For as long as they could remember, that was what they’d told each other, with and without words. They had a way of looking at each other, a certain fixed intensity, that was as good as speaking it out loud. When things were at their worst—in the middle of the Slaughter, when it was carcass after carcass, or when Skoy? slapped them, or they ran out of food before they ran out of winter—they kept the lie burning between them. This is not our life. Remember. We don’t belong here. The Mesarthim will come back and choose us. This is not our real life. However bad things got, they had that to keep them going. If they had been one girl instead of two it would have died out long ago, like a candle flame with just one hand to cup it. But there were two of them, and between them they kept it alive, saw it mirrored in each other and borrowed faith back and forth, never alone and never defeated.
They whispered at night of what gifts they would have. They would be powerful like their mother, they were sure. They were meant to be soldier-wizards, not drudge-brides or slave-daughters, and they would be whisked away to Aqa to train for battle and wear godsmetal against their skin, and when the time came they would ship Out, too—up and out through a cut in the sky, to be heroes of the empire, as blue as sapphires and glaciers, and as beautiful as stars.
But the years went by and no Mesarthim came, and the lie stretched thin, so that when they looked to each other for the faith they kept between them, they began to find fear instead. What if this is our life after all?
Every year on Deepwinter’s Eve, Kora and Nova climbed the ice-slick ridge trail to watch the sun’s brief appearance, knowing it was the last they’d see of it for a month. Well, losing their lie felt like losing the sun—not for a month, but forever.
So the sight of that skyship…it was like the return of the light.
Nova let out a whoop. Kora laughed—with joy and deliverance and…accusation. “Today?” she demanded of the ship in the sky. The reeling, brilliant sound of her laughter rang across the beach. “Really?”
“You couldn’t have come last week?” cried Nova, her head flung back, the same joy and deliverance alive in her voice, and the same edge of asperity. They were matted with sweat, rank with gore, and red-eyed from the sting of guts and gases, and the Mesarthim came now? Along the beach, among the wet-hollow husks of half-butchered beasts and the clouds of stinging flies, the other women looked up, too. Knives fell still. Awe stirred in the slaughter-numbed blankness as the ship soared nearer. It was made of godsmetal, vivid blue and mirror bright, catching the sun and searing spots into their vision.
Mesarthim skyships were shaped by the minds of their captains, and this one was in the likeness of a wasp. Its wings were knife-blade sleek, its head a tapered oval with two great orbs for eyes. Its body, insect-like, was formed of a thorax and abdomen joined in a pinch of a waist. It even had a stinger. It flew overhead, aiming for the headland, and passed out of sight behind the rock palisade that sheltered the village from wind.
Kora’s and Nova’s hearts were pounding. They were giddy and shaking with thrill, nerves, reverence, hope, and vindication. They swung their gaffs and knives, embedding them in the uul, both knowing, as they unclenched their fingers from the tools’ well-worn hafts, that they would never return to retrieve them.
This is not our life.
“What do you two think you’re doing?” Skoy? demanded as they stumbled toward the shore.
They ignored her, falling to their knees in the icy shallows to scoop water onto their heads. The sea-foam was pink, and flecks of fat and cartilage bobbed in the swaying surf, but it was cleaner than they were. They scrubbed at their skin and hair, and at each other’s skin and hair, careful not to step too deep, where the sharks and spikefish thrashed.
“Get back to work, the pair of you,” Skoy? scolded. “It’s not time to quit.”
They stared at her, incredulous. “The Mesarthim are here,” said Kora, her voice warm with wonder. “We’re going to be tested.”
“Not until you finish that uul, you aren’t.”
“Finish it yourself,” said Nova. “They don’t need to see you.”
Skoy?’s expression curdled. She wasn’t used to them talking back, and it wasn’t just the retort. She caught the edge in Nova’s tone. It was scorn. Skoy? had been tested sixteen years ago, and they knew what her gift had been. Everyone on Rieva had been tested, save the babies, and only one had been Chosen: Nyoka, their mother. Nyoka had a war gift of staggering power: literally staggering. She could send shock waves—into the earth, into the air. She’d shaken the village when her power first woke, and caused an avalanche that obliterated the path to the boarded-up mineshafts. Skoy?’s gift, technically, was a war gift, too, but of such a low magnitude as to make it a joke. She could cast a sensation of being prickled with needles—at least, she could for the brief duration of her test. Only the Chosen got to keep their gifts, and only in strict service to the empire. Everyone else had to fade back to normal: Unworthy. Powerless. Pale.
Piqued, Skoy? drew back her hand to slap Nova, but Kora caught her wrist. She didn’t say anything. She just shook her head. Skoy? snatched back her hand, as stunned as she was enraged. The girls had always been able to enrage her—not through disobedience, but by this way they had of being untouchable, of being above, peering down at the rest of them from some lofty place they had no right to. “You think they’re going to choose you, just because they chose her?” she demanded. Perfect Nyoka. Skoy? wanted to spit. It wasn’t enough that Nyoka had been chosen, plucked from this hell-rock frozen nowhere of an island, but she lingered here, too, in her husband’s heart and her daughters’ fantasies, and everyone else’s charitable memories. Nyoka got to escape and be preserved in false perfection, always and forever the pretty young mother called to greater things. Skoy?’s lips curled back in a sneer. “You think you’re better than the rest of us? You think she was?”
“Yes,” hissed Nova to the first question. “Yes,” she hissed to the second. “And yes.” Her teeth were bared. She wanted to bite. But Kora grabbed her hand and tugged her away, toward the trail that snaked up the rock face. They weren’t the only ones headed for it. All the rest of the women and girls had started back up to the village. There were visitors. Rieva was at the bottom of the world— where a drain would be, if worlds had drains. Strangers of any kind were as rare as storm-borne butterflies, and these strangers were Mesarthim. No one was going to miss out, not even if it meant the uuls spoiling on the beach.
There was eager chatter, stifled laughter, a hum and buzz of thrill. None of the others had bothered to wash. Not that Kora and Nova could be called clean, but their hands and faces were scrubbed and ruddy, and their hair, salty-damp, was combed back with their fingers. Everyone else was smeared and greasy and dark with blood, some still clutching their hooks and their knives.
They looked like a swarm of murderesses boiling out of a hive.
They reached the village. The wasp ship was in the clearing. The men and boys were gathered around it, and the gaze they turned on their women was full of distaste and shame. “I apologize for the smell,” said the village elder, Shergesh, to their esteemed visitors.
And so Kora and Nova saw Mesarthim for the first time—or the second, maybe, if they’d been babes in Nyoka’s arms sixteen years ago when she stood where they were now, her life about to change.