forever in the world of the living. Eventually, the death call of the Relinquishing became too strong.

  Essie had been resisting her death call for eight years now.

  Looking up to the stars, Roa whispered, “Essie, where are you?”

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  Once there were two sisters, born on the longest night of the year.

  This was not a night for celebrating new life; it was a night for letting go of the dead. That’s why it was called the Relinquishing.

  The midwives tried to bring the sisters early. When that failed, they tried to bring them late.

  But the girls came at midnight, defiant.

  Most newborns wail with their first taste of life. Most come into the world afraid, needing the comfort of their mothers.

  The two sisters didn’t come wailing. They came quietly, holding on to each other. As if they needed no one’s comfort but the other’s. As if, as long as they were together, there was nothing to be afraid of.

  That wasn’t the strange thing.

  The strange thing came later.

  It was their mother, Desta, who noticed it: how when one girl cried, the other comforted her. And when they both cried, the roses in the garden died. It was Desta who realized that when one girl threw a fit, the other calmed her. But when they threw a fit together, the windows cracked and the mirrors shattered.

  As if, when they were of one mind, the world shifted and bent to their will.

  When Desta asked the two sisters who broke the mirror, one or the other would tell her: “It wasn’t us, Mama. It was the hum.”

  “The hum?” she’d ask. “What is that?”

  The two girls stared at their mother.

  “The warm, bright thing that links you like a string. Don’t you and Papa have one?”

  No. She and their father did not. But when Desta told her husband, he shrugged it off as the wild imaginations of children who spent too much time together. After all, the two sisters played together, studied together, slept together . . . there was hardly a moment when they were apart.

  “It would be good for them to have other friends,” he told his wife.

  Desta agreed. She wrote her oldest friend, Amina, whose son, Dax, was falling further behind in his studies every year. His tutors had given up, declaring him illiterate and unteachable, and Amina was sick with worry. Desta told her friend to send him to the House of Song for the summer.

  Perhaps that will cure my daughters of this hum, thought Desta, who was tired of her roses dying.

  Perhaps, if they had other friends, she wouldn’t need to keep buying new mirrors.

  Two

  No one understood the bond shared by Roa and Essie. Before the accident, people thought their connection strange—or worse, to be feared. For Roa, though, it was something that had always simply been. She didn’t know how to be without it.

  Essie was the one who named it the hum, because that’s what it felt like: something deep and bright, almost like a song, vibrating inside them.

  After the accident, the hum changed. They were no longer able to keep out each other’s thoughts and feelings and—most especially—pain.

  They were one.

  For nearly eight years now, Essie had been in Roa’s head, and Roa had been in Essie’s.

  Which was why her sister’s silence felt so wrong.

  Maybe she went back to Song, thought Roa as Poppy’s ragged breathing filled the silence of the night.

  Roa fixed her gaze on the jagged massifs in the distance, rising out of the earth, each one a darker shade of blue than the last. Above them, a half-moon rose, flooding the plains with silvery light and making the sweat gleam on Poppy’s coat.

  Every now and again, shadows passed overhead.

  Dragons, Roa knew.

  Once, dragons had been plentiful here. Not so long ago, Dax’s people rode the fierce creatures through the skies. But under his grandmother’s reign, draksors and dragons turned on each other. Former allies became bitter enemies. Until Asha, Dax’s sister, put an end to a corrupt regime.

  The dragons had been returning ever since.

  It was past midnight when they trotted into the familiar stables of Song. The soft whuffing of horse sighs and the flick of tails greeted them. The stalls had been cleaned at the end of the day and smelled of dried mud and fresh hay.

 
Roa quickly untacked Poppy, then walked the lane up to the house. Except for the heart-fire in the central pavilion—which burned through the night—the lights of the House of Song were out.

  “Essie?” she called, reaching again for that normally bright hum.

  The dogs—Nola and Nin—were the only things that answered her, barking as she approached. When they realized who she was, they bounded up to her, trying to lick her to death. Roa slipped past them, through the rows of ropy warka trees, and stepped into the house.

  All was dark inside. Roa followed the dusty stone walls with her hands. Stone. So different from the whitewashed plaster of the palace. Roa preferred the simplicity of her home’s dirt floors and roughhewn windows to the palace’s elaborately cut and mosaicked tiles. She preferred the smell of smoke and acacia to the smell of mint and lime.

  It was a different world here. It was her world. The one she’d be leaving behind tomorrow—for the second and final time.

  Again, she called for her sister.

  Again, she received no answer.

  Essie didn’t just go off on her own without telling Roa. They were an inseparable pair. And tomorrow morning Roa would ride back across the desert with the husband she had no love for, to a city that wasn’t her home. She couldn’t go alone. Roa needed her sister by her side.

  At the entry to her and Dax’s room, she tried not to panic.

  She’s just angry at me for running away, she thought, trying to calm herself. Trying to convince herself that Essie would be nestled in her usual spot on Roa’s pillow come morning.

  Stepping inside her room, Roa pushed down her unease and closed the door behind her. The moonlight spilled in through the windows and across the bed.

  A bed that lay empty.

  It didn’t surprise her. Roa avoided Dax’s bed like a disease, and in return, Dax sought out the beds of other women.

  Her family didn’t know this. They didn’t know the rumors whispered up and down the palace halls at Firgaard: that her husband took a different girl to bed every night.

  Normally Roa wouldn’t care how many beds he slept in as long as Dax stayed far away from hers. It made being married to him easier.

  But tonight? Maybe it was the too-sharp absence of her sister, or maybe it was the five days of humiliation at his hands . . . the empty bed felt like an insult.

  This was her home. Almost every girl beneath this roof was related to her.

  It made Roa want to throw something—but that would wake her family, who would come asking what the matter was. So instead she moved to the wooden chest at the foot of her bed and lifted the ivory-inlaid lid—a gift from her mother.

  Sliding off her linen dress, she quickly pulled a nightgown over her head. After checking that the knife she kept sheathed at her calf was still secure—Essie’s knife, the one Roa promised to hold on to—she started doing up buttons.

  Which was when she heard the voices in the hall.

  The whispers were muffled and soft, but Roa could tell one voice belonged to a young man and the other a young woman. They giggled as if drunk, then hushed each other, and though Roa couldn’t tell who the voices belonged to, she had her guesses.

  They moved closer to her door.

  Roa’s hands fisted. Part of her wanted him to open that door. Wanted a reason to unsheathe her sister’s knife and wait for him. But a wearier, unhappier part of her whispered, Run.

  And that’s what she did.

  Pushing the window open, Roa climbed to the sill just as the voices reached her room. Before she could find out who Dax was with, Roa dropped into the garden. When the door swung open, she was already headed for Lirabel’s room.

  She’d been sharing her friend’s bed all week. What was one more night?

  It was a habit she’d fallen into after Essie’s accident—climbing into Lirabel’s bed. Knowing that someone was lying next to her, that there was another heart beating beside hers . . . it helped soothe Roa.

  Roa knew there would be a night when Dax came to collect what she owed him. It could hardly be prevented. A king needed an heir, and Roa was his queen. It was her duty to provide him with one.

  But it would not be tonight.

  A People Divided

  When the First Namsara brought the sacred flame out of the desert and founded Firgaard, no king ruled it. No walls caged them in. Instead, the Old One’s people governed themselves. Each voice was heard and decisions were made all together. Those who owned much shared with those who owned nothing. And the sick and the weak were esteemed as much as the healthy and strong.

  The Old One’s people believed they belonged to one another, and therefore took care of each other.

  But as the years wore on and their numbers grew, disagreements turned into division. They forgot how to see each other as equals, no matter the differences. Forgot that those who owned nothing were just as important as those who owned much. Forgot that everyone’s voice mattered.

  The Old One’s people forgot how to take care of each other.

  They wanted a king who could make laws to govern them. They wanted an army to protect them. They wanted a wall to keep others out.

  This was not the Old One’s way.

  His people didn’t care . . . except a devout few.

  Decisions, these few thought, should be made the way a tree grows—from the earth up and from many roots. They didn’t believe in building walls or hiring men with swords to keep their enemies out—because they did not believe in enemies.

  For their beliefs, they were persecuted and derided as zealots. So, with heavy hearts, they decided to leave Firgaard.

  It was not so easy.

  They were under the dominion of a king now. A king who was not interested in letting them go. A king who ruled Firgaard and the land surrounding it, from the mountains, across the desert, to the sea.

  “But,” said the king, “I will be generous with you.”

  He would give them the scrublands beyond the desert and he would let them go peacefully—on one condition. For as long as they lived beyond Firgaard’s walls, they would pay him a tax in exchange for his generosity: one tenth of their yearly harvests.

  With no other choice, they agreed.

  They crossed the sand sea together and when they came to the scrublands, they built five Great Houses, swearing to keep the old ways intact. To be hospitable and build no walls. To give according to the needs of others. To always make decisions as a whole, so that no one could be trampled upon.

  And, most of all, to never forget they belonged to each other.

  When people from far-off lands fled because of war or famine or flooding, when Firgaard shut its gates, the five Great Houses of the scrublands let the foreigners in. They gave them land to build new homes on and shared whatever they had. So the foreigners stayed, living and marrying among them. Defending them against the very ones they’d fled from and bringing with them new stories and gods: the Skyweaver, guardian of all souls, and her gift of the Relinquishing. These newcomers taught them the art of a well-crafted blade. They convinced them that sometimes, in times of great danger, you did need to pick up a sword to protect your kin.

  As the years turned to centuries, the scrublanders looked less and less like the ones they’d left behind in Firgaard. And it is when you cannot see yourself in another that you turn them into an enemy.

  In this one way, the scrublanders did not protect the old ways—by forgetting they did not believe in enemies.

  Three

  “What do you mean, you didn’t pack my tent?”

  Roa rounded on her brother, who was currently unbuckling his horse’s bridle and sliding it over her head.

  After their day’s travel, the desert sun pulsed low in the sky and waves of heat rolled up from the golden sand. They’d stopped early due to a herd of dragons spotted nearby. Most people saw the return of the dragons as a sign the kingdom was healing. But they were still dangerous predators best avoided.

  “There wasn’t room,”
said Jas after tying his horse up with the others. A faded maroon sandskarf was wrapped loosely around her brother’s head and shoulders, protecting him from the sun, and his two earned knives were sheathed at his hips, their blades engraved with the pattern of Song.

  “So you left my tent behind?”

  Turning to her, he lifted his hands, palms up. “I’m sorry. I had to.”

  “Where am I supposed to sleep?”

  Jas looked away, out over the caravan. Roa followed his gaze.

  She could see Dax from here, setting up his tent, shirtless and alone. The sweat gleamed across his arched back as he hammered pegs into the earth. Pegs that weren’t strong enough to keep a tent tethered if a storm hit.

  Roa had fought with Dax about it on the way to the scrublands, and he’d promised to buy new ones while staying at the House of Song.

  Another broken promise, Roa thought now. He hadn’t bought new tents just like he hadn’t lifted the sanctions on her people or formed a more representative council.

  He’d promised her both things before the revolt.

  But that’s what the treaty is for, she thought, trying to calm herself, to make him keep his oaths. When they returned, he would be bound by more than honor to make good on his promises. She would see to it that he did.

  “You can sleep in Dax’s tent,” said Jas.

  Roa’s gaze snapped to her brother.

  This felt like subterfuge. Like betrayal. Jas knew how Roa felt about sleeping in Dax’s tent. Why would he do this?

  “I don’t understand what the problem is.” Jas’s voice was edged in frustration. Sweat beaded along his hairline dampening his black curls. “Isn’t he your husband? Shouldn’t you be sleeping in his tent?” And then, lowering his voice, he said, “People are beginning to talk.”

  She shot her brother a scathing look.